Orit Halpern

Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Dresden University of Technology. Her research is on histories of cybernetics, design, and artificial intelligence. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automating decision making, and the second examines the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. Her most recent book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press, December 2023) is titled The Smartness Mandate. It examines how we have come to believe that digital computing is essential to human survival, and how “smart” technologies and ideologies are remaking planetary futures. She is the director of the Against Catastrophe a laboratory that bridges the arts, environmental sciences, media, and the social sciences to envision non-catastrophic futures. And she is also member of the collaborative research project Governing through Design about how design impacts society.