As the world endures and approaches a string of energy crises, both financially and environmentally, this project aims to critique and challenge society's relationship with energy by provoking individuals to examine their current habits of energy consumption, consider the future implications of these actions, and question their willingness to make sacrifices for a cleaner environment. This is accomplished through the development of a fictional society in the near future in which individuals are required to produce all the electrical energy that they need or desire to consume. Within the daily narrative of a fictional family of five, the details and events of their everyday lives have been extrapolated to create a liminal world where mundane, yet peculiar diegetic prototypes create tense situations, uncomfortable behaviors, and unforeseen consequences. Plot devices manifested include distributed government information in the form of an energy harvesting catalog, product infomercial, energy bill, and a home monitoring brochure. The narrative emphasis and human driven context aspires to foster a new lens of speculation, imagination, and discovery regarding the production and consumption of energy. What if you were required to produce all the energy you desire to consume?

Designers take inspiration about the future in order to shape values for their design practice, especially whennew technologies are involved. Participatory design fiction is an approach that enables designers to reflectupon futures are created by non-designers. These narratives about technologies that come from nondesignersare valuable for designers in the industry as inspirational material. Nonetheless, the distancebetween the academic research and designers in the industry makes difficult the spreading of design fictionsproduced by non-designers.This thesis project explore the following: How might we design a digital infrastructure that integrates the enduser's imaginaries about new technologies as inspiration and material for reflection in the design industrypractice?As well as: How might we enable the design research community to share results of their participatory designfiction experiments with the design industry in ways that benefit both parts?I will present an investigation in the relations between the academic design researchers and the designpractitioners by the means of co-design workshops, interviews, virtual ethnography and iterative prototyping.The outcome is an infrastructure which takes advantage of the existing practices of the design community onTwitter. By investigating these social media dynamics, I intent to create a bridge between academia anddesign industry for enabling critical inspiration from participatory design fiction outcomes. The final prototypeis a Twitter account run by a bot which enables an autonomous collection of design fictions from nondesignersshared on Twitter by design researchers with designers from the industry.

Wildland fires are a natural process from nature. Even though they are natural, humans inherently fear them and started to suppress them until recent years successfully. More and more countries are seeing unprecedented fires all around the globe. Emergency response agencies are struggling to keep up with wild and forest fire response due to significant and fast-spreading fires. During the research phase, I not only conducted interviews with people who have experienced wildfires but also experts from the frontlines. Also, I made a scan of the literature to find valuable studies regarding this topic. I discovered that the current wildfire problem is deeply rooted in the social aspect of how we, as humans, are placing us above nature. Nature needs wildfires and forest fires to have healthy forest ecosystems. Sadly humans have been suppressing wildfires for the last decades that lead to the fact that we created a bigger problem than before. This project is set right in the center of this change. It challenges the paradigm of how we interact with wildfire so we as a society can move from having a war with fire to living with fire. I used design fiction and speculative design methods to visualize this systemic change and give it a platform of provocation for good. The project describes a future in which humans are in coexistence with wildfires and are part of the ecosystem again. During the world-building process, to probe and verify ideas with experts and wildfire survivors, different creative methods have been used. All the factors which are influencing the preferable future and outcome are built upon findings from the research phase and repeated interviews I conducted during the project. The year of the created preferable future is 2025, when the world experienced massive wildfires and has arrived in the pyrocence. In this preferable future, the introduction of a new season happened: the 5th season - fire season. The outcome is a proposal for how FireGuardians are conducting their work and what tools they are using. It displays a new uniform, a soft robotic enhanced exosuit, and an advanced information system to plan and coordinate large-scale prescribed burns.

VR är ett växande medium men också ett medium som har stor potential för att utöka vår kapacitet som människor. Det finns olika designexempel inom fältet på hur gränssnitten ska se ut men enligt vår mening använder inte dessa gränssnitt mediets potential fullt ut. I denna artikeln använder vi oss av Affordances och en antropologisk vinkel för att hitta nya interaktioner i VR. Kan vi låta användaren interagera med innehåll på nätet och utökar det förmågan till personlig anpassning? Vi har baserat vår bedömning och vårt ramverk utifrån observationer av verklighetens interaktioner samt dom interaktioner som VR afforderar enligt arbetare inom fältet och dess användare.Vi har gjort en serie arbeten kring handtracking, kontextuella interaktioner, webbinnehåll och anpassning av det virtuella utrymmet. De prototyper vi har utvecklat har sammanställts i en gestaltning som söker att reproducera en hemmiljö för VR, alltså den miljö du ser när du startar ditt headset och motsvarigheten till skrivbordet i windows. / VR is a growing medium but also a medium that has great potential to expand our capacity as humans. There are various design examples in the field of what the interfaces should look like, but in our opinion these interfaces do not fully utilize the potential of the medium. In this article, we use Affordances and an anthropological angle to find new interactions in VR. Can we allow the user to interact with online content and does that increase the ability for personalization? We have based our assessment and our framework on observations of real-life interactions and the interactions that VR affords according to workers in the field and its users. We have done a series of works around hand tracking, contextual interactions, web content and customization of the virtual space. The prototypes we have developed have been put together in a design that seeks to reproduce a home environment for VR, i.e. the environment you see when you start your headset and the equivalent of the Windows desktop.

<p>This dissertation is an attempt to explain art in the 21st century by an artist/researcher. It is a theoretical writing on art informed by current discourses that influence art such as science and technology. There are two goals of this project. The first one is to understand art’s cultural role in the age of the anthropocene. What is the anthropocene? How does art’s role in society change in this particular geological epoch (following Crutzen’s definition), compared to for instance Holocene? This brings us to the second goal of my project. To better understand art’s role in society, can we benefit from a theory of art, that could present an insight on the dynamics within an artistic experience? What are the current tools and tendencies that can help form such a theory of art? Which fields can contribute to such an understanding?</p><p>As an instance of artistic research practice which involves both academic research and art practice, I will be using art projects as case studies to reach these goals. Case studies will consist of my own projects as well as projects by other artists who had been working on similar topics such as Edward Burtynsky, Chris Jordan, Louis Bec, Trevor Paglen, Patricia Piccinini and Lynn Hershmann to name a few. From Timothy Morton to Mackenzie Wark to Donna Haraway cultural theorists of our time, highlight the fact that there is a need for a cultural theory that can attend to what we might call the anthropocene. What is the contribution of art for such a theory? Or can art be instrumental in building a cultural theory at all? My dissertation offers a multi-disciplinary argument for the need to address such questions . Starting from art’s roots in biology and extending to what we might call our biological imagination, the dissertation focuses on art’s connection to biology to initiate a formula for art in the age of the anthropocene.</p> / Dissertation

Critical Design uses designed artifacts as a critique of consumer culture. However, the complex nature of these artifacts prompted designers to focus on the artifact and present it in an informative, but relatively isolated fashion.The theoretical framework for this thesis is drawn from a similar, yet more recent, design criterion called Design Fiction. The artifacts of Design Fiction are called Diegetic Prototypes: fictional prototypes that function in the social sphere of a film’s structure. This research develops a method for analyzing and creating artifacts, in reference to psychoanalysis theories on the human psyche and perception of objects. It then explores scenarios for presenting these artifacts as diegetic prototypes by exploring and integrating the disciplines of systems/parametric design, digital fabrication, music, animation and film. The scenarios function as micro-narratives. These micro-narratives created through the prototypes will inform the larger narrative structure of the film.

When outdoor recreational activities are restricted, where can we find solitude, exploration and self-reliance? Endangered Experiences in Nature is a project that creates disruptive scenarios to question the relationship we have now with landscapes. A forecast in which stargazing is replaced by watching cyborg fireflies in the sky, food is genetically engineered and getting lost can only happen with the aid of special devices. The thesis uses the tools of experience design and future studies to explore the meanings and values of nature. I analyze the experiential perspective of access to nature and outdoor recreation by focusing on experiences that will likely become inaccessible in the near future. This thesis is not about preservation but stands aspiring for recreating values humans got until now from the close relationship with natural settings. In doing so, I aspire to generate new experiences. My work therefore focuses not on what nature is but what it means to perceive something as being natural, wild, unexplored, in an age where every part of nature has been explored and exploited. My original contribution focuses on using nostalgia as an active method to create new relationships with our environment. Certain things will need to be “artificial” in order to achieve “real” experiences.   The project will focus on three scenarios placed in the near future (2040). Each case study extrapolates on a particular endangered experience in wilderness (solitude, exploration and self-reliance) and is set in 3 distinct landscapes located in The Netherlands, Sweden and Romania. By doing so, I touch upon different cultural and natural influences on my design process. All scenarios encompass artificial (engineered) surrogates that question the inaccessibility to experiences in natural landscapes. With the goal to create counter-experiences in the future and therefore formulate a new way to deal with our relationship with nature conceptually and physically.

abstract: Open Design is a crowd-driven global ecosystem which tries to challenge and alter contemporary modes of capitalistic hardware production. It strives to build on the collective skills, expertise and efforts of people regardless of their educational, social or political backgrounds to develop and disseminate physical products, machines and systems. In contrast to capitalistic hardware production, Open Design practitioners publicly share design files, blueprints and knowhow through various channels including internet platforms and in-person workshops. These designs are typically replicated, modified, improved and reshared by individuals and groups who are broadly referred to as ‘makers’. This dissertation aims to expand the current scope of Open Design within human-computer interaction (HCI) research through a long-term exploration of Open Design’s socio-technical processes. I examine Open Design from three perspectives: the functional—materials, tools, and platforms that enable crowd-driven open hardware production, the critical—materially-oriented engagements within open design as a site for sociotechnical discourse, and the speculative—crowd-driven critical envisioning of future hardware. More specifically, this dissertation first explores the growing global scene of Open Design through a long-term ethnographic study of the open science hardware (OScH) movement, a genre of Open Design. This long-term study of OScH provides a focal point for HCI to deeply understand Open Design's growing global landscape. Second, it examines the application of Critical Making within Open Design through an OScH workshop with designers, engineers, artists and makers from local communities. This work foregrounds the role of HCI researchers as facilitators of collaborative critical engagements within Open Design. Third, this dissertation introduces the concept of crowd-driven Design Fiction through the development of a publicly accessible online Design Fiction platform named Dream Drones. Through a six month long development and a study with drone related practitioners, it offers several pragmatic insights into the challenges and opportunities for crowd-driven Design Fiction. Through these explorations, I highlight the broader implications and novel research pathways for HCI to shape and be shaped by the global Open Design movement. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Media Arts and Sciences 2020

In this Bachelor thesis we navigate the ample world of vocal storytelling. Stories are told in all types of media today, but it all started with voices and narrative—from when poetry was sung and theatrical performances such as opera were amongst the most popular and beloved arts. We lift the ground where voices lie today and take them to their deserved place, from solely being an audial companion in media to a main element in interactive storytelling. Hand in hand with Design Fiction as a chosen design perspective and Research through Design as our research approach, we explore ways of creating an immersive, dynamic experience both creative and academically. We found ourselves in infinite ideations of futuristic scenarios which we wanted to symbolize with a world and characters through voices. With Research through Design, we learn not only by doing research, but through actually designing a functional prototype that grants agency to the person interacting with it. The learning process in building this prototype helped us gain significant knowledge in programming, implementation technique and writing for games, especially considering that we had very little experience with these subjects prior to this project. One could say that we were confident in our audio production skills and came with blind eyes when approaching this theme for the first time. The results of our work lead us to the conclusion that, with the adequate knowledge and methods, voices can function as a main element in interactive media prototypes. Narrative, voice design and implementation techniques combined create a group of powerful tools that can achieve interactive storytelling. / I denna kandidatuppsats utforskar vi i en värld av röstligt berättande. Berättelser berättas i alla typer av media idag, men det hela började med röster. Vi vill lyfta fram röster och deras förmåga att driva en berättelse, från att endast vara en osynlig del i ett audiovisuellt verk till ett huvudelement i en interaktiv berättelse. Med hjälp av Design Fiction som designperspektiv och Research through Design som forskningsmetod utforskar vi ett sätt att skapa en uppslukande, dynamisk upplevelse både kreativ och akademisk. Vi lär oss inte bara genom forskning, utan genom att faktiskt utforma en funktionell prototyp där användaren aktivt interagerar med narrativet. Berättelsen befinner sig i tankar om futuristiska scenarier som vi försöker få till liv. Resultatet av vår undersökning leder oss till slutsatsen att med tillräcklig kunskap och rätt metoder så kan röster fungera som ett huvudelement i interaktiva medieproduktioner. Berättande, röstdesign och implementeringstekniker skapar tillsammans en grupp kraftfulla verktyg för att uppnå interaktivt berättande.

As Digital Personal Assistants get increasingly present in our lives, repositioning Conversational Interfaces within Interaction Design could be beneficial. More contributions seem possible beyond the commercial vision of Conversational Agents as digital assistants. In this thesis, Design fiction is adopted as an approach to explore a future for these technologies, focusing on the possible social and ritual practices that might arise when Conversational Agents and Artificial Intelligence are employed in contexts such as mortality and grief. As a secondary but related concern, it is argued that designers need to come to find ways to work with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, uncovering the “AI blackbox”, and understanding its basic functioning, therefore, Machine learning is explored as a design material. This research through design project presents a scenario where the data we leave behind us are used after we die to build conversational models that become digital altars, shaping the way we deal with grief and death. This is presented through a semi-functional prototype and a diegetic prototype in the form of a short video.