
ACADEMIC BIO (short)
Dr Cindy Kohtala is Professor in Design for Sustainability at the Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden. She is interested in how people form communities in order to make and design things together, material and digital, as an alternative to mainstream industrial production and consumption.
Her research bridges constructivist design research and Science & Technology Studies (STS). She examines open design and localizing production in industrial transition: how active citizens experiment with “sustainability” through hacking and making at the grassroots, and how they involve publics in imagining and enacting alternative sustainability futures and infrastructures. She explores ways researchers and activists can collaborate on knowledge-making using design-led methods in sustainability transformation.
BIO (long)
Dr Cindy Kohtala is Professor in Design for Sustainability at the Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University, Sweden, and Programme Director of the MFA programme in Interaction Design. Dr Kohtala lectures and writes about design-for-sustainability methods, sustainable Product-Service System (PSS) design, open design, co-design, Participatory Design, distributed economies, maker culture, urban activism, design activism, peer production, open design, commoning, and user innovation.
Cindy Kohtala’s research is positioned in Design Research and Science & Technology Studies (STS) foregrounding socio-environmental sustainability and participatory cultures in design. She is interested in grassroots participation: how active people engage themselves in sustainability concerns, and how they encourage wider publics to materially participate in locally relevant and socially good design and production. She examines technology subcultures involved in open design, open hardware, maker culture, hacking and shared community technology workshops (e.g. fab labs), considering their roles in industrial transition. She is interested in how ecofeminist, anticapitalist, socialist and justice-oriented perspectives seek to re-politicize maker culture and technocultures to reveal how power is held and distributed.
Dr Kohtala is an active member of the international LeNS (Learning Network on Sustainability) network and the design-for-sustainability network o2 Global. She has taught design and research courses at Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD levels, and she has been a guest teacher in design-for-sustainability courses in Mexico, China and India. She was a key educator in the Creative Sustainability Master’s Programme, Department of Design, Aalto University and has participated in several urban activism initiatives in Helsinki. She co-chairs the research papers stream in the International Fab Lab Network annual conferences.