Associate Professor Shanti Sumartojo
Associate Professor Shanti Sumartojo

Associate Professor Shanti Sumartojo
Department of Design
Monash University Research Portal
Shanti Sumartojo is Associate Professor of Design Research in the Department of Design and a member of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab. Grounded in human geography, and with a strong commitment to interdisciplinary and collaborative scholarship, her research includes theoretically-informed inquiry into the entanglements of the spatial, digital, sensory and affective in people’s experiential worlds. This includes investigations of how people experience various forms of design and technology in their surroundings, particularly in shared, public spaces and events. She has published and taught on digital, visual, sensory and design ethnographic methodologies, approaches that she uses in her research.
Shanti has a PhD in Sociology from the Australian National University, an MSc in Nationalism Studies from the University of Edinburgh and a BA in Sociology/Anthropology from Carleton College. She held a post-doctoral research fellowship at ANU (2011-2013) and a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship at RMIT University (2017-2018).
Her current projects include interdisciplinary research into the effects of robots on public space; an investigation of how people make sense of and experience urban light and lighting design; and a collaborative project on public understandings of spatialised digital data. She has also conducted extensive research on memorials and commemorative events, including through her leadership of the 2017-2020 project Commemoration Reframed, a coordinated set of projects across 10 countries investigating the experience of events marking the end of the First World War centenary. She is an author of Atmospheres and the Experiential World: Theory and Methods (2018, with Sarah Pink) and Commemoration in a Digital World (2021, with Danielle Drozdzewski and Emma Waterton).