Gillian Crampton Smith is one of the most internationally renowned personalities in the field of interface and interaction design. In 1992, she founded the course "Computer Related Design" at the Royal College of Art in London, which she led as professor until 2000. At the Royal College, she did pioneering work and developed teaching and research concepts that are still decisive for all interaction design courses today.
From 2001 to 2005, she was the founding director of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea – probably the world's best-known institution dealing with interface and interaction design. Not only did a number of outstanding designers emerge from the institute, but also projects and initiatives that still have a great influence on the practice of interaction design today.
Gillian Crampton Smith is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Senseable City Lab.
She was awarded the Lifetime Practice Award at SIGCHI in Toronto in 2014.