INA WAGNER
Computer Scientist. Social scientist .
Build a working environment that supports you. Ina Wagner is a physicist, computer scientist and sociologist. In 1987 she was the first professor from outside the TU Vienna to be appointed professor at the Faculty of Computer Science and also the first that included a feminist perspective and a participatory approach in the design of IT-based systems. She firmly believes in the need to support younger women to have confidence in themselves, not to be discouraged, to pursue their own ideas even in the face of resistance, not to give up having children because of a career, and above all to build up a supportive environment.
Ina Wagner
“I am happy that my life is so diverse and that I have never concentrated on one single thing (not even in research).”
My research area - Computer Supported Cooperative Working - is interdisciplinary, which means that I combine social science research with knowledge of computer science and methods of participatory design to develop IT systems. This research approach contributes to the development of better IT systems, i.e. systems that help people to do their work more easily but also to take on new, more interesting activities. It helps to decide which activities can and should be transferred to a machine and which should not. I also deal with gender issues in technology as well as ethical problems that arise in the use of technology.
Ina Wagner has built up an interdisciplinary research group at the Faculty of Computer Science at TU Wien that brings together computer science with expertise in the social sciences for research into work practices and organisations as well as the design of supporting computer systems. Until September 2011, she was head of the Institute for Design and Impact Research at TU Vienna. She holds a PhD in physics from the University of Vienna.
She is the author and editor of numerous books as well as more than 160 scientific papers on computer support work in hospitals and in architecture, on issues of a feminist perspective in science and technology, on ethical and political issues of computer systems design, as well as on creative and participatory design methods and their use in technology development. She has carried out and developed her research programme through numerous EU, binational and national projects. She continues to work academically. Her most recent book publications are:
Future-proofing: Making Practice-Based IT Design Sustainable. Oxford University Press, 2022 (with Carla Simone, Claudia Müller, Anne Weibert, Volker Wulf).
L' Urbanisme informel: au-delà du droit à la ville. Presses de Pont, Paris, 2023 (with Jean-Jacques Terrin).
Gender and Technology At Work. From Workplace to Social Justice in Design. Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2024) (with Ellen Balka, Anne Weibert, Volker Wulf).
From 2005-2007 as well as 2009-2016 she held a part-time professorship (Adjunct Professor (20%) at the University of Oslo; Visiting Professorships at École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) Paris, France (2002); Danish University of Technology (DTU), Copenhagen, DK (2002); Sydney University of Technology, NSW, Australia (2010-2017). Since 2016, she has held a visiting professorship at the University of Siegen in the Department of Information Systems and New Media.
From 1998-2001 she was a member of the 'European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies' of the European Commission. Since 2001 she has been a member of the Austrian Bioethics Commission at the Federal Chancellery. In 2011, Ina Wagner received the Women's Prize of the City of Vienna and the Gabriele Possanner State Prize. In 2019, she was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of the Vienna University of Technology.
“Technology development should be participatory and closely linked to societal issues.”
