Anna Trojak
Sustainability educator and open-knowledge librarian building The People's University — a free digital library of 8,000+ resources on sustainability and human rights, designed for everyday citizens and professionals. Exploring how neuroaesthetics, art-science collaboration, and intentional spatial design can make complex knowledge genuinely welcoming and livable in digital form.
I run The People's University, a free, open-source digital knowledge library for sustainability reporting professionals, SMEs, and curious citizens who want to understand the systems shaping our world — from EU climate law and human rights due diligence to biodiversity and impact accounting. The library currently holds 8,000+ curated resources, structured into layered sub-repositories to make navigation easier for people with no prior topic knowledge.
The core design challenge I'm working on sits squarely at the intersection of neuroarts and knowledge infrastructure: how do you make a digital library feel like a library? Physical libraries are one of the last public spaces that invite people to slow down, linger, wander without a task, and recharge. I want to recreate that psychological quality in a digital context — using art, spatial metaphors, and the science of how the brain responds to aesthetic experience to lower the threshold of entry, reduce information overload, and build the kind of ambient belonging that keeps people coming back.
Each sub-repository in the library will open with a visual introduction — ideally created in collaboration between a topic expert and an artist — that orients visitors emotionally and conceptually before they encounter any text. This is where I hope the neuroarts community can help: I'm actively seeking collaborations, precedents, and research that can inform how visual and aesthetic experiences are designed for learning environments.
My professional background is in financial control, sustainability reporting, and EU regulatory frameworks (CSRD, ESRS, CSDDD, EU Taxonomy). I volunteer with the Value Balancing Alliance, contribute to EFRAG stakeholder consultation processes, and hold a Junior Research Fellowship at the European Institute of Policy Research and Human Rights. I am also based in Amsterdam.
Interests
What I'm Looking For / How I Want to Engage
I'm primarily here to find research and practitioners whose work can inform three specific design questions for The People's University:
The "oasis" problem: What does neuroaesthetics tell us about creating digital environments that invite rest, curiosity, and non-goal-directed exploration? Are there precedents in museum digital design, healing environments, or educational UX that have been studied?
Visual onboarding to complex knowledge: What do we know about how visual introductions — illustrations, animations, infographics — change the way non-experts engage with dense or unfamiliar material? I'm looking for both research evidence and practitioners who could collaborate on creating these entry-points.
Art-expert collaboration models: Has anyone systematically studied or documented how artist-researcher pairs work together to translate scientific or technical knowledge into aesthetic experiences? I'm looking for process models, not just outcomes.
I am open to cross-disciplinary collaborations, to sharing the library's open-access infrastructure as a research site, and to contributing a sustainability reporting and EU regulatory perspective to any neuroarts projects touching on environmental policy, climate communication, or institutional trust.