Augmenting Media Experiences with Affective Haptics

Within our Distributed and Interactive Systems research group, we focus on affective haptics, where we design and develop systems that can enhance human emotional states through the sense of touch. Such artificial haptic sensations can potentially augment and enhance our mind, body, and (virtual) social connections. In three works—voice...

Agent-Based Modeling of a Thermal Energy Transition in the Built Environment

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050, an energy transition is taking place in the European Union. Achieving these targets requires changes in the heating and cooling sector (H&C). Designing and implementing this energy transition is not trivial, as technology, actors, and institutions interact in complex ways....

Experiments on Socio-Technical Systems: The Problem of Control

My aim is to question whether the introduction of new technologies in society may be considered to be genuine experiments. I will argue that they are not, at least not in the sense in which the notion of experiment is being used in the natural and social sciences. If the introduction of a new technology in society is interpreted as an experiment...

Adaptation of interconnected infrastructures to climate change: A socio-technical systems perspective

Climate change is likely to affect how society will function in this century. Because climate change effects may be severe, a next step is to study not only the effects on natural systems, but also the effects on built infrastructure systems and, in response to anticipated effects, the adaptation of those systems. Studies that discuss...

Can We Make Sense of the Notion of Trustworthy Technology?

In this paper we raise the question whether technological artifacts can properly speaking be trusted or said to be trustworthy. First, we set out some prevalent accounts of trust and trustworthiness and explain how they compare with the engineer’s notion of reliability. We distinguish between pure rational-choice accounts of trust, which do not...

Treating socio-technical systems as engineering systems: Some conceptual problems

Systems engineering has been plagued by the problem of how to separate a system from its environment or context, in particular from its social context. We propose to include anything in the system that is necessary for performing its intended function and that may be the object of design. For certain engineering systems, such as civil aviation...