Meet the Head of Department

What does the Digital Design Department do?

Research in the Digital Design Department contributes with new knowledge, while engaging in practice of business or society. The researchers have interests in a wide range of areas from exploration and design of hybrid forms of “virtual museum” to digital media infrastructures or to co-design of sharing platforms for senior citizens and other welfare innovations. Our activities are also characterized by inter-disciplinarity, which means that we collaborate and join projects with researchers from the other two departments.

What are your ambitions for the department?

It’s my ambition that the Digital Design Department will create and share knowledge that is profound and leads to ground-breaking information technology and services for the benefit of humanity. When it comes to our education programs, the department contributes to tackling the competence bottlenecks of the labor market by creating a stronger technical base of all study programmes, while still paying attention to inter-disciplinarity.

How will you achieve these goals?

I have two strategies for achieving the goals: collaboration and relation-building. Collaboration through funding processes for all faculty in the department, ensuring efficient application writing, and encouraging everybody, including junior researchers, to participate in continuous and collaborative funding activities. I will encourage regular writing retreats for the research groups, providing a structured, constructive and collaborative environment to support academic publishing.

Secondly, the Digital Design Department will develop and maintain good relations to academia, business and society, and as head of department I consider it to be a core task to support building such relations to open opportunities for faculty and students, and to help making ITU a recognized and globally connected university in academia, business and society.

Biography

Lone Malmborg holds an MSc in computer science and Danish literature & language 1990, and a PhD in computer science / informatics from Copenhagen Business School 1995.

She is associate professor and has previously been part of the pioneering faculty of K3, Malmö University. At the IT University she has co-designed and headed the study program for the Digital Media and Design BSc program. Her research focuses on interaction design of a good life in the area of welfare technology, and co-design and social innovation in ageing. She is currently scientific coordinator of the EU project Give&Take. She was the co-editor of Digital Creativity journal for 17 years, and is the author or co-author of more than 75 academic publications.