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This project critically reflects on the relationship between human culture and the ocean from a posthumanist perspective. Specifically, it explores how ocean data can facilitate a relationship of care towards the sea. While doing this, this thesis explores how those critical ideas can be introduced when working in industry and natural science. In this project I propose and demonstrate a method of Relational Participatory Design as a possible way to not only create design outcomes with others but also establish relationships between different actors, human or nonhu-man involved in the process.

Home rehabilitation training has become an important part for patients to recover and maintain physical conditions due to the high health care cost and limited supervision in the clinic. Various technologies have been designed for assisting rehabilitation training but most of them are not able to provide personalized feedback and support according to different standards of patients’ physical condition and movement capability. The thesis aims to explore what information provided by the technology would be helpful for personalizing rehabilitation by incorporating interactive machine learning as part of a large research project, which has been discussed as an effective tool in motion interaction design to build conversation and provide personalized information. The participatory design methodology was conducted with bodystorming and role-playing approach in the workshops to collect people’s opinions on the role of technology, the design requirements and the way to present personalized feedback in rehabilitation training. The author collaborated with the research group to apply thematic analysis in the analysis of the workshop videos and drew the design spaces for future interaction design including three roles to integrate technology, five design concepts and some design takeaways to present feedback. Two interactive prototypes were envisioned based on the analysis result as an explorative design to incorporate the interplay between patients and machine learning in rehabilitation training.

Research in automatic control has enabled trucks to use adaptive cruise control to drive very close to each other and form platoons. This reduces drag and improves efficiency by lowering fuel consumption. A central challenge to understanding the formation of these platoons is that not all trucks are emerging from the same origin or reaching the same destination; they only share parts of their joint trip. This study uses participatory design methodologies to create a design for an interactive visualization system to enable researchers to study the formation of platoons in simulated scenarios. Three transport researchers participated in interviews and a set of two workshops to establish their needs and formulate tasks that would improve their understanding of the simulations. The main research-through-design question was “when do platoons form and how large are they?” To forward and ground the discussion, I developed a prototype with increasing fidelity after each round of participatory design. The interface consists four panels: 1) a spatial panel that contains a map view; 2) a temporal panel with context and focus timelines: 3) an adaptation panel with details on inter-truck relationships; and 4) a filtering panel with a parallel coordinate system. The results indicate a need for a flexible interactive visualization system that enables researchers to study how trucks are affected by plan recalculations and how they adapt to their partners influencing the costs and benefits of platooning. / Forskning inom reglerteknik och fordonsstyrning har gett lastbilar och andra tunga fordon möjlighet använda adaptiv farthållning till att köra med ett litet mellanrum och bilda vägkolonner. De kan då utnyttja vindsuget från fordonet framför och på så vis sänka bränsleförbrukningen. En central utmaning i skapandet av dessa kolonner är att fordonen inte har gemensamma startpunkter och destinationer. De delar i de flesta fall endast stycken av sin rutt med andra fordon, och turerna behöver då sammanfalla i tid. Denna studie använder deltagande designmetodik för att designa ett interaktivt visualiseringsverktyg som kan hjälpa forskare att studera skapandet av lastbilskolonner i simulerade scenarion. Tre transportforskare deltog i intervjuer och två cykler av workshops för att synliggöra och formulera arbetsuppgifter som kunde förbättra deras förståelse av simulationerna. Den primära deltagande design-frågan var “när bildas kolonner och hur stora är de?” För att förankra och driva diskussionen kring designen framåt utvecklades en prototyp som viderutvecklades efter varje deltagande designcykel. Interfacet i den resulterande prototypen och består av fyra paneler: 1) en geografisk panel som innehåller en kartvy; 2) en panel med tidslinjer för både fokus och kontext; 3) en anpassningspanel med detaljer på fordonens relationer; och 4) en filtreringspanel med ett parallellt koordinatsystem. Resultatet av studien indikerar ett behov ett flexibel visuellt analysverktyg som tillåter forskare att studera hur fordonen påverkas av förändringar i resplaner och vilken anpassning som krävs för att möta upp andra fordon för kolonnbildning.

In the current era of technological development, with issues relating to an abundance of industrially produced things, this project explores how the value of craft can be shared to cultivate mindful engagement with others and nature. To discover design methods, research was conducted through workshops and interviews with craft practitioners. The findings were crafted into a collection of stories, titled Handmade Stories, sharing the value of craft from the voices of craft practitioners, intended to act as an emergent strategy for sustainable development.

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This work presents a Feminist approach to Participatory Design focusing on provoking and subverting hegemonic narratives. Through Design Anthropology projects in the field of Active Aging, I aim at defining design tactics for making the Common visible. The system design literature on Active Aging presents aging as a problem that needs to be fixed and it attributes to older adults aging negative stereotypes, promoting in this way ageism. This narrative is influenced by, as it informs, the EU policies that fund projects on the design of assistive technologies through a rhetoric of compassion towards those considered older people. At date, critical interdisciplinary approaches consider the concept of aging in modern societies as a bio-product of capitalism, since it is related to the end of a person’s work life and therefore the end of her/his productive capacity. My thesis is positioned at the intersection between critical approaches and community-based Participatory Design, considering design as one of the practices for raising awareness and taking care of the common. The Common is the ensemble of material and immaterial resources that allow people to be tied together and it can be looked at in a positive and liberating way, in contrast with hegemonic and normative constraints, as the implications of active aging narrative. In my view Participatory Design is one of the approaches to subvert and rebalance power-relations, and for this reason I adopted it in my work. Therefore, the leading research question is: How can we learn to recognize the Common through a Participatory Design process? To answer this research question, Participatory Design is informed by Design Anthropology and Feminism. The former restitues the importance of anthropological reflexivity in the encounter with the Otherness and the in-depth empirical work of field-work. The latter provides an intersectional lens that offers the decisive lever to shift the focus from the homogeneous fictional image of the ``older person’’, to the rich heterogeneity of human beings, that includes not just the age identity, but multiple identity layers (gender, ethnicity, economy, education...). This shift of focus has been done mainly through the deconstruction of negative aging stereotypes (ageism), predominant in the institutional narratives of Active Aging, whether they are in the policies, in system design literature or in people’s everyday life. In this way the shift of focus highlights the passage from the Active Aging perspective to the Common one, and from the user to the participants towards a collective dimension in which aging becomes a secondary element in favour of the Common, as relational quality and ability to cooperate and self-organize. For this reason the case studies presented are situated in community-based organizations of - in institutional terms - older adults. The case studies are settled in three different contexts and with different design ideas, as they emerge from ethnographic fieldwork: working on public mobility in a grassroot movement of seniors and pensioners in a mountain community; sharing knowledge and competencies in an annual laboratory on digital technologies promoted by a social cooperative and organized by the university; improving communication and making compost in top-down senior social gardens, organized by senior social clubs and promoted by the local municipality. The case studies presented are situated in precarious contexts, that is, in which the available resources are scarce, there is little or not institutional safety net and the only way for the design researcher (myself) to set a project is through building informal and trustful relationships with the participants, nurturing attachments and managing stereotypes that the participants may have about her. The main contribution of my work is having elaborated guidelines that include relational movements and design tactics to reframe hegemonic design contexts and empowering people that are involved in, to re-imagining themselves from users to participants and to be entitled and responsible to design their own technologies in their own means, to strengthen the Common that ties them together. The design processes that me and the communities realized are constituted by the relational movements of exploration, provocation, conflict, reflexivity and appropriation. In contemporary times, where the Common is often dispossessed and converted to a product, and we are called to fight capitalistic forces to maintain the capacity of cooperate, the Common is often not evident in our everyday life. From my empirical work I elaborated three design tactics that can inform design projects that aim at making the Common visible, and these are: decolonizing hegemonic narratives, nurturing attachments with the people we designers work with, and creating contextual ethics to help us making decisions when encountering conflicts between ours and participants’ agendas.

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This thesis examines participatory Urban Planning as an emerging application area for Participatory Design. Through testing and analysis traditional methods and concepts from Interaction and Participatory Design demonstrate how Participatory Design can contribute to current practices within participatory Urban Planning. Literature research provides a base on which to analyze the designer’s roles acting within Urban Planning. Research findings concerning the redevelopment of the RAW-arena in Berlin suggest the adjustment of traditional Participatory Design operating principles, such as user-centeredness into citizen-centeredness. The Participatory Designer’s traditional roles of a facilitator and translator extend by the role of a mediator, advocate, connector and activist when acting in the context of Urban Planning. The research presents a thorough description of the design process, workshops and interventions on-site.

This thesis project explores the research question of “How can vulnerable groups be encouraged to contribute with genuine personal content to a shared entity (the archive) in a scalable way?”. The project applies co-design practices in order to identify qualities that a system for collaborative self-archiving should incorporate in order to engage vulnerable groups to contribute to the archive, more specifically exploring what would motivate the refugees in Sweden to contribute to the Swedish archive. Several workshops have been run together with the target group, preceded by sensitizing exercises and interviews and supported by additional field research of the other stakeholders for the subject explored - the professional archivists and the Swedish citizens.