As generative AI threatens creatives worldwide, this thesis applies Speculative Design through a Participatory Design process to speculate about the futures of AI in art by critically involving creatives. Conducting field research, interviews, and two co-design workshops, hosted at the Malmö City Library, the project resulted in an exhibition of four speculative scenarios in the form of short stories and AI-generated visualisations, sparking critical discourse and reflection about generative AI tools in art. The main insights from said discourse were that AI tools need to be investigated and critiqued through use by creatives, that designers working on AI tools have a responsibility to design for transparency, and that Speculative Design is the appropriate methodology to address AI in art, especially grounded in a Participatory Design process.

When using socially assistive robots (SAR), it is important that their personality is personalised so that it suits their user. This work investigated how the customisation of the personality of a SAR health coach is perceived when done by the users themselves or their friends via ChatGPT. Therefore, the research question in this study is: How is personalised dialogue for a social robot perceived when generated via ChatGPT, by users and their friends? This study uses a mixed method approach, where participants got to test their own and their friend’s personalised version. The qualitative data was analysed using a thematic analysis. Sixteen participants were recruited.The result from this study showed that it does not matter who is customising the SAR, nor does one make a more persuasive version than the other, and when customising the personality, participants explained what they or their friend preferred. However, it is important to remember that the individual’s preference matters.

<p>Human multi-robot systems constitute a relatively new area of research that focuses on the interaction and collaboration between humans and multiple robots. Well-designed systems can enable a team of humans and robots to effectively work together on complex and sophisticated tasks such as exploration, monitoring, and search and rescue operations. This dissertation introduces an affective workload allocation system capable of adaptively allocating workload in real-time while considering the conditions and work performance of human operators in multi-human multi-robot teams. The proposed system is largely composed of three parts, taking the surveillance scenario involving multi-human operators and multi-robot system as an example. The first part of the system is a framework for an adaptive multi-human multi-robot system that allows real-time measurement and communication between heterogeneous sensors and multi-robot systems. The second part is an algorithm for real-time monitoring of humans' affective states using machine learning techniques and estimation of the affective state from multimodal data that consists of physiological and behavioral signals. The third part is a deep reinforcement learning-based workload allocation algorithm. For the first part of the affective workload allocation system, we developed a robot operating system (ROS)-based affective monitoring framework to enable communication among multiple wearable biosensors, behavioral monitoring devices, and multi-robot systems using the real-time operating system feature of ROS. We validated the sub-interfaces of the affective monitoring framework through connecting to a robot simulation and utilizing the framework to create a dataset. The dataset included various visual and physiological data categorized on the cognitive load level. The targeted cognitive load is stimulated by a closed-circuit television (CCTV) monitoring task on the surveillance scenario with multi-robot systems. Furthermore, we developed a deep learning-based affective prediction algorithm using the physiological and behavioral data captured from wearable biosensors and behavior-monitoring devices, in order to estimate the cognitive states for the second part of the system. For the third part of the affective workload allocation system, we developed a deep reinforcement learning-based workload allocation algorithm to allocate optimal workloads based on a human operator's performance. The algorithm was designed to take an operator's cognitive load, using objective and subjective measurements as inputs, and consider the operator's task performance model we developed using the empirical findings of the extensive user experiments, to allocate optimal workloads to human operators. We validated the proposed system through within-subjects study experiments on a generalized surveillance scenario involving multiple humans and multiple robots in a team. The multi-human multi-robot surveillance environment included an affective monitoring framework and an affective prediction algorithm to read sensor data and predict human cognitive load in real-time, respectively. We investigated optimal methods for affective workload allocations by comparing other allocation strategies used in the user experiments. As a result, we demonstrated the effectiveness and performance of the proposed system. Moreover, we found that the subjective and objective measurement of an operator's cognitive loads and the process of seeking consent for the workload transitions must be included in the workload allocation system to improve the team performance of the multi-human multi-robot teams.</p>

The Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) industry is constantly searching for new methods for increasing efficiency and productivity. Facility managers, as a part of the owner/operator role, work in complex and dynamic environments where critical decisions are constantly made. This decision-making process and its consequent performance can be improved by enhancing Situation Awareness (SA) of the facility managers through new digital technologies. SA, as a user-centered approach for understanding facility managers’ information requirement, together with Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) was used for developing an Ambient Intelligent (AmI) environment for accessing building information in facilities. Augmented Reality has been considered as a viable option to reduce inefficiencies of data overload by providing facility managers with an SA-based tool for visualizing their “real-world” environment with added interactive data. Moreover, Building Information Modeling (BIM) was used as the data repository of the required building information. A pilot study was done to study the integration between SA, MAR, and BIM. InfoSPOT (Information Surveyed Point for Observation and Tracking) was developed as a low-cost solution that leverage current AR technology, showing that it is possible to take an idealized BIM model and integrate its data and 3D information in an MAR environment. A within-subjects user participation experiment and analysis was also conducted to evaluate the usability of the InfoSPOT in facility management related practices. The outcome of statistical analysis (a one-way repeated measure ANOVA) revealed that on average the mobile AR-based environment was relatively seamless and efficient for all participants in the study. Building on the InfoSPOT pilot study, an in-depth research was conducted in the area of healthcare facility management, integrating SA, MAR, and BIM to develop an AmI environment where facility mangers’ information requirement would be superimposed on their real-word view of the facility they maintain and would be interactively accessible through current mobile handheld technology. This AmI environment was compared to the traditional approach of conducting preventive and corrective maintenance using paper-based forms. The purpose of this part of the research was to investigate the hypothesis of “bringing 3D BIM models of building components in an AR environment and making it accessible through handheld mobile devices would help the facility managers to locate those components easier and faster compared to facility managers’ paper-based approach”. The result of this study shows that this innovative application of AR and integrating it with BIM to enhance the SA has the potential to improve construction practices, and in this case, facility management.

This dissertation provides initial empirical evidence for Expectancy Value Theory for Help Sources and generates design recommendations for online courses based on the newfound understanding between theory and student behavior. My high-level research goals are pursued in the context of help seeking in the presence of reputation systems in MOOC discussion forums. Educational technology can be intentionally designed and introduced in such a way as to maintain the benefits of existing technology while reducing negative impact on learning-relevant behaviors. I do this through the lens of student expectancy and values for the help source, and costs of pursuing that help. Within this thesis I present three online survey experiments, one is intended to provide empirical evidence for the connection between Expectancy Value Theory for Help Sources and student help seeking outcomes. The remaining two survey experiments are designed to further investigate the results of a system for help exchange through the lens of Expectancy Value Theory for Help Sources. The first survey supports the existence of beliefs for help sources, although careful design of value manipulations is necessary to isolate value beliefs from expectancy beliefs for the help source. In a field experiment investigating the design of a help exchange system, I explore the connection between common reputation system features and Expectancy Value Theory for Help Sources. This provides support for the theory outside of a controlled laboratory setting. This Quick Helper MOOC Experiment and the supporting Quick Helper Theory Survey Experiment show that voting within a reputation system context decreases the number of peers invited to be helpers possibly through an increase in evaluation anxiety. Help giver badges ca reduce this evaluation anxiety and mitigate the negative impact of voting. I performed a final field experiment in a small private online course to examine these issues in a more naturalistic setting outside of the Quick Helper help exchange system. I explored learning expectancy-emphasizing email prompts and voting in the course discussion forum, and how these manipulations impacted larger, more nuanced dependent variables such as help seeking and learning. Results from this experiment are not as strong as the more tightly controlled survey experiments and Quick Helper MOOC field experiment, but we still see support in the general direction of our original hypotheses. From these experiments I generate a series of design recommendations for instructors of online courses implementing discussion forums: (1) reputation systems can have a positive effect on student engagement in discussion forums, but there may be a negative effect on help seeking and other vulnerable learning-relevant behaviors, (2) The negative impact of evaluation anxiety from voting can be mitigated through the use of either help giver badges or using only upvoting instead of up/downvoting which may reduce evaluation anxiety, and (4) Email prompts with dilute implementation have questionable impact on student contributions in discussion forums.

Published Article / This study evaluated the difficulty, in terms of usability, of upgrading from one version of a word processor user interface (Microsoft Word 2003) to another (2007). Laboratory-based usability testing involving 23 participants, who had never used Microsoft Word 2007 before, was conducted. All participants used the two versions in a repeated-measures experimental design. A Tobii 1750 Eye Tracker was used for screen recordings during testing. Participants were also required to fill in user satisfaction questionnaires. Results from the usability test showed that, in terms of usability, migrating from an original interface to a completely changed user interface is not easy.

The learnability principle relates to improving usability of software, performance and productivity. It was formulated mainly for the adult user group. Children represent an important user group, but fewer guidelines exist for their educational and entertainment applications. This study compares these groups, addressing the question: “Does learnability of software interfaces have a different meaning for children and adults?”. A literature survey conducted on learnability and learning processes considered the meaning of learnability across generations. Users learning software systems were observed in a usability laboratory where eye tracking data could also be recorded. Insights emerged, from data analysis, showing different tactics when children and adults approached unfamiliar software and revealing aspects of interfaces they approached differently. The findings will help designers distinguish varying needs of users and improve learnability. An additional subprinciple of learnability, „engageability‟, is proposed. Factors that make products engaging for children are different from those engaging adults.

Since the late twentieth century, open source software projects (e.g., the GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache web server, Perl and many others) have achieved phenomenal success. This success can be attributed to a new paradigm of productivity in which individuals voluntarily collaborate to produce knowledge, goods and services. Benkler claims this productivity paradigm is a “new, third mode of production” particularly suited for “the digitally networked environment” (2002). In addition to its application to open source software projects, the peer production model, in different forms, has been used in areas such as science/citizen science (Silvertown, 2009), library science (Weinberger, 2007), politics (Castells, 2007; Jenkins, 2006), education (Daniel, 2012), journalism (Gillmor, 2004), and culture (Jenkins, 2006; Lessig, 2004). As peer production has flourished, merely describing successful cases has become less useful. Instead, scholars must identify the dynamics, structures, and conditions that contribute to or impede that success. In this dissertation, I focus on three management challenges at three distinct levels that impede the success of peer production. At the individual level, one significant question is how to best organize individual contributors with differing goals, experience, and commitment to achieve a collective outcome. At the practice level, peer production communities, like corporations, must often transfer best practices from one unit to another to improve performance. This transfer process poses the challenge of how to adapt and modify an original practice to make it effective in the new context. At the community level, peer production communities must learn to survive and succeed in a large ecosystem of related communities. This dissertation combines theoretical approaches in organization science with in-depth empirical analysis on a range of peer production communities to examine the mechanisms that help the communities overcome these three management challenges and succeed in peer production. The contributions of my dissertation are twofold. For scholars and researchers, my dissertation advances the theoretical understanding of the underlying mechanisms of successful peer production systems. For practitioners, my dissertation offers practical advice to build more effective peer production projects and platforms.

Die Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem Entwerfen in Theorie und Praxis. Dabei werden die unterschiedlichen Entwurfstätigkeiten immer als eingebettet in ein Entwurfsgefüge verstanden, in dem verschiedene kooperative Disziplinen mit unterschiedlichen Bezügen, Artefakte für die zukünftige Verwendung entwerfen. Hier geht es speziell um das kooperative Entwerfen, das von mehr als einer Person bewerkstelligt wird. Das sind oft Ingenieur und Designer, etwa Architekt und Bauingenieur oder Produktdesigner und technischer Ingenieur oder im Interaktionsdesign Designer und Informatiker. Dabei wird in der vorliegenden Arbeit Design als eine Kooperationsdisziplin und zugleich als eine Kooperationsdisziplin im Wandel dargestellt und gezeigt, wie die Zusammenarbeit mit Prototypen als manifesten Anker- und Differenzpunkten, gewinnbringender gestaltet werden kann. Zunächst wird die Kooperation von Designer und Ingenieur zur Lösung komplexer Probleme im Allgemeinen betrachtet. Anschließend wird die entwurfspraktische Zusammenarbeit beider Berufsgruppen im Interaktionsdesign untersucht. Dabei wird vorgeschlagen, den Entwurf in Skizzen, Mock-Ups oder Prototypen als kommunikativen Bezugspunkt zu wählen. Die Dimensionen von Prototypen im Interaktionsdesign werden bestimmt und in einer Taxonomie zusammengeführt. / Which material manifests a house? A sketch of the house? A car? A model of the car? Answering those questions is relatively simple because architecture and product design cultivate a rich and tangible tradition of prototyping and an adequate design theory. Which material manifests an interactive system? Is it the glas of the touch screen or is it the color of the buttons? Interaction design is an emerging discipline and its accompanying design theory is even more so in its early days. The dissertation contemplates questions of materiality in interaction design. What are interactive prototypes and how can they be sufficiently described? Which properties are inscribed and interpreted by designers, engineers, users and the environment alike? How can this knowledge be utilized for a meaningful transdisciplinary collaboration and equal participation in design processes? The book will start with the premise, that current research positions on prototypes in interaction design are based on hypotheses that are symmetrical in construction. Contemporary prototype research in interaction design focusses on either the artefact or the designer. The proposed research strives to combine those disjunct approaches on a metatheoretical level, via Somatic-Marker-Hypothesis from Neuroscience and Actor-Network-Theory from Philosophy of Technology. This serves as a declaration basis for the symmetric posture of current research and as a point of advancement for practice based research. A variety of empirical findings will be presented. The approach to an exhaustive working definition is building on four stages of analysis. First, this builds on the proposed theoretical framework as a structure for further analyses. In a second step, this framework was used to categorise existing dimensions of prototypes in literature. This extended literature review includes Fidelity Theories and what we call Inscription Theories as well as Form-Material Theories. In a third step, the thereby evolved categories were validated and advanced with content analysis of protocols of design processes between interaction designers and software engineers. In a final step the vocabulary was validated and advanced with of expert interviews.

Since the early 2000s, within the fields of Design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) an emerging body of unconventional design work has exemplified and articulated alternative and oppositional functions of design. Examples of such functions include provocatively speculating about alternative futures (speculation), questioning the status quo (critique), and debating political issues (agonism). Prominent examples of alternative and oppositional design have originated within HCI. Others have been heavily discussed, adapted, and critiqued within HCI. Alternative and oppositional designs have been presented under various names: critical design, design fiction, adversarial design, reflective design, ludic design, speculative design… At this moment the list continues to grow while examples of such work proliferate. This work collectively demonstrates the potential for design to engage concerns and goals that pivot around themes of generating radical alternatives and creating productive political, cultural, and social opposition. This thesis argues that there is a body of unconventional design work that becomes cohesive and legible when held together by themes of oppositionality and alternatives, and operating throughout these designs is a technique which I term design resistance. This thesis presents two primary contributions. The first contribution is to isolate and elaborate resistance as a design technique at work across a range of alternative and oppositional designs. I articulate how design resistance works by analyzing a series of design exemplars drawn from HCI and adjacent areas of Design. The second contribution is to extend and refine the overarching technique of design resistance through two design case studies. These design case studies serve the dual function of offering additional insight into design resistance grounded in my own design practice while concretely demonstrating new knowledge relevant to specific domains and concerns within HCI, including sustainable energy consumption and critiques of digital consumer technologies. Together these contributions provide new knowledge for (1) understanding the rise of alternative and oppositional designs, the concerns they are working to engage, and the research gaps they are working to fill, and (2) how to practice alternative and oppositional forms of design using techniques of design resistance.