Team

Dr Sara Heitlinger: I am a specialist in sustainable human-computer interaction (HCI) and design-led participatory research. My particular interests are in citizen-led innovation, urban agriculture, and smart cities. My research is grounded in participatory design, but I draw on methods and perspectives from the arts and humanities, such as feminist technoscience, and socially-engaged arts practice. I am motivated to find new approaches that help HCI move beyond authoritarian, top-down, efficiency-based solutions to sustainability, by co-designing new sociotechnical systems for urban cultural diversity and more-than-human cities.

Dr Alex Taylor is a sociologist working in the Centre for Human Computer Interaction Design. Showing a broad fasciation for the entanglements between social life and machines, his research ranges from empirical studies of technology in everyday life to speculative design interventions—both large and small scale. Across these realms, he draws on a feminist technoscience to ask questions about the co-constitutive roles human-machine composites play in forms of knowing and being, and how they might open up possibilities for fundamental transformations in society. Most recently, he’s begun to wonder about the abilities of humans and non-humans, together, and to speculate on hybrid compositions that enlarge capacity and offer the chance of something different-than, something more-than.

Dr Lara Houston is a researcher working at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Her work focusses on computing infrastructures and environmental sustainability, particularly issues around repair practices and computing in the global South. Her work draws on ethnographic and participatory research techniques.