Predictive AI systems increasingly shape social and technological life by abstracting from situated knowledge and experience, encoding human and nonhuman entities into fixed categories, and constraining indeterminate and queer senses of futurity. This dissertation develops a more-than-human design practice of queering AI, reconfiguring predictive systems toward co-predictive, relational ways of knowing and worlding. Drawing on autotheory as a queer methodology grounded in lived experience, the research advances three experimental engagements—Mutant in the Mirror, Undoing Gracia, and Sounding Territories—that recode predictive systems from within. Mutant in the Mirror uses a style-based Generative Adversarial Network (StyleGAN) to generate self-portraits that explore AI as a nonbinary entity, resisting fixed recognition systems. Undoing Gracia inhabits algorithmic borderlands through a multi-agent simulation grounded in autobiographical data, tracing how plural subjectivities emerge through interaction with a digital twin. Sounding Territories foregrounds embodied, more-than-human relations through a sound-generative model that embraces dis/identificatory codings and resists algorithmic capture. Working from a situated queer mestiza ethics, these experiments traverse AI development from data capture through post-training interaction by composing datasets, configuring models and simulations, and enacting co-performances.

Synthesizing what these experiments make perceptible in practice, the dissertation distills three queer practice (re)orientations—trans/mutations (toward indeterminacy), algorithmic borderlands (toward thresholds), and dis/identificatory codings (toward illegibility)—and translates them into tactics for design research with predictive systems. The research yields three contributions: 1) introduces co-predictive relations as a theoretical framework countering logics of separability in predictive systems; (2) advances autotheory as an epistemically generative queer design method; and (3) offers redirective pathways for designers and scholars to cultivate desirable un/predictability and queer futurities. By positioning queering as a mode of intervention within AI research, the dissertation contributes to Human Computer Interaction, Society and Technology Studies, design, and futures studies. Through this, the thesis shifts queer discourse from identity-based legibility toward a politics of possibility, concerned not only with who is rendered recognizable by AI, but with how worlds are made and transformed through the design of co-predictive relations.
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The challenges faced by society today demand ways of thinking and designing that go beyond the individual. This dissertation is concerned with sustainable transitions, and focuses on everyday practices, technologies within those practices, and the role of design.

Empirically, the research focuses on the transition from gas boilers to heat pumps in Dutch homes. Implementing heat pumps for residential buildings on a large scale should reduce CO2 emissions and save energy while providing comfortable indoor climate of homes. However, in everyday life in households, heat pumps are often not used as the technology developers intended. Ethnography, design research and interviews with value chain professionals are used to gather data and better understand how everyday practices with technologies are performed and understood.

Based on this analysis, I question dominant human-centered design approaches, which prioritize individual users and align with current practices, arguing that they fall short in supporting societal transitions. In my work I take steps towards a more-than-individual-human-centered approach, which embraces the improvisational nature of everyday life and the co-performance of humans and technologies, with the goal of benefitting design work within sustainable transitions. ... Read more

Today, the challenges of climate change and environmental crises are widely acknowledged as urgent global concerns. Against this backdrop, and informed by the epistemological turns of posthumanism, design research seeks to challenge and expand conventional paradigms. For the shared goal of "living as well as possible" with other earthly beings, it is essential to understand the intricate and dynamic relations we share with the (living) entities we design and cohabit with. Grounded in posthumanist, feminist care, and new materialist theories, this dissertation investigates care in biodesign, focusing on cultivating care relations between humans and living organisms, particularly microbes. Through exploring materiality as a lens for designing more-than-human care, it offers theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions to the expanding discourse on care in designing with living systems.

This dissertation employs a programmatic Research-through-Design process. A multiplicity of methods such as theoretical analysis, auto-ethnography, imaginary artefacts, material-driven design and a longitudinal ethnographic study are deployed. Within the research program, I conducted two main design experiments, including the creation of cyanobacteria-based living artefacts and the characterization of their temporal patterns..... ... Read more

This dissertation explores the shift from human-centered to more-than-human design within the context of artificial intelligence (AI). Through a series of design research experiments—spanning performance art, podcasting, kite-making, and designing interactive prototypes—it highlights anthropocentric biases in conversational AI and proposes more inclusive designs that can listen to and respond to more-than-human voices. Grounded in the critical posthumanities and developing a practice of designing-with, this research offers practical tools for designers and HCI researchers who aim to decenter the human in AI: It develops tactics and techniques for situating AI interactions, exposing entanglements within AI systems, and enacting alternative relations with AI agents. Additionally, the dissertation introduces emergent concepts to assist more-than-human designers in articulating their practices. Ultimately, it emphasizes the unique role of designers in generating posthuman knowledge rather than merely translating theory into practice.
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Urban forests are now digitalized as smart green infrastructures to mitigate environmental change. Cities are proactively planting and replacing trees considering their future ecosystem benefits, such as carbon sequestration, urban heat reduction, and water retention. Digital twin simulation is a key technology enabling this particular mode of governance, which generates future scenarios under various management schemes. These data inform decisions on tree selection and placement, thereby shaping forests into uniquely efficient and responsive urban organisms. Despite its positive prospects, however, the underlying ontologies of these digital forests are rarely questioned, often lacking consideration for the flora and fauna inhabiting the forests. The models built upon anthropocentric biases and values pose a risk of selectively consolidating futures where the forests are optimized only for humans, which does not always guarantee the same good future for multi-species.
Acknowledging that humans coexist with other forms of life, Eco-Urban Futures takes a more-than-human approach in designing the computational model and a simulation platform. The notion of more-than-human bodies was constructed as a strong concept to explore alternative modes of making sense of and acting upon data toward more-than-human forest governance. The designed interface enables users to navigate the forest data across diverse temporal, spatial, and agential scales, thereby urging policymakers, urban planners, and citizens to reimagine healthier futures for us-with-the-forest. ... Read more

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.
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The development of intelligent systems has created enormous opportunities to improve and change human lives. These systems are heavily reliant and driven by data and algorithms to achieve optimal user experiences for myriad users. However, these data-driven products/services are multi-dimensional and multifaceted and do not necessarily have the same meaning and value to all its users. Different users may have different intentions of use for the system. Each user could also define different goals that they may want to achieve using the system. Additionally, what goals the organization has for the users might not align with what the end users what for themselves. These differences in intentions are called as multi-intentionality. In such scenarios, traditional design enforces the idea of simplifying interfaces that frame or dictate certain intentions of use for people. But this can be considered a sensitive issue because the end-users are unaware of these other potentially conflicting intentions. This creates an increase in tension between intelligent systems and the needs of end-users but also a sense of mistrust. Hence, there is a need to create a sense of legibility to the users on the behavior of these systems and the other intentions of use in order to enable trust. In this project, a way to help users sustainably consume energy is explored through the lens of multi-intentionality. The main aim of the research is to explore the meaning of intentions and multi-intentionality in the given context. Following this, the goal becomes to concretely represent the multi-intentionality into something more tangible for the users and applicable to the real-world context. The initial research resulted in identifying intention profiles for users, the intentionality gap, and the need to capture intentions that is required in order to bring more legibility and transparency to a system that the user might interact with. Through multiple iterations, a digital interface is created that through various communication data, data visualizations and recommendation designs tries to bridge the gap of intentionality between the two stakeholders (user and energy provider). By capturing intentions, portraying the tradeoffs of user choices, showcasing their energy use, presenting their energy profile with respect to their goals, designing transparent recommendations an effective proposal to bridge the gap between intentions is made. The designs were made with concrete thinking on how it could be applied to a real world problem and were validated through tests with users. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

Childhood cancer is a disruptive life event that creates high levels of stress and anxiety in families. It turns everyday routines up-side-down, and can block the child’s psychosocial development when families have difficulties to emotionally cope with this potentially traumatic event. D’Olivo developed three interactive objects aimed at preserving space for quality time and stimulate interpersonal communication between family members. These objects were deployed in the homes of children who are receiving cancer treatment in order to better understand how families responded to them, and whether they were appropriate to support their situation. The broader question addressed by the work is ‘how can vulnerable users be empowered by design in sensitive settings?’. Tactfulness was found to be a critical expressive design quality of such objects, leading to the idea of Tactful Objects as a design perspective on interactive artefacts that function in sensitive settings. According to this perspective, designing tactful objects for sensitive settings means to design objects that behave like sensitive partners, establish a balanced collaboration with people, resemble familiar characters and maintain a discreet presence in the context where they are introduced. The thesis discusses the practical value of Tactful Objects in healthcare as well as the methodological implications of conducting Research-through-Design in sensitive settings. ... Read more

When building online systems designers have to make many decisions that impact user experience. One of said choices is whether certain interactions are automated or remain human. To make matters more complicated, they can also decide to make certain interactions seem automated or human. Making the right decision has increased in importance as more of our interactions are taking place online. Context The aim of this thesis is to discover if guidelines can be developed to facilitate designers when making these decisions. It does so by taking a new dating app called Breeze as a use case. This dating app is different compared to existing dating apps because it automates the date arrangement process. Instead of being able to swipe through profiles and chat with matches, users receive two profiles per day and directly fill in a date picker when matched. Breeze then arranges the date and lets the match know where to be at what time. The app faces the problem that many of the dates get canceled because users stop responding during the date arrangement process. User research reveals that, by having limited online interaction, this process has become impersonal, anonymous and inflexible which makes it easy to dehumanize your match. Dehumanization leads to loss of commitment when arranging a date. This leads to the research question: What would the impact on commitment and the overall user experience when this process would instead be humanized? And how can these learnings help designers of other online systems decide when and how to humanize interaction? Theory To answer these questions, this thesis first elaborates why dehumanization is inevitable when interaction is mediated by technology. Dehumanization can be mitigated by humanizing interaction. However simply humanizing interaction is not the solution because, apart from its advantages it too has disadvantages. The ideal balance between dehumanization and humanization depends on the type of platform in question. Findings Through conducting two Build-Measure-Learn loops, this thesis finds that the ideal balance does not only differ between platforms but also differs within the customer journey of one platform. Within each step of the journey, users have different interaction needs, which not only depends on why they decided to interact with the system in the first place, but also with whom they are interacting at that point. Additionally the companies that build these systems also have conflicting needs, which depend on their strategy and available resources. Result In order to find this ideal balance between humanization and dehumanization, this thesis proposes the Framework for humanized interaction. This framework is validated through conducting expert interviews, a pilot with an external company and by applying it to the use case. The latter results in new concepts and recommendations suitable for implementation by Breeze. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

Imagine a neighborhood where almost all of the decisions are left to its inhabitants; a neighborhood where all of the inhabitants cultivate soil to grow their food for their own consumption, in other words prosumerism*. This newly established neighborhood is Oosterwold which is located in the intersection of Dutch cities Almere and Zeewolde. Oosterwold is specifically designed to include agriculture activites into everyday life of its inhabitants which would enable sustainable ways of living in the area. This project is an attempt to explore the opportunities that prosumerism holds to enable the transition towards sustainability in Oosterwold. It explores and designs for prosumerism in Oosterwold as a means to foster the transition in the area. By framing prosumerism as a social practice and making use of ideas from transition design; the project offers a bottom-up approach to foster sharing and exchange of gardening things in the neighborhood. In order to understand and further design for the elements of prosumerism, the project makes use of both human and thing-centered design research methods. The project advocates that once the needs and desires of prosumers together with the role of gardening tools in the practice are discovered, then it would be possible to design for prosumerism to foster sustainable ways of living. The broader project question of “how can we enable the ongoing transition in Oosterwold through the food growing practices of inhabitants?” is narrowed down to the design goal of “how can we enable community building of prosumers through supporting their meanings of food growing in Oosterwold?”. The project choses sharing, exchanging and collaboration as mechanisms which enable community building in Oosterwold. Through increasing involvement in prosumerism activities and facilitating know-how sharing of individuals about gardening, community building can be reached. The resulted design is DIY Exchange Hubs that are cube-like boxes for Oosterwolders to exchange gardening things like tools, books, seeds and excess produce. The hubs can be built by Oosterwolders with the help of building manual which includes drawings of the pieces, instructions about how to put them together and extended features section that includes tips about coloring and functional differentiation of the hubs. Further, the hubs can be traced and tracked with the mobile application. Through the application, Oosterwolders may see the current status of the hubs, how to make use of the things that are in the hubs and further make a hub building request. *: A made up word which is derived from the combination of “producer” and “consumer”: “prosumer” refers to the ones who grow their own food where “prosumerism” refers to the practice of prosumers. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

In the emerging field of data science many exciting things are happening. Through the Internet of Things, health trackers and more we are collecting all kinds of data, that allow us to learn more about the world around us than we could have ever imagined. But how do we deal with this as designers? Why would we design with data, and how can we? And what would such a design look like? During my thesis I investigated the future of human-data interfaces, and came up with the Data Design Kit: a set of tools that helps designers and their teams to design effective and efficient human centred data flow systems. ... Read more

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. ... Read more