Aalto University in Finland will award an honorary degree to Ann Light, Professor of Design & Creative Technology in the School of Engineering and Informatics, for excellence in the field of art and design at a ceremony on 13 June 2025. Aalto University is ranked 8th in the world for art and design.
Professor Light will receive the honorary degree for her work on designing community initiatives to meet uncertainty, with a particular emphasis on collaborative creative practice, inclusive future-making and prefiguring new relations.
Ann, who is also a visiting Professor of Interaction Design, Social Change and Sustainability at Malmö University in Sweden, is a key figure in the Participatory Design community. The community is known for integrating creative disciplines and the humanities with technological research fields such as Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Collaborative Work.
Her latest project, The Role of Immersive Embodied Participatory Techniques in Eco-Social Change, aims to create connections between art, design, the humanities, and scientific fields to address climate collapse, supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) fellowship. It emphasises the need for creative approaches from socially engaged art and design to envision fairer worlds and move towards them.
Ann has been the recipient of more than 25 UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) projects and has collaborated with arts organisations, grassroots movements, and marginalised groups globally. She is a co-author of Designing Connected Products and co-creator of the CreaTures Framework, which involved artists, designers, researchers and policy-makers in exploring how cultural transformation could be inspired and supported by the work of creative practitioners.
Ann is also giving a talk at the 10th International Alvar Aalto Design Seminar on her trip to Finland and will be discussing the theme of Species as part of receiving her honorary doctorate with other awardees on 13 June.
Professor Ian Wakeman, Head of the School of Engineering and Informatics said: “I would very much like to join in the congratulations of Ann Light on her degree from Aalto University. Ann’s work is inter-disciplinary in a very Sussex sense, knitting together approaches to design from Human Computer Interaction through to playful art approaches. Her work on future-making about the Climate Crisis demonstrates that Ann is very much one of Sussex’s great thought leaders. Well done, Ann!”