Month: May 2014

Thomas Raben

 

 

Thomas Raben holds a MA in history from the University of Copenhagen in 2005. For the past 6 years he has been working as a consultant in Frederiksberg Municipality, primarily within employment and social welfare.

Frederiksberg Municipality has for the last few years been exploring new ways of involving and engaging citizens, businesses, associations and educational institutions in the development of Frederiksberg.  A central aim is to develop new social services aiming at participation and sharing of resources between different social groups and generations.

The Give & Take project contributes and fits within this focus by promoting active ageing and creating opportunities for senior citizens to contribute to fellow citizens and society. The municipality is looking forward to be a part of this project in the coming years.

Frederiksberg Municipality will primarily contribute to the project by identifying and involving citizens in Frederiksberg in the project and also supporting the development and testing of the Give & Take digital platform.

Erik Grönvall

I am an Associate professor in the People and Computational Things (PACT) section and the IxD Research Group at the IT University of Copenhagen. I have a Ph.D. in Telematics and Information society with a focus on Participatory Design and pervasive healthcare IT. I have 13+ years of experience working with, and designing, healthcare technologies. I have been teaching university classes for eight years; for example in Service Design, Physical computing and Participatory Design.

I have an interest in designing for everyday wellbeing, health and healthcare, especially for non-clinical settings and use. I’m interested in infrastructuring, co-design in non-work settings and civic engagement. I have done much work on care networks and collaboration between formal and informal (care) actors.

My role in the project will be to participate in research, for example related to co-design of services and other systems and technologies to support Give & Take. I will also be involved in co-authoring scientific papers.

Geraldine Fitzpatrick

I am a Professor of Design and Assessment of Technology in the Informatics Faculty at TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology). I have an eclectic background starting in Australia (dropping out of social work, training as a nurse and midwife, co-setting up the first private midwifery practice in Queensland, studying for an informatics degree, completing a PhD at the intersection of computer science and the social sciences, working in a distributed systems research organization) then moving to Europe to work as a user experience consultant in industry in London, and then as an academic in England and now Austria.

I am passionate about re-thinking the design of technology to enhance quality of life, in particular for this project, the experience of aging and community, connecting to people’s core values and to what makes life fun and rewarding. Other research areas include health and well being, social and emotional skills learning, and collaboration and social interaction.  

I facilitate the great team of researchers at TUW, responsible for WP2 on the service design model and facilitating the partner engagements in Austria.

Inger Vibeke Dorph

My background  is an MA in Sociology. I did my thesis on European Identity in Educational Area. I have a passion for applied sociology – to work with and understand how institutional structures, rules and obligations affects everyday life and work.
I have worked within in Research Support for the past 9 years as a project manager of EU and National funded research projects employed by the IT University of Copenhagen.
I am the administrative coordinator for Give&Take and look forward to increase my expertice within the the AAL programme – understanding a new sets of rules and to develop new tools and practices to facilitate the development of the Give&Take.
I happily share food, nice weather, childrens toys and Christmas cookies – meeting early  or in the afternoon – I take my coffee with loads of sugar and milk.

Katharina Werner

Katharina has studied Media Informatics at Vienna University of Technology. Before returning to the University as a project assistant she was responsible for user involvement and conducting and planning user trials at the Institute of Rehabilitation and Assisted Living Technologies (CEIT RALTEC).Her expertises are within the areas of user experience, participatory design methods, human computer and human robot interaction especially in the field of AAL.

At the end of the project she is hoping to see people who are proud of having managed the hurdle to use “technical devices of the young generation” and new relationships evolve between people who did not have a lot of social contact.

Within the Give&Take project Katharina is involved in planning and conducting of workshops, focus groups, interviews and trials with potential endusers of the Give&Take service.
Furthermore she will work on establishing a Living Lab in Austria and accompany the participating seniors and representatives of senior organisations throughout the whole project.

Katharina loves to share travel experiences.

Valeria Borsotti

I am a research assistant at the IT University of Copenhagen. My background is in social anthropology and I am interested in civic engagement, grassroots movements, creative approaches to participatory design and participatory action research. I have ethnographic experience studying arts-based community outreach projects in San Francisco and Yucatán. Before gaining my MS in Anthropology I worked in the field of communications in Italy and the U.S., and as a fine art printmaker in Copenhagen.

The Give&Take project is a wonderful opportunity for me to understand how social engagement can be used to empower senior citizens, and how it can improve their mental health.

My favorite thing to share is music.

Thomas Binder

I am associate professor at the design school in Copenhagen, where I teach codesign and constructive design research.  I have worked with interaction design and design participation from machine tools to the infrastucturing of community networks. Together with my colleagues Eva and Maria I was part of a related project, Seniorinteraction, where we and ITU worked with Copenhagen municipality to facilitate network building among senior citizens.

My interest in the Give&Take project is both methodological and thematic. Methodologically I am very interested in how designers and design researchers can work with societal challenges in fields that are traditionally governed my bureaucratic and political procedures. And related to this I find it very interesting to explore what kind of role of citizenship is offered to the participants, and to understand what happens as we move from thinking of participants as user to thinking of them as authorized citizens.

In the project my role will be together with my colleagues at the design school to take a lead in conducting user research and organizing collaborative design laboratories through out the different stages of the project. This means that we have most of our time to spend in WP2 and WP3 (and a lead role in WP3). My favorite thing to share is stories of which I believe we will have many more to tell as we commence the project work.

Pedro Pinto

I am passionate about sharing: personal stories, great achievements, life… As an entrepreneur, I have focused my business activities providing tools to empower and enable people to achieve the “next level. I am very interested helping Give & Take project to build a sustainable growing model, helping to build an infrastructure that would empower communities to share value in a simple and valued way.