Art and installations in public settings are often created on commission from a municipality or similar public sector. Within the public sector there are many values that the community strives to enhance. Values related to democracy, inclusion, and aesthetics are but a few. When designing for public environments, the design process might be affected by the need to strive for those values in addition to, or even rather than, the more common considerations focused on user experience or commercial aspects. In this pictorial we present how identified core values influenced a design process aimed at designing innovative IoT-enhanced playground installations in a public setting. Inspired by annotated portfolios, we explicate how these core values influenced the final design. ; Play IT
This thesis explores change and resistance to change of IT systems in organisations from a sociotechnical perspective. The work is drawing on empirical data gathered during two Action Research projects in Swedish Health Care: one regarding the deployment of electronic patient record systems within health care organisations, and the other regarding the deployment of eHealth services geared towards patients and citizens. Resistance to change is classified as an indicator of social inertia, and the concept of counter-implementation, comprising three general strategies to obstruct change initiatives, is used to highlight the political aspects of social inertia. For the analysis, the concept of social inertia is used as a point of departure towards inertia in sociotechnical systems by applying values and principles from sociotechnical systems research, most prominently the interdependence-characteristic. This extended concept is used to show and discuss how IT systems can either enforce change or be a source of inertia preventing change in organisations, and such planned or inadvertent effects of implementing IT systems are discussed as a significant source of user resistance.
A key motive in using gaming for educational purposes is to enhance user motivation and involvement to the subject matter. Within military education, games have always been utilized as a means to think clearly about military operations. However, some research results have shown that gaming, regardless of what the game is supposed to portray, is a meaningful activity in itself, and this can distract the learner away from the educational objective. Playing the game, then, becomes similar to competition, such as in sports where the objective is to only win the game. The player directs actions to achieving game goals even though some actions are inappropriate from a learning perspective. To shed light on the discrepancy between playing a game to win and playing a game to learn, we conducted an experiment on cadets playing an educational wargame. By varying the conditions of the game, playing with or without points, while still in line with the learning objective, we were interested to see what impact it had on the tactics employed by cadets. The results showed that adding reward structures, such as points, changed the outcome of the game, that is, groups playing with points played the game more aggressively and utilized the military units more extensively. These findings suggest that changes in the game design, although educationally relevant, may distract learners to be more oriented towards a lusory attitude, in which achieving the game goals becomes players' biggest concern. ; QC 20141208. QC 20200713
Despite the knowledge on the interaction between humans and computers, too many IT systems show great deficits when it comes to usability. Every day we run into technology that makes our every day life and our work unnecessarily complex and difficult because of the IT systems that are not designed to support our tasks in a usable way. This thesis deals with different aspects of usability and the process of how to develop usable IT systems effectively. Primarily, the systems concerned are used in professional work, such as case handling systems in large government organisations. The main objective of this research is to understand which essential factors in the system development process that facilitate the development of usable IT systems. Another key subject is how human-computer interaction (HCI) knowledge can be integrated into systems development, in particular the integration of user-centred design (UCD) and agile software development. The research is based on a qualitative approach and on reflections from my own experience in development projects. It also includes exploratory studies and design cases. The attempts of bridging the gap between HCI and software engineering have not been notably successful in practice. To address some of these problems, there is a need for a more precise definition of user-centred design, which is proposed in the thesis. Also, the complicated reality of systems development is not considered enough by HCI researchers and practitioner. To reach better results, UCD has to be integrated as a natural part of the development process. In the thesis, I argue that the agile approach together with UCD can be a good starting point for this integration. The agile approach emphasises that responding to change in development is more important than strictly adhering to a plan. Also, it prioritises regular deliveries of working software over extensive models and documentation. However, from an HCI perspective, agile processes do not inherently provide the required support for user-centred design. Nevertheless, the basic values and specific methods of agile development may have the potential to work very well together with UCD. For instance, iterative development is fundamental to both user-centred design and agile development. Finally, the research addresses how iterative methods can be used to find design solutions that support the users to cope with the problems of overview and control in case handling work.
Platform Design is a study of different viewpoints on the creation of digital systems, and how they converge in platforms designed, built, and managed by communities. As sociotechnical constructs in which features emerge through the interaction of different stakeholders, platforms are understood as both means and outcomes—the 'things' or boundary objects in a design process—generating the spaces where communities of practice can form. Utilizing two strongly interwoven timelines in education and research (both in academia and industry), the thesis shifts the centre of balance in actor–networks by iteratively recalibrating from a techno-deterministic analysis towards a community-driven one. The theoretical background in the fields of cybernetics, critical theory, design, and the sociology of technology frames the empirical work, which consists of academic publications, design reports, and the publicly available documentation of realized projects. In the space between theory and praxis, a methodological toolbox is developed, a posteriori revisiting experiences gathered over a decade Drawing on a series of functional concepts, the thesis proposes an alternative co-design framework, termed inclusive multiple prototyping. Meant to augment new sensibilities that are pertinent to the design process of platforms, this framework addresses the inherent complexity of actor–networks and human–machine communities. In practical terms, the thesis describes a series of projects, some of which can be considered platforms, while others would be better categorized as tools, toolboxes, kits, or infrastructure. These include co-creating the Arduino community, repurposing kitchen appliances for connection to the cloud, designing a modular prototyping platform involving programming and electronics, deploying an indoor location system, creating educational kits for upper secondary school teachers, and inventing new haptic interactive interfaces. Some of the projects required the long-term involvement of the researcher in intimate communities of practice; others were temporal interventions, yet reached thousands of users. Practice-based and transdisciplinary, the thesis contributes to the field of interaction design by bringing in elements of a sociotechnical discourse, while problematizing notions such as democracy and governance, openness of tools and outcomes, modularity, generalizability, and transferability—the three latter terms further fuelling the research questions. The research shows that these are properties that enable the creation of platforms, although the question remains whether there is such a thing as a standardized platform. While this thesis touches upon the potentials of state-of-the-art platform technology, it also points to the fact that there is work to be done, socially, ethically, and politically, when considering the augmentation of platforms for everyday use as pervasive and artificial intelligence agents.
In this paper we report on a four-month long field trial of ThoughtCloud, a feedback collection platform that allows people to leave ratings and audio or video responses to simple prompts. ThoughtCloud was trialled with four organisations providing care services for people with disabilities. We conducted interviews with staff and volunteers that used ThoughtCloud before, during and after its deployment, and workshops with service users and staff. While the collection of feedback was high, only one organisation regularly reviewed and responded to collected opinions. Furthermore, tensions arose around data access and sharing, and the mismatch of values between 'giving voice' and the capacity for staff to engage in feedback practices. We contribute insights into the challenges faced in using novel technologies in resource constrained organisations, and discuss opportunities for designs that give greater agency to service users to engage those that care for them in reflecting and responding to their opinions. ; QC 20190916
The instructor has a vital role in leading the debriefing discussion in game-based learning. The role during the gaming part is however not as clear. Some results suggest that the instructor should take an active and authoritative role, but results provide few clues on how to apply this to military wargaming. Wargaming is a two-sided game activity where both sides are assumed to learn from their play experience. Wargaming against a live opponent can however produce unwanted effects. One such effect is 'gamer mode' that is a result of an exaggerated willingness to win, which can be observed when the players, for instance, exploit the game rules in unrealistic manner. This paper investigates the main responsibilities or duties of the instructor to prevent gamer mode to occur and instead support the desired player-orientation toward the game. By reasoning on the main characteristic features of wargaming, to play the game and to learn from the experience, I conclude that the main duties of the instructor are to frame the game activity and to steer the learning process. This supports earlier results that the instructor should take an active part in the gaming process, yet needs to have the skills, knowledge, and authority to intervene in students' game play. The findings are illustrated with excerpts from videotaped wargaming sessions at the Swedish National Defence College. ; QC 20141208
Several recent maritime accidents suggest that modern technology sometimes can make it difficult for mariners to navigate safely. A review of the literature also indicates that the technological remedies designed to prevent maritime accidents at times can be ineffective or counterproductive. To understand why, problem-oriented ethnography was used to collect and analyse data on how mariners understand their work and their tools. Over 4 years, 15 ships were visited; the ship types studied were small and large archipelago passenger ships and cargo ships. Mariners and others who work in the maritime industry were interviewed. What I found onboard were numerous examples of what I now call integration work. Integration is about co-ordination, co-operation and compromise. When humans and technology have to work together, the human (mostly) has to co-ordinate resources, co-operate with devices and compromise between means and ends. What mariners have to integrate to get work done include representations of data and information; rules, regulations and practice; human and machine work; and learning and practice. Mariners largely have to perform integration work themselves because machines cannot communicate in ways mariners see as useful. What developers and manufacturers choose to integrate into screens or systems is not always what the mariners would choose. There are other kinds of 'mistakes' mariners have to adapt to. Basically, they arise from conflicts between global rationality (rules, regulations and legislation) and local rationality (what gets defined as good seamanship at a particular time and place). When technology is used to replace human work this is not necessarily a straightforward or successful process. What it often means is that mariners have to work, sometimes very hard, to 'construct' a cooperational human-machine system. Even when technology works 'as intended' work of this kind is still required. Even in most ostensibly integrated systems, human operators still must perform integration work. In short, technology alone cannot solve the problems that technology created. Further, trying to fix 'human error' by incremental 'improvements' in technology or procedure tends to be largely ineffective due to the adaptive compensation by users. A systems view is necessary to make changes to a workplace. Finally, this research illustrates the value problem-oriented ethnography can have when it comes to collecting information on what users 'mean' and 'really do' and what designers 'need' to make technology easier and safer to use.
This report is based on the site-specific art that developed during the latter part of the 20th century, by practitioners who wanted a more engaging dialogue between works and viewers. The strategies led many artists to move from galleries and art galleries to landscape and urban environments. A concept for the works that the movement from the galleries led to is Land Art. The Creative Europe-funded project Off Season Art Gardening (OSAG) is based on this movement. The project carries out activities in the form of workshops and lectures and creates artistic installations in the public space, adjacent to three rural towns, in the Netherlands, Sweden and Lithuania. My contribution to the project has partly been to place OSAG in an art and visual science context, and partly to relate the work carried out within the project Kulturarv och Spelteknologi i Skaraborg (KASTiS)-Cultural Heritage and Game Technology in Skaraborg, to the same context. Within KASTiS is the demonstrator Kiras and Luppe's Bestiarium –KLUB. KLUB is a transmedial children's book project that is used to build a contextualising narrative platform for otherwise disparate cultural heritage sites and objects within a large sub-region via fictional characters. The intangible cultural heritage from the area is also part of the project. The report concludes with a recommendation to actors in digital site-specific storytelling, which is partly based on the artist Robert Smithson's thoughts on a dialectic between his works of art displayed inside galleries (Nonsites) and the works created in the landscape (Sites). ; Rapport Off Season Art Gardening Co-founded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union KASTiS - Kulturarv och Spelteknologi i Skaraborg Högskolan i Skövde Skaraborgs kommunalförbund
Much of the academic and commercial work that seeks toinnovate around technology has been dismissed as"solutionist" because it solves problems that don't exist orignores the complexity of personal, political andenvironmental issues. This paper traces the "solutionism"critique to its origins in city planning and highlights theoriginal concern with imaging and representation in thedesign process. It is increasingly cheap and easy to createcompelling and seductive images of concept designs, whichsell solutions and presume problems. We consider a rangeof strategies, which explicitly reject the search for"solutions". These include design fiction and critical designbut also less well-known techniques, which aim forunuseless, questionable and silly designs. We present twoexamples of "magic machine" workshops whereparticipants are encouraged to reject realistic premises forpossible technological interventions and create absurdpropositions from lo-fi materials. We argue that suchpractices may help researchers resist the impulse towardssolutionism and suggest that attention to representationduring the ideation process is a key strategy for this. ; QC 20170919
Fighter pilots operate high-performing powerful aircraft, equipped with complex sensor systems, in a dynamic and hostile environment. The pilots need to have control over their own aircraft as well as the developing situation surrounding them. Moreover, the fighter pilot rarely is on a mission by himself, but collaborates with teammates to achieve the goals jointly. This collaboration between fighter aircraft cannot take place without technology in the form of a tactical support system (TSS) that aids the pilots with information retrieval and decision-making. A TSS in a fighter aircraft fuses data from different sources and organizes the information in order to assist the pilot in building situation awareness and support in the decision-making during missions. The capabilities of the aircraft and its sensors, as well as the design of the TSS will directly affect how the pilots can perform the missions. The technology and the design at the same time enable and constrain the possible acting space, such that the tactics and plans for the missions will be a consequence of these factors. Hence, the design and development of such a complex system requires deep knowledge about the users and understanding of how they will operate the system. High usability is among the requirements for such a specialized and advanced system as the TSS, and in order to achieve this there is a need to understand the circumstances the system will be used in. Due to the complex nature of the military operations and the difficulties to access the domain for others than pilots, it is challenging for designers of the TSSs to obtain this needed knowledge. Therefore, this thesis aims at investigating the nature of the operations, as well as the practice of user participation in the domain, in order to increase the designers' knowledge and give guidance to how users should participate in the development of the systems. Several methods that aim to design efficient and usable systems are available. User-centered design is a holistic philosophy that prescribes that the interests and needs of the users should be in focus through the whole development process in order to achieve better systems. At the core of user-centered design is to increase the knowledge about the users and their needs. This thesis applies two perspectives, which both contributes to fulfill the goal of user-centered design of the TSSs by obtaining more knowledge about the users. The two perspectives are: a better understanding of how the users/pilots utilize the TSS to perform teamwork during missions, and an insight into how the users/pilots participate during the development process of the TSSs. The teamwork perspective is motivated by the fact that fighter pilots perform a majority of their missions collaborating in teams. Their teamwork is depending on technology since the pilots are separated from each other in their fighter airplanes. Understanding this teamwork is hence a key to understanding the users in this domain. This thesis investigates the nature of teamwork between fighter pilots based on a theoretical teamwork model, the "Big Five" of effective teamwork proposed by Salas, Sims, and Burke (2005). The "Big Five" model contains eight elements that Salas et al. identified as necessary for effective teamwork: adaptability, backup behavior, closed-loop communication, shared mental models, mutual performance monitoring, team orientation, mutual trust, and team leadership. The user-participation perspective is based on the notion that involving the users in different stages through the development process will benefit the results. However, user participation can take many different forms. The users can have different roles during the process, and the impact their opinions will have on the product can vary. This thesis investigates user participation and the roles the users, i.e. pilots, have in the development process of fighter aircraft of TSSs and cockpit interfaces. These two perspectives are each assigned an aim in the investigation. For the first aim, Increase the knowledge about how fighter pilots collaborate in teams during missions with the current systems, ten fighter pilots were interviewed about their views on teamwork. The teamwork elements of the "Big Five" model are explored and described for the military fighter context. With this knowledge, a task performance cycle is proposed which shows were in the cycle of a mission each teamwork element is most important. Finally, a modified teamwork model adapted for mission performance for fighter pilots is suggested. For the second aim, Increase the knowledge about how pilots can and should participate in the design process of fighter aircraft interfaces, a study on how pilots participate in the design work of cockpit interfaces is conducted. The inquiry is based on a questionnaire, which was distributed to designers of fighter cockpit interfaces. The results indicate that the designers think the pilots have and should have many different roles in the design process. The designers wish to be able to observe pilots at work to a greater extent and to obtain more information and ideas from them. They also think that pilots should be more involved as examiners and testers. However, pilots should not be designers or decision-makers regarding design, according to the majority of respondents. The presented contributions of the team-related research in this thesis are a deeper understanding and rich descriptions of how fighter pilots perform missions from a teamwork perspective. The teamwork elements are examined, and their relations and their importance during mission performance are described. For example, it was found that the abilities to monitor each other, to adapt, and to communicate were the most important factors for effective teamwork during a mission. For the investigation of how designers of pilot interfaces work with user representatives in the design process, the contribution is a description of the different roles the users can have during the development process in this domain. The results are primarily intended to inform designers of tactical support systems and cockpit interfaces. However, other domains where team members are distributed, and are highly dependent on technology for their teamwork, should benefit from the findings. ; NFFP6 VINNOVA
Transparency is almost always seen as a desirable state of affairs. Governments should be more transparent towards their citizens, and corporations should be more transparent towards both public authorities and their customers. More transparency means more information which citizens can use to make decisions about their daily lives, and with increasing amounts of information in society, those citizens would be able to make more and more choices that align with their preferences. It is just that the story is slightly too good to be true. Instead, citizens are skeptical towards increased data collection, demand harsher transparency requirements and seem to lack both time and ability to properly engage with all the information available. In this thesis the relation between transparency, explanations and usability is investigated within the context of automated decision-making. Aside from showing the benefits that transparency can have, it shows a wide array of different problems with transparency, and how transparency can be harder to accomplish than most assume. This thesis explores the explanations, which often make up the transparency, and their limitations, developments in automation and algorithmic decisions, as well as how society tends to regulate such things. It then applies these frameworks and investigates how human-computer interaction in general, and usability in particular, can help improve how transparency can bring the many benefits it promises. Four papers are presented that study the topic from various perspectives. Paper I looks at how governments give guidance in achieving competitive advantages with ethical AI, while Paper II studies how insurance professionals view the benefits and limitations of transparency. Paper III and IV both study transparency in practice by use of requests for information according to GDPR. But while Paper III provides a comparative study of GDPR implementation in five countries, Paper IV instead shows and explores how transparency can fail and ponders why. The thesis ...
A significant part of the world's carbon emissions is related to energy use for housing and personal transport, and there are many efforts to make this energy use more sustainable. In the field of Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction, there has been a great interest in exploring how interactive systems can be used to influence people's energy use, often with a focus on providing information and encouraging energy users to change their behaviours. Similar ideas have been implemented in commercial products aiming to raise households' awareness of their energy use. This approach suggests that energy use is a matter of individual choice, and that it is the energy user's responsibility to change energy-related practices such as driving, cooking and heating the home. The effectiveness of the approach has, however, been questioned and it has been proposed to extend the focus beyond the individual – to the communities, corporations and governments that influence people's energy practices. With my research, I have aimed to contribute to an understanding of how various stakeholders can share responsibility for energy use and of how to take shared responsibility into account in design. The research has a starting point in studies of sustainable mobility and energy management in housing cooperatives. For these two cases, I have used design interventions to explore energy-intensive practices and more sustainable alternatives from the perspectives of both energy users and other stakeholders. In the thesis, I present ways that stakeholders influence, or could influence, energy use in terms of adoption of more sustainable practices and maintenance of these practices over time. Building on these findings, I suggest opportunities for interactive systems to amplify stakeholder initiatives and support shared responsibility for energy use, for example by contributing to transparency and trust between households and more powerful stakeholders. This includes to consider design sensitivities such as tensions between "odd" and ...
Games are rule-governed systems at the same time as they are fiction, simulating or representing a real or an abstract world. This defining characteristic may create for different forms of tensions, that is, at different times players may focus on the rules, the fiction or on both during game play. In military education with games, this poses a problem when the learner becomes too focused on the rules, trying to win at any price rather than taking the representation and what it implies in terms of permissible behaviour seriously. In here we attempt to understand how participants in a wargaming situation act out this tension by studying the interaction between the player and the game in military tactical training. The results first of all confirm that there is a tension – there are occasions where players are mainly concerned with winning the wargame, disregarding what the theme is meant to represent. I propose the term gamer mode to refer to this player orientation: players in gamer mode have an extreme rule-focused interaction, meaning they behave rationally with respect to game rules but irrationally with respect to the portrayed real-life situation they are training for. Gamer mode can probably occur for many reasons. This thesis documents two contributing factors. The first concerns whenever the game does not match players' expectation on mimicking warfare. In these situations players may find that the game breaks the fragile contract of upholding an accurate representation of warfare. The other factor that may lead to gamer mode are game design features such as explicit reward structures or victory conditions. To remedy the situation, the instructor can, in real-time, actively support players' orientation towards the game and explain in-game events, keeping them on track. When gamer mode occur I argue that the conditions for learning are compromised as the gaming activity becomes its own learning subject, blurring and overshadowing the learning objective. Although the results suggest that gamer mode is ...
