Professor, Design for Sustainablility
E-mail: cindy.kohtala@umu.se
Background
I am a Finnish-Canadian researcher, writer, educator and
designer, with degrees in industrial design and craft design from
Canada and Finland. I enjoy working translocally: I am an active
member of several international networks for
design-for-sustainability and for fab labs, as well as a
participant in local urban activism projects. I like to inhabit the
peripheries of design, where activists collaborate on alternatives
to conventional mass production and consumption offerings.
I did my doctorate in Aalto University where I examined fab
labs, distributed production and sustainability issues in my
dissertation.
What
I do at UID
I am Professor in design for sustainability. I aim to
build people's capacities for sustainability assessment and
collaborative knowledge-making in research projects and in design
education. I facilitate design students' ability to develop their
own design-for-sustainability skills and profiles.
Before coming to UID, I taught sustainable product-service
system design and design-for-sustainability courses at the Master's
level, introductory design at the Bachelor's level and introductory
doctoral research skills at the PhD level. I give lectures and
workshops in courses locally and internationally, on open design
and maker culture, distributed economies, design for a circular
economy, and co-design. I have been a guest teacher in
Design-for-Sustainability courses in Mexico, China and India.
I am interested in grassroots activism: how active people engage
materially in sustainability issues and how they build
infrastructure for others to get involved in locally relevant and
socially valuable production. As tools and knowledge become more
accessible, people have more and more opportunities to participate
in design and technology. At the same time, people need to
participate in decision-making in their direct environment and
often want to learn about local sustainability issues - even
changing their lifestyle. I study examples of industrial
transition, alternatives to mass production and consumption. This
can be a local community technology workshop (fab lab) or a
micro-factory that manufactures on-demand.
I explore how researchers and activists can collaborate on
knowledge making for sustainability transformation using design-led
methods.
Talk
to me about
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Open design, fab labs and maker culture
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Values in design
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Sustainable Product-Service Systems
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Science & Technology Studies
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Active user engagement in design and technology
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Co-design and collaborative design
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Ethnographic research
