Václav Drozd Object oriented political theory? A contribution of object oriented philosophy for political theory Abstract (in English): This diploma thesis is concerned with the turn to materiality and object in contemporary philosophy and explores its impact on political theory. It focuses on conceptions trying to reformulate the relation between subject and object, culture and nature or human and inhuman entities - symetrical ontology of Bruno Latour, speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. The aim of the study is to identify the benefits of these aproaches for political theory. The first frame topic important for investigated theories is the relation of human and state towards complex technologies. The second general topic is the existence under conditions of anthropocene and climate change. Keywords: anthropocene, speculative realism, object, corelationism, actor, vibrant matter, technologies, symmetry, actor-network-theory, Latour

This thesis explored design’s role in transitioning the Swedish food system to one that is more resilient to the shocks caused by climate change and in the context of the project duration, COVID-19. The project’s central question was: What does food citizenship look like in a resilient food system, and what design process is necessary to facilitate such a solution? The project collaborated with a local food ecosystem startup, Harvest, which has the mission to improve the local food supply chain so everyone can eat deliciously and sustainability. Together with Harvest, the project developed a vision of what the local food ecosystem will look like in a viable world. It proposes that collective action around food is a possible vehicle for systems transition. The resulting design is the proposition of a network that connects urban communities to local food producers while facilitating the support required to expand the production capability and stability of the local food ecosystem. The network is grounded in the design principles synthesized from the research conducted with the creative communities in Sweden that are working towards a resilient food system. The ideas of mutual aid and the permaculture ethics of people care and fair share have been guiding forces as supporting those living in transition is an essential element of food systems transition. From this proposition the project sets to explore what disruptive innovations need to occur in order to reach this vision. By framing the project in this way I aim to not only illuminate what the preferable future looks like and how it will function, but also illustrate how it is possible to reach this future.

The Ruderal Triptych is a narrative, fictional, artistic, research project. It centers itself on questions of ownership as a legal and physical machinery, that works within global extractive economies. I want to question what we are really producing when we produce architecture. For as it stands it might not be the study of space, a lofty exploration of homes and places, but a professional discipline. Tied to the economical organization of a commodity society. Ownership of land, as a means of production. As an organizational principle is the foundation of current nation states, where the plot is registered on the surface of the state and thereafter upon to the global hegemonic economy of speculation. While our profession is disciplined to work within this framework, what are we really doing when we build “sustainably” are we sustaining life? the earth? the industry or the institutions more broadly?  When we try to take Bennett, Maccormack or Haraway seriously what space is there in this system for the nonhuman actors of the world? No rat can sign a lease, they have to be spoken for by someone else. So the professional architecture comes into crisis when trying to address real sustainability.The purpose of this project is to try to imagine beyond property as constraint for the ideation of architecture, through a series of explorations, narratives, and Artifacts/drawings/paintings that together make up the triptych.

The fear of suffering dementia may lead to people signing an Advance Euthanasia Directive to make provision for health care decisions in the event that he/she becomes unable to make those decisions. However, Advance Euthanasia Directives are rarely adhered to in the case of dementia because the symptoms of dementia conflict with the due care criteria; a person requesting euthanasia must be able to confirm this request at time of death and must be undergoing unbearable and hopeless suffering. Once dementia has progressed, the euthanasia ‘wish’ can no longer be confirmed, and assessing suffering in a person with dementia is nearly impossible. This means that for a euthanasia request to be successful you have to perform the euthanasia early enough, while the patient is still cognitively competent. The risk in doing so is that the patient may lose years of their life that could have been full of quality. Postponing euthanasia in dementia could result in euthanasia not being possible and the person with dementia living a life that they did not want. This paper addresses how to decide what ‘on time’ is when it comes to dying with dementia through literature review, information visualisation and public debate.

This work explores the possibilities of Hegel's critique of liberalisms and Marxism. Firstly, I define the "Return to Hegel", or more precisely, the way how we should conceive of this return to Hegel in order to really return to him. In second part, this formal definition of return is given its content, i.e. Hegel's concept of state. This concept had been denied by the doctrine of liberalism as well as of Marxism and this denial, as I try to demonstrate, can be considered a theoretical cause of totalitarianism. Or, in other words, totalitarianism can be speculatively comprehended as the manifestation of this denial. Thus as long as we live in a post-totalitarian era, Hegel is our contemporary. The last part consists of an explication of Hegel's critique of understanding (Verstand). The main reason for this explication is that liberalism and Marxism are 'understanding'- theories of state, and because of that, they were not able to conceive of the state as an object of Reason (Vernunft) and therefore, they failed to recognize the state as rational in itself. The theoretical result of this analysis is that Hegel's critique of understanding can be grasped, so to speak, as a 'critique of ideology avant la lettre', if the concept of ideology is adequately redefined.

With the advent of novel digital interfaces such as augmented, mixed and virtual reality, the way we interact with digital artefacts is changing at a nearly reckless pace. The adoption rate within enterprise applications is racing, with mass adoption among consumers soon to follow. This paper aims to iterate a key question sometimes hidden within these rapid developments; are the practices used to develop these artefacts properly tested and evaluated as the best possible ones? In order to answer this, we will explore and evaluate how existing best practices adhere to empirical evidence, but also to experiment with potential avenues of alternative design methodologies. Once adequate conclusions are reached, they will be utilized to design a prototype/proof of concept to showcase just how aninterface/interaction made with the new considerations in mind can differ from those made with contemporary design principles. Upon evaluation of thi sexperimental prototype which utilized the user’s hands as physical, tactile feedback for interactions, respondents were overall positive to this method of interaction, despite some discomfort from the limitations imposed by this specific technical approach. Due to this, it is strongly suggested that development of XR artefacts might often be designed around these technical limitations instead of a truly best practice. This is why we heavily implore both further testing and experimentation as time goes on, since emergent technologies might lack these limitations and therefore enable richer, better interaction methods and experiences within XR.

Spekulativ fabulation är ett designperspektiv som möjliggör kombinationen av fakta och historia med fantasi. Det förespråkar fablernas användning utav fiction i en faktabaserad miljö. Vi har i detta kandidatarbetet undersökt hur vi kan med hjälp av spekulativ fabulation skapa nya perspektiv kring en historisk händelse. Detta genom att tillämpa designperspektivet i vår designprocess för att skapa en spelfilm som undersöker mötet som uppstår. Vi kommer att gå igenom de designmetoder som vi använt oss som möjliggjorde för vår iterativa arbetsprocess, samt argumentera kring de design valen som gjordes för att uppnå det resultat som vi fick. Vi går sedan in på det resultatet som vi fick, samt lite mer djupgående in på diskussion. Där vi förklarar hur man kan undvika några av de problemen som vi fick och hur man kan fortsätta undersöka spekulativ fabulation film för framtida undersökningar. / Speculative fabulation is a design perspective that enables the combination of facts and history with imagination. It advocates for fables' use of fiction within a fact-based environment. In this dissertation we have explored how we can create different perspectives of a historical event with the help of speculative fabulation. This is done by applying speculative fabulation to our design process to create a feature film that examines the encounter which occurs. We will go through the design methods that were used and that made it possible for our iterative work process, as well as argue for the design choices that were made in order to achieve the end results. Then we explore the results we received. We will also go a little more in-depth into the process in the discussion section. The discussion section explains how to avoid some of the problems we encountered and how to continue investigating speculative fabulation films for future investigations.

The stories humans tell and are told about climate change matters in our understanding of the phenomena, and have an impact on how we act in relation to it. However, climate fiction video games are few in numbers. This project presents the development of “The Testing Bureau”; an interactive fiction game with a story inspired by climate research. The research used is that of the shared socioeconomic pathways: five scenarios that present different socio-economic and political movements and their impact on mitigating and adapting to climate change (O’Neill et. al 2015). The game has been created as a response to the lack of climate fiction within video games, as well as being a way to make climate change research visible outside of scientific circles. Playtests indicated that the game held the potential of spurring personal reflection and engagement on the topics of the policies and possible endings.

This research deals with the highly-relevant issue of paternalism within the discipline and practice of HCI with a particular focus on the autonomous decision-making AI technologies. It is an attempt to reframe the problem of paternalism as a basis for posthuman-centered design, as the emerging technologies have already started to redefine autonomy, morality and therefore what it means to be a human. Instead of following traditional design processes, queering as an analogy/method is used in order to speculate on the notion of technological mediation through design fictions. Relying on arguments drawn from the relevant theory on philosophy of technology and feminist technoscience studies as well as the insights from the fieldwork rather than conventional empirical design research for its conclusions, this research aims to provide a background for a possible ‘Design Thing’ to tackle the problem in multidisciplinary and democratic ways under the guidance of the ‘queer cyborg’ imagery.

In this thesis the idea of relationship-centered design is proposed based on a speculative design project which is grounded in an understanding of post-anthropocentrism. To facilitate post-anthropocentric human-artifact relationships, that don’t favor living actors over non-living actor, objects may appear to have a life-like agency based on needs and therefore must be empathized with which can be achieved through object characters. Through the discussion of materiality, object behaviors, and object characters, the philosophy of object-oriented ontology and the social-theory of actor-network theory are connected to concepts from interaction design and reveal that materiality, object characters, and object behaviors “meet” in the interaction of humans and artifacts. The phenomenological approach of the Research through Design methodology has shown how the applied methods, that were focussed on the perceived experience of the designer, helped to identify possible correlations of materiality, object behavior and object characters that might affect the human-artifact relationship. Further, the research identified possible implications of post-anthropocentric design, which suggests, that further investigation of how post-anthropocentrism as an approach to design might influence aspects as understandings of equality, consent, and consumption behavior which eventually might have an influence on socio-political structures.