Guest talk with Dr. Linda Hirsch, UC Santa Cruz, Ca

March 10, 2025

Are you still thinking about sustainable behavior or already adapting to the new reality?
Climate change has increased the frequency and intensity of natural hazards globally, strongly impacting the lives of all people living in risk areas. While this is a new reality that people have to get used to, it remains a challenge to increase awareness of local risks, support relevant adaption, and upskill locals to be able to prepare, deal with, and bounce back from natural hazard impacts. In this talk, Dr. Hirsch will go more in-depth about the role of Human-Computer Interaction and informal learning in this context, as well as the challenges of conducting research in natural hazard-prone environments.

Dr. rer. nat. Linda Hirsch is a postdoctoral fellow at the Social Emotional Technology Lab at UC Santa Cruz, CA, and is working on the intersection of playful technological intervention and climate resilience. Before, she was a postdoc at Fraunhofer FIT, shaping the future of XR interventions in industry. She holds a doctorate degree in Media Informatics from LMU Munich, where she developed the design concept of Traces in Use for meaningful human-environment interaction. She is also an elected executive committee member of the German group “Be-greifbare Interaktion” since 2021, an expert research group within the GI (Gesellschaft für Informatik) regarding topics for tangible and embedded interfaces.

Feature image from: https://gmhplanning.co.uk/nec-downloads/nec4-x29-climate-change/