Critical Fabulations

Daniela Rosner is Associate Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington, co-director of the Tactile and Tactical Design (TAT) Lab, an artist-in-residence at MPIWG in Berlin, and a Visiting Scholar at Humboldt University. Her research critically investigates the role design practices play in materializing collective futures, focusing on practices historically marginalized within engineering cultures such as electronics maintenance and needlecraft.

Rosner has published widely on craft and technoculture. In her recent book, Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (MIT, 2018), she investigates new ways of thinking about design’s past to rework future relationships between technology and social responsibility. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago. She serves on the Editorial Board of Artifact: Journal of Design Practice and as the editor of the “Design as Inquiry” forum for Interactions magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI. She has worked in design research at Microsoft Research, Adobe Systems, Nokia Research and as an exhibit designer at several museums, including the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum. Her work has been supported by multiple awards from the National Science Foundation, including an NSF CAREER award.