Maria Håkansson

Maria Håkansson is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Culturally Embedded Computing group at Information Science, Cornell University, where she is doing HCI research on IT design and sustainability. Broadly, she is interested in how IT (existing and future designs) can support people in becoming more sustainable, where the concept of sustainability goes beyond environmental concerns to include personal and social. Most recently, she did an exploratory study of families in the US who are voluntarily living ‘simply’ out of concern for the environment and for their own quality of life, their practices related to sustainability, and how IT is helping and/or hindering them to live simply today. Currently she is using the findings as inspiration for sustainability-oriented IT designs for a wider group of people. Maria’s work is funded through a three-year fellowship from the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning (Formas), Sweden. Prior to her work at Cornell, Maria was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) and the Mobile Life Centre, both in Stockholm, Sweden. She received a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction from Stockholm University in 2009.