about _

Dr. Maliheh Ghajargar (ملیحه قاجارگر) is an Assistant Professor at the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and has a courtesy appointment in the Fowler School of Engineering, Chapman University. Prior to joining Chapman University, she held an assistant professorship position at Malmö University, Sweden and a post-doc position at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands.

She holds a PhD (cum laude) in Management, Production and Design with a focus on HCI from Politecnico di Torino, Department of Architecture and Design (DAD). She received a M.Sc. in Eco design (a.k.a. Systemic Design), and a B.Sc. in Industrial Design from the same university.

Her research and teaching interests are within the areas of design research, sustainability, UX and creativity.

news_

I presented designing with nature dataduring an invited talk for the regional chapter of Women in Data Science (WiDS), Irvine, CA, on April, 6th, 2024. In this presentation I talked about data collection and analysis approaches in data sciences for conservation and sustainability.

I was invited to present some of the early findings of my research inhuman-plant interaction designat a seminar in Fowler School of Engineering, Chapman University, on March 12th, 2024. I enjoyed thoughtful questions from the interdisciplinary audience who attended this seminar!

I gave a research talk “More than Human Interaction Design” on March 1st, 2024, at the newly established School of Data Science and Society at UNC, which included also some of the early results of the research project “Posthuman Interaction Design and Human-AI Creativity”funded by Chapman University’s FGRSC grant.

I was awarded a Chapman University’s FGRSC grant (2023-2024) to support my research project “Posthuman Interaction Design and Human-AI Creativity: Fieldworks, Design Patterns, Artifacts”. The project links my two research interests in sustainable design and Human-AI creative interactions and will contribute to the posthuman design research. More soon!

I will be part of a panel at Computing Conference, 2023, London, UK, onAI and Climate Change. I will share my research on using Generative AI for design research on sustainability.

I will be co-chairing the doctoral consortium at Academic MindTrek 2022 conference onNovember 15th.I am looking forward to having a lively discussion with PhD students and mentors on user experience design, aesthetics and body-centric design!

I will be co-organising the 2nd studio on “Graspable AI”, in conjunction with ACM TEI 2022 conference with Jeffrey Bardzell, Alison Smith- Renner, Kristina Höök and Peter Gall Krogh. For this studio we invite contributions on making AI more understandable, by leveraging design qualities of physical forms, their self-explanatory features, their ecologies and relationships with other kinds of forms.Submissions are due January 25th, 2022.

My student Anna Schröder and I contributed to Perspectives 2021 workshop, at ACM RecSys conference with a paper entitled: “Unboxing the Algorithm: Designing Understandable Algorithmic Experience in Music Recommender Systems”!

I will be presenting at CHI’2021! The paper is co-authored with Jeffrey Bardzell and it explores the synthesis of reflective and practical qualities in design of interactive and intelligent everyday use objects, through an analysis of two prototypes! It offers two possible modes of such synthesis taking into account forms and form giving processes.

Our studio proposal, “From Explainable AI to Graspable AI” has been accepted for the 15th ACM International Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction (TEI’2021)! The studio will be co-organised with Jeffrey Bardzell, Kristina Höök, Peter Gall Krogh, Alison Smith- Renner, Laurens Boer, David Cuartielles and Mikael Wiberg. Submissions are due January 25th, 2021.

I will co-organise a workshop on user experience (UX) of IML, with Jan Persson, Jeffrey Bardzell, Lars Holmberg and Agnes Tegen, at NordiCHI’20 conference: “The UX of Interactive Machine Learning”, on October 25th, 2020! Submissions are due August 21st.

I will co-organise a workshop entitled “Human- Machine Learning Interaction Design Challenges and Opportunities” at 10th International conference on the Internet of Things (IoT2020), with Jan Persson, Jeffrey Bardzell, Lars Holmberg and Agnes Tegen, on October 6th, 2020! Deadline for submission of position papers: July 3rd July 20th (Extended deadline)