Professor Marcus Foth

Marcus Foth (/foːt/) is Professor of Strategic Design in the School of Design at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, where he coordinates the Master of Design (Strategic Design). He is a Chief Investigator in the QUT Design Lab, the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), the ARC Training Centre for Automated Vehicles in Rural and Remote Regions (AVR3), and a Senior Associate with Outside Opinion.

Marcus is a strategic designer and computing researcher whose research integrates digital innovation with humanistic perspectives to create public-interest technology that is technically robust, socially legitimate, democratically accountable, and ecologically responsible. Using participatory design and action research, he connects theory, practice, and advocacy to help communities, industry, and government co-design and govern emerging technologies that create lasting public value.

Over more than two decades, Marcus has helped shape successive interdisciplinary research agendas spanning urban informatics, digital civics, and more-than-human futures. He founded the Urban Informatics Research Lab at QUT in 2006, helping pioneer urban informatics as a new interdisciplinary field concerned with the design, application, and governance of digital technologies in cities and communities. His research and leadership helped establish urban informatics as a globally recognised field whose influence extends beyond academia into government, industry, and professional practice, which contributed to its recognition as a distinct Field of Research in the 2020 Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification.

In collaboration with governments, industry, and communities, Marcus leads interdisciplinary teams that develop technologies and decision-support tools for smart cities, infrastructure planning, agrifood systems, and mobility and transport, alongside policy and institutional frameworks that advance data governance, community engagement, digital inclusion, and sustainability. The Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer Toolkit received the Planning Institute of Australia’s 2021 National Award for Cutting Edge Research for enabling evidence-based infrastructure planning, while the BeefLedger project received two Good Design Australia Awards in 2020 for applying blockchain technology and smart contracts to agrifood supply chains. Nominated by the Smart Cities Council Australia New Zealand, Marcus was named the Australian Computer Society’s ICT Researcher of the Year (Gold Disruptor) in 2017. His expertise has also informed national and state policy through appointments to the Australian Government’s Urban Policy Network and the Queensland Infrastructure Innovation Taskforce.

Marcus’s books have helped define research agendas in urban informatics, digital civics, participatory design, and more-than-human futures, including the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (IGI, 2009), From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press, 2011), Community, Culture, Commerce: The Intermediary in Design and Creative Industries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Designing More-than-Human Smart Cities (Oxford University Press, 2024), and Human-Building Interaction (Springer Nature, 2026). He has authored more than 300 peer-reviewed publications that have attracted over 17,000 citations (h-index 70). He has led interdisciplinary collaborations supported by more than $14 million in competitive research funding and supervised 35 higher degree research completions (including 31 PhDs).

He is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society, a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, and serves on the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (2021 – 2027). Marcus has chaired leading international conferences including ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2016), Communities & Technologies (C&T 2011), and OZCHI 2009. As an ACM Distinguished Speaker, he has delivered invited keynotes at leading universities and research institutions worldwide, and contributes regularly to public debate through opinion pieces, news media commentary, and expert panel discussions that translate research into public understanding and evidence-informed policy.