IxD Lab

Leveraging the power of emotion, embodiment, and imagination for more ethical, sustainable futures
2026-02-19 10:00 - 11:30 (Europe/Copenhagen)
Noura Howell, University of Southern Denmark
Abstract:
Society is urgently seeking more ethical, sustainable futures. Howell’s research leverages emotion, embodiment, and imagination as powerful capabilities that designers can leverage to support more ethical, sustainable alternatives around data and AI: (1) Design futuring with children to envision sustainable community futures, (2) Embodied interactions for critically interrogating algorithmic systems, (3) More-than-human embodied interactions. Howell will present a range of past projects around these themes and invite discussion about current projects from the audience and ideas for potential collaborations.
Bio:
Howell is a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) design researcher and Associate Professor in the Centre for Software Technology at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU) in Vejle. Howell’s research includes participatory imagining of more sustainable futures and building prototypes for embodied, emotional sense-making with data. Prior to SDU, Howell was an Assistant Professor in Digital Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in the department of Digital Media. Howell’s research has been funded by a US National Science Foundation CAREER award and a Google TensorFlow Faculty Award, among other sources. Howell completed her PhD at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a member of the BioSENSE lab. Previously she worked as a human centered designer and engineer in Singapore, Morocco, and China, and at the MIT Media Lab, Intel Labs, and Microsoft.
