Madeline Balaam

Associate Professor in Interaction Design, KTH Stockholm

Intimacy, empathy and the soma design process

Bio:

Madeline Balaam is an Associate Professor in Interaction Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, where she works with a team of amazing researchers on designing technologies and interactions at the intersection of intimate health, the body and touch. She takes a feminist perspective to her research which is perhaps best illustrated through the kinds of topics and issues that her design work examines and troubles. Madeline has published her work extensively at ACM CHI and ACM DIS and has received five best paper awards from ACM venues over the last six years. Her work is funded by VR, SSF and Digital Futures and in September she began an ERC-funded project in "Intimate Touch: Designing for where technology meets the Body."

Katta Spiel

Hertha Firnberg Scholar in (Critical) Participatory Design and Action Research

Refusing Empathy — Fostering Kinship

Bio:

Katta Spiel is an FWF Hertha-Firnberg scholar at the HCI Group of TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology), where they work on the intersection of Computer Science, Design and Cultural Studies through the lens of Critical Access. They research marginalized perspectives on technologies to inform interaction design and engineering in critical ways so they may account for the diverse realities they operate in. In collaboration with neurodivergent and/or nonbinary peers, they explore novel potentials for designs, methodological contributions to Human-Computer Interaction and innovative technological artifacts.