Profile
Viktor Bedö is a designer, researcher, and educator who has been contributing to the areas of critical design, service design, street game design and philosophy of embodied knowledge for over twenty years across academia and industry. Viktor’s commitment is to imagining and designing just urban futures where digital technologies and algorithmic governance of resources enable communities and the public to flourish.
Viktor is currently a Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Creative Futures, Loughborough University London, and was a Visiting Professor at the FHNW Critical Media Lab Basel (2021–2024).
Starting in Humanities as a Junior Researcher at the Institute for Philosophical Research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2003-2007), Viktor received his PhD from Humboldt University Berlin and University of Pécs (2010). During these years, he held Visiting Fellowships at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (2007), Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik in Berlin (2008-2009), and the artist Olafur Eliasson’s Institute for Spatial Experiments at the University of the Arts Berlin (2009). Parallel to developing an experimental and playful design practice after his dissertation, Viktor’s pivot towards service design and innovation included teaching at the HPI School for Design Thinking in Potsdam (2010-2016). After a decade as a service design practitioner and independent urban game projects, he returned to academia in the field of Experimental Design as a Senior Researcher (2018-2021) and then Visiting Professor at the FHNW Critical Media Lab in Basel (2021-2024) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, at Goldsmiths, University of London (2018-2020).
He has been teaching Design and Innovation for BA and MA for the past fifteen years, has supervised MA thesis across several institutes and is an External PhD Supervisor at Kingston School of Art.
Research
Viktor’s research explores participatory methods and critical city-making approaches for imagining urban futures and technologies otherwise. As Principal Investigator of the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded Scaling Material Urban Commons project (2021–2024) at FHNW Critical Media Lab Basel, he investigated algorithmic commoning and strategies to rehearse community-based data governance and participatory machine learning. In his broader research, Viktor integrates designerly and artistic practices to advance more-than-human design approaches and non-extractive paradigms of technology use. In his PhD thesis, he elaborated on the multimodal interconnectedness of embodied urban experience and map reading.
Teaching
At the Institute for Creative Futures, Viktor is Programme Director for Service Design Innovation and Module Leader for Service Design Strategy, Service Design Innovation and Design for Experience. Additionally, he is teaching the modules Design Thinking and Design Ecologies. He is co-leader of the Institute for Creative Future’s Research Seminar.
Interests and activities
Viktor is passionate about the urban experience and invested in transformational practices at the intersection of academic research, creative practice and social innovation.
A founding member of the arts collective Invisible Playground and founder of the street game laboratory Tacit Dimension, he shaped the international street game scene in the ‘10s. He co-organised the Berlin-based Playpublic Festival, and his games were featured in festivals such as the Metropolis Festival in Copenhagen or the Festival of Future Nows at the Neue Nationalgallerie Berlin.
As a Service Design Strategist he has led 50+ innovation projects in urban mobility, telecommunications, and public services and professional education.
Viktor thrives on cycling across the urban landscape and knows how to alter or repair his clothes.