Maria Menendez-Blanco

My research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction for societal engagement. I am interested in how technologies support, or hinder, participation. Since 2020, I’ve been an Assistant Professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy). I led the Embodied Data Lab, where we work with data as design material to create interactive installations that allow experiencing interconnectedness in nature. I teach in bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD programmes at unibz, where students learn practical (e.g., digital prototyping) and critical skills on the design and analysis of sociotechnical systems.

From this beautiful alpine region, I collaborate with colleagues and friends from around the world. I am part of the INTRA project, led by Prof. Uğur Yavuz from the Faculty of Design and Art at unibz. I have worked on narratives, gender, and computing in FemTech.dk; on sustained participation, digital platforms, and issue formation at the ParticipaLab of MediaLab Prado; and on representing matters of concern in spazioD.

My research interests and outcomes are shaped by the places I worked and the people I collaborated with. Before joining unibz, I worked at the Human-Centred Computing section of the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) with Pernille Bjørn. I did my Ph.D. at the InterAction Lab of the University of Trento (Italy), where I worked with Antonella De Angeli, Maurizio Teli, and many others. Before, I had worked at the KnowDive group of the University of Trento with Fausto Giunchiglia and at the Multimedia Retrieval group of the University of Delft (The Netherlands) with Martha Larson. I studied  User-System Interaction at the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Eindhoven (The Netherlands), and Computer Engineering (BSc and MSc) at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). You can find a detailed version of my CV here.