Ron Wakkary

Ron Wakkary is a Professor in SIAT where he founded the Everyday Design Studio (eds.siat.sfu.ca). In addition, he is a part-time Professor of Design for More Than Human-Centred Worlds in Future Everyday, Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Wakkary is the author of the book Things We Could Design for More Than Human-Centered Worlds (MIT Press, 2021), in which he theorizes the notion of designing-with, an expansive and pluralistic rethinking of design in which humans share center stage with nonhumans. The book weaves together posthumanist philosophies with research through design to argue for a more than human-centered approach to designing that acknowledges that humans and nonhumans are relational and entangled, bound together materially, ethically, and existentially. Wakkary’s research has also contributed methodologies for design research and HCI including material speculation, co-speculation, and research products. Earlier research argued for a broader understanding of who designs, called everyday design in which everyday resourceful appropriations of technologies are seen as designing.

Wakkary has been recognized with numerous awards including the Kyoto Global Design Award for design theory for Things We Could Design for More than Human-Centered Worlds (2021) in 2021; Distinguished Researcher, Faculty of Communication, Art, and Technology, SFU in 2021; and the Dean of Graduate Studies Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision, SFU in 2017. He and his co-authors have received 16 best paper and honourable mention awards for their publications at CHI, DIS, CSCW, C&C, EVA, and ICAD.

Wakkary co-chaired ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conferences in 2020 and 2014, and co-chaired ACM Tangible Embedded/Embodied Interaction (TEI) conference in 2019. He is currently the co-Chair of DIS Steering Committee and was a member of TEI Steering Committee. He was Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM interactions from 2010 to 2017. He is an editorial board member of several journals including ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI), International Journal of Design (IJD), Journal of Human-Technology Relations (JHTR), Archives of Design Research (KSDR) and Temes de Disseny (TdD) Journal.

Wakkary’s research has been funded by NSERC, SSHRC, NCE, Mellon Foundation, CFI, and MITACS in Canada and US, and by Horizon 2020-Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions, NWO, and Design United in Europe. Together with co-author Doenja Oogjes, he has a forthcoming book titled The Importance of Speculation in HCI and Design Research with Springer Nature to be published in 2023.