UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Heidi Biggs, design researcher and assistant professor of digital media at Georgia Tech, will present a talk titled “Designing Embodied Ecologies: Reframing Local Environmental Data through Design and Making” at 3:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 30, in 112 Walker Building on the Penn State University Park campus. The talk will also be accessible via Zoom.
Biggs will discuss how environmental and climate change data that is often viewed as neutral and scientific can be critically reframed through design practices that bring these data into more intimate, local and embodied forms.
She will highlight projects that use textile art, wearable soft technologies and sonification to build relationships with environmental data at the human scale. These design interventions aim to foster ecological awareness and action through creative, situated encounters.
Biggs’s research focuses on how information technologies shape relationships to the environment and how those relationships might be redesigned for more sustainable outcomes. A 2023 graduate of Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology, Biggs earned a doctorate in human-computer interaction.
This event is part of the fall 2025 Coffee Hour series hosted by Penn State’s Department of Geography. To learn more and access Zoom information, visit the Coffee Hour event webpage.