Designing Expressive Movements for Non-Anthropomorphic Hotel Restaurant Service Robots

The hospitality industry, struggling with significant staff shortages, has increasingly turned to service robots as a solution. However, the prevalent service robot’s design with anthropomorphic appearance is considered inharmonious with the fine-dining restaurant ambiance and may harm the guests’ perception of the service. An alternative...

Dataslip: Into the Present and Future(s) of Personal Data

Most people are entangled with an ever-growing trail of data that results from their daily interactions with products and services. Yet, they are hardly aware of the nature and characteristics of the data within this trail. We design dataslip, a provocative artifact that materializes the personal data trail into a receipt and aims to elicit...

From Farm to Future: Designing a Roadmap for Robotics in Agriculture

This study develops a roadmap to guide the integration of robotic technologies into Dutch agriculture in a responsible manner that benefits farmers and the environment.<br/>The Dutch agricultural sector faces challenges from climate change, labor shortages, and sustainability pressures. Robotics shows promise in addressing these issues through...

ARchitechturing the journey: Speculating integration of immersive technologies in autonomous driving

Immersive technologies are redefining user interactions in the evolving digital landscape, promising deeper and almost physical digital experiences (Alpers et al., 2020). Concurrently, the mobility world is undergoing a paradigm shift, with an emphasis on advanced autonomous solutions. Such autonomy enables users to reclaim and repurpose their...

Design Guidelines for Human-Agent Collaboration in a Painting Context: Authority, Autonomy, and Delegation

This project focuses on developing design guidelines for Human-Agent Collaboration around Authority, Autonomy, and Control in the outdoor painting context. While painting as an activity is something most of us have done and understand, working professionals have a sense of pride and skill in their motions that would be difficult to replace with...

Exploring shared understandings of future AI systems through design

The focus of this project was building shared understandings of future AI systems through design. Based on the literature study on the Explainability of AI, two main gaps were identified: the stakeholder's backgrounds are not accounted for during the design of systems and there is a need for a more holistic approach considering social and...

Creating Monsters: crafting gender ambiguous child toys through reflexive designer-AI interactions

Growing up, social constructs like roles, norms and values are being internalised and naturalised. Despite offering a sense of stability, such constructs also prohibit equality, justice and diversity, by pushing people into categories, roles and norms they do not represent. However, once internalised, social constructs fall under the surface of...

Reimagining the smart allocation of road space in Amsterdam for fairness

Roads are currently governed by relatively static rules communicated via road signs, road surface markings and navigation apps. However they could also be dynamic, allowing road space to be allocated for a multitude of activities over time. The Code the Streets project envisions a digital system for managing urban mobility in Amsterdam that...

Design for resilience in the space ecosystem: A cosmopolitan approach

There is a need for environmental sustainability also beyond the atmosphere: Human activities are causing a tragedy of the commons in outer space, and most of the world population does not know anything about it. Outer space has become a non-cooperative game for a few players with infinite resources, in an environment with limited resources. The...

Living with Micro Mobility in 2030: Presenting a Speculative Design

Micro mobility services aim to offer people new and more convenient modes of transport, usually across urban areas. In order to achieve this they make use of public space to implement their infrastructure on, for example by allowing people to freely park a vehicle almost anywhere in the city. One can imagine that this has a major impact on how...

Inculcating ​a ​sense ​of ​stewardship ​and ​responsibility ​towards urban ​​trees ​amongst ​citizens: Using i-tree technology as a means to facilitate active participation of local communities in urban forestry

Cities are in an urgent need to adapt to the impacts of climate change, particularly, high temperatures and heat stress. Urban Forests are the most effective means of climate adaptation. However, the multiple benefits of urban trees are highly undervalued in the urban contexts. This project focuses on positioning urban trees as effective agents...

Enriching the autonomous ritual kitchen with embodied interactions: Future cooking with Gaggenau

Domestic kitchens are the heart of modern households, a space that embraces social gatherings and most importantly, where pleasures associated with interacting with food arise while cooking and eating. Nevertheless, the way technology is being introduced in this context moves away from this ritual aspect of kitchens as it focuses on a rather...

Smart Bench: A Speculative Design to Create Critical Awareness of Data-driven Nudging in the Smart City

The Smart Bench is a speculative design aiming to create critical awareness about the social implications of Data-driven Nudging in the Smart City. The project originated from a critical perspective on Smart City as a leading urban development paradigm. Many cities labelling themselves as smart cities competitively implemented advanced...

Participation in Speculative Design

There is a more than ever need to be critical of the present and imagine future possibilities. Several critical approaches to design place its efforts in creating artefacts for critical reflection. As part of the spectrum, speculative design is an approach that, through speculation into the possible, aims to challenge the status quo, explore the...

What If?: Thinking Through/Confronting Our Relation with Food

The relations between us and food have become distorted, deviated from their origin and meaning in our daily lives. Where solutions are sought in consciousness, this research focuses on the subconscious level of our relation with food. By changing our perception of food, using architecture as a medium between us, the subject, and food, the...