In this report, I have explained my iterative design process using research through design approach. This project focuses on the context of Artificial intelligence and design collaboration. It also represents a design method of integrating human and non – human biases while designing intelligent products.Abilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are expanding so rapidly, that it already surpasses the human in specific tasks that were not thought before. Recent advancements in machine learning algorithms (ML) and its techniques e.g. ‘deep learning’, enable the machine to develop creative content on its own (John, 2016). Meanwhile, in the design domain, people have already begun to consider artificial intelligence as new design material (Holmquist & Erik, 2017). One can consider it an intelligent design material as it can include creativity as individual machine learning models.To understand this new paradigm of using AI in the design process, I created a speculative prototype of a design toolkit called objectResponder (v1.0). A toolkit which enables to design and prototype from the perspective of AI in the ‘wild’(Rogers & Marshall, 2017). I explored this toolkit with six professional designers from various discipline. Initial results suggested that looking at the world from the perspective of the AI may enable designers to balance human and nonhuman biases, enrich a designer’s understanding of the context, and open up unexpected directions for idea generation. The results from the study initiate my graduation project with — identifying what designers need, their concerns and challenges while working with Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning projects. In my thorough investigation with professional designers and design students, I learned that there is a gap in comprehending Artificial intelligence technology in design practice. Such as, designers struggle to incorporate these technologies into their products and services due to the complex nature of it. It was also evident in the literature study that, designers’ need to understand the underpinning principle e.g. limitations of Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning (Dove, Halskov, Forlizzi, & Zimmerman, 2017). Designers’ currently working with Artificial intelligence technologies mentioned that they are looking for a tool or prototyping toolkit which integrates AI with embodied ideation and rapid prototyping methods.To understand the state-of-the-art of AI, a literature study was conducted with the exploration of various ML technologies and prototyping tools. The purpose of this literature study was to understand the state-of-the-art AI and its current state. In this literature studies, I encountered some initial prototypes of tools that showed the possibilities of Artificial intelligence intervening into the design process. Meanwhile, technology exploration with various AI and ML tools and platforms allowed me to learn some facet of current AI and ML tools and ML platforms and perceive its limitations. From this observation, I designed three varied computer vision enabled experiments. Designers from various expertise have participated in the experiments. They were asked to follow the idea generation process with and without an AI’s Computer Vision technique (Machine perspective). Based on designers’ feedback about the experience of working with a designed speculative prototype, I propose a design toolkit called ‘object responder v2.0’ — with further advancement in it.

The project aims to encourage "young-older people" to age resourcefully. Although they are better at appropriating artefacts, technologies, and other people available around them to solve challenges as they age, the current "smart products" for those people do not allow them to do so because of their use scenarios rigidly prescribed. To challenge this situation, the graduation project seeks to design Connected Resources, artefacts with internet connection to support older people's inherent abilities of resourcefulness. The project involves two studies to find out design guidelines to design for resourcefulness with Research through Design approach. The first study addresses artefactual dimensions of openness necessary to support resourcefulness. It reveals while some dimensions, such as interfaces to expand capability and accessibility of knowledge, need to open; other dimensions, such as newness, signifiers, and structural simplicity, are required to close for giving artefacts familiarity and an entry point to explore personal adaptations. The second study approaches a variety of uses in which a workshop with older people using working prototypes of Connected Resources takes place. They imagine seven use scenarios of Connected Resources in their everyday practices, resulting in identifying six dimensions of the variety of uses, e.g., use in both fixed and mobile space, use with both user-generated content and crowed-generated content. With these design guidelines, the final Connected Resources are designed: the four combinable objects, which have different digital and physical capabilities, and the online platform, which encourages older people to learn each other's strategies to find new uses. They are designed with the principle of simplicity, familiarity, and playfulness to fit into older people’s everyday practices found through these studies. The project reflects knowledge gained in the Research through Design and closes the thesis addressing directions for future work.

Nowadays, designers deal with increasingly complex and meaningful challenges. Because of that, design schools are required to deliver professional designers capable of handling what future decades might bring. Therefore, resilience, generally described as the process of adapting well in the presence of adversity, makes it a valuable quality future generations of designers could develop. As resilience is still an abstract concept within the education domain, this thesis aimed to explore how it could be built and enhanced in such a context. The approach chosen to tackle that question was initially to analyze the literature regarding resilience. Then, to perform an in-depth autoethnographic study in a moment I believed resilience was systematically achieved in the Industrial Design Engineering faculty: the COVID19 lockdowns. Finally, I synthesized the learnings from that period and previous literature research into a theoretical framework that aims to assist educators in conceptualizing interventions to foster Resilience in Learning Systems. This framework was implemented to design and evaluate MyRubric, a co-creative guide for adaptive assessment, which aims to offer a constructive, resilient alternative to the current rubric.

Digital platforms harvest end-users’ data for providing personalised recommended content. However, this data is also used to predict individual end-users’ behaviours and hook them to the content, eventually influencing their worldviews. This raises ethical debates related to the development of serious societal issues, such as fake-news diffusion, increasing polarisation and threats to democracies. On the individual level, end-users are affected by data leaks and privacy intrusiveness. People are therefore increasingly concerned about sharing their data without knowing what they reveal, for what purpose and to whom, and are consequentially unable to exercise their digital right to privacy and consent, as also concluded by the European Commission (2015). This thesis investigates how consent practices and disclosure interactions can be redesigned to instate future data practices and digital platform relations which both digital platform organisations and end-users desire. This thesis adopts a sociotechnical perspective on digital platforms, as in de Reuver et al. (2018) and Tilson et al. (2012). The hypothesis is that future visions on 1) digital platform relations, 2) data practices, and 3) consent practices and disclosure interactions, from digital platform organisations and end-users should be explored, defined and compared to identify commonalities that provide a foundation for solution exploration, and to identify fundamental tensions that need to be resolved to create the conditions in which new practices can be effective and meaningful. Future visions are defined through semi-structured interviews and Context Mapping conducted with eight field experts and eight (sensitised) end-users, led by the Path of Expression line of inquiry and analysed accordingly to the Grounded Theory Method. For every future vision topic, one theoretical framework is made to extract values and sources of friction. While the first are the drivers of the future visions, the latter contain conflicting interests to resolve before they can occur. By comparing the values extracted from the future visions on consent practices and disclosure interactions from the experts and end-users, it is concluded that some values match and others clash, which are defined as value similarities and value tensions respectively. Methods to leverage value similarities in consent practice redesign are investigated through creative sessions with (former) design students employing How To – Questions, Brainwriting and Creative Confrontation. As all values can be leveraged in different ways, strategies for creating new consent practices are defined by using a Morphological Chart. A similar creative session employing Personal Analogy, Role-Play and Scenarios is used to investigate how to resolve value tensions in a consent redesign. All common tactics used to reach agreements on the value tensions are analysed and applied to the redesign for resolving the value tensions. Eventually the design objective of the thesis is reached by creating new (aspects of) consent practices and disclosure interactions based on the design propositions, for a total of 21 design directions including 88 different ideas from several ideation activities. The digital platform organisation Flickr served as a real-life case for applying the research insights and design directions. A new consent journey proposal which balances privacy considerations from end-users and interests of the AI community is created for obtaining users’ photos to create image data sets. The proposal is validated with representatives from Flickr, Flickr’s end-users and the AI community, and evaluated as desirable, sufficiently feasible and viable, with part of it effectively contributing to solving the design case. Additionally, the proposal enables the exercise of end-users’ digital right to privacy and consent. It’s effect on individual-level relations also contributes to solving data practice-related societal issues. This thesis concludes that consent practices and disclosure interactions can successfully be redesigned by leveraging the set of identified value similarities and resolving the set of identified value tensions. It is also found that ensuring a match between desired practices and reducing opportunities for dissension allows redesigning consent practices to be effective and meaningful. The early assumption that the identified sources of friction are solved limits however this thesis’ effective implementations, possibly requiring future research and investigations in these regards.

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 awareness, making their mitigation and re-framing a complex task. This also poses a great challenge for designers, who often aim to create fair and inclusive futures for those marginalised and discriminated against. Attempts are made to mitigate bias by introducing artificial intelligence (AI). Technology however, often acts as a double-edged sword, having the abilities to both identify and mitigate bias, or amplify inequality, reinforce existing stereotypes and increase injustice. Recognising both the potential but also the limitations of AI, this thesis explores the idea of reflexive designer-AI interactions, as a new form of human-machine collaboration towards more reflective design practitioners who are able to surface and dismantle and rethink personal and collective imaginings. Seeing a key role in reflection, often criticised behaviour of AI, like inconsistency, unpredictability and confrontation, are being explored as potentially meaningful for triggering critical and self-reflective thinking and decision making in design. Following a speculative and introspective research through design approach, this thesis explores such reflexive interactions in the context of gender representation in child toys. The hypothesis is that the introduction of reflection and a change in mindset when engaging with AI, can be productive in terms of mitigating gender bias in child toys. In order to envision the situated designer-AI interactions, a speculative vision of the first gender fluid child toy company is introduced. This vision serves as a tool for presenting queer future AI-design practices, but also as a critique of current gender stereotypes in the design of children's toys. Technological exploration insights are translated into four design tactics, resulting in designer reflection and bias awareness. Those tactics are applied and explored in practice, by designing three gender-ambiguous child toys. Each toy represents a new reflexive design-AI workflow. Each workflow differently illustrates human and non-human collaboration that surfaces, de-familiarizes and dismantles personal and collective imaginings of gender in toys. Additionally, these speculative practices also challenge the status quo in design, raising awareness about design and AI issues that need to be addressed further in the future. Taking into account the insights from the experiments, as well as prototype testing with children and evaluating expert interviews, this project concludes that reflexive interactions – as proposed alternative to traditional human-AI interactions and in addition to the current design practice – are potentially productive to surface, dismantle and re-familiarize personal bias and collective imaginings. Furthermore, does this thesis suggest that AI’s often negatively described behaviour like confusion and inconsistency, also carry the power to trigger reflective practices that help surfacing and challenge bias. However potentially limiting factors like ecological, economical and social cost as well as ethical concerns are discussed.

What is the impact of smart speakers on our well-being? As the popularity of these devices continues to grow, so does the discussions around their potential dangers. From reports of children developing aggressive behaviours to studies on the perpetuation of sexist stereotypes, our interactions with smart speakers are accompanied by a series of risks. This project aims to propose a repertoire of meaningful voice interactions that mitigate those impacts and foster well-being instead. To achieve this, a categorisation of seven dangers of voice interactions was created based on literature review: impoliteness, aggressiveness, gender stereotyping, exposure, shallow mindedness, emotional dependency and social detachment. Each danger was analysed to define which of the fundamental human needs of the Self-Determination Theory they harm: autonomy, competence and relatedness. This theory proposes that people experience well-being when these three needs are satisfied. Also, a phase of exploratory research was conducted, combining established research methods such as user interviews with emerging More-Than-Human design approaches in the form of Thing Ethnography. The findings inspired the ideation phase, where more than 70 ideas were created to prevent the dangers of smart speakers. These ideas were clustered, filtered and remotely tested with participants who expressed their perceptions and examined the potential impact on the fundamental human needs. The resulting data revealed the interaction concepts perceived as most meaningful, which served as the basis for the final repertoire of voice interactions. The repertoire includes design guidelines, traps to avoid, in-depth analysis and reflective questions to guide ideation. Its goal is to serve as a tool for designers and researchers involved in voice-related projects to foster well-being by designing more humane voice interactions. It was designed to be shared as an online platform and a booklet, but its content could take various forms beyond those.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging field which unleashes massive new (business) opportunities. The potential growth and broad application of the AI technology has great economic benefits however also severe societal implications. Simultaneously, ethical challenges arise with its development. Questions of values and ethics are becoming urgent, as systems can be negatively biased and the decision processes are often not traceable, while impacting our lives. Abstract concepts such as fairness and values need to find their way into the fast and agile AI development processes. The contemporary (research and practice) fields tackle these challenges by technological feats, ethical AI principles and strategies. However, it are the decisions made by humans today and tomorrow that will shape our future. It is, therefore, alarming the translation of ethics to that day to day work of the AI development team is missing. Hence, the central aim of this thesis is to explore and design support for AI teams with the creation of more ethical AI systems, bridging the gap between ethical AI principles and current practice. By that, design for organizational capacity for the development of fairer AI by using strategic design and critical design approaches. In this thesis, due to the diversity and magnitude of ethical challenges in AI, particular attention is paid to two challenges, fairness and value-alignment, to benefit from a design perspective. Three streams of expertise are brought together to tackle these challenges: AI, applied ethics and design. Ethics bears critique, and this thesis argues that it can benefit from a design perspective, using imagination in the solution space and synthesized thinking for implementable ideas instead of solely discussion. The thesis focuses on ways how design approaches can supplement the ethical ones and thereby stimulate the ethical uptake in the AI field. Instead of defining what fairness is, this thesis takes a novel approach in unraveling ten unfairness sources in the AI development. It is aspired to reduce these sources of unfairness in AI, in project specific fashion. In AI practice, the ways ethics is incorporated and how value tensions are resolved is under-researched. In depth interviews, generative tools and provotypes are conducted and designed to research and critique the contemporary AI field in relation to ethics, both with IBM and their clients. Simultaneously to inquire novel value tensions in its development. Five main value tensions are unraveled in its relation to fairness. All above is consolidated a framework to design for organizational capacity and team support leading to the creation of fairer and value-aligned AI systems. With this framework an organizational role is designed, the ethical coach, to aid the AI team with cocreating fairer and value-aligned AI systems with an accompanying modular toolkit. The modular toolkit is iterated upon multiple times and uses the AI dish metaphor. Finally, two evaluation sessions with IBM and their clients as well as the conversations concerning of the implementation of the toolkit led to recommendations for further development including education and implementation directions.

A significant portion of academic graduates have difficulty finding a first job after graduation. Research shows that the expectations of academic graduate job seekers and employers do not align and this graduation project confirms that job seekers and employers do not speak the same language. On the one hand, job seekers do not seem very able to communicate their skills and abilities in a convincing manner. On the other hand, employers do not seem very able to communicate the job requirements effectively. In this graduation project, Jeroen ter Haar Romenij validated and developed a vacancy platform in collaboration with the start-up HelloCareer. The platform allows academic graduate job seekers to explore job opportunities with the use of a job task language. With this task-language, HelloCareer aims to bridge the gap between educational study programs and actual job profiles on the labour market. The task language enables job seekers and employers to express their preferences, respectively for a future job and a future employee, in a uniform language, thereby reducing the asymmetry of information between the two parties, ultimately resulting in better matches. During this graduation project, a task-language for the three master programmes that are a part of the TU Delft’s faculty of Industrial Design Engineering was co-developed with academic graduate job seekers. Based on intense involvement of both the job seekers and the employers, crucial learnings were acquired on how to best define and apply the task-language and shape the design of the task-based vacancy platform. The way in which the preferences of the job seekers are represented by the platform has a direct effect on the job opportunities that are presented to them. Therefore, the value of autonomy over self-representation is highly at stake and has been put central in the development of the task-based vacancy platform. To engrain this way of thinking in the design process, a design for values approach has been chosen. Through empirical research that was conducted with academic job seekers, it has been explored what the value of autonomy over self-representation means for them in the context of the vacancy platform. As a result, these insights have shaped the design of the task-based vacancy platform which is described in this thesis. The final result is of this graduation project is a User Interface Design that demonstrates in a clear and practical manner how the task-based vacancy platform operates.

By 2030, 70% of the world’s population will live in cities. With technological development, the focus of building a city has been changing over time. Currently, the urban construction is dominated by the dream of the built environment with embedded intelligence. Urban data streams are processed by algorithms which feed to the physical urban choreography, namely the Smart City. But what does this smart-dream-future vision mean to its citizens? People choose to live in the city for seeking out meaningful jobs, like-minded communities, exciting opportunities etc. People take delight not in urban technological wonders, but in how the city can empower them to fulfil their own dreams. And this is where cityness lies. Taken as an organic combination of the ‘nexus of technological infrastructure’ and the ‘concentration of humanity’, cityness reflects how people live in and live for the city. The core of this project is to call for cityness in the future smart age. Hinting Civic Futures is a design practice that explores the alternative futures for cities in the smart age, concerned with interrelatedness of social and technical aspects. It stimulates a re-envisioning of urban solutions beyond traditional smart city. By exploring how people want to dwell in what kind of city in the future, Hinting Civic Futures strives to find the connection of functionality and desirability, where resides the cityness. And furthermore, to develop the notion cityness in a preferable direction. By exploring next generation cities derived from positive value incentives and brings them alive, the project strives to uncover the composition of cityness. This will help further open up space about how cityness can be amplified in enacting policy-making, business-modelling and behavioural change.

This graduation project aims to design a data driven service system for Swapfiets. The designed system allows users to locate their bicycle if they have trouble finding it. Other data driven services using the information are explored. The device is designed to be integrated into a bicycle light and capable of sustaining itself for its energy needs.

This master thesis shows that how to make a transition in everyday life and how to amplify the transition to the system level. Specifically, this research takes a practical case about 'protein transition' in the Netherlands. Based on Transition Design, practical theory, and thing-centric approaches, it designs a new framework for the change of eating habit. For instance, the study explores how different practices and values converge in the ‘kitchen’. Then, it demonstrates opportunities for ‘protein transition’ around the new 'kitchen' concept.

Envision began as an attempt to increase independence for people with visual impairment. During the course of the project, through a very participatory design approach, a deep understanding of the challenges faced by visually impaired people was obtained. A technology exploration in search for potential solutions led to the discovery of the emerging models in the field of artificial intelligence. By adopting an iterative design method a solution in the form of the Envision device was conceptualised that allows visually impaired people access to visual information. The device is a wearable camera that communicates with the artificial intelligence software on the users smartphone to augment the visual information in front of them.

This graduation project contributes to the PACT research project. The PACT (Pure Air for Cities of Things) project aims to develop novel methods and tools for understanding and demonstrating how intelligent things can act in concert with people and connect to existing data and cloud services. In this context, things are connected artefacts that are able to connect to humans and non-humans via internet with data technologies. Therefore, things have a special influence on humans as compared to other artefacts. Currently, things in the city mostly serve as measurers, an added digital layer that is also referred to as the smart city, but what if things get the ability to act upon their own insights? The aim of this graduation project is to identify design qualities for things with this kind of agency to perform appropriately during shared practices with citizens in the urban environment. The theme is Things as Citizens; as things are expected to behave conform the behaviour of a citizen in order to coexist with and to be accepted by citizens. The focus is the notion of co-performance in the smart city: a concept that regards the practices of humans and things with agency to be equally important. A literature review on things and the notion of co-performance as well as practice based research with Dutch citizens: a creative session, contextmapping session and workshop at the yearly event Thingscon, an Internet of Things related conference. The studies showed that a democratic dialogue between citizens and things is needed in order to establish co-performance between both. The design qualities are identified by combining both the literature review and the outcomes of the practice based research into a synthesis. All design qualities are based on values for democratic citizenship: the right of truth, equality, privacy and granted authority. The result is the design qualities model as can be seen at the right. In order to evaluate and validate the design qualities, a concept of things in the city is developed that serves as a demonstrator for the theme Things as Citizens. The concept is designed in the context for air pollution and is a provider and distributor of clean air. The implemented design cues of the concept represent the design qualities model, which is validated by the results of a qualitative study demonstrating to Dutch citizens the interaction with a physical prototype of the concept.

Our society is facing a number of great challenges which will require all of us to significantly change our lifestyle in the coming years. To support people in those transitions, next to systemic changes, new design interventions have to be crafted that intentionally aim to redirect behaviour for the common good. As changing behaviour intentionally comes with great responsibility, social and behavioural design calls for sound and deliberate design and evaluation. However, changing behaviour is something that takes a long time to materialise durably and thus conventional qualitative user-centered approaches to evaluation may not be the most suitable. On the other hand, quantitative approaches measuring only the outcomes of the behaviour do not provide detailed insight into the performance of the intervention. This thesis investigated how integrating various sources of qualitative and quantitative data on a behavioural situation during evaluation contributes to critically assessing and anticipating the effectiveness and appropriateness of an intervention aimed at changing behaviour. Studies that investigate the effectiveness of interventions often find that the effects induced in the short-term were not sustained (Abrahamse et al., 2005). A theoretical model was developed that conceptualises the underlying mechanism of this observation as the transition of the design being efficacious (works when people receive an intervention) to being effective (works when people are offered an intervention), which is influenced by the appropriateness of the intervention to its context. This appropriateness can be further operationalised into three types: aesthetic, moral and systemic appropriateness. The relations between the effectiveness and appropriateness were experimentally explored through deploying research artefacts in the context of the end-user. In this experiment an interactive bedlight and a chatbot were evaluated on their effectiveness and appropriateness in achieving the intended effect, ‘adopting regular sleep and wake times’, while at the same time understanding their performance in relation to ‘sleeping better’ and ‘balancing sleep and other practices’. In the study several perspectives on the situation were collected and integrated: sensor data from an ecology of instrumented things, data from interviews with the participant before and after using the intervention, and data generated through the interaction with the interventions. Integrating these perspectives resulted in concurrent insight into the performance of the intervention as it is now and potential elements for improvement. Although some perspectives are more attuned to the efficacy, and others more to the appropriateness—in general the integration of perspectives contribute to a holistic understanding of the situation as the individual perspectives filled in each other’s blind spots. Through assessing the efficacy and appropriateness of the intervention the long-term effectiveness can be anticipated. This could nurture new methods for evaluation where data is informing the design process in order to assess how the mechanism in the intervention performs to decide what the right level of persuasive influence of the intervention is and assess whether the intervention is proportionate.