Erik Hekman (1982) has always worked in the nexus of media, technology, and culture. With a bachelor’s degree in Information and Communication Technology and a master’s degree in Media Technology, he focuses on how technology unavoidably affects public values. Currently, he works for the research group Human Experience and Media Design and is a coordinator/senior lecturer at the master Data-driven Design.
By combining data science and value-sensitive design, he strives to understand and explores what values remain hidden in large corpora of text. This ranges from evaluating the changing attitudes towards platform economy/silicon valley to creating data-driven personas. He is also exploring the notion of Algorithmic Affordances and how new design patterns for recommender systems can empower the users that are affected by them.