Involuntary loneliness is today considered to be a public health problem, and studies show that feeling lonely can have major negative effects on one's health. Project Omtanke and the social administration in Helsingborg has mapped a big problem with loneliness in Helsingborg, and has come to the conclusion that they need a website with the purpose of mitigating loneliness. Thus, this research project explores how a website should be designed to make people feel less lonely.  This thesis essay explores the research question with the approach Research Through Design (RtD). The research was conducted by conducting user research, creating a prototype and validating the design with users.  This thesis has come to the conclusion that a website with the purpose of supporting lonely individuals should include content providing help and support to all relevant target groups, such as educational content and help alternatives. It should also be designed with the goal to decrease the gap between available help and the people in need of help, by increasing awareness and reassuring personal relevance of available help. The website should also include functions that promote social contact between people, and be designed with the goal of being perceived as inclusive. The website prototype that was created in this thesis was well received by potential users. The users expressed in the validation of the website that they would like to use it, and that they believe it could help them with their loneliness.

UX designers define digital products that shape our modern world. They are at the very beginning of product development and can directly influence the impact the products generate. However, little attention is paid to sustainability values in day-to-day business, which has a counterproductive effect on all dimensions of sustainable development. This thesis explores how a digital co-design toolkit can help UX design (UXD) practitioners find ways to integrate sustainable values into their daily work. Thematically, this project focuses on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). On the one hand, to ensure a holistic point of view on the topic of sustainable development. On the other hand, to provide an approach to contribute to the SDGs from the UXD field. This research builds upon Sustainable Interaction Design (SID) theories, and a participatory design approach is pursued using a co-design process. The result of this work is a digital toolkit, which is designed for a collaborative online whiteboard platform for UX practitioners. The thesis contributes knowledge to the field of Interaction Design by proposing a toolkit for sustainable UX design.

This document serves as a mini dissertation in the professional Master of Architecture degree in the Department of Architecture at the University of Pretoria. It focuses on the educational ecosystem within the context of South Africa, with emphasis placed on the economically distressed environment of Mamelodi East. Mamelodi is a township situated in the north east of the City of Tshwane, Gauteng. Due to the location of the University of Pretoria’s Mamelodi Campus, this area has been a study of investigation for many faculties over the years. The spatial consequences of architecture on the educational ecosystem are questioned, with focus placed on the shift in the learning environment towards lifelong learning. The dissertation deals with this concept from the perspective of the holistic development of a person through the qualitative social activities of learning. Lifelong learning is explored throughout the dissertation from a spatial and non-spatial point of view. The spatial conversation deals with the intersection between architecture and education, whilst the non-spatial conversation advocates for a relationship between a community and its school, as integral in achieving lifelong learning. The study is grounded in a typological understanding of the schooling environment that arises as a result of South African educational policy documents. A critical stance is taken where the resulting school typology is challenged in relation to context. The intention is to redefine the current teacher-centric classroom and corridor typology. It is proposed that the schooling environment should be publicly redefined and serve as a support structure within its context, instead of isolating the educational experience. This is explored through the concepts of building as a boundary and building for pedagogy with the resulting development of a spatial matrix to provide architectural definition to South African educational policy. Tsako Thabo Secondary School was used as a case study school for the application of the matrix principles, however it is intended that these principles could be applied to other schools within similar contexts and typologies to achieve lifelong learning potential. Both the research and design process of the dissertation has been directed through the lens of Participatory Action Research (PAR) involving co-design and spatial agency theories. Particular focus within the co-design process was given to the development of design games as a mediation tool. An intimate use of both analogue and digital design games has been applied throughout. / Mini Dissertation (MArch (Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Departmental National Research Foundation (NRF) project titled, Stitching the city: From micro-data to macro-views (STINT), aimed at establishing a “transdisciplinary collaboration” to develop a “methodological framework and digital platform for the collection, storage, and sharing of spatial, socio-economic data at a street and precinct level” (Roussou, Brandao, Adelfio & Thuvander 2019). The STINT project was a collaborative effort between the University of Pretoria (UP), South Africa (Departments of Architecture and GeoInformatics) and Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden (Department of Architecture) from 2019 to 2020. In particular, the collaboration was between the Unit for Urban Citizenship (UUC) and the Social Inclusion Studio (SIS) from Chalmers University’s architecture department. / Architecture / MArch (Prof) / Unrestricted

This research focuses on the connection between voice-based interactions and harassment in online games, from the point of interaction design. It points out severe faults in privacy afforded by voice-based communication and explores beyond this medium to design a communication system that relies only on non-verbal communication (NVC). Such system was co-created with the players supporting the idea that inclusion starts even in the early design stages. Through the playtesting of the NVC system the research shows the many ways in which the type of communication impacts the game and how players experience cooperation, cohabitation, and inclusion in online games. However, to achieve this, this research had to create a framework and mapping methods that focus on the players and their communicative intention. Hence, the “levels of multiplayer communication” is proposed as a tool to analyze and a method to design for communication in games, and it stands as a knowledge contribution along with the information acquired through its use.

Screen readers for visually impaired users are poorly optimized for e-commerce websites hence the exclusion of the content. It creates a societal need for accessibility of the content in e-commerce websites for the visually impaired users. This study explores how six blindfolded participants could co-design a Voice User Interface (VUI) in an e-commerce website to convey its information that creates a good user experience for visually impaired. The result of a co-design workshop with interaction design practices showed that a VUI should be humanlike and convey relevant information. Failed speech recognition and overwhelming information had a negative impact on the user experience. To cope with the problems, the VUI should provide more control to the users by conveying explicit confirmations and retrospective information from past shopping trips. Due to the difficulties in finding visually impaired participants, the design process was not completed hence the ideation needs an additional design process.

Today’s emerging Co-design processes between citizens and civil servants in helixes groups, produces multiple challenges for the interaction designer. How can these challenges produce new merging roles and communication strategies for interaction designers for use in Co-design processes? This thesis focuses on the design research process outcomes from Co-design processes between civil servants and citizens in urban development processes. The tangible outcomes will be elicited through the merging of practice-based know-how as seen through the eyes of an interaction designer with a bifocal lens on Social psychology and Behavior economics. This research process produces tangible outcomes in the form of educational material, communication methods and strategies for interaction designers, civil servants in Co-design processes. Additional outcomes are digital communication strategies for city operations based on the need for increased citizen involvement in the urban development process.

Gaming experience refers to the players’ overall experience when playing agame. Both game and controller have an impact on it. This project exploreshow different element arrangements on a controller can affect the players’gaming experience. Four lo-fi prototypes were constructed and used to bothtest the reaction of players, but also to educate them into the possibleelements included in controllers. Participants were then invited to designtheir own controller while reflecting about aspects like embodiment,immersion, or latency. Throughout the whole process participants reportedabout their previous experiences with controllers through an interview. Theresearch showed that the elemental arrangements did in fact affect theplayers’ gaming experience but also that there is a cultural understanding ofgames and controllers that constrains the possibility of new designs. Theproject also explored the limitations of conducting research on distance, andreflects about how remote design can be conducted.

Denna studie undersöker med hjälp av en fallstudie hos två filmproduktionsbolag, King Edward och Cinematik hur co-design som metod hade kunnat användas inom postproduktionsprocessen av reklamfilm. Med en teoretisk djupdykning i filmproduktionens fyra processer; förproduktion, produktion, postproduktion, distribution och metoden co-design har det legat som grund för undersökningen. Även teori kring filmens historia och reklamfilm har undersökts för att ge en bättre grund och tyngd till resultatet.Med kvalitativa intervjuer på båda företagen har information samlats in kring hur deras arbetsprocess ser ut och vad deras tidigare kunskap kring co-design var och om de själva hade ansett att det hade varit användbart. Genom en jämförelse av den insamlade teorin och resultatet från företagen har en prototyp skapats som visar vart i en postproduktionsprocess inom reklamfilm som implementering av co-design hade varit möjligt. Det sammansatta resultatet visar att co-design som det används inom produktdesign inte hade varit möjligt inom film, men att vissa delar av metoden, nämligen att låta kunden vara med tidigt i postproduktionsprocessen och dela med sig av sina erfarenheter beroende på vilken kund reklamen riktas åt hade varit möjligt att implementera. Genom att ha kunden med i det tidiga skedet av postproduktionen hos produktionsbolag hade färre revideringar gjorts i processen och färre möten med kund som tvingat fram ändringar i filmerna hade undvikits. / This thesis explores through a case study with two film production firms, King Edward and Cinematik how co-design as a method would be applicable in post-production of commercials. With a theoretical deep dive into the film production’s four phases; pre-production, production, post production, distribution and the method of co-design it has been the foundation of this thesis. Further information has been gathered for film history and commercials to give a better understanding and weight for the analysis. By doing qualitative interviews on both firms, information has been gathered regarding their production process, and their previous knowledge of co-design and if they themselves believe that it would be a useful method. By comparing the gathered theory with the results from the interviews, a prototype has been created showing where in a post-production process, in commercials, co-design as a method could be implemented. The combined result proves that the way co-design is used in production design would not be viable in film production, but that some parts of the method could be implemented depending on the client and the commercial, for example if the client has specific experiences needed for the film. By having the client be a part of the early stages of the post production process at a film production firm, less revisions would be needed and less meetings would be needed for fixes.

The use of neural networks, machine learning, or artificial intelligence, in its broadest and most controversial sense, has been a tumultuous journey involving three distinct hype cycles and a history dating back to the 1960s. Resurgent, enthusiastic interest in machine learning and its applications bolsters the case for machine learning as a fundamental computational kernel. Furthermore, researchers have demonstrated that machine learning can be utilized as an auxiliary component of applications to enhance or enable new types of computation such as approximate computing or automatic parallelization. In our view, machine learning becomes not the underlying application, but a ubiquitous component of applications. This view necessitates a different approach towards the deployment of machine learning computation that spans not only hardware design of accelerator architectures, but also user and supervisor software to enable the safe, simultaneous use of machine learning accelerator resources. In this dissertation, we propose a multi-transaction model of neural network computation to meet the needs of future machine learning applications. We demonstrate that this model, encompassing a decoupled backend accelerator for inference and learning from hardware and software for managing neural network transactions can be achieved with low overhead and integrated with a modern RISC-V microprocessor. Our extensions span user and supervisor software and data structures and, coupled with our hardware, enable multiple transactions from different address spaces to execute simultaneously, yet safely. Together, our system demonstrates the utility of a multi-transaction model to increase energy efficiency improvements and improve overall accelerator throughput for machine learning applications.

Dans le domaine de la détection et du suivi d'obstacles pour les systèmes ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) basés vision, il est nécessaire d'assurer la localisation à court terme du véhicule. Le SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) basé vision propose de résoudre ce problème en combinant l’estimation de l’état du véhicule (pose dans un repère local et vitesses) et une modélisation incrémentale de l’environnement. Ce dernier est perçu par l'extraction de caractéristiques locales (points d'intérêt) dans une séquence d'images et leur suivi au cours du temps pour permettre la construction incrémentale d'une carte d'amers. Cette tâche de perception engendre une importante charge de calcul qui affecte très significativement la latence et la cadence du système. Les méthodologies de co-design permettent de concevoir une architecture mixte de calcul pour l“exécution d'une application particulière. Dans ce type d'architecture, l'utilisation d'accélérateurs matériels permet d'améliorer significativement les performances (temps d'exécution, encombrement, consommation). Le ZynQ (Xilinx) propose une architecture de prototypage mixte comprenant un processeur dual-core associé à des ressources matérielles configurables. L'objectif de cette thèse est donc de proposer une implémentation co-design d'un SLAM basé vision par la conception d'accélérateurs pour les opérations de vision afin de satisfaire les contraintes en performances des systèmes ADAS embarqués. La première contribution des travaux est la conception de cette chaîne complète 3D EKF-SLAM à l'aide une approche co-design. Nous avons défini et validé, selon notre méthodologie de conception, le choix d'une architecture Hardware-in-theloop (HIL) afin de valider les différentes itérations de conception. La seconde contribution est l'intégration de modules matériels dédiés pour accélérer les traitements de perception visuelle de cette chaîne (détection, description et mise en correspondance de points d’intérêt). / In the field of obstacle detection and tracking for vision-based ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System), it is necessary to perform short-term vehicle localisation. Vision based SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) solves this problem by combining the vehicle state estimation (local pose and speeds) and an incremental modelling of the environment. The environment is perceived by extracting features (interest points) in a sequence of images and tracking them over time to allow an incremental landmarks map construction. The perception step leads to an important computational load which affects very significantly the system latency and throughput. Co-design methodologies allow to design a mixed processing architecture optimized for a specific application In this type of architecture, the use of hardware accelerators allows for great performance increase (throughput, memory size, power consumption). The ZynQ (Xilinx) provides a prototyping mixed-architecture including a dual-core microprocessor combined with configurable hardware resources. The goal of this thesis is to propose a co-design implementation of a vision-based SLAM processing chain involving hardware accelerators for image processing in order to meet the constraints of an embedded ADAS system. The first contribution is the design of a complete 3D EKF-SLAM processing chain thanks to a codesign approach. We defined and validated, according to the followed co-design approach, the choice of a Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) architecture to validate the different design iterations. The second contribution is the integration of dedicated hardware modules to accelerate the visual perception computations of this processing chain (features detection, description and matching).