Despina Papadopoulos

Despina Papadopoulos is a designer, strategist and researcher whose pioneering work in wearable technologies asks important questions about intimacy, desire and gesture. She holds a Master’s in Philosophy from KU University in Leuven and a MPS from NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Her work is focused on finding the human edge of emerging technologies and imagining ways to make technology make sense to humans instead of making humans make sense to technology and has led multiple winning research projects with industry in order to promote this vision.

Ultimately, her work is about communication and the way we tacitly interact with artifacts. In pursuing this exploration she makes her own award-winning artifacts that aim to elicit slightly altered perceptions and expand the limits of what technology can do and be. In making new products she imagines herself as an anthropologist of the future, observing emergent material cultures while always looking back and absorbing the past into things to come.

Her work has been exhibited at the Dyson Gallery, Copeland Gallery and Beaconsfield Gallery and V&A Museum in London, the Holon Museum in Israel, the Gwangju Design Biennale and her work published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals.

Despina is currently working on The Unruliness of Matter, turning the conceptual and the abstract into the tangible and sensory, as part of her practice-led research PhD at the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art, on a TECHNE Fellowship from the National Productivity and Innovation Fund in the UK.

Prior to joining Collaborative Arts, Despina taught at NYU's ITP for the past 18 years and was founding faculty at SVA’s Design for Social Innovation Program.