Carl DiSalvo received his Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006.  He is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for the Arts in Society and the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon. The topic of his post-doctoral research is Imaging the City and he is currently teaching an interdisciplinary course on that topic to graduate and undergraduate students. Most recently, his research and design work has centered on public and participatory geographic information systems, products and services for community monitoring and representation, and the intersection of design practice and  advocacy. Carl's work approaches design from a critical and reflective perspective. He uses design to ask questions, provoke debate, and facilitate conversations concerning the social aspects of technologies and technological discourses. His work also questions design itself, examining and critiquing contemporary design products, practices, and agendas.

Janet Vertesi is a graduate student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, where she is an active member of the Culturally Embedded Computing Group led by Dr. Phoebe Sengers. Her interest in representation and urban studies is reflected in her extensive work on the London Underground Map and users’ narratives of the city. “Mind the Gap: The Tube Map as London’s User Interface” was presented at the CHI workshop ‘Engaging the City’ in 2005, and a subsequent version of the paper was awarded the 2006 Hacker-Muller Prize for best student paper in Science, Knowledge and Technology by the American Sociological Association. Following an internship at Intel’s User-Centered Design team in Portland, OR, Ms. Vertesi co-authored and presented the full paper “To Have and To Hold: Exploring the Personal Archive” with Joseph ‘Jofish’ Kaye at CHI 2006, and participated in the CHI 2006 workshop “Reflective HCI: Articulating a Research Agenda for Critical Practice” with her work on ‘intercultural probes’. With several publications on the use of images and representational issues in the history and philosophy of science, Ms. Vertesi is currently working on maps and images as user interfaces on the Mars Exploration Rover mission.