Coco Huberts

Email: C.Huberts@sms.ed.ac.uk

Research keywords: Human-AI Partnership, Personal Information Management, HCI

Bio:

Coco is an interdisciplinary designer and researcher interested in how people interact with and make sense of increasingly complex digital environments, and how emerging technologies shape these experiences. She holds a BFA in Web Design and New Media, where she developed a foundation in digital product and brand design, and an MFA in Design Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, where her research explored spatial approaches to navigating digital information in virtual reality. She has worked across design, digital tools, and user experience, including leading UX and product strategy for an AI-driven data analytics platform and developing educational resources and digital tools for non-technical users.

PhD research:

Coco is interested in how NLP-driven and agentic AI systems can help people curate, interpret, and make decisions about their personal digital files without displacing human involvement. As AI increasingly moves beyond retrieval and summarization to recommending and taking action, these systems may shape what people perceive as relevant, valuable, or worth preserving. Her research asks what this may mean for memory, identity, and interpretive agency.

Using a human-centered and design-led approach, Coco investigates how people may use AI agents to organize and evaluate large personal collections of files, and how AI can support rather than perform this work. Her research explores new models of human-AI partnership and develops design principles for personal AI systems that act as collaborative partners rather than decision-makers.

Supervisors: Chris Elsden, Susan Lechelt