Ferran Altarriba Bertran is an Associate Professor at ERAM Escola Universitària de les Arts (Salt, Catalonia), where he leads the Playful Living Lab. His research explores how to co-design technologies and experiences that support ways of living that are both joyful and caring. As part of this work, he investigates how technology can mediate joyful interactions in forest ecologies, building on his personal relationship with forests as important spaces in his everyday life. Ferran has extensive experience organizing and facilitating co-design workshops, both in academic venues (e.g., DIS, CHI Play, CHI, and PDC) and in community contexts. ferran.altarriba.bertran@eram.cat

Heidi Biggs is a design researcher and assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication in the Department of Digital Media. Their research asks how the design of information technologies build and mediate relationships to the environment, how those relationships are more or less sustainable, and what other types of relationships we might design to the environment that imagine new ways of being in the world with more sustainable outcomes.

Oğuz ‘Oz’ Buruk is an Assistant Professor of Gameful Experience at Tampere University, Finland. His research focuses on designing gameful environments for various contexts such as body-integrated technologies, computational fashion, posthumanism, urban spaces, extended reality and nature. He adopts research-through-design methods such as speculative design, design fiction and participatory design. 

Angella Mackey is a design researcher with the Civic Interaction Design group at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Her work explores embodied relationships to seemingly intangible, dynamic materials encountered in daily life, using techniques from research through design, first-person research, speculative design, and more-than-human design to materially engage them. Currently her research focuses on solar energy and the design of relational technologies that might support weather-guided ways of living in post-fossil worlds.

Will Odom is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. He is the founder and director of the Homeware Lab (www.homewarelab.com) which explores a range of projects that inquire into topics including remaking outdoor technologies, long-term human-data relations, slow interaction design, and methods for developing the practice of Research-through-Design. He has co-organized numerous successful workshops at ACM CHI and DIS over the past 15 years.

Oscar Tomico is an Associate Professor at the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology on Design Research Methodologies for Posthuman Sustainability. His research expands the context of human-centered design and positions designers as part of complex ecological systems. Building on his research on 1st person research methodologies, he explores ecologies of design, production and use focusing on the impact they have on the co-existence and co-habitation with other-than-human actors, such as plants. He is currently involved in projects ranging from exploring more-than-human cohabitation in the greening of interior spaces through multi-species design, situating design practice as part of existing ecosystems, and analysing the impact of local regenerative social-ecological-technical systems of production.