Daniela Rosner
· Professor, DXARTS Professor, Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE)University of Washington · Digital Arts & Experimental Media
Active 2002–2025
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About
Daniela Rosner is an Associate Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington. Her research investigates the social, political, and material circumstances of technology development, with an emphasis on foregrounding marginalized histories of practice, from maintenance to needlecraft. She has worked in design research at Microsoft Research, Adobe Systems, Nokia Research, and as an exhibit designer at several museums, including the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum. Rosner's work has been supported by multiple awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award. She is the author of several articles on craft and technoculture, and her book, Critical Fabulations, explores new ways of thinking about design’s past to rework future relationships between technology and social responsibility. Rosner earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. She serves on the Editorial Board of Artifact: Journal of Design Practice and is the editor of the “Design as Inquiry” forum for Interactions Magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI. Along with Professor Beth Kolko, she co-directs HCDE's Tactile and Tactical Design Lab (TAT Lab).
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Artificial Intelligence
- Engineering
- World Wide Web
- Human–computer interaction
- Epistemology
- Business
- Computer Security
Selected publications
2020 · 97 citations
Current approaches to AI and Assistive Technology (AT) often foreground task completion over other encounters such as expressions of care. Our paper challenges and complements such task-completion approaches by attending to the care work of access-the continual affective and emotional adjustments that people make by noticing and attending to one another. We explore how this work impacts encounters among people with and without vision impairments who complete tasks together. We find that bound up…
On the Grounds of Solutionism: Ontologies of Blackness and HCI
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · 2022 · 69 citations
Why is the solution the end point to a problem? While many in HCI and design have examined the impulse to solve problems–the solutionist or techno-solutionist mindset–we examine the logic that binds the solution and the problem together as a pair. Focusing on the timely and consequential problem of systemic racial injustice, we think through the paradoxical possibility that the pairing of the problem and solution (so often treated as the default in design and HCI) perpetuates the very conditions…
2023 · 38 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingDespite the central role that stories play in social movement-building, they are difficult to sustainably document for many reasons. To explore this challenge, this paper describes the design of a community-based conversational storytelling agent (CSA) to document digital stories of housing insecurity. Building on insights from an ongoing grassroots project, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, we share how a study initially focused on CSA-support opened an investigation of the role that artificia…
Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World
Design and Culture · 2021 · 37 citations
Senior authorCorrespondingWho is a medium designer? If you’re hoping to find out, you’re barking up the wrong book (review). There is no particular medium designer, at least not in the sense of a person enrolled in the work...
Towards Mutual Benefit: Reflecting on Artist Residencies as a Method for Collaboration in DIS
Designing Interactive Systems Conference · 2023-07-08 · 25 citations
articleOpen accessWhile cross-disciplinary collaboration continues to be a cornerstone of inventive work in interactive design, the infrastructures of academia, as well as barriers to participation imposed by our professional organizations, make collaboration between particular groups difficult. In this workshop, we will focus specifically on how artist residencies are addressing (or not addressing) the challenges that artists, craftspeople, and/or independent designers face when collaborating with researchers af…
Recent grants
NSF · $250k · 2015–2019
CAREER: Enhancing the Integration of Craft and Computing
NSF · $549k · 2015–2021
NSF · $202k · 2015–2018
Frequent coauthors
- 22 shared
Mikael Wiberg
Umeå University
- 19 shared
Jonathan Bean
University of Arizona
- 18 shared
Alex Taylor
- 11 shared
Sarah Fox
- 8 shared
Cynthia L. Bennett
Google (United States)
- 8 shared
Alex Taylor
- 7 shared
Morgan G. Ames
University of California, Berkeley
- 6 shared
Caitlin Lustig
University of Washington
Education
Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley
M.S., Computer Science
University of Chicago
Other, Graphic Design
Rhode Island School of Design
Awards & honors
- NSF CAREER Award
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