Anja Overdiek

Anja Overdiek is professor Cyber Social Design at Research Centre Creating 010. Anja is active within the research theme “Design in the 21st Century.” She works together with lecturers and students to conduct research into designing interventions and platforms to help with complex societal challenges and to augment social resilience through digitization. Digitization and internationalization have resulted in societal challenges becoming more complex. Everything seems connected to everything else, and existing institutions and disciplines must work together for social, economic, and environmental innovation. In addition, the needs of people, machines and nature must be considered. Designing in and for these new multi-stakeholder networks is complex but can add enormously to societal resilience. Designers can bring diverse parties together like no other, offer concrete visions for possible futures, and experiment with designs in practice. Cyber social design is “social design” but focused on the design of digital applications. The research group conducts research together with educational partners and design agencies to unlock new design capabilities, making digital design more inclusive, and supporting governments and companies with digital applications in their transitions to more circularity and inclusiveness. Anja is also an Associate Lecturer at the Mission Zero Research Centre of The Hague University of Applied Sciences, where she specializes in living labs as an environment for the energy transition. Earlier in her career she was manager Europe at an international ICT/telecom branding and communication agency and has facilitated transition processes with her own company. She obtained her doctorate in 1998 from the Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) conducting research on social movements and their knowledge production. She has been working on social topics together with designers and design researchers for 10 years.