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.

Recently, I was the PI on Algorithmic Food Justice, a project exploring how new algorithmic technologies such as blockchain could be used to create a fairer and more sustainable food system (algorithmicfoodjustice.net). This was funded through an EPSRC Not-Equal Network Plus grant. I was also PI on More-than-Human Data Interactions in the Smart City, a project exploring how we might co-design data interactions in the smart city for more inclusive and sustainable urban cohabitation with other species (https://mothcities.uk). This was funded through an EPSRC Human Data Interactions Network Plus grant.

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

Qualifications

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

Employment

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

Awards

• 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
• 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