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This thesis, “Designing for Death in a Divided Future,” by Hillevi Hesseldahl, is a speculative design project which explores the ideological dichotomy in addressing climate crises within the Anthropocene epoch. The study highlights two major frameworks: Posthumanism together with Anthroposophy, advocating for a harmonious integration with nature, and Transhumanism together with Eco-Realism, emphasizing technological solutions and a geologial separation between human and wild ecosystems. The project uses speculative design to visualize future death rites, presenting two contrasting scenarios for Stockholm in 2050.  The first scenario, “Gaian Sympoiesis,” envisions a society deeply connected with nature, employing local, community-based solutions. Here, death rites involve the “Vessel of Return,” an urn designed to return human essence to the earth, symbolizing a cyclical view of life.  The second scenario, “Cybernetic Ascendancy,” portrays a technologically advanced society where humans withdraw from nature, relying on digital innovation and conservation of natural habitats. This scenario introduces the “Orb of Descendancy,” a digital artifact encapsulating a deceased person’s life data, reflecting a rational, data-driven approach to memorialization.  By examining these speculative futures, the thesis sheds light on current ideological divides and the potential impacts of our choices on the trajectory of human civilization. This project combines artistic methods, personal interviews, and design theories to create tangible representations of possible futures, aiming to foster a deeper understanding of the present and stimulate discourse on navigating the Anthropocene.

Our interactions with objects build cultural codes, reflecting lifestyles, values, and identities beyond functional expectations. With open connectivity in the contemporary consumer environments, we have access to homogenized material cultures not only for daily activities but also for ceremonies and rituals to mark important events, such as birth, marriage, and death. What will happen to our cultural codes and diverse traditions when various cultural norms meet, exchange, clash, hybridize, and evolve? In this research, globalized material cultures were investigated to discover metaphoric comparisons, to formulate conceptual frameworks, and to develop informed design, which can address evolving cultural conditions appropriately, in comparison with commercialized goods. Considering we often ritualize sequential stages of life course or challenging events, but rarely divorce, I explored the socio-cultural norms of marriage and divorce in the current social construct to anticipate globally evolving divorce phenomena. My thesis focused on relatively unknown material cultures in ritualizing divorce by combining speculative design with semiotic, hybrid, idiosyncratic approaches to communicate desirable future scenarios for the emerging multi-cultural context. This research aims to explore how artifacts and rituals can help people cope with transitional events and how design practices can provide meaningful and reflective material cultures.

Nuclear waste remains radioactive for thousands of years. Burying it underground in an enormous repository, called Onkalo, surrounded and secured by solid rock is the long-term solution Finnish authorities implement right now. Once the repository is filled up, it will be locked up forever and never opened again. At the same time three new nuclear power plants are built. Out of Sight, out of Mind? Ultimately, this raises questions: Can this be the solution for final disposal of nuclear waste? How do we understand a problem clearly exceeding our capabilities as human beings? How do we deal with the dilemmas of uncertainty, invisibility, time, demand, possible contamination, and our individual responsibility as human beings? Understanding Through Interaction I designed three everyday products, a lamp, a toy for children, and a pregnancy test, that afford a familiar everyday action on one hand, while exposing a dilemma related to Onkalo on the other. In doing so, the artifacts make those dilemma tangible and facilitate understanding and critical thinking. Sharing a personal experience, the users can engage in a personal discourse around nuclear waste actively, opposing the distant and highly politicalised discourse spread by the media.

The home is a physical place that provides isolation, comfort, access to essential needs on a daily basis, and it has a strong impact on a person’s life. Computational and media technologies (digital and electronic objects, devices, protocols, virtual spaces, telematics, interaction, social media, and cyberspace) become an important and vital part of the home ecology, although they have the ability to transform the domestic experience and the understanding of what a personal space is. For this reason, this work investigates the domestication of computational media technology; how objects, systems, and devices become part of the personal and intimate space of the inhabitants. To better understand the taming process, the home is studied and analysed from a range of perspectives (philosophy, sociology, architecture, art, and technology), and a methodological process is proposed for critically exploring the topic with the development of artworks, designs, and computational systems. The methodology of this research, which consists of five points (Context, Media Layers, Invisible Matter, Diffusion, and Symbiosis), suggests a procedure that is fundamental to the development and critical integration of the computationally enhanced home. Accordingly, the home is observed as an ecological system that contains numerous properties (organic, inorganic, hybrid, virtual, augmented), and is viewed on a range of scales (micro, meso and macro). To identify the “choreographies” that are formed between these properties and scales, case studies have been developed to suggest, provoke, and speculate concepts, ideas, and alternative realities of the home. Part of the speculation proposes the concept of DomoNovus (the “New Home”), where technological ubiquity supports the inhabitants’ awareness, perception, and imagination. DomoNovus intends to challenge our understanding of the domestic environment, and demonstrates a range of possibilities, threats, and limitations in relation to the future of home. This thesis, thus, presents methods, experiments, and speculations that intend to inform and inspire, as well as define creative and imaginative dimensions of the computationally-enhanced home, suggesting directions for the further understanding of the domestic life.

Cars have been around for over a century and have grown to become an essential part of society with an increasing number of different models being sold and developed each year. Car manufacturers steadily expand the offered product portfolio and invent new market niches constantly. Often, this is not done to meet the customers’ expectations but rather to match and rival a competitor’s model lineup. The increase in model variety results in a significant increase in the complexity of production and manufacturing, more difficult and demanding work surrounding employees, and massive negative impacts on the environment. Not only are cars unsustainable in the way they are used, but also in the way they are produced. For a more sustainable future of and with cars to be possible, this practice of product portfolio expansion needs to be critically analyzed. It is, in my eyes, additionally necessary to evaluate the essence of the car industry, the car itself, and to re-think what defines a car. This paper critically analyzes the car industry and the production and development of cars, and it proposes an alternative to standard car design based on the idea and ability of speculative and critical design to highlight issues of today. The proposed concept is a speculative design alternative to car design, aiming to put sustainability and the customers back into the focus of car development, and discover what is possible, rather than probable, in the future of cars. The proposed concept aims at changing the understanding of cars and turns the car from being fixed and immutable into alterable and changeable objects, depending on the use-case and user. By analyzing manufacturing procedures and future trends, and interviewing experts from various disciplines, insights are used to evaluate the proposed alternative.

abstract: Open Design is a crowd-driven global ecosystem which tries to challenge and alter contemporary modes of capitalistic hardware production. It strives to build on the collective skills, expertise and efforts of people regardless of their educational, social or political backgrounds to develop and disseminate physical products, machines and systems. In contrast to capitalistic hardware production, Open Design practitioners publicly share design files, blueprints and knowhow through various channels including internet platforms and in-person workshops. These designs are typically replicated, modified, improved and reshared by individuals and groups who are broadly referred to as ‘makers’. This dissertation aims to expand the current scope of Open Design within human-computer interaction (HCI) research through a long-term exploration of Open Design’s socio-technical processes. I examine Open Design from three perspectives: the functional—materials, tools, and platforms that enable crowd-driven open hardware production, the critical—materially-oriented engagements within open design as a site for sociotechnical discourse, and the speculative—crowd-driven critical envisioning of future hardware. More specifically, this dissertation first explores the growing global scene of Open Design through a long-term ethnographic study of the open science hardware (OScH) movement, a genre of Open Design. This long-term study of OScH provides a focal point for HCI to deeply understand Open Design's growing global landscape. Second, it examines the application of Critical Making within Open Design through an OScH workshop with designers, engineers, artists and makers from local communities. This work foregrounds the role of HCI researchers as facilitators of collaborative critical engagements within Open Design. Third, this dissertation introduces the concept of crowd-driven Design Fiction through the development of a publicly accessible online Design Fiction platform named Dream Drones. Through a six month long development and a study with drone related practitioners, it offers several pragmatic insights into the challenges and opportunities for crowd-driven Design Fiction. Through these explorations, I highlight the broader implications and novel research pathways for HCI to shape and be shaped by the global Open Design movement. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Media Arts and Sciences 2020

Robotics engineers' ongoing quest to create human-like robots has raised profound questions on their lack of ethical implications. The rapid progress and growth of humanoid robots is said to have a significant impact on society and human psychology in the near future. Interaction Design is a multidisciplinary field in which designers are often encouraged to engage in important conversations and find solutions to complex problems. On the other hand, animators often use animated videos as metaphors to reflect on important matters that are present in our cultural and societal spheres. This study investigates the use of animation in Speculative Design settings as material to bridge two communities together - the animators and roboticists, to foster ethical behaviors and impact future technology. The main result of the design process is a concept for a mobile platform that stimulates discussions on the ethical considerations of human relationships with humanoid robots, through speculative animation. Moreover, the interactive platform enhances imagination, creativity and learning processes between users.

In the field of human-computer interaction, the majority of domestic IoT and smart devices run on proprietary software that possess limited technical properties and predetermined functionalities. As practices of building, modifying, and making IoT applications grow, this thesis follows an open-source approach to IoT to investigate the relationships of humans and things in a domestic setting. As a result of this material exploration, proprietary frameworks for interactions with smart devices are challenged through speculative scenarios, that include diverse instances of human-things interactions. Thus, a research through design methodology is suggested to support series of experiments, conducted to explore instances of perceived intelligence of these open-source hardware, without the use of advanced computational systems as proprietary devices entail. The suggested process is the creation of a speculative design artifact that combines hacking practices, to support designers in generating insights and to further iterate on possible open-source IoT interactions.

The ideas expressed in this thesis are meant to address the need for a transformation in the identity management systems currently in use in different parts of the world. Specifically, the paper presents a logical deduction of essential processes to allow for communication between individual people, governments, organizations, and private institutions to exchange and manage information pertaining to identity. This thesis proposes a conceptual framework for the design of an ecosystem that supports self-sovereign identity. The research reviews theory, methodology, and technology from subjects such as design, identity, and distributed systems. Through the design process, a set of elements and functions supporting interactions within an ecosystem were developed. The design is revolved around the ideas of privacy, security, distribution, and interoperability. The findings are presented as two parts of a whole, the first being the conceptual framework that describes a set of essential factors that an ecosystem requires in order to fulfill the goals of self-sovereign identity and interoperability. The second is a set of visualizations of how the framework can be used to design systems and interactions, inside and between the systems, to create an ecosystem. / <p>2022-06-20: Author's name has been corrected on the front page.</p>