Sara Ljungblad

Peace, respect and people first! How can we understand the impact of technology on us as humans in the present and forward and backward in time? Sara Ljungblad is associate professor in interaction design at Gothenburg University and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. Her research interests are about understanding people's experiences of robots - and how we can avoid becoming like robots ourselves in a technology-driven and hectic world. She has carried out several studies on how people experience and reflect on robotic solutions such as drones, a social robot in school and a transport robot in hospitals. Sara explores the boundary between what includes and excludes and how different people, with different bodies and functional variations experience robotic technology. Her research area is human-robot interaction and human-computer interaction and is about understanding different people and their needs in technology development. Sara writes articles with critical perspectives on robots and on design know-how. Robots as design solutions may be more or less appropriate. When are other types of solutions needed and why?

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).