Janis Lena Meißner
Senior Lecturer Dipl.-Ing. / Bakk.techn.
About
Janis Lena Meißner is a senior lecturer and project assistant at the HCI research group of TU Wien and a doctoral trainee in Digital Civics at Open Lab (Newcastle University). She holds a BSc and MSc in Media Informatics (TU Wien) and a MRes in Digital Civics. She previously worked in the IT-department of an Austrian governmental institution as well as in consulting services for a software company. She is a co-founding member of fempower.tech, a group of intersectional feminists who raise awareness of feminist issues in HCI.
Janis's research interests are in productive creative practices of non-expert technology users and their ways of meaning-making with digital tools. Her work is committed to addressing social issues with the design and use of technologies - that is, to raising critical questions of social justice in design and empowerment of technology users. She has a particular interest in experimenting with participatory and creative research methods and how co-design can be used as a means to establish healthy give-and-take-relationships between researcher and researched.
In her research she has engaged with:
- urban knitters, their use of social media and the 'Tools for Wools' prototype
- the DIY-Making practices of makers-in-the-making: people with disabilities using 3D-printers for 'empowering hacks'; charity workers and service users creating the Partnership Quilt; organisers and users of a Men Shed combining tradtitional skills with new digital technologies
- potentials for telemonitoring in the treatment of chronic heart failure
- the hidden technological labour of workers in female dominated occupations (i.e. retail employees and mobile care workers)
Role
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Senior Lecturer
Human Computer Interaction, E193-05