Han Qiao Receives SDGs@UofT Student Award
The Just Sustainability Design (JSD) Lab is delighted to share that Han Qiao, PhD student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, has been named a recipient of the SDGs@UofT Student Award.
The SDGs@UofT Student Awards program recognizes outstanding student research that advances the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through interdisciplinary scholarship across the University’s three campuses. The award supports graduate and undergraduate students whose work demonstrates academic excellence and meaningful contributions to sustainable development.
Han’s funded project, Designing with Near Data and Far Data: Co-designing with Communities for Reflecting and Visualizing Politics of Data for Sustainable Futures, explores how sustainability data shapes the ways people interact, design, and imagine urban futures.
Working at the intersection of human–computer interaction, design, and urban planning, Han collaborates with urban sustainability and civic technology groups in Toronto using ethnographic and design-oriented methods. Her research examines how data is produced, abstracted, and mobilized in community advocacy work. Building on these insights, she is developing reflective toolkits that reorient data practices toward alternative approaches to urban sustainability—approaches that foreground power, affect, and participation. By centering communities in the design of sustainability data practices, Han’s work contributes to more just and participatory forms of data-driven urban change. Her research exemplifies the kind of critical, engaged scholarship that the SDGs@UofT initiative seeks to foster.
Her paper, “Near Data” and “Far Data” for Urban Sustainability: How Do Community Advocates Envision Data Intermediaries?,” coauthored with Siyi Wu and Christoph Becker, also received the Best Paper Award at the 28th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW 2025) in Bergen, Norway.
We warmly congratulate Han on this well-deserved recognition and celebrate the impact of her work within and beyond the JSD Lab and the Faculty of Information.