Dirk vom Lehn is a Lecturer in Marketing. He joined the Department of Management at King’s College London as a Research Fellow and member of the Work, Interaction & Technology Research Centre in 1998. His research involves ethnographic, video-based studies of social interaction in museums and galleries, in optometric consultations and on street-markets. He is particularly interested in the embedding of tools and technologies in social interaction, in cultural consumption and experiential marketing and in the co-creation of value in service encounters.
 
Dirk currently works with Christian Heath, Helena Webb, David Thomson, Bruce Evans and Will Gibson on the ESRC-funded project “Assessing Eye-Sight and Ocular Health: The Practical Work of Optometrists”. The project is concerned with the relationship of professional standards and situation-specific variations and explores how optometric practitioners use subjective reports of seeing in their objective measurement of eyesight. It also examines the impact of new technology on optometric consultations and training. Dirk also works on the EPSRC-funded project UTIFORO where he examines sales interaction on street-markets. His research particularly examines the collaborative and in-situ valuation of objects and the concept of trust that traders and customers bring to bear in their exchanges of objects and money.