Ann Light

Ann Light is Professor of Design and Creative Technology, University of Sussex, UK and Professor of Interaction Design, Social Change and Sustainability at Malmo University, Sweden. She is a design researcher and interaction theorist, specializing in participatory practice, human-technology relations and collaborative future-making. Her research 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. She has worked with arts and grass-roots organizations and marginalized groups on five continents, in local, transnational and international development settings. 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 co-creator of the CreaTures Framework, prepared as part of the European Union project Creative Practices for Transformative Futures (CreaTures: https://creaturesframework.org/), she recently completed work on Social Justice in the Digital Economy (https://not-equal.tech/), a UK platform for research into more equal societies, and has two new EU projects starting this year, on ReWorlding and Bauhaus of the Seas.