Gillian Crampton Smith trained as a philosopher and art historian, but decided to follow her long-standing interest in typography. She designed books and magazines, and spent four years on the London Sunday Times before going freelance. At the same time she wrote and designed an innovative series of comic strips on social topics for use as teaching materials in schools.

In 1981 an issue of the typographic magazine Upper & Lower Case, on computers in graphic design, inspired her to buy a computer and write a program to do magazine layouts on-screen—a very early example of desktop publishing. This experience convinced her of the potential contribution of designers to the design of the human-computer interface. In 1984 she set up the computer studio at St Martin’s School of Art in London and started a graduate programme for practising graphic designers to learn about the potential of computers for their work.

In 1990 she moved to the Royal College of Art in London, Britain’s only college dedicated to graduate programmes in art and design, where she founded the Computer Related Design department. This spanned the disciplines of graphic and industrial design, film and animation, architecture, electronic and software engineering, and psychology. Its research studio, started in 1994 with a generous grant from the California company, Interval Research, collaborated with many high-tech companies and developed the role of the art and design disciplines in shaping how people interact with electronic tools, products and media. She spent several summers working in Silicon Valley at Interval and Apple.

In 2000 she was invited to be the first Director of Interaction-Ivrea, an institute for advanced teaching and research founded by Telecom Italia and Olivetti. This became a world-class centre for interaction design teaching and research. In 2005, when Interaction-Ivrea moved to Milan, she moved to Venice in order to take a much delayed sabbatical and start work, with Philip Tabor, on a book on interaction design.