Much of my work takes place on the University of Waterloo, Mount Royal University, and University of Illinois Urbana Champaign campuses. My collaborators, colleagues, students, partners, and I pay our respect to the First Nation and Métis ancestors of the lands where we live and work, and reaffirm our relationship with one another.
My home institution, Mount Royal University, is located in the traditional territories of the Niitsitapi (Blackfoot) and the people of Treaty 7 which includes the Siksika, the Piikani, the Kainai, the Tsuut’ina, and the Îyârhe Nakoda. The campus is situated on land where the Bow River meets the Elbow River, and the traditional Blackfoot name of this place is “Mohkinstsis” which we now call the City of Calgary.
our work has received support from the following...
long bio
Since 2005, Radzikowska has collaborated on over 30 design research projects that extended anywhere from 2 to 7 years; 4 of those with budgets in the millions. Her research work is transdisciplinary, marked by a passion to benefit others and informed by 15 years on teams with researchers from over 30 different fields. She’s worked on large, medium, and small, national and international projects, with undergraduate and graduate researchers, industry partners, not-for-profit agencies, and scholars. Her work has been iterative and experimental—meant to challenge existing design conventions and explore unique alternatives to complex problems.
Much of Radzikowska’s efforts have been spent on the intersection of design and DH although, more recently, she has led several teams in digital/material remediation, with exhibition (physical and video-based) components. She is also part of a team examining how to use prototypes in research, first to formulate research questions, then to produce theories, and finally to test them; and using design thinking to examine such “wicked problems” as marginalization through data display, displacement, health and safety, academic freedom, and design thinking itself. This year, she has joined an international team working on design for reconciliation in post-conflict zones, which involved a sometimes uncomfortable number of bullet-proof vests, resulting in the phrase: “there’s always room in the decoy truck.”
Radzikowska has more than 75 publications and presentations on data visualization, aesthetics, interaction design, interaction theory, design methods, and design research. She is the co-author of Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage (Routledge Publishing, 2011), two upcoming books, Design + DH and Better Futures: How Prototyping Improves the World (Intellect Books, 2020), and two books in progress, Digital Feminist Activisms and Raising the Bar: The Practice of Intersectional Feminist Design Research. She is a member of the Design Concepts Lab research group, and one of the founding members of the qLab (qcollaborative.com), an Intersectional Feminist Design Research Lab, located at Mount Royal University, University of Waterloo, and University of Illinois.
alternate (shorter) bio
Dr. Milena Radzikowska is an established researcher in humanities-based data visualization, feminist human-computer interaction (HCI), and interface design for decision support. Her major contributions have been in the development of humanities-based approaches for oil extraction; experimental interface design to help protect Alberta wildlife; and materializing digital tools for content analysis. Since 2005, she’s been the PI or Co-I on over 25 interdisciplinary design research projects, four of those with budgets in the millions, extending over longer periods (anywhere from two to seven years).
Dr. Radzikowska has co-authored more than 75 publications and presentations on data visualization, aesthetics, interaction design, interaction theory, and design for large text collections, including the following books: Visual Interface Design for Digital Cultural Heritage: A Guide to Rich-Prospect Browsing (2011); Design + DH (2020); and Prototyping Across the Disciplines (2020). She has designed or designed and developed over three dozen web sites, interactive tools, and interfaces. In 2018, Dr. Radzikowska won the prestigious Design Educator of the Year Award from the Registered Graphic Designers of Canada. Radzikowska is currently a Full Professor for Mount Royal University’s Information Design program.