Meet the team - Yiota Demetriou

Yiota Demetriou - User Experience Design Lead at Lyfta

What is your role at Lyfta?

I ensure that user perspectives are represented in the process of designing Lyfta. I help maintain Lyfta's immersivity, help drive the creative vision of our brand, conduct user research, and improve the teaching/learning experiences for our users. I'm responsible for making the technology usable, enjoyable, and accessible.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

Connecting with our customers. It's my job to bridge the gap between the user, the development team, and stakeholders. This means that it is important for me to speak regularly to our end users and gather insights that will better the experience of using Lyfta. I'm an engineer at heart - so my other favourite thing is that I get to collaborate with our amazing engineering team to brainstorm and develop innovative products and features for Lyfta.

Tell us a bit about your background?

As journeys go, mine is also non-linear, and to some - it still doesn't make a lot of sense. The act of storytelling, and play, is a prominent thread throughout my journey.

I trained in Theatre and Performance Studies in which I was educated to explore the many ways in which performance reflects and influences society, politics, and culture.

In my studies I was mesmerised by critical theory and philosophy on the creation of audience experience, akin to the formation of broader human experience. I was drawn to documentary and political theatre, creative works produced by activists and social movements, in addition to the curation of exhibits in museums and cultural heritage settings.

I was curious about how stories are told, performed and artistically displayed; how creative works are designed and curated in such a way as to deliver particular meaning. This led me to produce an MA project that amplified social issues related to the marginalisation of youth. I worked with groups of young people and we co-produced a public artwork, a soundscape of their personal accounts and social struggles.

This influenced my interest in the collection and curation of public oral history archives.The power relations influencing oral testimony exhibitions in museums - for instance, who gets to decide whose stories are told, and which ones aren't, as well as how technologies used inform the whole experience of encountering these stories. I went on to study for PhD at Bristol University, which focused on artistic interventions in oral history collections and museums, the exhibition/curation, and engagement of these.

Since then, I have lectured and conducted research at Universities and NGOs, across Arts and Technology programmes.

Love Letters, by Yiota Demetriou (2012 -), image by Paul Blakemore © Watershed 2018

I grew my artistic practice and built-up a portfolio as a creative consultant for tech-based collaborative projects, and gallery/museum exhibits, with a focus on audience engagement, participation, playfulness, immersion, and interaction. My artwork is situated at the interplay of art, science and technology. I create innovative ways to tell stories with and for the public and new ways for audiences to engage with narrative by foregrounding felt experiences, generating realisations about human connection: on stage, in museums, for screens, speakers, XR technologies, and for books.

I toured my performance installation Love Letters, across the EU, experimenting with immersive and ubiquitous tech, and letter writing, inviting audiences to delve into an installation of past audiences' letters collected whilst touring.

Love Letters performed at Tempting Failure, Photo my Andy Mcals 2013.

To You by Yiota Demetriou, exhibited as part of the curated exhibit on Sensational Books at the Bodleian Library, June 2022.

My interactive piece, To You is a limited edition paper-based heat and touch-sensitive book about love and loss, and can only be read when warmed-up by readers' hands. It was shortlisted for an award by Communication Arts in California, and won "Most Subversive use of Technology in Art"; it has been purchased by international readers, book and art collectors, acclaimed libraries and galleries.

To You by Yiota Demetriou. A collage of images captured during the curated exhibit Sensational Books at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

An image of a hand interacting with the heat-sensitive book To You. The book's pages are black. These respond to the reader's body temperature by revealing the content on the page and the blank coating disappears.

You can check out other projects here: https://linktr.ee/yiotademetriou

So, now, it is really exciting to be at Lyfta working on the ways in which peoples' stories from across the world can be designed and experienced for global learning.

What's your favourite Lyfta storyworld and why?

Woman with blond hair looks out from the main stage into the darkened, empty theatre.

This is such a difficult question! I absolutely love Secrets of the Opera because of its extensive interactivity and playfulness. Saying that, I do have a soft spot for Togetherness situated in Hungary, because it is about collectivity and sisterhood, which I strongly advocate for. It also brings attention to how ageing affects people in different ways, which is really overlooked in today's world.

Who is your favourite person featured in a Lyfta storyworld and why?

Ilona and Erzsébet from Lyfta storyworld ‘Togetherness'

That's easy. The elderly sisters Ilonka and Erzsébet. I feel like they could be my grannies, and it brings me great comfort watching them strudel away whilst singing (spoiler alert!). As a child of displaced diaspora, I have first-hand experience of how the immigrant generational gap can affect the lives of elderly groups from these communities - especially when adapting to the culture of the host country. Many elderly people from such backgrounds may feel rather isolated as they are used to operating in collective systems, as opposed to a more individualised societies. This can make them feel lonely and vulnerable. So it was a pleasure to be able to experience Ilonka and Erzsébet speaking about their life and the experience of ageing together.

What is your favourite food?

Great question. Food is really important in my family. Not at least due to the obvious reasons of it being a fundamental substance, but because it's deeply embedded in our culture as a moment of sharing and being together. As most diaspora communities, culinary practices bind people together to recreate an identity in diaspora, and in my case also operate as conduits of cultural knowledge. So my favourites are foods from West Asia that keep me rooted to one side of my heritage, and Congolese foods like: Poulet à la Moambé, Pondu/Cassava Leaves, that transport me to the other side of my family history.

Do you speak any other languages?

I was brought up in the South of Cyprus as Greek-speaking. The language of instruction at school was Greek, so we had to learn this as well. But we spoke the dialect of the, now, South, in everyday conversation; a creole and the "lingua franca" for the multicultural communities on the South of Cyprus (Greek, Turkish, Arabic Sana, Maronite, Armenian and Latin). This is also reflected in the dialects' vocabulary that borrows from the languages of all these communities. Due to my family history, we spoke the Cypriot dialect (of the South), with a mixture of a few languages like English, French, Swahili.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I love reading graphic novels, going to gigs, and visiting interactive exhibits at museums. I live to travel, and I write a lot.

What travel experience has had the biggest impact on you?

Getting lost in rural Shanghai without a map or a phone in my early 20s. The phrase "don't talk to strangers" went straight out the door. I depended on the kindness of a local family, who found me stranded. They welcomed me into their home for an afternoon, invited me to have dinner with them and drove me to my accommodation. I'll be eternally grateful.

Can you give us an interesting/fun fact about yourself?

I don't know if this will interest anyone - but, I'm a hobbyist archivist. I'm currently using the material from a family archive that I put together, to write a creative non-fiction memoir about my grandmothers' stories in diaspora.

We love to learn new words from around the world. Do you have favourite you could share?

A common word in both Greek speaking and Turkish speaking Cypriot dialects is "Marazi/Maraz" (Μαράζι or Maraz) meaning heartache. It's a special word for me because it binds our communities that have been segregated with a common heartache, an equal sense of loss. The use of the term is different from its mainland Turkish and Greek understandings. In our dialects, maraz or marazi refers to deep and inescapable sadness and longing that is carried in the body. This expression has not only been the center of my upbringing due to a generational trauma of segregation and displacement, but has also helped me understand the layers of diasporic feelings, and how cultural identities are framed.

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