Prof. Elisa Giaccardi

Lecture "Things We Value"

As designers of interactive systems, we are increasingly asked to better understand what people value. At the core is the deeper question: What does it mean to be human? Understanding what makes us human influences how we design and what we design. It also places at the center of our thinking the fact that the world we inhabit is always changing. Who we are and what we value never stay the same. In this talk, Elisa Giaccardi will offer a personal reflection on notions of value in her design work. From such a personal perspective, she will discuss the need for designing products and systems that allow values to emerge, ground and change, and thus advocate for dialogic rather than normative approaches to how values have to be embedded into technology.

About Elisa Giaccardi

Elisa Giaccardi is full professor of Interactive Media Design, and one of the recipients of the TU Delft Technology Fellowship for top female scientists. Her background brings together humanities, digital media, and interaction design. Prior to her position at TU Delft, she has been an Associate Professor at UC3M in Madrid (Digital Living Initiative) and a Senior Research Scientist at CU Boulder in the United States (Center for Lifelong Learning and Design).

She regularly lectures and publishes in international journals and at leading conferences for interaction design and human-computer interaction, and has been the recipient of several scholarships and grants, including a NSF Science of Design grant on participative systems and a EU FP7 ICT on open interaction design. S-he is the editor of Heritage and Social Media (Routledge, 2012), in which she uses heritage as a lens to understand how emerging information and communication technology and services are changing the way in which people participate in the assessment and passing on of the ‘things we value’.

Her work on metadesign has been foundational, among other initiatives worldwide, to the Metadesigners Open Network. Her design work has been referenced in several publications, including The Tuning of Place by Richard Coyne (MIT Press, 2010), and has been featured by Peter Wright and John McCarthy in Experience-Centered Design: Designers, Users and Communities in dialogue (Morgan & Claypool, 2010) together with that of Jayne Wallace and Bill Gaver.