Visiting Critic and Artist in Residence, Department of Digital + Media, Rhode Island School of Design: http://dm.risd.edu/~lgay

Classes at DM http://dm.risd.edu/courses/7032/

PhD Candidate, University of Gothenburg (Sweden): http://www.ait.gu.se/

Dånk! Collective: http://www.daonk.org

Steering Committee Mobile Music Workshop: http://www.mobilemusicworkshop.org

HCI/interaction design freelance researcher with an engineering background who works in multidisciplinary projects at the convergence of art, technology and design. Usually based in Göteborg, Sweden, she is currently at Rhode Island School of Design as a visiting critic and artist in residence at the Digital + Media department.

Lalya received a B.Sc. in Physics at the University of Geneva, a M.Sc.Eng. in Electroacoustics at KTH in Stockholm, worked several years at the Future Applications Lab, Viktoria Institute, and regularly teaches at the Interaction Design programme at the IT-University in Göteborg, while finishing a Ph.D. thesis in Applied Information Technology at the University of Göteborg. In Göteborg, she is part of the local art, design and technolgy collective Dånk!, in which she works on various projects centred around interactivity, urban space and audio experimentations, as well as co-organises the local Dorkbot-GBG meetings. She is also a member of the PLAN network for pervasive and locative arts, a permanent member of the steering committee for the International Workshop Series on Mobile Music Technology, and is actively involved in the NIME research community. She has presented her work at various international conferences, festivals and journals and regularly gives talks, workshops and lectures at universities, institutions and events worldwide.

In her research, she is interested in the relation between people and new technologies, in the context of contemporary culture and society: how to design new technologies that can challenge and inspire people creatively, and what aesthetic activities people come up with when having access to them. This covers a broad range of interests, from mobility and urban space, to aesthetic computer-mediated interactions such as electronic music making or digital photography, to physical interfaces and the integration of technology into everyday environments, artefacts and behaviours, i.e. ubiquitous computing. Her research explores in particular the potentials of mobile and ubiquitous computing for everyday life aesthetic practices and creative behaviours, and builds on mobile music, locative media and physical computing projects. She approaches her research question with a combination of user-centred, body-centric and culturally grounded interaction design, of physical prototyping and of user studies in context.
Her teaching builds on the multidisciplinary nature of interactive media and ubiquitous computing, and aims – just like her research – at building bridges between science and design; art and everyday life; academia and pop cultures; science and design; technology research and aesthetic practices.