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Elisa Giaccardi is Professor and Chair of Interaction Design at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. From 2018, she also holds a position as Professor in Post-industrial Design at the Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden. She brings together an interdisciplinary background in humanities and philosophy (MSc 1998) and computing and interaction design (PhD 2003). She regularly lectures and publishes in international journals and at leading conferences for design research, interaction design and human-computer interaction, and has been the recipient of several scholarships and research grants in both Europe and the United States.

Elisa is director of the MSc Design for Interaction and lead of the Delft Design Lab Cities of Things at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. She is also founding member of AiTech, the Delft University of Technology campus-wide initiative for the responsible design and engineering of AI systems, and principle investigator of the Responsible Urban Digitization research program at the Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions Institute in collaboration with the City of Amsterdam.

Autonomous Technologies and the Challenges of Probabilistic Design

In her keynote, Elisa argues for the need to raise critical questions about the ways we design in the post-industrial age and to dare developing radically new frameworks and methodologies. Her idea of probabilistic design aims to establish and research agency as foundational to our understanding of autonomous technologies as was once the notion of function to our understanding of tools. To illustrate this, she will introduce and discuss examples from healthcare, mobility and sustainability of how designers should consider what is uniquely human and uniquely artificial in the configuration of agency (e.g., improvisation and foresight) and attend to this co-performance as a decentralized act of design with probabilistic outcomes.

Video of the talk on Vimeo.