Our Research Team
Project Leads
Dr. Marcel O'Gorman
PROJECT DIRECTOR
Professor Marcel O’Gorman is a University Research Chair and Founding Director of the Critical Media Lab (CML). The CML supports the design and development of research and creative projects that explore the impacts of technology on society and the more than human world. O’Gorman has published widely about tech issues in both academic and public contexts, including articles and op-eds in The Atlantic, Slate, The Globe and Mail, and The Conversation. He is also a practicing artist with an international portfolio of exhibitions and performances.
Email: marcel@uwaterloo.ca
University of Waterloo Profile: Dr. Marcel O’Gorman
Dr. Heather A. Love
FACULTY RESEARCHER
Heather A. Love is an assistant professor of English at the University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada), where she conducts interdisciplinary research and teaches courses on topics related to literature, culture, technology, health, and engineering. Her first monograph, “Cybernetic Aesthetics: Modernist Networks of Information and Data” (forthcoming from Cambridge UP) traces a cultural pre-history to the technological field of mid- to late-twentieth-century cybernetics in the experimental work of modernist authors such as Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Cultural and Critical Theory and IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, for which she currently serves as Associate Editor. Heather is an elected Member-at-Large on the Board of Governors for the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (SSIT).
Email: heather.love@uwaterloo.ca
University of Waterloo Profile: Dr. Heather A. Love
Dr. Jennifer Boger
FACULTY RESEARCHER
Jennifer Boger is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Waterloo, Adjunct Professor at UBC (Okanagan), and a Research Scientist at the Research institute for Aging. She has been a lead researcher on more than 40 transdisciplinary projects that apply state-of-the-art computer science, engineering, and rehabilitation science resulting in more than 150 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Boger is internationally renowned for the human-centric development of cutting-edge technology for supporting aging, quality of life, and wellbeing, including formal research in collaborative technology development. She is spearheading the concept of ‘Ethical by Design’, which involves the systematic design of a methodology to enable disparate stakeholders to collaboratively build aspects such ethics, culture, and citizenship into products and systems throughout their lifecycle.
Email: jboger@uwaterloo.ca
Profile: Dr. Jennifer Boger
Dr. Katina Michael
FACULTY RESEARCHER
Katina Michael is a professor at Arizona State University, a Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Global Futures Laboratory and has a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. She is the director of the Society Policy Engineering Collective (SPEC) and the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society. Katina is a senior member of the IEEE and the founding chair of the inaugural Masters of Science in Public Interest Technology. She has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), and the Australian Research Council (ARC). Prior to academia, Katina was employed by Nortel Networks, Anderson Consulting and OTIS Elevator Company.
Email: katina.michael@asu.edu
Profile: Dr. Katina Michael
Dr. Daniela Rosner
FACULTY RESEARCHER
Daniela K. Rosner is an Associate Professor in Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington and co-director of the Tactile and Tactical Design (TAT) Lab. Her research investigates the social, political, and material circumstances of technology development and use. Rosner’s work has appeared in Public Culture, New Media & Society, Design Issues, and other journals, conference proceedings, and edited volumes. She is the author of Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design (MIT Press). Rosner serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Interactions magazine, a bimonthly publication of ACM SIGCHI. For this project, Dr. Rosner will consult on critical design methods deployed in the workshops by supporting collaborative work between her students and students in Critical Design at Waterloo. She will also introduce the workshops to engineers at U of Washington, scaffolding critical pedagogy and hybrid learning around technology development.
Email: dkrosner@uw.edu
Profile: Dr. Daniela Rosner
Dr. Rob Gorbet
Faculty Researcher
Formally trained as an electrical engineer, Rob is an interdisciplinarian, an award-winning teacher and a technology artist. He is interested in the design of technological and social interfaces, where humans have interactions with other humans and non-humans.Rob’s collaborative interactive artworks have been exhibited across Europe and North America and have won several awards, including the international FEIDAD and VIDA 11.0 first prize, and being selected to represent Canada at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. They have been featured in major print and online media, and on the Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet.Rob teaches museum exhibit design in the interdisciplinary Bachelor of Knowledge Integration, a unique undergraduate degree that teaches students to value and leverage diversity of all kinds in service of effective solutions to important problems.
Email: rob.gorbet@uwaterloo.ca.
Dr. Carter Neal
Faculty Researcher
Carter Neal is a Continuing Lecturer in English at the University of Waterloo, where he delivers courses in English and communications courses in the Faculties of Science and Engineering. Since 2018, his first-year communications courses for students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering have situated engineering communication within concrete rhetorical and ethical contexts and have asked students to perform as engineering communicators while learning about the rhetorical processes involved in their chosen field. For this project, Dr. Neal will refine his pedagogical integration of critical design methods as he implements curricular materials, critical design workshops and assignments into his courses, and develops other student-facing pedagogical interventions.
Email: carter.neal@uwaterloo.ca
Profile: Dr. Carter Neal
Research Assistants
Alexi Orchard
Alexi Orchard is a PhD candidate in English Language & Literature at the University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on engineering ethics education and cross-disciplinary, sociotechnical pedagogical methods, including critical design, as a means to enhance technologists’ abilities to recognize, mitigate, and reflect on complex ethical issues in their work. She also manages the Critical Media Lab, a research-creation initiative dedicated to exploring the impact of technology on society and promoting responsible innovation.
Email: alexi.orchard@uwaterloo.ca
Shannon Lodoen
Shannon Lodoen is an English doctoral candidate whose research interests lie at the intersection of rhetoric, media theory, and Frankfurt School critical theory. Her SSHRC-funded dissertation examines how smartphones are reshaping users’ subjectivity through their constant, customizable, and captivating presence in everyday life. Shannon is especially interested in understanding how smartphones and other technological devices are designed to be (and are) used in ways that are antithetical to users’ health, happiness, and freedom. Through her own research and her participation on the Critical by Design team, she hopes to highlight the importance of tech ethics and responsible innovation practices that prioritize people’s wellbeing and safety over potential profit or progress for the sake of progress alone.
Email: smlodoen@uwaterloo.ca
Aleksander Franiczek
Aleksander Franiczek is an English PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo. His research synthesizes perspectives from game studies, phenomenology, and critical design to consider how a player’s sense of immersion in a digital game can provide a means towards self-reflection through creative engagement both during and outside gameplay. This has also led him to explore how games’ reflective potential can be leveraged to engage players in ethics-related issues surrounding the tech and games industries by designing narrative-driven games focused on these matters. Through his involvement with the Critical By Design team, Aleks hopes to continue this and other related work that will contribute to the dissemination of ethical approaches to tech innovation.
Email: afraniczek@uwaterloo.ca
Dakota Pinheiro
Dakota Pinheiro (he/him) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Waterloo. As a member of the Critical by Design research team, Dakota is particularly interested in the affordances of critical design and production methods in the postsecondary classroom and in public-facing EDI advocacy. Dakota’s critical design experience has primarily taken the form of self-authored digital games that he employs in his communication and literary studies courses. As part of his dissertation research project, Dakota is also interested in discussions about popular perceptions of technology and the role that they may play in perpetuating intersectional labour inequities. Using an interdisciplinary and humanities-informed approach, Dakota continues to advocate for a deconstruction of the rhetoric surrounding technology-based work and to assert the necessity of implementing sustainable design practices in an increasingly precarious labour market.
Email: ddpinheiro@uwaterloo.ca
Norhan Abbas
Norhan Abbas is a Computer Science Master’s student. Her research interests mainly lie in security, privacy, and gender diversity in software engineering. Through the Critical Media Lab she has found an opportunity to work on what is beyond just the scientific aspect of technology. Norhan aims to study more about the perception of Engineering students as we seek to have a well-rounded tech community that does not only innovate new things but also strongly consider how inclusive, significantly accessible, and intentionally ethical the new technology should be.
Derrick Wang
Derrick is an upcoming PhD student in the User Research PhD program in the Stratford campus at the University of Waterloo. His research focus includes gamification and game player research. He seeks to bring gamification, the practice of enhancing the user experience in non-game applications using elements commonly found in games (such as badges and leaderboards), into critical design to help create a more desirable user experience. And as the current game design profession is constantly challenged by designs such as lootboxes and pay-to-win mechanics that seek not to improve player experience but incentivize purchase which are considered unethical by many, he’s interested to see what impact critical design may have on the game industry as well.
Email: dwmaru@uwaterloo.ca
