Keynotes

We are lucky to have four fantastic keynote speakers at PDC 2022 – two for the online conference (Ahmed Ansari and Catherine D’Ignazio), and two for the in-person event in Newcastle upon Tyne (Lilly Irani and Ann Light). Keynote speaker bios are below, with abstracts of talks to appear soon.



Professor Ahmed Ansari (he/him)
Industry Assistant Professor at New York University
Twitter:  @aansari86



Ahmed Ansari is an Industry Assistant Professor at New York University at the Integrated Digital Media program in the department of Technology, Culture & Society, where he teaches courses in interaction and systemic design, design research, and design studies, and directs the PhD program in Human-Centered Design, Technology and Innovation. His interests intersect between critical design studies and history, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and the philosophy and history of design and technology with an area focus on the Indian subcontinent. He is a founder of the Decolonising Design platform and the Architectural Design Research Lab in Karachi, and also does academic consulting focusing on curriculum development at the undergraduate level, having designed curricula for design programs at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture (IVSAA) and Habib University (HU) in Karachi. More recently, he has been working on an NEH grant that brings together perspectives from the natural sciences, humanities, and design on the smallest of things, moss, in order to rethink how we might redesign public digital humanities archives. Dr. Ansari received his PhD in Design Studies and MDes in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University, and his BDes in Communication Design from IVSAA.



Professor Catherine D’Ignazio (she/her)
Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT
Twitter: @kanarinka


Image credit: Sofi Donner

Catherine D’Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology and data justice. She has run reproductive justice hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, and created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures. With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Since 2019, she has co-organized Data Against Feminicide, a participatory action-research-design project, with Silvana Fumega and Helena Suárez Val. D’Ignazio is an Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly in relation to space and place.



Professor Lilly Irani (she/her)
Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego
Twitter: @gleemie



Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego where she co-directs the Just Transitions Initiative. She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Redacted (with Jesse Marx) (Taller California, 2021). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine. Her research examines the cultural politics of high-tech work and the counter-practices they generate, as both an ethnographer, a designer, and a former technology worker. She is a co-founder of the digital worker advocacy organization Turkopticon and organizes with Tech Workers Coalition San Diego and the TRUST (Transparent Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology) Coalition.



Professor Ann Light (she/her)
Professor of Design and Creative Technology, University of Sussex, UK and Professor of Interaction Design, Social Change and Sustainability at Malmö University, Sweden
Twitter: @StrangertoHabit



Ann Light is a design researcher and interaction theorist, specializing in participatory practice, human-technology relations and collaborative future-making. Her 25-year research career has focused on the politics, ethics and agency of design, and especially co-design in communities, exploring social activism at neighbourhood level, investigating the design of sharing structures and questioning the boundaries of participation. Regarding the social and ecological as inextricably linked, over the last few years she has turned to consider climate collapse and the stress that current systems put on the planet, believing creative remaking of relations is needed for liveable futures and looking at ways that socially engaged art and design can find potential in difficult places and offer visions of fairer worlds. She is currently co-leading research on the European Union project Creative Practices for Transformative Futures (CreaTures: https://creatures-eu.org/). She has been attending PDC since 2006.