Building more just futures through critical, feminist interaction design
Welcome to Marianela Ciolfi Felice´s docent lecture
This lecture presents interaction design research at the intersection of feminist HCI (human-computer interaction), women’s health, and soma design. It shows how, ultimately, this research has been building a programme of change. Such programme is guided by critical, feminist, and Latin American perspectives and values, and seeks to inform not just technology design, but also public sector initiatives and wider tech policy.
Time: Fri 2026-02-13 14.00 - 15.00
Location: E36
Language: English
Participating: Marianela Ciolfi Felice
Contact:
Interactive technologies are enmeshed in human life and therefore must be accounted for in any meaningful societal transformation. Now more than ever, it is crucial to study the value of technology and how it can serve us in building more just futures, without posing it as a fix for complex social problems. At the same time, historical, systematic inequities remain embedded in both technology and design methods, requiring the contestation of dominant epistemological and methodological frames.
In this lecture, I will present the main threads underpinning my research in this space in the last 7 years: anti-technosolutionism, work, creativity, and HCI epistemology and practice. What weaves these threads together is a consistent commitment to examine interaction with technology -including its design, use, and study- as relational, situated, and structural, from a position that foregrounds epistemic diversity and justice.
Based on my research projects spanning women’s health and intimate care technologies, HCI in Latin America, and feminist approaches to AI, this lecture highlights empirically informed critique, participatory and transdisciplinary work, and mixed methods, as key tools that -alongside theory- can serve change in and through interaction design. In particular, it shows how my thematic and methodological choices have sought to redistribute power and agency to those often marginalised on the basis of gender, disabilities, geographies, and so on. Finally, it reflects on the collective, structural work required to effect change at different scales.