Organisers

Sebastian Prost is a research fellow at Northumbria University’s School of Design. His research focuses on civic technology and sustainability, with a particular interest and passion for food systems, energy, and transport. He works with low-income communities using participatory approaches to co-create socio-technical innovations. Through these innovations, he explores how sustainability intersects questions of social justice, democracy, and economic activity. He is also interested in building and sustaining equitable research relationships between academia and communities and community-based organisations. Sebastian is the main contact person for this workshop.

Nick Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Open Lab at Newcastle University. His research typically involves long engagements with communities, focusing on the role of connected technologies in neighbourhoods and public spaces. His past work has explored responsible practices at the end of research projects and methods for supporting ongoing collaborations beyond the lifetime of a project.

Angelika Strohmayer is an Assistant Professor at Northumbria University’s School of Design. Her research explores the practices and potentials of working in equitable, long-term collaboration with Third Sector Support Services, primarily those who support people experiencing multiple forms of disadvantage, marginalisation, or stigmatisation. She is interested in topics at various intersections of safety, craft, technologies, social justice, and feminisms.

Henry Collingham is a designer and research fellow at Northumbria University’s School of Design. His research is rooted in Participatory Design, principally working alongside people with Dementia to foreground autonomy, voice, and active citizenship through material practice. He is keen to scrutinise the ways in which the designed world can inhibit or permit ways of being, and how those worldmaking decisions can be democratised. His work pulls focus onto political and social sustainability through a craft lens.

Débora Leal is Brazilian and a research associate at University of Siegen, in Germany. Her research focus is on the role of digital technologies in rural communities in the Brazilian Amazon region and the tension between these technologies and coloniality.

Max Krüger is a researcher at the chair for Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen, Germany. His dissertation work focusses on the participatory design and longevity of technological interventions to support forced migrants in their efforts to make themselves at home in Germany, his research focusses nowadays on issues of environmental protection and stewardship and the role of technology in meditating relations between humans and the rest of nature.

Jen Liu is a PhD student in Information Science at Cornell University. Her work investigates the ecological, social, and political implications of computing technologies and infrastructures. She uses qualitative and design methods to understand these challenges and build alternatives for liveable and equitable futures. Some topics she works on include studying the impact of climate change on Internet infrastructures, building devices for environmental sensing, and examining the land politics of digital agriculture projects.

Clara Crivellaro is senior research fellow at Newcastle University’s Open Lab. Her research explores the role of HCI in democratic practices and social justice with a particular concern for equity, collaboration and co-production, as a strategy for sustainable socio-technical innovations and interventions.

John Vines is a Professor in the School of Informatics at University of Edinburgh and co-directs its Institute for Design Informatics. John’s research is at the intersection of HCI, participatory design and the design of public, community, and civic services. He has conducted research into the ways in which participatory projects and civically oriented HCI research scales and sustains over time.