I am associate professor in design for the data-intensive society at Umeå Institute of Design, where I am currently leading a project called “Design Philosophy for Things That Change”.
My transdisciplinary research centers around trying to understand, articulate, and critique the role of digitally connected, responsive, and data-intensive things in experience and society in ways that can inform response-able design. This work builds on an interdisciplinary background and education in human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, design, and communication and culture with a PhD in Informatics from Indiana University Bloomington in 2013 (advised by Erik Stolterman).
The focus of my research is on doing design philosophy at the intersection of critical design studies and philosophy of technology; and my teaching focus is currently design studies and design philosophy taught to industrial design students (mostly MFA and PhD level), framed as an interdisciplinary enterprise of understanding the social complexities, consequences, and responsibilities of design.
From 2018-2021 I led a project called “Design Philosophy for Things That Change” (funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation) that aimed to develop a philosophical and aesthetical foundation that forms and informs a design practice capable of conceptually handling the complexity of the evolving, globally connected and locally manifested sociotechnical landscapes now created using networked computational technologies and digital media.
My recent books are Changing Things: The Future of Objects in a Digital World (with Johan Redström, Bloomsbury 2019); and (as editor) Relating to Things: Design, Technology and the Artificial (Bloomsbury, 2020). Current work seeks to understand and explore possible alternatives for interaction and governance mechanisms in data-driven socioeconomic systems as part of the DCODE network (funded by the Horizon 2020 programme under a Marie Skłodowska-Curie training network grant), which aims to develop foundations of design competence for a digital society. I have served on the executive boards of the Design Research Society and the Society for Philosophy and Technology, and am currently a member of the International Advisory Council of the Design Research Society. I am also an associate editor for the Journal of Human-Technology Relations.