Chris Speed

Chris is Director for the Edinburgh Futures Institute, involving the transformation of the 22,000m2 Old Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, a Florence Nightingale hospital in the centre of Edinburgh, into a world leading centre for interdisciplinary teaching, research and innovation.

Chris led the development and leadership of the Institute for Design Informatics that is home to a combination of researchers working across the fields of design, social science, and data science, as well as the PhD, MA/MFA and MSc and Advanced MSc programmes.

Chris is currently Director of the £7.4m Creative Informatics R&D Partnership, one of the nine AHRC funded Creative Industries Clusters in the UK. Chris maintains research projects with partners across the UK and Europe including being a Co-I to the Next Stage Digital Economy Centre DECaDE led by Surrey with the Digital Catapult, and a Co-I to the DCODE European network and PhD program for training the next generation of researchers and designers to guide society’s digital transformation towards inclusive, sustainable futures. Chris was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2020.