This year, the City of Vienna’s Sponsorship Prize in STEM goes to Katta Spiel for their outstanding contribution to informatics at the intersection of computer science, design, and cultural studies. The City of Vienna has been awarding annual sponsorship prizes to exceptional talents in the fields of science, architecture, fine arts, literature, music, and education since 1951. Both individuals and teams can be honored with this award, each endowed with €4,000.

Katta Spiel considers themself “very privileged and honored to have been chosen for the 2022 STEM Sponsorship Prize. This shows the strong support for interdisciplinary critical work within technical sciences. I research marginalized perspectives on technology. My work informs design and engineering in critical ways to support the development of technologies that account for the diverse realities they operate in. Drawing on methods from Critical Participatory Design and Action Research, I collaborate with neurodivergent and/or nonbinary peers to explore novel potentials for designs, methodological contributions, and innovative technological artifacts. With this prize, the City of Vienna emphasizes the high relevance and urgency for work investigating how technologies operate on the margins of society and how we may think differently about what technologies can do for whom and how.”

About Katta Spiel

Katta Spiel is an FWF Hertha-Firnberg scholar at the Research Unit for Human Computer Interaction at TU Wien Informatics, where they work on their project entitled “Exceptional Norms: Marginalised Bodies in Interaction Design”. Additionally, they teach externally in the interdisciplinary Master’s curriculum in Gender Studies at the University of Vienna. Before that, they researched attitudes, desires, and interests of neurodivergent youth in digital games, collaborating with Kathrin Gerling and Fares Kayali as part of the FWF-funded projects Social Play Technologies and OutsideTheBox, both at TU Wien. Within these projects, they investigated the experiences of autistic children in technological contexts, moving away from empathy and developing a concept for Participatory Evaluation. Katta Spiel acquired their bachelor’s degrees in Media Culture (B.A.) and Media Systems (B.Sc.) as well as their Master’s degree in Computer Science and Media (M.Sc.) at Bauhaus Universität Weimar.

For information on current research endeavors and more, visit their website.

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