Sara Ljungblad

Sara Ljungblad is an associate professor in interaction design at University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests concern  understanding user needs and experiences of robots and other digital artefacts. She is also interested of design processes and inclusive design as a methodology in research and practice. She mostly conducts her research in the field of Human-Robot Interaction and Human-Computer Interaction, where she has done several qualitative studies of people’s experiences and use of robotic products and other technology. In 2021 she was a guest editor for a Special Issue on the topic of Critical Robotics Research published in AI&Society (2021). Her most recent research is about drones and their use in society. Together with Morten Fjeld she is managing the Social Drones project, part of the WASP-HS program, founded by the Wallenberg Foundation. She is the main supervisor for Mafalda Samuelsson Gamboa and co-supervisor for Ziming Wang at Chalmers University of Technology. She has also been a co-supervisor for Sara Ekström at West University, who finished her Ph.D. thesis 2023 “Teaching with social robots”. Another Ph.D student she has been supervising is Kristina Knaving (2016-2018) in the area of visualization. Sara Ljungblad has a background in Cognitive Science, Informatics and Human-Machine Interaction (Ph.D degree 2008).  She also has experience from industrial and interaction design practice, after spending three years working closely with industrial designers and interaction designers at LOTS Design, a Design and Innovation Agency (2011-2014). She was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, to be an in-house researcher, also applying for and receiving funding to be a project leader in a project on inclusive design. At LOTS Design she also conducted qualitative user studies at hospitals in Sweden and the US to gather data in an interaction design project. Sara Ljungblad has presented her work at various research conferences (such as CHI, CSCW, TEI, DIS, RoMan, HRI) and for the public at Robotdagen (2018), and Vetenskapsfestivalen (2021).