372. Grassroots sustainability (Canadá/Finland/Sweden). An interview with Cindy Kohtala.

Cindy Kohtala is a researcher, teacher, and writer in Design-for-Sustainability. Her focus is especially on everyday design, maker culture, and urban activism in sustainability transformation. She is a Professor in Design for Sustainability at Umeå Institute of Design in Sweden. She previously worked at Aalto University, Finland, in the INUSE Users and Innovation Research group and was PI of the postdoctoral research project Making the Next (Sustainable) Industrial Revolution from the Grassroots, funded by the Nessling Foundation. Here, you can read her doctoral dissertation Making Sustainability, awarded with Distinction, from Aalto ARTS books.

Her areas of expertise as a Science & Technology Studies scholar include qualitative research (mainly Symbolic  Interactionism, the social worlds framework, ethnographic and participant/non-participant in documenting and analyzing technology subculture).  

As a design researcher and teacher, she has published on and taught sustainable product-service system design,  design for social innovation, design for a circular economy, design for distributed economies, values-in-design in the design of products and technologies, and collaborative- and co-design.

Mentioned in the interview: o2 global network; Open Source Circular Economy Days; International Fab Lab network; Koppelting; O2 Finland and Pixelache. 

This interview is part of the lists: Diseño sostenible, Diseño en transición, FABLABS, Diseño y activismo, Canada y diseño, Finlandia y diseño, Suecia y diseño y D&D in English.