Who am I?
I come from a family in Michoacán, México. Near the Lake of Pátzcuaro, the Ciénega de Zacapu, and the Tecolote mountain of the meseta Purépecha.
I love to learn and have been an autodidact since young. When I was 11, I learned computer programming. At 18 I built a car with my best friend, and I designed and built what is called today 'a tiny house'. I taught English to children and travelled to remote places. I worked at a farm in Occitania in the early 1990s.
As a teenager I had many jobs including in fast food joints, farms, and manufacturing. I then went to Uni and found my passion for design. I joined the Lab "El Centro del Placer" at UAM Azcapotzalco in 1993 where I first found the Internet and early digital technologies for design.
As a young professional, I became interested in how people have ideas about the future, ideas of what doesn't exist yet. I decided to do a PhD to find out more about creativity and learning.
For the last 22 years, I have been studying and teaching in a variety of places and contexts in three continents: The Americas, Asia, and Oceania.
My goal is to help people discover and improve their creative capacities. I believe the world will be better as more of us are able to imagine different futures.
I work to contribute new knowledge about creativity and design, active learning, critical and ethical uses of technology, teamwork, and research methods.
You can find more about me at: https://about.me/designcomputing
And here is a collection of key people, ideas, and events shaping Creative Technologies presented as "The Year of Creative Tech" (please be patient it takes a little to download)
My research interests
- Computational Thinking
- Creative and Critical Technology Design
- Design Theory and Practice
- Participatory Creativity
- Creative Communities
- Ethics and Creativity
- Trans-Disciplinary Research Methods
- Indigenous design creativity
- Future Learning Environments
More about my research: https://academics.aut.ac.nz/ricardo.sosa
My research grants (1.5M+ NZD)
- 2022: Collaborative International Interuniversity Research, Innovation and Development Programme, PUCV - AUT CIIRID: IDEA ($6,000)
- 2022: SoFE Doctoral Scholarship 1 PhD student
- 2022: Future Learning Environments (TBD)
- 2021: DCT Faculty Contestable Research Fund ($28,300)
- 2021: Health Futures ($500,000)
- 2020: Teaching and Learning Research Initiative ($141,000)
- 2017: Research & Innovation Office SRIF co-PI Tim Maloney ($100,000)
- 2016: Faculty SRIF co-PI with Bryn Evans:Human-Robot Interaction ($15,000)
- 2012-2015: SUTD-MIT International Design Center ($800,000 SGD)
My recent research outputs
My list of publications includes about 130 entries since 1999 in the top journals of design research, international conferences, and it includes outputs in two
languages (English and Spanish). These are some key publications from 2018 to date.
- In progress:
- Chapter for book "Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations to Pluriverse" (accepted for publication 2022)
- Manuscript "A Robot for Mayor in Manurewa: A critical and creative approach to social robots in secondary education" (under review 2022)
- Manuscript "Generative Allegories of Oppression and Emancipation: Reflecting with Computational Social Models" (under review 2022)
- Manuscript "I am a Creative Loop: Towards Integrative Studios in Design and Creative Technologies " (under review 2022)
- Manuscript "Powerful Ideas and Dialogic Learning: A Systematic Critical Review towards Advanced Computational Thinking" (submitted)
- Entry for "Encyclopedia of Social Justice in Education" (in progress)
- Literature review of Design Studio pedagogies (in progress)
- Literature review of Creative Futures for Youth Wellbeing (in progress)
- Manuscript "Innovability Design Theory from Design Artefacts" (in progress)
- Manuscript "Global Talanoa Platform Va Moana" (in progress)
- Manuscript "Design frames" (in progress)
- Manuscript "Reverse empathy" (in progress)
- Manuscript "Creative robots" (in progress)
- Chapter "User-centered robot design and evaluation" (in progress)
- Chapter for book "Handbook of Service Design" (in progress)
- Manuscript for journal "Revista Tecnologia & Diseño CyAD" (in progress)
- Manuscript "Analysis - Evaluation - Synthesis projects to teach Critical Technologies" (in progress)
- Manuscript "Data Objects" (in progress)
- Manuscript "GPT-3 Creativity" (in progress)
- Manuscript "Other ways of creating" (in progress)
- Manuscript "How not to design a flag" (in progress)