Telephone +41 (0) 43 446 6426
Email karmen.franinovic@zhdk.ch

Biography

Karmen received the Laurea degree summa cum laude from Istituto Universitario di Archittetura di Venezia, and the Master's degree from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.  She is the PhD candidate in School of Computing, Communications and Electronics at University of Plymouth, and pursues her research through Z-node at ZHdK.  She has worked as an architect on large public buildings with AltenArchitekten, Studio ArchA, Arata Isozaki and Associates, and Arup. Karmen's research is increasingly focused on sound and movement in enactive interfaces. She leads related interaction design research for a European Commission NEST (New and Emerging Science and Technology) project called CLOSED: Closing the Loop of Sound Evaluation and Design.  The project, developed together with colleagues at Ircam, TU-Berlin and Uni-Verona, researches new approaches to interactive sound design that are robustly adapted to human perception and cognition. Recently, Karmen was appointed to be a Swiss delegate to the new European COST Network on Sonic Interaction Design which she proposed with colleges across Europe and Canada.

In her practical work, Karmen focuses on the critical and playful uses of interactive technology embedded in architectures and artefacts of everyday life. Through creative and tangible interactions, people engage in producing social and sensorial changes of their surroundings, and by doing so, challenge their own habitual uses of places and artefacts. Karmen's organization, Zero-Th develops concepts and projects which aim to explore and influence the evolution of the multidimensional urban fabric, together with the presence and condition of its inhabitants. Her work has been presented at and commissioned by Ircam/Centre Pompidou (Paris), SF Camerawork (San Francisco), Fondazione Sandretto (Torino), MoMA Ljubljana, Far Eastern Memorial Foundation (Taipei), DEAF (Rotterdam), The Junction (Cambridge), Interstices - Hexagram (Montreal) and others.