Pia Grumeth-Zechner
Pia Grumeth-Zechner is a Master’s student at the Institute of Sociology and a member of the Digital Societies Research Group at the University of Graz in Austria. As a student research assistant, she works for the GraSP Futures Studio, contributing to both research and design.
Her interest lies in participatory and future-oriented research, with a focus on anticipations of the future. This involves groups of people within their social and cultural environments, interacting with new technologies. Grumeth-Zechner enjoys using innovative world-building methods to reflect on our possible futures and ways of living together, with the help of card games or objects created in workshops. The aim is to identify the hopes and fears of those involved whilst foster agency. In autumn 2026, the speculative carddeck Ping the Future will be released, exploring future relationships and the expectations placed on individuals in our society.
After having lived in Prague, Berlin and Hamburg for 11 years, socio-cultural differences became the focus of her graphic work, she founded the studio feberdesign in Graz in 2012. Through her studies in sociology, she is developing the theoretical foundation for her practical work and operates at the intersection of research, conception and graphic design to develop tailor-made methods for participatory social research.
In her research to date, she has explored the Collective Memory according to Maurice Halbwachs, the health behaviours of women with a migration background, as well as the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the hopes and fears of female photographers and graphic designers in Graz: AI and the desire for control, under the supervision of Prof. Juliane Jarke and Gwendolin Barnard, MSc.