Organizers

Susan Lechelt is a postdoctoral researcher in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her research explores how to enable people to think critically about the technologies and data that surround them - typically by designing personally meaningful tangible interfaces and speculative interventions, aimed to spark reflection.

Katerina Gorkovenko is a postdoctoral researcher in Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research explores innovative data-driven research and design practices around IoT products by utilising research through design and ethnographic approaches. She is interested in research at the intersection of design, social science, and sustainability.

Chris Speed is Chair of Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh where he collaborates with a wide variety of partners to explore how design provides methods to adapt, and create products and services within a networked society. He especially favours transgressive design interventions, to help identify and promote the values we care about most, including coffee machines that order their own ethical supplies, hairdryers that ask you to wait for the right time to blow dry your hair, and apps for sham marriages.

James Thorp is a PhD candidate at the Lancaster Institute of Contemporary Arts and Data Science Institute at Lancaster University, UK. His research explores how current and future technologies can encourage more sustainable behaviours through data and data visualisation. His work uses provocative speculative designs to explore these possibilities. James trained and worked in architecture before starting his PhD.

Michael Stead is a postdoctoral researcher at ImaginationLancaster, the exploratory design research lab at Lancaster University, UK. His research explores the socio-technical values that surround the adoption of emerging technologies including IoT, AI, datafication and smartness, and the critical role design can play in helping us to understand the implications of such technologies in facilitating sustainable futures.

Luis Soares is a postdoctoral social researcher working for Design Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. He has experience in the field of ICT4D and recently gained interest in Sustainable Innovation, looking at how many of the objects that in western societies would have reached the end of their life are reinvented in developing countries, namely in Africa. His research focus spans the role of technology in society, particularly in low-income countries, contextualising innovation and development from the grassroots perspective.