Simply Wood is a collaborative inquiry into the topic of all wood joints for industrially produced furniture through engineering and the culture of care for and with furniture through Design+Change. This thesis is written in collaboration with the product development and communication wings from IKEA of Sweden, as the external tutors and supervisors. The design part, called the Kinship of Care, focuses on the culture of care between IKEA’s fast furniture and its user. This research, Kinship of care, consists of slow design principles reveal, expand, and reflect that serve as a cyclic timeline through the design process. Reader, the new caregiver is at the beginning introduced into the field of Slow Design and what does it mean to be the agent of change in today’s world. As the thesis unfolds, the section Reveal expresses challenges IKEA is facing when it comes to the culture of care. These challenges serve as a foundation from which this thesis builds its shape. The notion of care is highly abundant in meanings, and the understanding of furniture is quite narrow and static. The sectionReveal reframes the idea of care in collaboration with other caregivers in the form of a Caregiver manifesto for Living in Times of Social Distancing. The notion of furniture is revalued during an intervention walk Beyond Furniture that reveals hidden connections to furniture in the forest. Once the concepts of furniture and care are reframed, they are brought together and reimagined in the next section Expand. Expand uses tools of bisociation to combine seemingly unrelated notions together. All this information is transformed in conclusion into seeds for caring with furniture that serves as carative guidelines, guidelines that motivate caregiving behaviour in one’s household, and guidelines for imagining caring furniture. In the last section Reflect, the reader contemplates the life of furniture and learns to let go for sustainable disposal practices through the Love and the Breakup letters. This section also contains an interview with a caregiving practitioner, a furniture upholsterer. In conclusion, seeds for caring with furniture are introduced in the form of a moving zine. This thesis, Simply Wood, encourages the reader, fast-furniture user, and fast-furniture producer, to become a slow caregiver in this fast-changing society and offers tools for re-conceptualizing rooted notions of care and furniture.

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The project explores the contribution of digital platforms to Social Sharing, a term used for the nonreciprocal, social aspect of Sharing, in the context of a local neighbourhood. Sharing is considered a way to create more sustainable ways of living and empower community engagement in cities.  The project used participatory design processes to create a conceptual prototype of a Sharing Platform. The platform proposes a digital whiteboard as a communication tool among residents and a board of Sharing actions modules to trigger residents' imagination on what can be shared. The outcomes of the process also entailed connections among stakeholders and the potential of new sharing initiatives. The project provides insights into methods for designing feasible solutions for the future using playfulness. It discusses how trust and access are established through digital platforms. Finally, it argues for the role of the latter as facilitators for social exchange in place.

<p>Accessibility often isn’t recognized to the abled-bodied. The objects, systems and tools of access aren’t even noticed until those without disabilities need it or become disabled themselves. Building on my initial academic and scholarly research, I conducted a case study at The Wabash Center; a facility that serves people with disabilities in the local West Lafayette and surrounding communities. I spent three months observing, journaling, and identifying key patterns that revealed the tensions in food access issues at the facility. These patterns included community, agency, dependency and assistance, and accountability. The issues I identified at The Wabash Center all fall under the overarching issue of power and control. Power and control describes the notion that is often exercised by abled-bodies in the presence of people with disabilities. In this context, food and food access is used as a form of power and control. It is commonly found that the issue of power and control is embedded in design and the way that designers conduct their processes. To better understand the systemic relationships and issues of food access, it was imperative to analyze the internal interactions of how disabled people negotiate in an institutionalized setting. This thesis discusses the reflection process of my efforts to look critically at my own assumptions about disability, food access, and its relationship to design.</p>

This paper analyses the players’ perception of the feedback and polling systems of OldSchool RuneScape to determine what level of participatory design is achieved by the feedback and polling systems used in the game. The aim of the research is to increase the availability of knowledge regarding participatory design in live-service games, as only limited coverage of the topic exists. The study uses an adapted survey created by Segalowitz and Chamorro-Koc that uses three different metrics to measure genuine participation. The survey was presented to in-game players and users of the game’s different forums. It was determined that a high level of genuine participation and participatory design is achieved.

Participatory urban planning is seen as an important aspect of developing local democracy, as some of the interviewees in my research mentioned (T. Kesarovski, personal communication, January 27, 2022). With city-users being co-owners of the city and providing valuable knowledge from a non-experts perspective for the munici-palities about how the city is experienced, it is widely accepted that residents themselves should be more involved in the processes of shaping their urban environment (B. Herlo, personal communication, February 04, 2022).In order to involve city-users in local planning processes, there has been a recent shift away from traditional, analog practices toward the use of technological means. However, the current implementation of digital tools, which is primarily limited on the desktop, is still either unsuitable or cumbersome for many people (S. Rott, personal com-munication, January 31, 2022). During my research I observed that these traditional practices got mainly replicated as digital platforms  instead of rethinking participatory methods in general. This is one of the main causes which lead to the fact that the same homogenous group of people remain involved and committed to these projects. The efforts of the municipalities to integrate especially young people in such processes, who so far represent an absolute minority, still remains an unresolved challenge.In this project I explore technological possibilities in order to create a participation culture on the go and therefore offer a more flexible opportunity to participate in planning processes. Consequently, I explore technological ways to engage a broader range of people, focusing primarily on digital natives among the cities residents. In doing so, I develop a framework based on the concept of contextual experiences to see whether mobile devices can serve as a gateway to more meaningful participatory methods and raise awareness of urban change.The mobile application leverages situated and lightweight inter-actions to enable citizens to reflect and comment on their given surroundings. By taking advantages of emerging technologies, the city-users are enabled to participate in engaging ways and experi-ence urban projects through its visualisations in context. This project is grounded in the notion of the surrounding environment and the experience in context, rather than solely on the technology itself.Rather than replacing traditional methods, the project is intended to serve as a complement to traditional participation methods by providing an engaging, flexible, and easy entry point to participatory planning opportunities.

The purpose of this thesis is to create a conceptual framework for designing culturally responsive game based learning (GBL) with diverse students by including their cultural capital. This addition of cultural capital can contribute to the students' learning capabilities. This framework provides a structure of workshops and best practices for game designers and pedagogical professionals to jointly incorporate cultural capital into GBL, specifically in an Aotearoa/New Zealand context. Although many studies have been conducted on the benefits of culturally responsive teaching, limited research exists on GBL in this context. New Zealand educators are already implementing GBL in classrooms, but they can have difficulties with creating culturally responsive perspectives. The proposed framework facilitates collaboration with game designers, educators, students, cultural leaders and community members to co-create GBL that reflects a multicultural society's cultural capital. The key contribution is the conceptual framework that identifies how to incorporate cultural capital into GBL. Future research is needed to evaluate the framework's effectiveness for culturally diverse student groups in NZ and other culturally diverse student groups with similar colonial histories.

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Due to the rapid digitalisation of mobility, and the emergence of cross-disciplinary businesses within the transport sector, transcending it from a traditionally product focused industry, into a service one. Therefore, the contextual understanding of mobility has become of even greater importance. With future mobility bringing possible solutions to a range of social problems it’s vital for researchers to understand how the adoption of these services can become even more substantial. By doing so, hopefully curtailing the negative effects that urbanisation has on society. This paper puts forward a method of how to involve young Swedish people in the development of future digitalised mobility (FDM). From the synthesis of insights from literature on adoption of future mobility and new intelligent technology a participatory design approach was used to explore how coming user perspective can be counted for in the development of FDM.