Dr. Michelle Christensen

Michelle Christensen is a sociologist and designer, exploring the spaces in between these realms. Her research interests include trans- and postdisciplinarity, the politics of design and the democratic potentials of free and open technologies.

Michelle wrote her Ph.D. in the field of Design Research at the Berlin University of the Arts. Prior to this, she studied political sociology at Roskilde University in Denmark (B.A.), conflict studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (M.A.), gender studies at the University of Amsterdam (M.Sc.), and integrated design at the Köln International School of Design in Cologne (M.A.). She has worked at the Crisis Department of Amnesty International USA, was a Humanity in Action Fellow, and a Congressional Fellow in the United States Congress in Washington DC. As a researcher, she has worked at the Design Research Lab (UdK Berlin) and the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). She has taught courses in conflict analysis, gender studies and design methods at universities in the Netherlands and Germany, most recently as a visiting professor at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Dessau.

Currently, she co-heads the research group ‘Design, Diversity and New Commons’ at the UdK Berlin / Weizenbaum Institute, as well as teaching as a visiting professor for Open Science / Critical Culture at the Technische Universität Berlin in the context of the Einstein Center Digital Future. Within this collaboration, her research, teaching and experimental design practice focuses on feminist/queer, decolonial and postantropocentric approaches to design. From 2014-2024 she was a board member of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF), since 2015 she is a member of the Board of International Research in Design (BIRD) at Birkhäuser, and in 2023 she joined the board of directors of the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF).