Many cognitive scientists agree that musical play is beneficial for preschool children. They consider music to be one of the most important means to promote preschool children’s learning potential. From an interaction design point of view, music provides opportunities to engage children in collaborative play which in return is beneficial for their cognitive and physical development.I argue that tangible interaction can facilitate such collaborative and playful musical activities among preschool children and in the scope of this thesis, I explore how this can be achieved. Through the exploration of related projects in this area and my own design experiments at a preschool, I propose a design concept of a modular musical toy for children which I created and then tested in a preschool context with children of different ages. Along the way, I reflect on the peculiarities of children’s behaviors and the aspects of conducting design research with preschool children, since acknowledging these aspects is crucial for working with children as a designer.

Patrullerande poliser i Malmö har en varierande och oförutsägbar arbetsmiljö. När de kommer till händelser där de är osäkra på hur de ska agera kan de konsultera tryckt metodstödsmaterial. Dessa tryckta handböcker är ofta utdaterade och icke-standardiserade.Tillsammans med Polisen i Malmö har vi tagit fram ett förslag till hur en digital version av denna typ av material kan se ut, med förslag kring gränssnitt och informationsrepresentation, och en diskussion kring vilka potentiella konsekvenser ett mediebyte kan få för poliserna ute på fältet.För att ta fram dessa designförslag använde vi oss av ett antal interaktionsdesignmetoder. Dessa utvärderar och diskuterar vi, utifrån hur väl de fungerar inom en myndighet som Polisen, i kontexten patrullerande poliser i Malmö. / Patrolling officers in Malmö have a varied and unpredictable working environment. When they encounter situations within which they are not certain how to take action, they have printed material with support information. This type of handbook is often outdated and non-standardized. Together with the Malmö Police, we sketch a proposal for how a digital version of this kind of material could be designed, with suggestions for interface design and information representation, as well as outline what the potential consequences could be for the individual officer on the field.While outlining these design suggestions, we utilized a number of different interaction design methods. These are evaluated and discussed as to how well they work within a governmental organization like the Police in Malmö, within the context of patrolling officers.

Smart cities are seen as the answer for specific problems, that we will face in the future: overpopulation, shortage of resources, demographic change, etc. At the same time more people than ever will live in cities. This creates huge difficulties for governmental institutions on the one side, but also profit promising opportunities for companies on the other. This thesis will have a close look at this tension and unpack the vision of the smart cities, as they are created with the help of integrators and service companies. Through the lens of Critical Design, it will result in a fictional artifact to trigger the imagination and a debate about a possible future in which corporate interests changed the relationship between the city and its citizens.

Programming language tools help software developers to understand a program and to recognize possible pitfalls. Used with the right knowledge, they can be instrumented to achieve better software quality. However, creating language tools that integrate well into the development environment and workflow is challenging.This thesis utilizes a user-centered design process to identify the needs of professional developers through in-depth interviews, address those needs through a concept, and finally implement and evaluate the concept. Taking 'scope' as an exemplary source of misconceptions in programming, a “Scope Inspector” plug-in for the Atom IDE—targeting experienced JavaScript developers in the open source community—is implemented.

In this thesis I take up the challenge to see whether designers would benefit from using science fiction in order to extend their resources when generating novel interaction design concepts for emergency situations. I discuss the relationship between the nature of fiction and design, and trademarks for emergency situations. I choose four scenes from different media types to analyse, further ideate and evaluate in order to derive final concepts, which I submitted to user testing. I argue that designers may well take science fiction into consideration when generating novel interaction design concepts in a successful way.

This is a project to design digital technologies to promote uses of public spaces challenging the social religion of productivism + consumerism. Instead I celebrate participative leisure, free time, political involvement and social relationships. Digital artefacts for what I'm calling the "unproductive city". The goal is to incorporate a different set of values where the “paid work” is not as relevant in our life as it is today.The project is focused on life in cities and works with the integration of computing technologies into everyday urban settings and lifestyles. What it is called “urban informatics”.Participative processes as well as user center design have guided the design. It comprehends different services and activities: A collaborative urban jukebox, exercises with locative media, participative design as a leisure activity, technological infrastructures for meetings and game design for public spacesThese activities are examples and explorations to find future challenges and different ways to design technologies for the unproductive city.

This thesis aims at exploring the potential of playful annotations in interactive textbooks, to engage the teacher and the learner in an active learning process. This research focus was taken after a Field study consisting of a range of semi-structured interviews, surveys, and discussions with teachers and students from a pilot school provided with an interactive textbook platform called Gleerups. This latter is a Swedish publisher which spreads a large offer of educational textbooks across Sweden. The thesis topic was chosen in order to find and suggest ways to approach the learning and reading phase in an active way while also focusing on the teacher-learner relationship.The design contributions include proposals for improvements taking the shape of scenarios and sketches using field research and qualitative studies. It is based on an analysis of related examples and cross disciplinary literature, grounding the research in education and learning theories. Finally, a prototype encompassing the main features raised from the research is presented.The thesis ends with outcomes and reflections from findings, as well as discussions with stakeholders and teachers that initiated the research.

The skill of cooking a meal from start to end is becoming a stressful every day activity in many homes in Denmark. Less and less parents focus on including their children in preparing dinner because they see it as a time-consuming activity that the child would rather be left out of. In this paper we examine the importance of teaching children how to cook from a young age as well as we investigate in why it can seem like such a big task for them to actually get started with cooking. The study focuses on how to develop an interactive tablet and smartphone application that provides children with an explorative platform for them to develop their cooking skills on. The detailed process of developing a simple tablet/smartphone application is explored in order to arrive at an understand of the challenges children face when cooking, how we encourage them to cook and how we facilitate them with the best possible options for this. By doing several explorative workshops and studying previous research about how children learn, understand and explore their creativity, we arrive at an understanding of the challenges, limits and benefits there would be with an application like this.

This thesis introduces the exploration of making wearables as a collaborative expression between a performer and a participant in a performative participatory installation. With a phenomenological view on our embodied experience with technology, the methodological approach is program/experiment dialectics, mixing experiments in the lab with exploration in the field. The thesis introduces the full process, the program and experiments where the perception (the embodied interaction with the materials and the context) of the designer/researcher and participants has been a great resource of the iterative process of creating the prototype from sketching in digital material, to prototyping and testing. From the making of the final prototype it is concluded that, the participant and performer express shared movement as the performance is constituted by both technology and human agency - both wearable and body acts - in the interaction between interpretation, body, and experience on the one side, and concept, werable, and technology on the other. As a methodological knowledge contribution it is stated that program/experiment dialectics is a generous space, allowing elements from several other methods, non linearity, and intuition, to be part of the process, where researcher (and participants) are phenomenologists. Phenomenology in interaction design is an attribution to research through design as a method that allows room for active participation of the lived body in different stages of the design process - a development of the notion of embodiment beyond situatedness - acknowledging the interplay between bodies and technology, that users, artifacts, and contexts influence, touch, and touch back each other.

The thesis explores the possibilites of involving users – students and teachers – into the design process for an interactive textbook for assisting the teaching and learning of mathematics at a secondary school level. Involvement of students and teachers is executed with participatory design methodology for the purpose of infrastructuring between different actors – developers, designers, students and teachers, in order to suggest and emphasize novel, in terms of the market, ways for ideating, creating and evaluating concepts in the field of digital learning. The design process is executed with the aim of producing a re-design proposal for an existing interactive textbook – namely Exponent 1b by Gleerups Utbildning AB - a renowned Swedish publisher of learning materials. The proposal is part of the ideation phase of Gleerups’ project and the design process is adressed accordingly.The initial sections introduce a theoretical framework for looking at interactive learning environments and present examples of such environments and their functionalities. Significant focus is dedicated to the preliminary analysis of the current state of Exponent 1b and the follow-up participatory analysis and re-design process. The author’s proposals for improvements in the core functionalities and the interactions are based on the initial research of the theoretical framework, presented examples of integrated learning environments examples and services, and predominantly on the outcomes from the participatory analysis and design process. At the end of the thesis the author summarizes the outcomes concerning involvement of students, teachers, designers and developers, and inclusion of digital tools to facilitate learning and variety in teaching.