Joanna Saad-Sulonen

Associate professor

Software Engineering

LUT School of Engineering Sciences

Lahti

Joanna.Saad-Sulonen@lut.fi

LUT Focus Areas

Other Focus Area

Research areas

Social Sciences (miscellaneous)

Urban Studies

Software

Biography

Joanna Saad-Sulonen (she/her) is Associate Professor at the School of Engineering Sciences, Department of Software Engineering, at LUT University in Finland. Joanna has a background in architecture and digital design. Her research work focuses on understanding the way civic participation intersects with participation in the design of digital technology and services, and expanding the understanding of participatory design to include grassroots design and commoning practices. She was worked in several Finnish, Nordic, and European projects where participatory design has played a key role in exploring shared citizen-city infrastructures, collective digital artefact ecologies of urban grassroots communities, infrastructuring processes associated with research infrastructures, and the role of volunteers in providing IT support for peers in helpdesks at municipal Nordic libraries. She is also co-founder and co-organizer of the Special Interest Group on Commons and Commoning started at the IT University of Copenhagen in 2018, and was full paper chair for the Participatory Design conference of 2020.

My research interest lies at the intersection of design, digitalization, and participation. I am interested in expanding the understanding of participation in the design of information technologies and services by inquiring into existing and emerging creative practices of collectives and people not trained as professional designers, in the way they undertake intrinsic-design-as-infrastructuring.

Empirically, I study the way groups of citizens self-organize around topics of interest, how they use information technologies and digital services for that purpose, and what type of design work is at hand in such configurations. I follow an ethnographic approach, often combined with participatory design interventions, to collect rich qualitative data. My theoretical and conceptual framework draws from Scandinavian participatory design, design research, civic participation, the commons, service design and computer supported collaborative work. I have always integrated my research interests in participation and design to my teaching, and I also refine my own research scope thanks to my students’ curiosity and questions.

I have mostly taught master’s level students at different universities in Finland and Denmark, since 2004. I have taught various courses on design and collaborative work topics between 2009 and 2015 at the University of Art and Design, Aalto University, Laurea University of Applied Sciences, and the Aarhus University. During my time at the IT University of Copenhagen (ITU), between 2018 and 2022, my teaching responsibilities included managing my own courses on service design for master’s students and co-teaching bachelor level students. I have since August 2023 started teaching Service Design to master’s students at LUT University, as part of the newly launched master’s programme in Digital Systems and Service Development for software engineering students. I have also taught the User Interfaces and Usability course to bachelor students in software and systems engineering at LUT. I have co-designed both courses, and I am acting as course manager for them. I have also co-taught the Research Design and Methods master’s course at LUT.

In addition to this experience, I have given short workshops to master’s students in Lebanon and Japan. I have also acted as course manager for an intensive PhD level course on Critical Participatory Research and Design at ITU in 2022 and will be co-teaching another PhD level course on Prototyping Re-considered at ITU in spring 2024.

Researcher profiles

Google scholar

Elsewhere in the web

Keywords

Participatory design, Service design, Human Computer Interaction, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Urban planning, Design research

Joanna Saad-Sulonen

Biography

Research interests

Teaching experience

Researcher profiles

Elsewhere in the web

Keywords