Open Lecture: Bianca Herlo “Digital Justice. Feminist Futures”

Bianca Herlo will give a public lecture entitled “Digital Justice. Feminist Futures” on Tuesday, December 10th at 16:00 in room A501. 

Design, arts, culture, media, and science are eagerly trying to categorize the latest developments in digital technology. Affirmative voices praise especially GenAI and its potentials, critical voices are expressing concerns about the developments in digital technologies and especially AI, and their eco-social consequences. Under the conditions of complex structural crises, technology-induced transformation processes and uncertain futures, new understandings of research and knowledge production might play a decisive role.

How can we shape digitalization processes in the interest of a fairer future for people and the environment? To what extent can practice-integrating research be understood as transformative research?

Bianca Herlo is Professor of Eco-Social Design and head of the Competence Center “Transformation Design” at Lucerne University, Design Film Art. She has been working for many years on issues of inequalities, social and digital participation and the potential of design for a more just digital transformation. As a research group leader at the Weizenbaum Institute and the Berlin University of the Arts, she has worked in national and international collaborations with actors from the arts, academia, politics and civil society to explore how emerging discourses of injustice and inequality can be translated into structural change.

Bianca is a founding member of the international Social Design Network (SDN) and chair of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF). Since 2022 she has co-hosted the podcast “Purple Code. Intersectional feminist perspectives on digital societies” (purplecode.org).

The Design Open Lecture series 2024 is part of Sandra Nuut and Ruth-Helene Melioranski’s Design Issues course. It is public and open to all.