Dr Viktor Bedö
- Associate Lecturer
- Service Design MA
Viktor is an interdisciplinary researcher, designer and educator with 15 years of experience in service design, urban play and infrastructure making across academia, industry and arts.
Over the past fifteen years, Viktor’s career has traversed the domains of academic research in design and humanities, innovation consultancy, higher education, and creative practice. Today, this trajectory supports a strategic, critical, and collaborative approach to design research and mission-driven innovation. At the foundation of his work is a commitment to design justice and to the development of life-affirming, humane, and more-than-human infrastructures, with a focus on urban ecosystems and the public good.
Key details
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More information
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Publications
Bedö, V., Güngör, O. (2026) ‘Collective Machine Teaching: Rehearsing non-extractivist situated approaches to AI, in CoDesign. https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2026.2685868
Bedö, V. (2024) ‘MealSense: A fiction about datafication and algorithms in commoning food’, DRS2024: Boston.
Ampatzidou, C., Bedö, V. & Ntourakos, E. (2023) Three-Tier Garden: More-than-human choreographies in the post-COVID city. Mediathek HGK FHNW.
Choi, J.H., Heitlinger, S., Taylor, A. & Bedö, V. (2022) ‘Towards governance for open urban food futures’, in Moragues-Faus, A., Clark, J.K., Battersby, J. & Davies, A. (eds.) Routledge handbook of urban food governance. 1st ed. London: Routledge, pp. 399–412.
Bedö, V. (2022) ‘Design f(r)iction für food rescue infrastructures’, Design × Nachhaltigkeit: Materialität / Systeme / Gerechtigkeit. Berlin, pp. 96–97.
Reddy, A., Kocaballi, A.B., Nicenboim, I., Søndergaard, M.L.J., Lupetti, M.L., Key, C., Speed, C., Lockton, D., Giaccardi, E., Grommé, F., Robbins, H., Primlani, N., Yurman, P., Sumartojo, S., Phan, T., Bedö, V. & Strengers, Y. (2021) ‘Making everyday things talk: Speculative conversations into the future of voice interfaces at home’, Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1–16.
Bedö, V. (2021) ‘Catch the bus: Probing other-than-human perspectives in design research’, Frontiers in Computer Science, 3, 636107.
Ibach, M., Büsse, M., Gerloff, F., Bedö, V., Miyazaki, S. & Allen, J. (2020) ‘Unmaking – against general applicability’, in Bogers, L. & Chiappini, L. (eds.) The critical makers reader: Collaborative learning with technology. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, pp. 47–60.
Savic, S., Bedö, V., Büsse, M., Martins, Y. & Miyazaki, S. (2020) ‘Toys for conviviality. Situating commoning, computation and modelling’, Open Cultural Studies, 4(1), pp. 143–153.
Bedö, V. (2019) ‘Rapid street game design: Prototyping laboratory for urban change’, in de Lange, M. & de Waal, M. (eds.) The hackable city: Digital media and collaborative city making in the network society. Cham: Springer.
Naseem, A., Drew, W., Bedö, V. & Hermansen, S. (2018) ‘Playmakers in the Maldives’, in Cermak-Sassenrath, D. (ed.) Playful disruption of digital media. Cham: Springer.
Bedö, V. (2017) ‘Size & shape of the playing field’, in Nijholt, A. (ed.) Playable cities: The city as a digital playground. Cham: Springer.
Bedö, V., Kerényi, S. & Horváth, K. (2016) ‘Részvételi játéképítés [Participative game design]’, in Horváth, K. & Obláth, M. (eds.) A részvételi ifjúságkutatás módszerei [Youth participative research methods]. Budapest: OKT-Full Tanácsadó Kft., pp. 160–176.
Bedö, V. (2014) ‘Kartographie’, in Günzel, S. & Mersch, D. (eds.) Bild. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler.
Exhibitions
(2024) Machine Teaching Commons / Teaching Machine Commons. FHNW Academy of Art and Design, exhibition curated by Viktor Bedö and Jaz Choi. Basel, Switzerland.
(2014 – 2015) Operation Noose game in Maldives Exodus Caravan Show. Official Collateral Event of the 55th Venice Biennale in conjunction with the Museum of Everything.
(2014) Feromone game, Festival of Future Nows, Neue Nationalgallerie, Berlin.
(2014) Operation Noose game, The Future of Art is Urban, Enclave Gallery, London.
(2015) Horror Vacui game in Tomrom, Kunsforening Sandefjord, Norway.
Research funding
CHF 506,178 Swiss National Science Foundation funding for the Scaling Material Urban Commons critical city-making project at the Critical Media Lab Basel.
Practice
As a service design strategist, Viktor has led 50+ innovation projects in the past fifteen years in telecommunications, automotive, insurance, urban mobility, and the public sector. Recently he advised Dark Matter Labs on community-based machine learning protocols for their Re:Permissioning the City mission or mapped UK Government Digital Services framework readiness of HM Land Registry as the Lead Designer in a multi-agency setting.
As co-founder of the arts collective Invisible Playground and founder of the street game design studio Tacit Dimension, his practice engaged with situated imagination and prototyping by creating playful experiences in the urban built environment to explore citizens’ relationships with technologies such as location services and autonomous public transport.
Research interests
Viktor’s research engages with critical, participatory and making-based methods to advance just urban infrastructures.
As Principal Investigator of the Scaling Material Urban Commons project (2021–2024) at FHNW Critical Media Lab Basel, his team investigated participatory machine teaching for resource sharing communities.
Viktor’s research focuses on the situatedness of predictive models and agentic AI and in approaches to generating Gold Standard Small Data as a means of bringing people and ground truth into AI-enhanced infrastructures.
His PhD thesis in Philosophy addressed how tacit embodied knowledge operates in connecting urban experience to map reading.
Awards
Media Architecture Biennale Award for Future Trends and Prototypes, 2025