Joanna Saad-Sulonen

I am an assistant professor at ITU Copenhagen. I have a mixed academic and practical background in architecture, urban design and planning, new media, digital design, and HCI. My main research interest lies in participatory design, especially as it is positioned in contexts of civic participation, and how it unfolds over time. My doctoral dissertation, looked at possible combinations of different types of participation that take place in urban planning and in the design of information technologies. The main focus of my postdoc research has been on urban self-organized movements and communities in Aarhus and Helsinki. I have relied on ethnographic approaches to examine, along with members of these communities, what digital media and technologies they use and what type of intrinsic design activities involving IT – such as the shaping of community artefact ecologies – take place in self-organizatory settings. I have also been involved in the ethnographic study of a national research infrastructure, thus reinforcing the notions of infrastructuring and constructing the ethnographic field in my research. More broadly, I am engaged in the theoretical examination on and around the concepts of participation and collaboration across domains related to or intersecting with design.