Natalie Jeremijenko

Natalie Jeremijenko (born 1966) is an active member of the net.art movement, and her work primarily explores the interface between society, the environment and technology. She is currently an Associate Professor at New York University in the Visual Art Department, and has affiliated faculty appointments in Computer Science and Environmental Studies. Jeremijenko has alternatively described her work as 'X Design' (short for experimental design) and herself as a 'thingker'.

She has been named to Fast Company's list of Most Influential Women in Design for 2011. One of America's brightest digital pioneers, Natalie Jeremijenko has been named one of the Top 100 young innovators by the MIT Technology Review, and one of the Top 40 most influential designers by I.D. Magazine.

The former Director of Yale's Engineering Design Studio, she now directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic at NYU. Her experimental design -- hence xDesign -- explores the opportunities new technologies present for social change. It centers on structures of participation in the production of knowledge, information, and the political and social possibilities --and limitations -- of information and emerging technologies. Much of it involves biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering, and almost all of it is carried out through public experiments.

xDesign's environmental goal is to develop and prescribe locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence and coordinating diverse projects to effective material change. Some of her work includes a permanent installation on the roof of Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea Model Urban Development, which provides infrastructure and facilities for highdensity bird cohabitation. Her work spans a range of media from statistical indices (such as the Despondency Index, which linked the Dow Jones to the suicide rate at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge) to biological substrates (such as the installations of cloned trees in pairs in various urban micro-climates) to robotics (such as the development of her famous feral robotic dog packs that investigated environmental hazards).

Jeremijenko is also a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, in London and an artist not-in-residence at the Institute for the Future, Palo Alto.

Awards

2011 Fast Company Most Influential Women in Technology

2005 ID Magazine Forty (#37)

1999 Rockefeller Fellow

1999 Technology Review Top 100 Young Innovators