Designing Collective Futures

Rather than viewing people as ‘users’ or ‘subjects’, designers are increasingly directly engaging people in neighborhoods and communities as participants in the collection of data, the telling of stories and the use of emerging technologies such as sensors and connected devices. How do we develop thoughtful, community-based and situated methods that resist the impulses of big data? How do we intervene meaningfully in issues such as air pollution and gentrification that disproportionately impact vulnerable communities? This panel engages two researchers in a conversation around emerging design practices with examples from industry practice and academic scholarship.

Panelists

Dawn Nafus
Dawn Nafus is a senior research scientist at Intel Corporation, where she conducts anthropological research for new product innovation. Her ethnographic research has been primarily on experiences of time, data literacy, self-tracking and wearables. Most recently, she has been working on instrumentation and data interpretation for community-based environmental health projects. She is the editor of Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life (MIT Press) and co-editor of Ethnography for a Data Saturated World (Manchester University Press).  She holds a PhD from University of Cambridge.

Daniela Rosner
Daniela Rosner is an assistant professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington and co-director of the Tactile and Tactical Design (TAT) Lab. Her research critically investigates the ways people work with materials to imagine more socially responsible technological futures, focusing on practices historically marginalized within engineering cultures such as electronics maintenance and needlecraft. Rosner's work has generated several best paper nominations and awards and appeared in Public Culture, New Media & Society, and other journals, conference proceedings, and edited volumes. She is the author of Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (MIT Press). Her work has been supported by multiple awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. Rosner earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She also holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. Rosner serves on the Editorial Board of Artifact: Journal of Design Practice and as the editor of the “Design as Inquiry” forum for Interactions magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI.

Persons with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations or who have questions about physical access may call Andy Dutil at 312-595-4924 in advance of the event.