The School of Design is thrilled to welcome two new Courtesy Appointments to our faculty, Christina Harrington & Paul Pangaro. Both Christina and Paul are joining Design from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII) at Carnegie Mellon University.
Christina Harrington (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Christina has several years of experience as a designer and qualitative researcher who works at the intersection of interaction design and health and racial equity. She has worked as a design researcher and UX designer at various companies such as Apple, Lenovo, and Motorola and her research has been published at various venues focused on HCI and design.
Her research combines her background in and industrial design, interactive systems and human factors psychology to focus on areas of universal, accessible, and inclusive design. Specifically, she looks at how to use design in the development of products to support older adults, individuals with differing abilities, and historically excluded groups such as Black and LatinX communities in maintaining their health, wellness, and autonomy in defining technological futures. Christina is passionate about using design to center communities that have historically been at the margins of mainstream design. She looks to methods such as design justice and community collectivism to broaden and amplify participation in design by addressing the barriers that corporate approaches to design have placed on our ability to see design as a universal language of communication and knowledge. Dr. Harrington is the Director of the Equity and Health Innovations Design Research Lab.
More information about Christina's work >>
Paul Pangaro is a Professor of the Practice at HCII, as well as the President at the American Society for Cybernetics. Paul Pangaro's career spans startups, consulting, research, and education. His work explores the role of conversation in expanding human agency in human-human as well as human-machine interactions. His knowledge and practice of cybernetics, systems, conversation theory, design, and artificial intelligence, are the basis of his approach.
Paul and Hugh Dubberly co-chair the Systems Working Group in the Future of Design Education Initiative. As an educator, Paul begins with the conviction that 21st-century designers, architects, and technologists must wholly engage with the complex systems that comprise the entangled domains of technology and human nature, society and justice, climate change and planet health.
With the American Society for Cybernetics, Paul is leading an initiative to revive and revise the renowned Macy Meetings from the birth of cybernetics. Now dubbed #NewMacy, the initiative has attracted an international community of transdisciplinary and transgenerational participants committed to addressing the complex systems-level challenges mentioned above.
Paul is deeply committed to bringing the field of cybernetics to light across multiple disciplines and domains. For example, Paul and TJ McLeish have created a full-scale, faithful replica of Gordon Pask's seminal interactive work, Colloquy of Mobiles. In 2019 Colloquy was exhibited at Centre Pompidou in Paris and is now part of the permanent collection of the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany.