Peter Tolmie originally trained as a musician and is an Associate in Music at Trinity College London. He later shifted his attention to the social sciences and gained a First Class Honours degree in Independent Studies at Lancaster University in 1997. This was followed by a PhD in Sociology, also at Lancaster, which he completed in 2003. After finishing his graduate studies in 1997 he worked as an ethnographer and ethnomethodologist with a number of well-known figures in CSCW at Lancaster’s Centre for CSCW. In 2000 he was recruited to work as a Research Scientist at Xerox Research Centre Europe’s Cambridge laboratory. When the Cambridge lab closed in 2002 he moved to working at XRCE’s sister laboratory in Grenoble, where he stayed until 2006, becoming Area Manager of the Work Practice Technology Group in 2005. In 2006 he began working as a freelance consultant, chiefly for the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Laboratory. He became a full-time member of staff at Nottingham in 2010, where he stayed until moving to Siegen in April 2017.
He has conducted ethnographic studies across numerous settings including: retail banking; small businesses; home environments; gaming and mobile-based artistic experiences; musical performance and music production; administrative work; outdoor leisure pastimes; museums and galleries; the TV and film industries; bid management; healthcare professionals treating breast cancer; and journalism.
He has been published widely in both journals and conferences in the domains of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Ubiquitous Computing and Human-Computer Interaction. Amongst the most cited of his works are: ‘Unremarkable Computing’ (CHI, 2002, with James Pycock, Tim Diggins, et al); ‘Making the Home Network at Home: Digital Housekeeping’’ (ECSCW, 2007, with Andy Crabtree, Tom Rodden, Chris Greenhalgh and Steven Benford); and ‘The Adequate Design of Ethnographic Outputs for Practice’ (PUC, 2003, with Tim Diggins). A publication relating to his recent work with journalists gained a best paper award at CHI in 2017 (with Rob Proctor, Dave Randall, Mark Rouncefield, et al). He is also the author of a book on intimacy in domestic environments (‘Everyday Intimacy’, 2010), the joint author of two books on the relationship between ethnographic work and design (‘Doing Design Ethnography’, 2012, with Andy Crabtree and Mark Rouncefield; and ‘Deconstructing Ethnography’, 2015, with Graham Button, Andy Crabtree, and Mark Rouncefield), and the joint editor of two published volumes of articles relating to ethnomethodological studies of work and of play (‘Ethnomethodology at Work’, 2011, and ‘Ethnomethodology at Play’, 2013, both with Mark Rouncefield). He is also an active reviewer for a number of the major computing conferences and journals and regularly serves as an associate and sub-committee chair.