Digital implants have become a new frontier for body hackers, technology enthusiasts and disruptive innovation developers, who seek to service this technology for themselves and to new users. This thesis has explored conditions for future user adoption of human body augmentation with digital implants. The conditions explored were mainly self-beneficial health optimization through technology, self-quantification or convenience scenarios. Applying Diffusion Of Innovation theory, Value-based Acceptance Model and research through design methods were used. The process consisted of quantitative and qualitative data gathering and analysis, using interviews, surveys and iterative prototyping with evaluation. The results show mixed user attitude towards implant usage, mainly depending on users' need for added benefits, whether the user is a technology enthusiast actively using technology for self-beneficial gain or a casual everyday consumer of technology. Certain conditions could affect adoption of implants into mainstream usage, mainly data privacy, regulation, convenience, self-quantification or health management. In order for implants to succeed as a mainstream technology, there needs to be proper secure infrastructure, easy installation and coordinated services that offer individual benefits of health or convenience, with a high consumer confidence in supported services, installation / removal and devices. Several companies are working on offering such a service, in order to evaluate such a proposition, iterative prototypes were created to evaluate a health management scenario as a streamlined consumer service, using a service design blueprint and a related interactive smartphone application prototype.

The thesis project underlines the importance of designing calm and subtle technologies, by exploring how mobile communicative technologies, such as cell phones, could notify their users about incoming information in a more natural, and non-intrusive manner. The aim of the thesis was to find a way for cell phones to act more appropriately in public and social settings, where they now often are considered intrusive due to their uninhibited manifestations.The thesis provides a theoretical understanding of how normative expectations of cell phone conduct are constituted and maintained within public and social settings. The theories are further grounded in practical work, where the project employ user centered design methods and techniques to, in a collaborative manner, together with users explore the research field to generate insights. Solutions have further been prototyped and evaluated together with users in their everyday settings.Taking inspiration from calm technology, the project looks into how information can be notified, in a more subtle manner in the periphery of the user’s attention. Users’ own priming abilities have been considered as a personal way to recognize the notification and to further associate it as relevant information.As a solution for intrusive cell phones, the thesis proposes Knot; a signature based notification system, which builds on friends’ abilities to recognize each other’s characteristic traits. The system consists of a notification rope, which is a free standing phone accessory that twists and turns, when new information is arriving to the user’s cell phone. It can present whom the information is from by shaping itself into the sender’s representative Knot-signature. If the user can recognize the signature, it will immediately trigger a meaningful association to the person who sent the information.The solution builds upon the restrictiveness between those who can associate a certain signature to a certain person, and those who cannot. For those who have the ability to associate to the signature, its role as a notifier will become meaningful and informative, while for others, who do not share this ability, the signature would be subtle and meaningless, and hence not interfering. The thesis exemplifies how interfaces could provide users with output in a more natural way, by considering users’ previous skills and knowledge, and primarily their priming abilities.

Three-dimensional literature is a virtually non-existent or in any case very rare and emergent digital art form, defined by the author as a unit of text, which is not confined to the two-dimensional layout of print literature, but instead mediated across all three axes of a virtual space. In collaboration with two artists the author explores through a bodystorming workshop how writers and readers could create and experience three-dimensional literature in mixed reality, by using mobile devices that are equipped with motion sensors, which enable users to perform embodied interactions as an integral part of the literary experience.For documenting the workshop, the author used body-mounted action cameras in order to record the point-of-view of the participants. This choice turned out to generate promising knowledge on using point-of-view footage as an integral part of the methodological approach. The author has found that by engaging creatively with such footage, the designer gains a profound understanding and vivid memory of complex design activities.As the outcome the various design activities, the author developed a concept for an app called TEXTILE. It enables users to build three-dimensional texts by positioning words in a virtual bubble of space around the user and to share them, either on an online platform or at site-specific places. A key finding of this thesis is that the creation of three-dimensional literature on a platform such as TEXTILE is not just an act of writing – it is an act of sculpture and an act of social performance.

During face-to-face meetings, humans use multimodal information, including verbal information, visual information, body language, facial expressions, and other non-verbal gestures. In contrast, during computer-mediated-communication (CMC), humans rely either on mono-modal information such as text-only, voice-only, or video-only or on bi-modal information by using audiovisual modalities such as video teleconferencing. Psychologically, the difference between the two lies in the level of the subjective experience of presence, where people perceive a reduced feeling of presence in the case of CMC. Despite the current advancements in CMC, it is still far from face-to-face communication, especially in terms of the experience of presence. This thesis aims to introduce new concepts, theories, and technologies for presence design where the core is actions for creating presence. Thus, the contribution of the thesis can be divided into a technical contribution and a knowledge contribution. Technically, this thesis details novel technologies for improving presence experience during mediated communication (video teleconferencing). The proposed technologies include action robots (including a telepresence mechatronic robot (TEBoT) and a face robot), embodied control techniques (head orientation modeling and virtual reality headset based collaboration), and face reconstruction/retrieval algorithms. The introduced technologies enable action possibilities and embodied interactions that improve the presence experience between the distantly located participants. The novel setups were put into real experimental scenarios, and the well-known social, spatial, and gaze related problems were analyzed. The developed technologies and the results of the experiments led to the knowledge contribution of this thesis. In terms of knowledge contribution, this thesis presents a more general theoretical conceptual framework for mediated communication technologies. This conceptual framework can guide telepresence researchers toward the development of appropriate technologies for mediated communication applications. Furthermore, this thesis also presents a novel strong concept – presence through actions - that brings in philosophical understandings for developing presence- related technologies. The strong concept - presence through actions is an intermediate-level knowledge that proposes a new way of creating and developing future 'presence artifacts'. Presence- through actions is an action-oriented phenomenological approach to presence that differs from traditional immersive presence approaches that are based (implicitly) on rationalist, internalist views.

For thousands of years, physical objects have been used to represent data, in order to support cognition, communication and learning. Such representations, especially newly computer-supported ones, became the focus of an emerging field called data physicalization. Although most physicalizations are passive (i.e., static), a growing number of active (i.e., dynamic) representations have been recently created. There is still, however, an immense opportunity in exploring interactive data physicalizations. This thesis proposes a tangible artifact (a shovel equipped with orientation sensors) that could be used by visitors of Earth sciences museums. SuperTunnel Simulator calculates a hole through Earth, indicating where in the world visitors would end up if they dug in a certain direction. Feedback from participants indicate such embodied interaction might influence learning by igniting visitors’ curiosity and stimulating hypothesis formulation. Finally, we point to research opportunities in conveying data not through an object’s shape, but through our interaction with it.

It was analyzed if instructions on a head-worn Augmented Reality display (AR-HWD) are better for manual industrial assembly tasks than instructions on a stationary screen. A prototype was built which consisted of virtual instruction screens for two example assembly tasks. In a comparison study participants performed the tasks with instructions through an AR-HWD and alternatively through a stationary screen. Questionnaires, interviews and observation notes were used to evaluate the task performances and the user experience. The study revealed that the users were excited and enjoyed trying the technology. The perceived usefulness at the current state was diverse, but the users saw a huge potential in AR-HWDs for the future. The task accuracy with instructions on the AR-HWD was equally good as with instructions on the screen. AR-HWDs are found to be a better approach than a stationary screen, but technological limitations need to be overcome and workers need to train using the new technology to make its application efficient.