Dr Sara Heitlinger

Overview

I am a specialist in sustainable human-computer interaction (HCI) and design-led participatory research. My particular interests are in citizen-led innovation, urban agriculture, and smart cities. My research is grounded in participatory design, but I draw on methods and perspectives from the arts and humanities, such as feminist technoscience, and socially-engaged arts practice. I am motivated to find new approaches that help HCI move beyond authoritarian, top-down, efficiency-based solutions to sustainability, by co-designing new sociotechnical systems for urban cultural diversity and more-than-human cities.

Prior to coming to City, I was part of the Digital Local Democracy research strand in the Global Urban Research Centre at Newcastle University, where I investigated new methods for increasing citizen participation in democratic processes through co-designing “smart” urban food futures. I was also the lead researcher Co-Investigator on Connected Seeds and Sensors, an 18-month project based at Queen Mary University of London, where I investigated co-designing novel interactive Internet of Things systems with urban agricultural communities to support more sustainable food consumption and production in the city. For this project I won a Community Collaboration Award for Research at Queen Mary University of London in 2017.

All my work is collaborative, and I am always keen to make new collaborative links.

Qualifications

1. PhD in Media and Arts Technology, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
2. MA in Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, United Kingdom
3. BSc in Computer Science, Hebrew University, Israel

Employment

1. Lecturer in Computer Science, City, University of London, Jan 2019 – present
2. Postdoctoral Research Associate, Newcastle University, Apr 2017 – Jan 2019
3. Researcher Co-Investigator, Queen Mary University of London, Oct 2015 – Mar 2017

Awards

1. Queen Mary University of London (2017) Community Collaboration Award for Research
   An award to recognise the people and projects at QMUL that work with the community to mutual benefit
2. UNESCO (2007) UNESCO Digital Arts Award

Featured publications

1. Heitlinger, S., Bryan-Kinns, N. and Comber, R. (2019). The Right to the Sustainable Smart City. CHI '19: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Publications by category