15
2023
Four new academics join the Institute for Design Informatics
It has been a busy start to the 2023/2024 academic year here in Edinburgh, as the Institute for Design Informatics (IDI) welcomes four new fabulous colleagues who are joining our community as academic faculty members.
At the start of October we welcomed Caterina Moruzzi and Tara Capel. Caterina joins us from University of Konstanz, where she was a Research Associate, and is now a Chancellor’s Fellow within Edinburgh College of Art and based within IDI. Tara joins us from Queensland University of Technology in Australia where she was a postdoctoral research fellow, and is now a Lecturer within the School of Informatics and based with IDI.
At the start of this month (November) we also had Alex Taylor join us from City, University of London, where he was co-director of City’s Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design. Alex joins IDI as a Reader, based within the School of Informatics.
Last but not least, at the start of December we will have Ted Koterwas join IDI as a Lecturer within Edinburgh College of Art. Ted has most recently been working as an independent practitioner, and has collaborated extensively with IDI and the Creative Informatics programme in the past.
As a joint enterprise between the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics and Edinburgh College of Art, we are very pleased that these new appointments are balanced across the two new School’s that forms the Institute for Design Informatics, emphasising our ongoing interdisciplinarity and appreciation of diverse research practices. These four new appointments also highlight the growing influence within our Institute on work at the intersection of artificial intelligence, creative practice, and complex human and more-than-human values.
The warmest of welcomes to our new colleagues, especially as we start to enter the short days of late Autumn and Winter in Edinburgh. We can’t wait to work with you all!
More information on each of the new IDI academic faculty members can be found below:
Caterina Moruzzi, Chancellor’s Fellow in Design Informatics
Caterina works at the intersections of the philosophy of art, history and philosophy of human and artificial creativity, and the philosophy of AI. In her ongoing projects, she investigates modes of shared agency and creativity between humans, data, and technology and the disruptive effects that emerging technological innovations can have on creative labour. Since 2021, she closely collaborates with the Oxford Internet Institute and Adobe Research in projects which investigate public attitudes of reception of algorithmic content creation and curation.
https://www.designinformatics.org/person/caterina-moruzzi/
Tara Capel, Lecturer in Design Informatics
Tara’s research explored how technology can support people’s wellbeing and empowerment. Her research combines participatory and feminist research, collaborative design (co-design), design probes and making practices to explore new areas of technology design. Tara completed her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at Queensland University of Technology in 2023, which explored how makerspaces could be designed in more inclusive ways to promote participation, and how the configuration of new spaces, which facilitate engagement with new tools and materials, can lead to new areas of design.
https://www.designinformatics.org/person/tara-capel/
Alex Taylor, Reader in Design Informatics
Alex has been contributing to the areas of Human-Computer Interaction and Science and Technology Studies for over twenty years, and held positions in both academic and industrial research, most recently as Centre Co-Director of HCID at City, University of London, and in the past at institutions such as the University of Surrey, Goldsmiths, Xerox, Google and Microsoft Research. Alex’s commitment is to justice-led research, where the design and use of digital technologies are seen as co-constitutive of forms of knowing and being and, as a consequence, might just create the conditions for more just and equitable worlds. He’s invested in building and sustaining collective and participatory practices that enable diverse people and communities to flourish, together.
https://www.designinformatics.org/person/alex-taylor/
Ted Koterwas, Lecturer in Design Informatics
Ted is an artist working with the science of perception, data, sound, video and physical phenomena to make things resonate in new ways. He has an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute and has produced work for the University of Oxford, Edinburgh Science Festival and has been shortlisted for the Lumen Prize. Between 2022 and 2023, he completed a Creative AI residency with the Institute for Design Informatics and Creative Informatics, exploring how people might experience data and artificial intelligence through the body, and explored new forms of “conversational AI” through gesture and embodied action.