Designing Positive AI: How optimizing for contextual wellbeing inspired a design method for artificial intelligence that promotes human flourishing

The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), from <i>curatorial</i> AI in YouTube to <i>generative</i> AI in ChatGPT, demonstrates both potential for progress and risks of harm. Adopting a Positive Design approach aimed at directly enhancing human wellbeing, this dissertation develops the concept of...

Identifying meaningful user experiences with autonomous products: a case study in fundamental user needs in fully autonomous vehicles

Autonomous products (e.g., home cleaning robots, smart fridges, or autonomous vehicles) take over tasks that require time and effort from their users, redefining both the user roles and context around a product. Consequently, meaningful user experiences should be designed to overcome the risk of relegating humans to undesirable tasks and to take...

Supporting mental health self-care discovery through a chatbot

Good mental health is imperative for one’s wellbeing. While clinical mental disorder treatments exist, self-care is an essential aspect of mental health. This paper explores the use and perceived trust of conversational agents, chatbots, in the context of crowdsourced self-care through a between-subjects study (N = 80). One group used a...

Trustworthy Embodied Conversational Agents for Healthcare: A Design Exploration of Embodied Conversational Agents for the periconception period at Erasmus MC

This paper explores the potential implications of embodied conversational agents (ECAs) in healthcare, focusing on the impact of appearance and conversation style on trustworthiness. We conducted a Research through Design investigation of ECAs for supporting women during the periconception period and in pregnancy. The paper presents the...

Towards a Design (Research) Framework with Generative AI

This one day workshop will explore the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in design research and practice. Generative technologies are developing rapidly and many designers are using them. Yet, there remains little published work on the use of GenAI in design. Our goal is to not only showcase the potential of GenAI for design,...

A framework for designing AI systems that support community wellbeing

Introduction: Designing artificial intelligence (AI) to support health and wellbeing is an important and broad challenge for technologists, designers, and policymakers. Drawing upon theories of AI and cybernetics, this article offers a design framework for designing intelligent systems to optimize human wellbeing. We focus on the production...

Creative AI for HRI Design Explorations

Design fixation, a phenomenon describing designers' adherence to pre-existing ideas or concepts that constrain design outcomes, is particularly prevalent in human-robot interaction (HRI), for example, due to collectively held and stabilised imaginations of what a robot should look like or behave. In this paper, we explore the contribution of...

Design for wellbeing during Covid-19: A cybernetic perspective on data feedback loops in complex socIotechnical systems

The COVID-19 pandemic has put wellbeing on the global agenda like never<br/>before. Many businesses, organizations, and even governments have recognized<br/>wellbeing as a formal policy goal. This paper addresses the question of how to design<br/>complex systems to improve the wellbeing of their stakeholders. We present a case of<br/>helping a...

Resonance as a Design Strategy for AI and Social Robots

Resonance, a powerful and pervasive phenomenon, appears to play a major role in human interactions. This article investigates the relationship between the physical mechanism of resonance and the human experience of resonance, and considers possibilities for enhancing the experience of resonance within human–robot interactions. We first...

MyWellnessCheck: Designing a student and staff wellbeing feedback loop to inform university policy and governance

“My Wellness Check” is a well-being assessment system designed to support wellbeing feedback loops within large organizations, like universities. In this paper, we present a narrative describing the human-centred design process used to develop a context-sensitive well-being feedback system within a large technical university during the COVID-19...