Michel Hohendanner

Michel Hohendanner is a doctoral candidate at the Chair of Cyber Trust with Professor Jens Grossklags at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and a research associate at the Munich Center for Digital Sciences & AI (MUC.DAI) at the Munich University of Applied Sciences. Previously, Michel was research associate at the Institute for Digital Ethics at the University of Media Stuttgart. With a bachelor’s degree in Media Art & Media Informatics and a master’s degree in Applied Design Research he draws on a broad interdisciplinary toolkit that allows him to apply theoretical but also practical lenses.

His research focuses on the social impact of new emerging technologies like (generative) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and social aspects of immersive technologies. His investigations are driven and informed by (speculative) design as method of inquiry (research through design), digital ethics, and human-computer interaction (HCI). As technology changes the social fabric of today’s societies, he puts a particular focus on participatory methods and citizen-centred perspectives. His investigations integrate a cross-national lens, motivated by the global scale of technologies’ impact on societies. This led to several comparative research projects between Japan and Germany, which remains a special focus of interest. In 2022, Michel visited Professor Hirotaka Osawa’s Hai Lab at Keio University, Tokyo, for a Design Futuring project on the Metaverse. They jointly explored how laypeople in Japan make sense of a prospective metaverse and of the social impact citizens deem possible, acceptable, and desirable. The results were then utilized to promote ethical discourse about immersive technologies among international residents in Germany. In 2020, Michel was a visiting researcher at the Kyoto Design Lab at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, exploring design methods for deliberative citizen dialogues under the supervision of Professor Daijiro Mizuno. This built the foundation for another research project asking how local-culturally specific narratives about how AI influences perceptions of the technology in Japan and Germany.

For his research stay at the German Institute for Japanese Studies, Michel will engage with citizens and local communities to explore their touch points with and perceptions of generative AI through dialogue workshops utilizing design and futuring methods. The theoretical background of his approach is grounded in notions of research through design (Frayling, 1993; Zimmerman & Forlizzi, 2014), ontological design (e.g., Fry, 2009; Escobar, 2018), design as sensemaking (Manzini, 2015) and participatory speculative design (e.g., Farias et al., 2022).