Erik Grönvall - Homepage

Erik is Associate Professor at the Digital Design department, ITU and a founding member of the Co-Design research group. Erik is also Head of the Co-design group since 2021. Erik’s research is situated within the HCI and CSCW research domains, is often Participatory Design/Co-design driven and may contain electrical or otherwise interactive prototypes that Erik design and build.

Erik researches the role technology has in everyday life, the notion of participation, how people appropriate technology and how technology can be designed to better align with the capabilities and needs of diverse users and/or organizations. To investigate these and other aspects of technology use in everyday life, Erik has worked with for example Participatory Design in weak, ill peoples’ homes, PD as a tool for organizational change, Service Design, Care networks, Tele-care and homecare. Erik also engages in technology explorations from an Interaction Design perspective to explore how humans react and relate to (new) technology.

Erik has managed several national and international projects (incl. partners from both academia and industry).

Erik currently teach Co-Design and Physical Computing at ITU where he previously also taught courses in for example Service Design and Python Programming.

Before joining ITU, Erik worked at the 'Use, Design and Innovation' group and the 'Centre for Pervasive Healthcare' (both directed by Prof. Morten Kyng), Aarhus University. In Aarhus, he was a Project Manager for different multi-disciplinary research projects that worked with Participatory Design and User-Driven Innovation in healthcare. He was also associated with the research centre Participatory IT (PIT) at Aarhus University (directed by Prof. Susanne Bødker and Prof. Kim Halskov).

Erik has a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Florence, Italy (2007). Previously, Erik has also been a post-doc and lecturer (e.g. in Advanced Physical computing, Java, Web development/WEB 2.0) at Aarhus University and at the University of Siena.

Before moving to Denmark and Italy, he worked in Sweden (as a consultant, as employee and within his own company) with mainly smart home development and novel solutions for elderly care.