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Dr. Maliheh Ghajargar (ملیحه قاجارگر) is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography and Environment at the College of Arts and Sciences, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Prior to joining UNC-CH she held an Assistant Professor position at Chapman University, an Associate Senior Lecturer position at Malmö University, Sweden and a post-doc researcher 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 human-environment interaction, sustainability, and human-AI interaction.

***My research lab (plantai) is hiring highly motivated undergraduate and graduate students to work on several research projects. Topics include multi-species storytelling, more-than-human-geographies, and human-environment-AI interaction!
If you are interested please email an updated CV/portfolio with a brief text describing your interests and motivation to me at maliheg@unc.edu.***

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My research proposal, “Designing Encounters with AI,” was awarded a grant for research diversity by the Institute for Arts and Humanities (IAH) at UNC-CH. This research grant builds on my previous research project, “In Conversation with Landscapes”, and engages with emerging cultural concerns and themes in AI research—such as explainability, trust, bias, and hallucinations—through a series of interdisciplinary co-design workshops.

I presented my paper,“Intimate Anthropocene: Attending to Land- and Soundscapes,”at the 2025 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS). This paper examines the Anthropocene through attentive engagements with land- and soundscapes, foregrounding sensory, situated practices of listening and observation. It argues that sonic and spatial attunement can reveal intimate human–environment relations, offering methodological and conceptual tools for understanding ecological change, multispecies entanglements, and care-driven environmental knowledge.

My article,“Tellings of the Pacific Ocean: A Landscape-based Approach for Multispecies Design and HCI,”has been published by the ACM Journal of Sustainable Computing and Societies. This article examines landscape-based graphic storytelling as a research-through-design method in HCI. By framing the Pacific Ocean as an active agent, it advances more-than-human perspectives, demonstrating how visual narratives can surface ecological relations, challenge anthropocentric design assumptions, and support environmental reflection and critique.

I was selected as one of the participants in the Trusted AI Training Program made possible by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (2025-2026) to support my research project“In-Conversation with Landscapes”. This is a design research project and focuses on supporting people’s learning about and their relationships with their environments through interacting with tangible AI products.

My article,“Alterity and kinship: co-writing posthumanist speculative nonfiction with AI”has been published by Oxford Press’s Interacting with Computers journal. This research devises a methodology aimed at disrupting the human-centered thinking that interferes with humans’ ability to perceive and engage with nonhumans as kin. We contribute a methodological process involving two “creative experiments,” with generative AI: “plant autobiography” and “plant music criticism.” This is first-coauthored with Jeffrey Bardzell and is published Open Access!

I presented two (peer-reviewed) papers at the ACM Academic Mindtrek 2024 conference. The first one‘AI and Future-Making: Design, Biases and Human-Plant Interaction’ presented at Design Fiction, Speculative Design or Critical Design track, interrogates the relationships between AI biases and future making activities common in design processes. The second one, ‘”The Words We Do Not Yet Have.” A Creative Inquiry Into Human-Plant Relationships’presented at Human-nature Interaction track is the result of a long term auto- ethnographic study in nature and a reflective and creative engagement with generative AI to examine human-environment interactions. They are published Open Access, check them out!

I was awarded a Jeffrey Griffith ’11 Jr Faculty Research award (2024-2026) to support my research project“Invisible Subjects: A Creativity Toolkit for Eco-sustainable AI”. This is an interdisciplinary and co-design research project that aims to diversify human-AI interaction design and computing approaches for sustainability. I will conduct (design) ethnographic studies, and co-design workshops to develop a series of co-creativity tools to support expressing the voice of the marginalized and underrepresented humans and nature. Stay tuned!

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 2^nd 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)