Happy New Year!
Dear friends, colleagues and collaborators,
Another eventful and turbulent year ends. Thank you for the amazing generosity you have provided us throughout the year – be that as project partner and participant, co-author and collaborator, or as a trusted critical friend. Together, we have been able to forge new design-led paths into the public sector and policies and local government. It was a year where our strategic objectives to bridge new technologies with sustainability and human-centred design have gained new salience with the rise of ChatGPT. Our concern for how we relate to each other and to our environment has offered many new avenues for research and study.
It has been a full year for us with highlights that include participating in the Digital Design Week/London Design Week with our project installation Voice Matters at the Victoria and Albert Museum and re:publica, a workshop on designing policies and technologies simultaneously at the CHI conference in Hamburg, and the Mozilla Festival in Amsterdam.
In 2024, we will focus on the closing events for our SNSF Sinergia project VA-PEPR. In January and March, we will be ‘Talking AI’ in a series of exciting events:
On January 15, we will share our work and its implications with the Municipality Emmen – a highlight of HSLU’s role as their official partner for digital transformation. The next day, we are honoured to host representatives of the World Health Organization and the EU Joint Research Centre for a workshop on Policy, Design & AI. We will be joined by a select group of international experts to explore innovation in policy-making and implementation relevant to new technologies.
On March 7, we host a series of academic workshops on the topics that emerged through VA-PEPR. If you are interested in data-intermediaries, interactive installations, the rcc application, digital off-boarding, or policy implications, please mark your calendars!
Our final event on March 8 includes an interactive exhibition, and brings together participants and partners but also those interested in ‘Talking AI’ and making the ‘invisible’ visible, and accessible to everyday people.
The new year also brings some changes to our research group. Senior research associate Dr. Paola Perri will be moving on to a professorship in Social Design at the HKB Institute of Design Research at the Bern University of the Arts, while research assistant Aurelio Todisco will be applying his amazing talents in a professional architect’s studio setting. Prof. Dr. Sabine Junginger already stepped down as the head of our research group in September to dedicate herself to the final months of the VA-PEPR project. She will be taking up her new position as a full professor and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Northumbria in the UK in the spring. Prof. Dr. Dagmar Steffen will serve as the interim lead the research group.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and a healthy start to the New Year!
Aysun Aytaç, Sabine Junginger, Minh-Nguyet Le, Guillermina Noël, Paola Pierri, Dagmar Steffen & Aurelio Todisco