Personalized persuasive game design for youth addiction care

Applying persuasive games in mental healthcare contexts, especially using game-elements to support and redesign therapy, is a relatively new concept. In the youth addiction care context, patients often have comorbidities, causing a lot of differences between them. Besides this, therapists apply the therapy protocol in a specific personal way,...

Designing Robot Embodiments for Social Interaction: Affordances Topple Realism and Aesthetics

In the near future, human-like social robots will become indispensable for providing support in various social tasks, in particular for healthcare (e.g., assistance, coaching). The perception of realism, in particular human-like features, can help facilitate mediated social interaction. The current study investigated the effects of form realism...

Capturing conflict experiences: Five methods for identifying intra-personal concern conflicts

This paper starts from the proposition that concern conflicts can be powerful starting points for user-centered design processes. Our focus is on the challenge to identify conflicting concerns that are both inspiring and relevant in the context of use, or in the user’s general context of life. First, three main ingredients of concern conflict...

The development of a reliable and valid scale to measure aesthetic pleasure in design

There is a lack of consistency regarding the scales used to measure aesthetic pleasure. They are often chosen ad hoc or derived from other research fields but never validated for design. Moreover, those scales often do not measure aesthetic pleasure in isolation, but instead include its determinants (e.g., novelty). Therefore, we developed a...

UCD4SME: Small to Medium-sized Enterprises involving their users and clients for product innovation

An increasing number of Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) starts to realize the opportunities offered by User-centred Design (UCD). The issue is that our understanding of UCD either comes from large companies or is developed in an academic setting, without taking SMEs into account. This research project demonstrates that in order to make...

Surprise and humor in product design: Designing sensory metaphors in multiple modalities

When information from two or more sensory modalities conflicts, this can evoke a surprise reaction as well as feelings of amusement, interest, confusion or disappointment. In concurrence to joke theory, we argue that people appreciate and enjoy appropriate incongruities that can be related back to the product, whereas they are confused by and...

Meaningful Encounters: Explorative studies about designers learning from children with autism

Designers coping with culture in an educational setting

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study about how design students cope with culture in the i-do (international design opportunity) series of international design workshops in Hong Kong. We wanted to learn three things. (1) To what extent do the design students from different nations share common cultural values? (2) what...

On the moment-to-moment measurement of emotion during person-product interaction: By means of video-supported retrospective self-report, with some ancillary remarks on other issues in design-related emotion measurement

This thesis investigated the measurement of emotion during short episodes of interaction between products and their users. Chapter 2 is a review of the many ways that have been used to measure emotions, organized according to the component of emotion involved: feelings, bodily changes, and facial expression. Measurement based on bodily changes...

A pattern language of firefighting frontline practice to inform the design of ubiquitous computing

Designing computing systems for frontline firefighting is an open challenge. As of today, little computing support exists for such hazardous environments and designers struggle to build appropriate systems that fit the complex configuration on the frontline. Following Christopher Alexander’s understanding, design is about producing living...

Infusing digital creativity in design, the low fidelity way

In (industrial) design projects, digital and non-digital aspects are often seen as two separate design 'tracks'. Due to advances in our social and technological context, the hard boundary between the digital and the non-digital is fading. This is a challenge for the designer since he needs to be creative with digital technology without...

Shoes, Cars, and Other Love Stories: Investigating The Experience of Love for Products

People often say they love a product. What do they really mean when they say this, and is this a phenomenon that is relevant to the field of design? Findings from a preliminary study in this thesis indicated that people describe their love as a rewarding, long-term, and dynamic experience that arises from a meaningful relationship built with...

Once more, into the soup

In one of the earlier essays in this department, we discussed a number of acronyms all having to do with system design, and all having the form "x-centered design." The purpose of that essay was to demonstrate a broad framework within which to understand human-centered computing (HCC), and also to show the various convergences and divergences of...