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Design researchers engage in speculative design to explore alternative futures. In speculative design, probes are used to engage participants in envisioning future design. Probes come in different forms and can be implemented as games or playful engagements. Due to the variety of probes, it is important for researchers to consider the properties of their probes. Moreover, these properties are not set only by analysing the depth and richness of probe results, but are also understood through analysing participants’ experiences of use. However, there is limited support in literature on the properties of gaming probes, and how they are experienced by participants. This study contributes to this void by using a city building game as a probe object in a speculative gaming probe (SGP) simulating a city environment for future mobility services, and gain insights on the experiences indicated by participants. The result of the study shows that the SGP is experienced as an empowerment of privileges in an alternative reality that is skill demanding, requiring an act of commitment. This has several implications for the use of SGP’s in design research. First, the powers provided by the game affects participants’ roles, but also their creative freedom. Second, researchers have to consider the learning curves of the SGP. Lastly, researchers should treat the SGP as one alternative in a set of probes.

In this paper, I explore the emerging field of voluntary implants as seen in the DIY biohacking scene. My work on such implants focuses specifically on implantable Radio frequency Identification capsules. With the approach of research through design, I have undergone an iterative process, combining research and prototyping methods to externalize insights and knowledge generated along the way, in an effort to bring shed light on the new ideas and design considerations that arise when we embed computer technology in our bodies. By challenging the status quo, and setting aside my preconceptions through speculative design, my work has resulted in a working prototype, inspired by the ideology of slow technology. Elmer, the memory machine, is a device that enables the implantee to capture memories in point of time via their implants. Here user are can record and review moments of everyday life, merely through a timestamp — a design decision that contributes to the debate on topics like convenience, privacy, and the right to be human.

Compared to private car ownership, carsharing has emerged as one of the innovative ways of promoting sustainable and more environmentally friendly transportation. As a service thathas existed for decades, carsharing has evolved significantly, with the introduction of several business and service models to create value for users. Despite the popularity of carsharing, private car ownership continues to grow, even though these cars end up being parked most of the time, contributing to congestion in urban areas. Using an exploratory research approach with the aid of speculative design, this thesis investigated the key qualities of a potential digital carsharing service for private vehicle owners, who could share their vehicles with fleet operators during times when the vehicles are idle. Qualitative, semi-structured interviews of ten private vehicle owners wereconducted to investigate the qualities of the potential digital carsharing service. The potential key qualities were grouped under technical and functional qualities according to Grönroos’ Nordic service quality model. The results indicate the importance of designing services that leverage technical qualities such as reward, accessibility, appearance and safety, and security, and functional qualities such as assurance, flexibility, responsiveness, and personalized.

Ongoing scholarship on the impact of speculative fiction demonstrates how science fiction and fantasy are fundamentally concerned with interrogating the socio-political networks that define contemporary life, and in constructing alternative environments that both critique and offer solutions to present-day inequalities. This project contributes to this scholarship by focusing on the ways in which recent speculative fiction re-envisions space—including urban sites, new architectural forms, and natural landscapes—to theorize innovative forms of socio-political organization. This work draws from the spatial turn in cultural studies and critical theory that has gained popularity since the 1970s, and which takes on assumption that space and politics are always intertwined. Drawing predominantly from assemblage theory, assemblage urban theory, and new materialist theory, this project examines how human and nonhuman agents—including space itself—interact to create new spaces and relations that resist hegemonic neoliberal modes of spatial, political, and social organization. Chapter Two analyzes utopian assemblages and spaces in Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction, deploying Noah De Lissovoy’s concept of “emergency time” and David M. Bell’s theories of place-based and affective utopias. Chapter Three examines place-making tactics in Lauren Beukes’ novel Zoo City through the lens of Abdou-Maliq Simone's concept of people as infrastructure, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of nomadology, and Jane Bennett's theory of “thing power.” Chapter Four uses the work of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett to explore the thing power of the non-human and nature in China Mieville’s Kraken and Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In sum, this work attempts to demonstrate how examining speculative spaces through the lens of assemblage theory can illuminate new paths for political resistance. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Exile is not only an appropriate lens through which to view the ecological, social, and psychological destabilizations of the Anthropocene, but also as a state which can inspire the flexibility and creativity necessary to survive difficult times through ecologically-connected states of being. Examinations of literary alienation and responses to this condition in this project are confined to women’s exoplanetary science fiction which anticipates the experience of physical and emotional separation from planet Earth. In contextualizing experiences of exile from our planet of origin and the expressions of such in women’s science fiction literature, this project interrogates selected cultural movements in human relationships to the environment, separation from the environment, and resistances to that estrangement through the concept of exile. Chapter One considers the Western myth of the lost paradise and the ways in which the Garden of Eden has contributed to Western conceptions of environmental and human perfection and belonging and the persistent idea of working one’s way back to Eden. In contrast to this idea, I present analyses of James Tiptree Jr.’s A Momentary Taste of Being and Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day, both of which illustrate that working toward perfection is an ultimately stagnating and often violent move. Chapter Two, mounting further challenges to the Western paradise and its reverberations through environmental discourse, frames science fiction’s initial acquiescence to narratives of colonization and later feminist rejection of these narratives. Analyzing the connections between colonial structures, the environment, and beings considered nonhuman or less-than-human in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest and Joan Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean, this chapter describes the psychological and emotional estrangements necessary to survive and resist colonization and its ecological destruction and contextualizes experiences of exile. Chapter Two argues that though exile is often a destructive process, it can form a basis with which to resist entrenched social structures. Finally, Chapter Three examines the ways in which Indigenous science fiction, working in a different historical and cultural context than that of the Western feminist texts discussed in the previous two chapters, emphasizes an experience of and approach to exilic destabilizations which centres on what Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance”—the survival of colonial genocide and resistance to further colonial impositions. While Lee Maracle’s “The Void” and Mari Kurisato’s “Imposter Syndrome” utilize exoplanetary distance from Earth’s ecosystems to illustrate modes of survivance, they also demonstrate the ways in which relations to the land are maintained through interrelational rather than hierarchical subjectivities, and demonstrate the resilience intrinsic to interconnected ecological systems. In sum, the estranged position of women’s exoplanetary science fiction emerges as critical of the hierarchical structures which have resulted in widespread ecological collapse, and imparts the perspective necessary not only to challenge those structures but also to survive their destabilizations. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

An effective risk management program requires reliable risk measurement. Failure to assess inherited risks in mortgage-backed securities in the U.S. market contributed to the financial crisis of 2007–2008, which has prompted government regulators to pay greater attention to controlling risk in banks, investment funds, credit unions, and other financial institutions to prevent bankruptcy and financial crisis in the future. In order to calculate risk in a reliable manner, this thesis has focused on the statistical modeling of expected return and volatility. The primary aim of this study is to propose a framework, based on the probabilistic reduction approach, to reliably quantify market risk using statistical models and historical data. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of the validity of the probabilistic assumptions in risk measurement by demonstrating how a statistically misspecified model will lead the evaluation of risk astray. The concept of market risk is explained by discussing the narrow definition of risk in a financial context and its evaluation and implications for financial management. After highlighting empirical evidence and discussing the limitations of the ARCH-GARCH-type volatility models using exchange rate and stock market data, we proposed Student's t Autoregressive models to estimate expected return and volatility to measure risk, using Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). The misspecification testing analysis shows that our proposed models can adequately capture the chance regularities in exchange rates and stock indexes data and give a reliable estimation of regression and skedastic functions used in risk measurement. According to empirical findings, the COVID-19 pandemic in the first quarter of 2020 posed an enormous risk to global financial markets. The risk in financial markets returned to levels prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, after COVID-19 vaccine distribution started in developed countries. / Doctor of Philosophy / Reliable risk measurement is necessary for any effective risk management program. Hence, the primary purpose of this dissertation was to propose a framework to quantify market risk using statistical models and historical data, with a particular emphasis placed on checking the validity of probabilistic assumptions underlying models. After discussing the concept of market risk and its evaluation methods in financial management, we explored the empirical evidence in financial data and highlighted some limitations of other well-known modeling approaches. In order to ameliorate limitations, this study proposed Student's t Autoregressive models to estimate the conditional mean and the conditional variance of the financial variables and use them to measure risk via two popular methods: Value at Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). Further investigation shows that our proposed models can adequately model exchange rates and stock indexes data and give reliable estimations to use in risk measurement. We used our model to quantify risk in global financial markets in recent years. The results show that the COVID-19 pandemic posed an enormous risk to global financial markets in the first quarter of 2020. In 2021, the level of risk in financial markets returned to levels before the COVID-19 pandemic, after COVID-19 vaccine distribution started in developed countries.

Due to the lack of effective techniques for detecting and mitigating property violations, existing approaches to ensure the safety and security of software systems are often labor intensive and error prone. Furthermore, they focus primarily on functional correctness of the software code while ignoring micro-architectural details of the underlying processor, such as cache and speculative execution, which may undermine their soundness guarantees. To fill the gap, I propose a set of new methods and tools for ensuring the safety and security of software systems. Broadly speaking, these methods and tools fall into three categories. The first category is concerned with static program analysis. Specifically, I develop a novel abstract interpretation framework that considers both speculative execution and a cache model, and guarantees to be sound for estimating the execution time of a program and detecting side-channel information leaks. The second category is concerned with static program transformation. The goal is to eliminate side channels by equalizing the number of CPU cycles and the number of cache misses along all program paths for all sensitive variables. The third category is concerned with runtime safety enforcement. Given a property that may be violated by a reactive system, the goal is to synthesize an enforcer, called the shield, to correct the erroneous behaviors of the system instantaneously, so that the property is always satisfied by the combined system. I develop techniques to make the shield practical by handling both burst error and real-valued signals. The proposed techniques have been implemented and evaluated on realistic applications to demonstrate their effectiveness and efficiency. / Doctor of Philosophy / It is important for everything around us to follow some rules to work correctly. That is the same for our software systems to follow the security and safety properties. Especially, softwares may leak information via unexpected ways, e.g. the program timing, which makes it more difficult to be detected or mitigated. For instance, if the execution time of a program is related to the sensitive value, the attacker may obtain information about the sensitive value. On the other side, due to the complexity of software, it is nearly impossible to fully test or verify them. However, the correctness of software systems at runtime is crucial for critical applications. While existing approaches to find or resolve properties violation problem are often labor intensive and error prone, in this dissertation, I first propose an automated tool for detecting and mitigating the security vulnerability through program timing. Programs processed by the tool are guaranteed to be time constant under any sensitive values. I have also taken the influence of speculative execution, which is the cause behind recent Spectre and Meltdown attack, into consideration for the first time. To enforce the correctness of programs at runtime, I introduce an extra component that can be attached to the original system to correct any violation if it happens, thus the entire system will still be correct. All proposed methods have been evaluated on a variety of real world applications. The results show that these methods are effective and efficient in practice.

The thesis delves into the concept of digital afterlife and its potential impact on the relationship between the deceased and the bereaved. Here the study explores the notion of being digitally immortal to stay in touch with the people left behind. It uses speculative design to envision future technologies that could enable digital resurrection, allowing individuals to interact with virtual representations of their loved ones. A participatory design workshop using speculation as a thought experiment was organized to create artefacts using a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) program. These ideas and digital artefacts were set in the preferred future using the “what if” narrative to discard the aspect of feasibility and help participants visualize contexts and scenarios as well as open critical discussions. The study reveals various forms of digital afterlife, from realistic avatars in VR environments to abstract representations, and the importance of presence and immersion in creating a sense of connection with the deceased. Additionally, it discusses the tension between control and autonomy, as bereaved individuals seek to maintain power over the digital presence of loved ones, while also empathizing with the rights and autonomy of the deceased within the virtual realm. The speculative design approach facilitates critical discussions on the potential societal impact of digital afterlife technologies, highlighting the importance of responsible design and regulation. Finally, in accordance with the posthumanism lens, the complexity observed by the entanglement of the digital and the virtual realm has been demonstrated.

This master’s thesis aims to contribute to the design and innovation management literature by exploring to understand an alternative shared social kitchen that is people-driven around shared interests, promoting social well-being. This is in order to explore the potential of systemic, regenerative, speculative sustainable design in addressing challenges faced by shared kitchens, while understanding diverse user needs within enabling contexts. Through a design process of ethnography research, frameworks, imperatives and solution finding, the kitchen was explored from different participants’ perspectives and context. The resulting scenario from the ethnography research highlighted technology, food waste, circularity and food system scenarios. The study contributes to future dialogue and understanding of the different processes and perspectives in imaginative shared kitchen using an explorative approach. It is vital to understand the holistic picture of the shared kitchen and not only focus on the functional, environmental and economic aspect, but also on the social development for a more inclusive design.