This research is investigating ways of promoting social change towards more sustainable practices around the consumption of decorative home textiles. Knowledge is built and a prototype developed by using transdisciplinary design theory and participatory design methods.  Motivators for this work are the sustainability goals defined by the United Nations, specifically reducing waste through prevention and building awareness for sustainable lifestyles (UN Sustainability Initiative, 2020); and a combined interest of becoming more accessible to more people and interacting with them there where they are from the point of view of product or service design, as well as working towards sustainability goals of IKEA (Ingka Group, 2020).  The context of home textiles has been chosen because textile waste is a growing problem and with the main emphasis being on issues relating to clothing items and fast fashion, problems with home textiles can be easily overlooked. However, with giant fast fashion companies like H&M and Zara entering the home decor market, there is a reason to focus on preventing the same kind of issues rising with home fashion textiles as have with fast fashion clothes.  The aim is to understand the behaviours and meanings surrounding home fashion textiles and to reduce the amount of textile waste going to landfills through prevention and mindful consumption. The purpose is to develop a vehicle of interaction between IKEA and consumers that emphasizes inclusion and the merits of co-creating to solve a problem in a sustainable way and benefits IKEA in their pursuits of cultivating a stronger relationship with the consumers while working towards their circularity goals.  The prototype proposed as a result is an evidence-based tool for communication which enables IKEA to access more people while offering both parties a chance to learn from each other while developing sustainable initiatives and mindsets.

Interactive light systems create unique opportunities for different kinds of social interactions in public places. This thesis explores movement as the main interaction to discover and create new ways of engaging in social interaction as well as to encourage people of different age groups to come together and participate. To further explore and answer the questions in mind, different field studies such as interviews and user tests were implemented to gather information on how the pedestrian’s thoughts and actions were. The outcome of these field studies showed that there is a slight shyness in the Swedish people and that they need to be encouraged to start socially interacting. Which through the presented prototype and its mechanics worked and allowed the participants to express their thoughts and feelings regarding an interactive light system that could encourage social interaction in public spaces.

The project aims at exploring the process of designing recommender systems from a users’ perspective. Recommendations are the systems that can help users navigate in the overload of information, that is currently available online. This project focuses on the recommender network of Strossle, which provides article recommendations across various publishers’ websites. User-centered research has been performed to understand the current system and how that influences the users’ perceived experience. The goal was to develop a more engaging content experience for the Strossle recommendation system. This is done by means of participatory design methods. As people tend to use recommendations very sporadic and they often do not really know what they are looking for. The emphasis was on finding the balance between exploratory browsing and navigating towards the users’ preferences. In order to achieve this, a more dynamic widget has been developed that offers navigation in various related topics.

This thesis explores the dimensions of an emerging vulnerable design space in the context of COVID-19 pandemic through a design process that rethinks designer's presence and power in a context of remote exploration and embraces diary as a method and prototype to integrate interdisciplinary research in exploring different temporalities to record the past, to deal with the present and to speculate about what can happen afterwards.

Comics have been around for centuries and have had different culturalmeanings depending on era, genre and country. Toward the end of the 20thcentury and the start of the 21st century, we experienced the rise of theinternet as well as the normalization of home computers and with that,comics also started inhabiting the digital space. The digital space opens upfor opportunities of multimedia and new ways of interacting with comics, butmost comics maintain the formats of their printed counterparts.The goal of this thesis is to contribute knowledge to both interaction designpractice as well as digital comics. This is done by conducting research throughdesign and interaction-driven design and through them, launch anexploration into how different interactions affect the experience of reading.User tests as well as a workshop was conducted in order to help articulate theexperience. The conclusions reached were that a more active way ofinteracting (i.e. scrolling for instance) appeared to be preferable to othermore static ways of interacting. The usage of the digital space appeared to insome cases enhance the experience of reading but it was closely connected tothe nature of the interactions.

Globalisation and fast evolution of technologies have driven people to immigrate and live outside their home country. The multicultural society is no longer extraordinary. This thesis project explores the role and form of technologies and interactive design in assisting the parents with an ethnic background to introduce their culture and language to their children, as well as in maintaining its application in their everyday lives. The primary focus group are parents whose originated from Indonesia and have been living in other countries for more than two years. This research has utilised the user-research method employed in the design research process. The result suggested that persistence, consistency and community support are primary in promoting the preservation of the parents’ cultural background and language. Therefore, technology and interactive design have a significant impact to support it. The design outcome is a physical prototype combined with digitalised media support such as a website and an application.

This thesis explores the topic of how one can streamline a data journalists analytical workflow in a graph visualization environment. Interactive graph visualizations have been used recently by data journalists to investigate the biggest leaks of data in history. Graph visualizations empower users to find patterns in their connected data, and as the world continuously produces more data, the more important it becomes to make sense of it. The exploration was done by conducting semi-structured interviews with users, which illuminated three categories of insights called Graph Readability, Charts in Graphs and Temporality. Graph Readability was the category that were conceptualized and designed by integrating user research and data visualization best practises. The design process was concluded with a usability test with graph visualization developers, followed by a final iteration of the concept. The outcome resulted in a module that lets users simplify their graph and preserve information by aggregating nodes with similar attributes.

The benefit of a self-service technology (SST) is often for the companies, needing less employees when the customers can perform the service by themselves. But an SST might not always benefit the customer or employees experience. However, there are certain attributes that motivates customers to use SSTs and sometimes preferring them over service staff. This research explores how to design an SST with the aim of improving the overall service experience, for both the service customers and its employees at a mid-range hotel. By involving the stakeholders in the design process using co-creative methods, opportunities for improving their existing service was identified. Concepts were developed in co-creative workshops, and prototypes were designed and tested using interaction design principles. The final design was an SST kiosk that shows potential of improving the experience for customers and employees at the hotel.

To effectively manage and facilitate the knowledge sharing process in organisations is crucial, as it contributes with economic and competitive organisational value. This thesis investigates the knowledge sharing process in an organisation, and how a design solution could be developed to facilitate this process. The investigation of the organisation showed that, a barrier for the employees to exchange knowledge, is that they are not fully aware of each others knowledge gaps. Consequently, due to low awareness of each others knowledge gaps, the employees are having difficulties to know if their knowledge could be valuable to share. This illuminated an area to focus upon, and an opportunity for a design solution to be developed. The design solution evolved along with insights obtained from usability testing, to achieve a result which correlates with the needs of the employees. The final design solution is a tool, which enables the employees to gather information of their knowledge gaps, thus enhance the awareness of what knowledge to share. The tool, and the process of its creation, provides an answer of how a design solution could be developed to facilitate the exchange of knowledge among employees in an organisation.

This thesis contributes to an EU Policy Lab project entitled The Future of Government 2030+. The aim of which is to generate knowledge in the context of the rapidly changing relationship between citizens and government.Using a co-design and speculative design process this thesis specifically looks at informing a citizen centric perspective on envisioning and formulating the design of new interactive tools and forms of engagement. Looking at the potential of art’s role in rethinking the way democracy and governments operate and exploring how citizens could interact, participate and engage in democracy. Investigating how new forms of debate and decision making could unfold in both domestic and public spaces in a future model of participatory democracy.A framework for a future model of government is presented in this thesis through prototype scenarios. This framework emerged from citizens visions of communication and interaction with a future government. The framework focuses on two key areas where artistic expression is used: 1: The formulation and communication of issues of concerns. 2: Community organising for creative participation in addressing these issues.The discussions on art and democracy by philosophers John Dewey and Bruno Latour were influential in the formulation and selection of the methodological approach. Culminating in a sequential design research process conducted through public probes, cultural probes and co-design workshops.