I am a prolific collaborator - as you might have noticed almost all of my work is coauthored and my doctoral and postdoctoral work happened in two major research projects: Creativity in Blended Interaction Spaces during my PhD at Aarhus University, and the Smart Technologies, Empowered Citizens during my postdoc at the TU Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Currently I am part of the DREAMS(Digitally supported Environmental Assessment for Sustainable Development Goals) project here at Aalborg University.
Below I outline a few of the typical ways to collaborate with me - don’t feel sad if I didn’t use OUR collaboration as an example. These are mostly chosen for their ability to communicate what I do with people.
Giving a talk or a workshop
I love giving talks and workshops, both at academic and industry venues or at the local highschool. I simply just love getting out there you know?
Recent workshops I have given include “Is that really Participatory Design” (at OpenLab, Newcastle University), concerning Participatory Design as a world/view and methodology, and guided early career researchers in analyzing their research projects using PD as a lens. Another emblematic talk is “Introduction to CoDesign methods” at Industrial Design TU Eindhoven where I outline and discussed with students how involving users and domain experts in creating design ideas might be a fruitful approach - and how to do it.
Student projects
Since my work is closely intertwined with practice it makes lots of sense to have students involved in my work. What I often do is that I work with students relevant to my research agenda on their own projects.
For instance, I collaborated with a group of students at the Master in Digital Design at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam on a project where they created an interactive installation Minicipality that aimed to use play and games to make local citizens more aware of possibilities of engaging in developing their own neighborhood. You can read more about that here The Minicipality - Creating a platform for citizen participation.
In another example, I supervised the bachelors project of Anna Smulders and while all credit must go to Anna for her brilliant work, it is also an example of her and my interests intersecting - she created the Conext; A discussion tool for next level co-creation at citizen-evenings by making connections. The goal of this project was to empower citizens during the redevelopment of their city within the co-creation process at citizen-evenings. This project neatly combined my interests in citizen empowerment as well as tools for participatory design.
In general I am open to student projects of all types and kinds, and I have a lot of experience collaborating with companies and external stakeholders. During my PhD I worked with LEGO and a series of architectural companies, and in my time in the Netherlands I worked together with students with Philips and KPN.
So do hit me up :)
Co-authoring papers
Last, I am always open to co-authoring papers - I want to go as to say that I love nothing more than the rush of minds meeting, and I think its always fantastic when things come together. I have obviously written a lot of papers with people whom I also shared project funding with (see above), but recently I have also begun writing more with people who I like and who I share interests with. So again - do hit me up :)