I am a Colombian designer and Senior Lecturer in Design at Linnaeus University, based in Sweden since 2021. My work positions design as a “third way of knowing”, complementing both scientific and artistic traditions. I specialise in Participatory Design, Behaviour Change, Design Theory, and Design Research within the broader field of Informatics and sustainability-oriented design education.
I am currently developing the framework of Participatory Behavioural Design (PBD), which seeks to ethically integrate behavioural insights with participatory processes. My research explores how public organisations and municipalities can collaborate with citizens to address complex societal challenges such as sustainability transitions, energy use, and information practices.
I serve on the Editorial Board of CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, contributing to the section on politics, policy, and public co-design.
Teaching
I teach across several programmes at Linnaeus University, including the Master’s in Innovation through Business, Engineering and Design; the Master’s in Design +Change; the Bachelor’s in Visual Communication +Change; the Bachelor’s in Design +Change; the Bachelor's in Interaction Design; and the Master’s Programme in Educational Technology. I also contribute to the new Master’s Programme in Informatics, which I co-coordinate with two colleagues. Across these programmes, I combine participatory methods, behavioural insights, systemic perspectives and critical design approaches to support students in developing reflective and practice-oriented skills.
Research
2025-2027 BALCA – Building Capacity for Citizen-Led Action Groups
BALCA is an Interreg South Baltic project involving partners from Sweden, Lithuania and Poland. It focuses on strengthening municipalities’ capacity to work with long-term, citizen-led action groups (CLAGs). The project develops tools, methods and participatory processes that enable public organisations to collaborate meaningfully with residents on local sustainability challenges. Through cross-border cooperation, BALCA supports municipalities in building structures for participation, fostering community-driven insights, and integrating citizens’ perspectives into decision-making and innovation processes. I am a co-author of the project and contribute with participatory design methods, behavioural insights, and frameworks that help municipalities design and facilitate CLAGs in ethical and sustainable ways.
2021-2023 Post-doctoral Research - The Bridge (Linnaeus University & IKEA)
Valuing Water: designing norms and behaviours for water positive lives at home
My postdoctoral project within The Bridge collaboration between IKEA and Linnaeus University examined how design, behavioural insights and real-time data can support more sustainable water practices in the home. Through three phases of Research through Design (RtD), the work combined systemic design approaches—such as gigamapping, stakeholder mapping and value modelling—with behavioural theory, social norms research and iterative prototyping.
The project identified a clear intention–action gap in domestic water use and explored how households interpret and act upon information related to water care. Insights from surveys, dilemmas, stakeholder workshops and literature reviews informed the development of IoT-based prototypes capable of translating water consumption into meaningful feedback through political, economic, social, environmental and emotional value modes. These prototypes were tested in Swedish households and complemented with methods such as user journey mapping, backlogs, Kanban processes and multi-modal feedback design.
The postdoctoral work resulted in functional prototypes, empirical findings from household tests, a systemic framework for understanding the value of water at home and academic publications addressing behavioural design for sustainability. Its ongoing aim is to support the transition from individual awareness to community-level engagement and enable public organisations and industry partners to work with water in more informed, ethical and participatory ways.
My ongoing research projects
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Project: BALCA – Building Capacity for Baltic Climate Action BALCA is an EU-funded initiative that enhances the capacity of local actors and citizens in Sweden, Poland, and Lithuania to collaborate on…
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Project: IDEAL - Interaction design program expansion and alignment with market needs The project aims to develop two advanced courses within the area of Interaction Design in close collaboration with…
Publications
Article in journal (Refereed)
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Erazo Coral, H.J., Velasquez, J.P. (2024). Mapeo a través del diseño de las prácticas restaurativas para adolescentes vinculados al sistema de responsabilidad penal en Colombia. Revista 180. (53).
Status: Published
Conference paper (Refereed)
- Velasquez, J.P., Ferati, M., Kurti, A. (2025). Active and Passive Participation in Participatory Design and User-Centered Design. Human-Computer Interaction : Thematic Area, HCI 2025 Held as Part of the 27th HCI International Conference, HCII 2025 Gothenburg, Sweden, June 22–27, 2025 Proceedings, Part I. 261-270.
- Velasquez, J.P., Ferati, M. (2024). Promoting Sustainable Water Behaviours Through Exploration with IoT Prototypes. 2024 11th International Conference on Internet of Things: Systems, Management and Security (IOTSMS). 66-73.
- Velasquez, J.P., Ståhl, Å., Tham, M., Lee, Y.K., Svanberg, T. (2023). The Systemic Value of Water at Home: Social norms, behaviours, and design. PROCEEDINGS OF RELATING SYSTEMS THINKING AND DESIGN, RSD12.