Enabling participation in design

Fostering wellbeing in the more-than-human world

What do we need to know to live in today's world in a sustainable way?

Dear visitor, welcome to my website! It somehow represents what I am currently interested in and how that is connected to what I have done in the past. If you are curious about anything in my work, let's connect! The easiest is to write me an email at katerina dot cerna at hh dot se, but LinkedIn also works.

We are in the middle of a crisis - the world is literally burning and the well-being of humans and more is drastically decreasing. To find suitable approach to this situation, as an Assistant senior lecturer at division of DSI @ Halmstad University I use design ethnographic and participatory approaches to understand learning and design to enable people to take the actions they need in the more-than-human world. More specifically, I develop further understanding of enabling participation in design, both human-centered but also the implications for more-than-human and embodied design.

I am currently trying to understand these topics as an assistant senior lecturer (level assistant professor) at ISDD division at School of Information Technology/Halmstad University. Here, I am also part of research program REBEL, research program focused on Re-Imagining Future Smart Living – Beyond the Living Lab. Here I lead a pilot project focusing on re-connecting with nature in smart cities. I am also part of CAISR Health, where I am the Responsible Area Leader for participation.

More-than-human design approach

My efforts connected to sustainability and design are collected under the project Grow 2B well.

Enabling participation in design

I further explore wellbeing and how we can foster it by including relevant stakeholders into the design process, so that we can collaboratively make sense of the collected data.

I explore these topics through a project PadAI, where we are exploring through participatory design where AI could help when young people seek help with their mental wellbeing. I also work in the project PAS-SAP, where we co-design a toolkit for self-documenting of people with chronic pain.

In the past, I tried understanding these issues as a senior lecturer at division MDI at the Applied IT, University of Gothenburg. Here I collaborated with Appademin, especially on matching Fitbit to the needs of wheelchair users. I have also worked in the area of aging and IT in group of Assistant Professor Claudia Müller as a postdoc in "IT for the ageing society" at the department of Infomation Systems at the University of Siegen. More specifically, I coordinated the ACCESS project, in which I focused on how we can enable older adults to become autonomous when using digital tools by involving them in participatory design process. ACCESS project was an interdisciplinary and international project. You can learn more about the project here.

I gained my PhD in Education sciences from the University of Gothenburg. In my PhD work I focused on how we can design for learning and knowing of nurses when they start using self-monitoring data in chronic care. You can learn about my thesis work more here.

My background is a mixture of HCI, learning science, sociology, strong drive to understand impact of technology on our society and will to do something about it.

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