Iohanna Nicenboim
Research group:
Our research explores AI beyond anthropocentric perspectives. Using a more-than-human design approach, we investigate how AI can be materialized by:
- designing situated and embodied interactions,
- examining the material resources that make AI and how they can align with regenerative principles,
- committing to new materialist perspectives that reframe AI as relational and ecological.
Combining analytical and practice-based approaches across computer science, STS, HCI, art, and design, we challenge extractivist models and prototype regenerative alternatives—shaping more inclusive and sustainable futures for AI.
Short bio:
Iohanna Nicenboim is a design researcher from the Global South whose work bridges art, design, ecology, and artificial intelligence. She completed her PhD with honors as a Microsoft Research PhD Fellow at Delft University of Technology, focusing on More-than-Human Design in Practice. Her research explores Regenerative AI through experimental, practice-based, and feminist perspectives. It examines the material and ecological conditions of AI, how AI might adopt regenerative principles, and how new materialist perspectives position AI as relational and entangled with human and nonhuman worlds. Her interest lies in designing embodied and situated (non)human–AI interactions. Over the past eight years, she has developed a More-than-Human approach to AI (Designing-with AI), publishing extensively in international journals, organizing workshops and panels at leading conferences in HCI, design and STS, co-editing a special issue of the HCI Journal on the More-than-Human Turn in Design. She led conference tracks at DRS2024 and DRS2026 and is a pictorial chair of the ACM conferences DIS2023, DIS2026 and DIS2027.
“Growing up in the Global South, where AI-driven extraction weighs heavily on communities and ecosystems, my research reveals how AI is not so artificial nor intelligent but embodied and material”.
Iohanna Nicenboim