Regina Sipos

Dr. Regina Sipos is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Technical University of Munich, working at the intersection of technology and society. She wrote her PhD thesis focusing on intrinsic and collaborative technology design and innovation in grassroots communities in the Global South. She is also the Founder and Director of the Social-Digital Innovation Initiative, facilitating the cross-pollination of open-source technology and social innovation. She designed and managed the United Nations' first global co-creation and incubation platform for social entrepreneurs working with information and communications technologies.

Her fellowship project focuses on building an evidence-based framework for design-driven knowledge valorisation. Intangible knowledge is made tangible through prototyping, and the facilitated exploration of materiality and intentionality guides scientific findings toward societal relevance. The project seeks to demonstrate how emerging practices like translational design can help transform scientific ideas, research outputs, and patented innovations into prototypes and projects with social, environmental, and economic impacts. Examples include improving participant retention in food science studies, using AI to enable better decision making in complex design processes in service of transformations, explorations into the societal relevance of foundational research in lightweight design, and shaping new paradigms in how we interact with robots.