Dr. Helen V. Pritchard is the new Head of Research at IXDM

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Helen V. Pritchard to the institute, where they have started their new position as Professor and Head of Research IXDM in September 2022.

Helen V. Pritchard has over 15 years of experience in academic research, teaching and leadership and was previously Associate Professor in queer feminist technoscience & digital design at i-DAT and program lead of the MRes Digital Art and Technology at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, University of Plymouth. Since 2019, Helen acted as a Visiting Associate Professor for the Design +Change and Visual Communication+Change programs at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and taught modules in multispecies design and energy prototyping. Helen is currently supervising six doctoral candidates with focus on environment and design, queer VR, Black Feminist Poetics, Computational media – all of whom work with speculative or activist practices.

Helen’s research and practice is fundamentally concerned with the social and environmental justice implications of computing. They work collectively to propose and design for a different computing and to develop methods to uphold a politics of queer survival, and environmental practice. Since 2013, Helen has been a member of Citizen Sense, an award-winning group exploring the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and civic engagement. They are also a co-organizer of the Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPi), which brings communities together to hold accountable infrastructures and create spaces to articulate what technologies might be in the public interest.

With Helen’s extensive experience and unique perspectives, we are looking forward to further integrate research and teaching practices across the IXDM’s two central labs, the Critical Media Lab and HyperWerk.