More-than-human design represents a paradigm shift that decentralises the human in relation to the rest of the living world. As part of this movement, scholars call for a new worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness between human and non-human beings. Prior studies have focused on the experience of human-human connections, leaving the more- than-human largely unexplored. Addressing this gap, this study explores design strategies for fostering feelings and reflections of interconnectedness towards the more-than-human world and associated emotions. With a research-through-design methodology, two workshops were conducted, resulting in six key design strategies and an "interconnectedness experience framework". The strategies were evaluated through a prototype in partnership with AquaPrint, a Swedish company that up-cycles fishing nets into designer furniture. Future research should evaluate the strategies individually and in combinations as well as in a field setting. The presented framework and strategies are intended for practitioners as inspiration in design projects to promote noticing the more-than-human world, and encouraging a posthuman perspective.

We increasingly move through and with technology in our homes. One could, using a dance metaphor, view our home as a stage where we become unintentional performers to an audience of digital devices. Still, the way we interact with our devices is mostly based on us, as humans, adapting to the technology – leading to technology-driven products rather than humanistic. By involving dancers and learning from choreographic approaches, the project aim is to consider the body in the design process to form more humanistic interactions where the technology adapts to our personal ways of moving.  Through interviews, autobiographical research, recurring workshops with professional dancers, and prototyping, the realisation came digital devices make us unlearn how to move creatively at an earlier stage but that feedback on our movements together with how a space is designed can encourage it. Furthermore, that when designing for movement one has a lot of power, since while claiming what is the right movement one is at the same time deciding what is the wrong movement– which might lead to exclusion. This led to the outcome of the project which suggest a way in which we might evaluate Choreographic Interfaces based on how open for personalisation they are. From this a concept is proposed where what role digital devices should have in our home is redefined.  Instead of using conventional ways of interacting with digital devices (e.g., buttons, phone, voice assistant, motion sensors), this project takes the shape of a system which lets the user configure and manage devices using existing “choreographies” and routines that naturally develop over time when people live together. The system learns how people move at home during different times and manifests it in contextual ”zones”, which, through visual feedback, allow users to change the appearance of their space, such as setting the room up for play mode, meditation, or a morning stretch. The suggestion is that future movement technologies might enable us to redefine how we live our lives at home through eliciting joy, play, and wellbeing while we interact with our digital devices.  This project aims to contribute to the field of interaction design through suggesting a shift away from designers creating each interaction and the users just adapting to them. Instead, the suggestion is the approach of Choreographic Interfaces where the designer empower the user to utilise their personal way of moving and encourages an active relationship with their devices at home.

Emotions play a critical role within the workplace, impacting employees' well-being, motivation, productivity, colleague relationships, and overall workplace culture. As a designer, my objective was to address emotional issues in the workplace by developing a tool capable of recognizing and effectively managing emotions. Through a comprehensive research process involving workshops, interviews, and surveys with employees, I identified self-awareness as a fundamental and essential aspect in addressing emotional issues within organisations. Building upon these findings, I created a design tool named "How are you feeling now?" which prompts employees to reflect upon their emotions while providing resources for their effective management. This service incorporates features such as emotion recording and the presentation of emotion history, facilitating users' self-reflection on their emotional states. I dedicated efforts to visually represent the various elements associated with emotions in this tool, aiming to enable individuals to scrutinise their emotions with greater attentiveness and depth. It is my intention that this visualisation process captivates users' interest and encourages them to momentarily embrace and acknowledge their emotions. Furthermore, by visually displaying the historical record of emotions, my goal is to assist employees in understanding that emotions constitute an ongoing accumulation of valuable data. Ultimately, I aspire for this heightened self-awareness to yield positive behavioural transformations by enabling individuals to regulate and transform their emotions effectively.

The pension system in Sweden today is a very simple system. Taxed incomes generate pension incomes, paid out monthly after retirement. Yet the topic seems riddled with emotions; guilt, shame and anxiety over what you should or should not do. Increasing inflation, population age and climate change are projected to pose big threats to pensions in the coming decades. By 2060, pension incomes are projected to diminish substantially. Yet the future brings hope too; the gender gap in pension incomes is today at 30% and is projected to go down to 4% by 2040 as the changing view on women in the workplace and policy making is evening the (occupational) field. To learn about pension on the personal, professional and societal layers, I conducted conversations with professionals working for the pension agency, banks, savings solutions and researchers at economics and sociology departments at universities, as well as with individuals with pension planning on their minds (or not). The professionals argued that financial literacy teaches how simple the system is while the individuals feel overwhelmed and confused, showing that the system is not complicated but feels complicated. This dissonance became the space for designing. I propose to look at money as an actor we have a relationship with, to scale away guilt, shame or anxiety and leverage the positives. Through the strategic use of reflection, we learn about our ongoing relationship with money; formed in childhood, and shaped by everyday life planning towards the future. Thus, we grow towards a life where money serves us by investing in our values, hopes and dreams. As we change our financial behaviour today, we change our relationship in the future. The value of money does not start with the currency, but with the intention of use, in the hopes and dreams of a person that wants to spend their time with families and hobbies, not with stocks and funds. Looking at financial planning more holistically shows how the established system is biased, rejecting those that do not speak the language. We as designers can be mindful of this and make more inclusive tools to learn this financial language. Insofar the system can be changed is what I examine through speculative futures methods and designs.

Motion classification and action localization have rapidly become essential tasks in computer vision and video analytics. In particular, Human Action Recognition (HAR), which has important applications in clinical assessments, activity monitoring, and sports performance evaluation, has drawn a lot of attention in research communities. Nevertheless, the high-dimensional and time-continuous nature of motion data creates non-trivial challenges in action detection and action recognition. In this degree project, on a set of recorded unannotated mixed workouts, we test and evaluate unsupervised and semi-supervised machine learning models to identify the correct location, i.e., a timestamp, of various exercises in videos and to study different approaches in clustering detected actions. This is done by modelling the data via the two-step clustering pipeline using the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) approach. Moreover, the concept of repetition counting is under consideration as a parallel task. We find that clustering alone tends to produce cluster solutions with a mixture of exercises and is not sufficient to solve the exercise recognition problem. Instead, we use clustering as an initial step to aggregate similar exercises. This allows us to effectively find many repetitions of similar exercises for their further annotation. When combined with a subsequent Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier, the BoVW concept proved itself, achieving an accuracy score of 95.5% on the labelled subset. Much attention has also been paid to various methods of dimensionality reduction and benchmarking their ability to encode the original data into a lower-dimensional latent space. / Rörelseklassificering och handlingslokalisering har snabbt blivit viktiga uppgifter inom datorseende och videoanalys. I synnerhet har HAR fångat en stor uppmärksamhet i forskarsamhällen, då den har viktiga tillämpningar i kliniska bedömningar, aktivitetsövervakning och utvärdering av sportprestanda.Likväl så skapar den högdimensionella och tidskontinuerliga naturen hos rörelsedata icke-triviala utmaningar i handlingsdetektering och handlingsigenkänning. I detta examensarbete testar vi samt utvärderar oövervakade och semi-övervarakde maskininlärningsmodeller på en samling av inspelade blandade träningspass, som inte är noterade. Detta är för att identifiera den korrekta positionen, d.v.s en tidsstämpel, för olika övningar i videofilmer och för att studera olika tillvägagångssätt för att gruppera upptäckta handlingar. Detta görs genom att modellera data via tvåstegs klustringspipeline, med tillämpning av BoVW-metoden. Som en parallell uppgift övervägs även repetitionsräkning som koncept. Vi finner att kluster enbart tenderar att producera klusterlösningar med en blandning av övningar och är därför inte tillräckligt för att lösa problemet med övningsigenkänning. Istället, använder vi klustring som ett första steg för att sammanställa liknande övningar. Detta gör att vi effektivt kan hitta många upprepningar av liknande övningar för att vidare hantera dess anteckningar. Detta, kombinerad med en efterföljande SVM-klassificerare, visade sig att BoVWkonceptet är mycket effektivt, vilket uppnådde en noggrannhet på 95, 5% på den märkta delmängden. Mycket uppmärksamhet har också ägnats åt olika metoder för dimensionalitetsreduktion och jämförelse av dessa metoders förmåga att koda originaldata till ett dimensionellt lägre latentutrymme.

This study has a phenomenographic starting point that aims to investigate prospective preschool teachers' perceptions of their conditions and opportunities to meet digitization in the education at preschool. The target group for the study is prospective preschool teachers with previous experience of working in preschool, who are in the last semester of an experience-based preschool teacher program at a university in Sweden. By using two research methods, interviews and questionnaires, we have been able to get hold of and clarify the participants' perceptions, which has also enabled the identification and interpretation of areas of development. This answers the study's two questions which are: What do preschool teacher students' perceptions look like regarding their conditions and opportunities they are given both in the workplace and through the preschool teacher education to meet digitalization in preschool, in line with the curriculum goals? What possible areas of development can be deciphered based on the participants' descriptive perceptions of their conditions and opportunities to meet digitization? The result presents the variation of the participants' perceptions in the form of categories consisting of codes interpreted based on the participants' statements. Furthermore, it is shown that there are different and unequal conditions and opportunities in workplaces and that the digitization content of preschool teacher education is not sufficient for a preschool teacher to be able to meet digitization in education. In order for the digitization content in education to be in accordance with the curriculum goals, the results reveal areas of development that, among other things, require an increased implementation of both practical and theoretical digitization content in preschool teacher education. In terms of workplaces, there is a demand for skills development, spaces for reflection and an increased range and variety of technologies. / Denna studie har en fenomenografisk utgångspunkt som syftar till att undersöka blivande förskollärares uppfattningar om deras förutsättningar och möjligheter att möta digitalisering i utbildningen på förskolan. Målgruppen för studien är blivande förskollärare med tidigare erfarenhet av arbete i förskola, som går sista terminen på ett erfarenhetsbaserat förskollärarprogram vid ett universitet i Sverige. Genom att använda två forskningsmetoder, intervjuer och enkäter, har vi kunnat få fatt i och tydliggöra deltagarnas uppfattningar, vilket också har möjliggjort identifiering och tolkning av utvecklingsområden. Detta svarar på studiens två frågeställningar som är: Hur ser förskollärarstudenters uppfattningar ut gällande deras förutsättningar och möjligheter de ges både på arbetsplatsen och genom förskollärarutbildningen för att möta digitaliseringen i förskolan, i linje med läroplansmålen? Vilka eventuella utvecklingsområden kan tydas utifrån deltagarnas beskrivande uppfattningar om deras förutsättningar och möjligheter att möta digitaliseringen? Resultatet presenterar variationen i deltagarnas uppfattningar i form av kategorier som består av koder tolkade utifrån deltagarnas uttalanden. Vidare visas att det finns olika och ojämlika villkor och möjligheter på arbetsplatser och att digitaliseringsinnehållet i förskollärarutbildningen inte är tillräckligt för att en förskollärare ska kunna möta digitaliseringen i utbildningen. För att digitaliseringsinnehållet i utbildningen ska överensstämma med läroplanens mål synliggör resultatet utvecklingsområden som bland annat kräver en ökad implementering av såväl praktiskt som teoretiskt digitaliseringsinnehåll i förskollärarutbildningen. När det gäller arbetsplatser efterfrågas kompetensutveckling, utrymmen för reflektion och ett ökat utbud och mångfald av teknologier.

With the ongoing progress of research in robotics, computer vision and artificial intelligence, robots are becoming more complex, their functionalities are increasing and their abilities to solve particular problems get more efficient. For these robots to share with us our lives and environment, they should be able to move autonomously and be operated easily by users. The main focus of this thesis is on the differences and similarities in a human to a human versus a human to a robot interaction in an office environment. Experimental methods are used to identify these differences and similarities and arrive at an understanding about how users perceive robots and the robots’ abilities to help in the development of interactive service robots that are able to navigate and perform various tasks in a real life environment. A user study was conducted where 14 subjects were observed while presenting an office environment to a mobile robot and then to a person. The results from this study were that users used the same verbal phrases, hand gestures, gaze, etc. to present the environment to the robot versus a person but they emphasized more by identifying the different items to the robot .The subjects took less time to show a person around than the robot. / Genom forskning i robotik, datorseende och artificiell intelligens kommer robotar att bli mer och mer komplexa. Robotars funktionalitet ökar ständigt och deras kapacitet att lösa specifika problem blir mer effektiv. För att dessa robotar ska finnas i våra vardagsliv och vår miljö måste de kunna röra sig självständigt (autonomt) och de måste vara lätta att hantera för användare. Detta examensarbete fokuserar på skillnader och likheter mellan interaktion människa - människa och robot - människa i en kontorsmiljö. Med hjälp av experimentell metod är det möjligt att upptäcka dessa skillnader och likheter och därmed förstå hur människor uppfattar robotar och deras förmåga. Detta kan bidra till utvecklingen av servicerobotar som kan navigera och utföra olika uppgifter i vardagslivet. En användarstudie utfördes med 14 försökspersoner som observerades medan de presenterade en kontorsmiljö både för en människa och för en robot. Resultatet av denna studie var att försökspersonerna använde samma typer av muntliga uttryck och handgester, blickar, osv. för att presentera miljön för en människa som för roboten. De uttryckte sig mer detaljerat för roboten när det gällde att identifiera olika föremål i miljön. Försökspersonerna behövde mer tid för att presentera miljön för roboten än en människa.

Stort intresse har väckts för höga trähus den senaste tiden. Vi är nu i en tid där höga trähus går från teoretiska koncept till verkliga byggnader. Norge har världens högsta träbyggnad med dess 84 meter över marken. Mjöstårnet i Brumddal har lett till djupare förståelse för de dynamiska parametrar som är viktiga för dess konstruktioner. Men även både i Sverige och Kanada planeras högre flervåningshus i trä. Målet med detta examensarbete är att titta närmare på de utmaningarna som uppstår när man bygger höga trähus. För att kunna utföra undersökningen har litteratur studerats samt har intervjuer genomförts med erfarna aktörer inom byggbranschen som är inriktade inom trähus. En av de största utmaningarna är dynamisk vindpåverkan med hänsyn till träs låga vikt, en annan är brand med tanke på att trä är ett brännbart material. Resultaten visar att massa är det viktigaste faktorn som avgör hur byggnaden påverkas av vindlasten. Genom att öka byggnadens totala massa i överdelen innebär att byggnaden kommer vara tyngre mot toppen. Ju mer massa desto mindre svängningar. Brandproblematiken är något som i stor del redan är löst och man klarar ganska lätt av att uppskatta brandkrav. Dock är det betydligt svårare när det kommer till Br0-byggnader. Resultaten visar att eurokoder är diffust skrivet i hela brandkapitlet då ett högt hus av trä måste överdimensioneras. Slutsatsen visas att trä som bärande stomme är ett utmärkt stomalternativ till betong och stål med tanke på koldioxidutsläpp. Det finns många fördelar med att bygga i trä, bland annat har trä hög hållfasthet i förhållande med sin egentyngd vilket resulterar att transporten blir billigare, det skapar möjligheter att bearbeta med trä inomhus, byggtiden bli kortare då inga torktider behöver beaktas såväl som att trä är ett förnybart material. / There is a great interest in tall timber buildings. We are now in a time when tall timber buildings has gone from theoretical concepts to real buildings. Norway has the world’s tallest timber buildings with it’s 84 meters above the ground. Thanks to Mjöstårnet in Brumddal, we have gained a deeper understanding of the dynamic parameters that are important for these constructions. But also, in both Sweden and Canada, higher multistorey timber buildings are planned. The aim of this work is to take a closer look at the challenges that arise when tall timber buildings are built. In order to be able to carry out the survey, literature has been studied and interviews have been conducted with experienced players in the construction industry who are focused on timber buildings. One of the biggest challenges is the dynamic wind effect with regard to the low weight of wood. While the other is fire considering wood is a combustible material. The results show that mass is the most important factor that determines how the building is affected by the wind load. By increasing the building’s total mass in the upper part means that the building will be heavier towards the top. The more mass, the less oscillations. Fire the problem is something that has largely already been solved and it is quite easy to estimate fire requirements. However, it is much more difficult when it com s to Br0-buildings. The results show that Eurocodes are diffusely written throughout the fire chapter as a tall timber building must over dimension. The conclusion is shown that wood is like a load-bearing frame and is an excellent frame alternative to concrete and steel. There are many other advantages to building in wood, among other things, wood has high strength in relation to its own weight, which results in transport being cheaper, it creates opportunities to process with wood indoors, construction time is shorter.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital assets that exist in the blockchain with a unique signature that has been gaining significant attention starting from the early 2021. While NFTs can be anything stored digitally from text to music, since these digital tokens enable artists to democratize their works, there has been a particular rise in using them to promote digital art which has long been undervalued. With NFTs’ potentially holding the power to transform the art world and imminent Web 3.0, the lack of women representation in NFT space and blockchain has started to occupy the agenda of mission-driven artists, sparking conversations around the issue that has led some female artists to begin strategically taking up their space in a male-dominated market with different initiatives and projects. World of Women (WoW) and Women Rise are two separate NFT art projects that aim to diversify and balance the NFT space. They put emphasis on increasing the representation of women while empowering them to participate in blockchain and NFT space by using the tools of Web 3.0 to challenge gender biases and ‘decentralize’ power structures. Herewith, this research by examining these NFT projects will explore how exactly NFT art projects can culminate a more inclusive environment towards Web 3.0, the future of internet. The project will try to uncover the mechanisms and strategies of these NFT art projects through the themes of voice, agency, and representation by using a case-study approach. The project will be analyzing the findings with the guidance of the conceptual framework that is operationalized though Roberts’ ICT4D Intent and Practice Matrix. The data used for this research consists of chosen web pages of the websites of these projects and media texts that feature the projects and the artists who founded these projects. The findings will in the end reveal through what types of practices these projects unlock social change and enable representation based on their conformist, reformist, and transformist inclinations.

This bachelor's thesis explores the integration of digital technology in elderly care, specifically nursing homes, within a medium-sized municipality in Sweden. The aging global population presents significant challenges, notably in elderly care where digital technologies are increasingly being utilized to enhance residents' quality of life and streamline operations. This qualitative study employed semi-structured interviews with municipal employees to examine how digital technologies are utilized, the attitudes of decision-makers towards these technologies, and the challenges and opportunities associated with their implementation. Findings indicate that digital technologies can potentially improve mental health, social interactions, and the overall well-being of elderly residents. However, the study also identifies significant barriers, including insufficient training of staff, procurement issues, and the lack of robust infrastructure, which hinder effective implementation. The results underscore the need for strategic planning and further research to effectively integrate digital solutions in elderly care settings, aligning technological advancements with the practical needs and capabilities of the elderly population.