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The purpose of this study is to investigate and deepen the understanding of onboarding processes with digital elements within an IT-consultant firm. In this study we also discuss opportunities and challenges with digital onboarding from the perspective of both the employee and the employer. In today's society companies invest a lot of resources to find the best future employee. Effective onboarding programs can ensure that the time and money spent during the recruiting process are well invested. Furthermore, onboarding programs can result in higher productivity and well-being. The digital world we now call our home is affecting our everyday work lives and has been crucial for distance work during Covid-19. Even though digital onboarding has been a known phenomenon for several years, the pandemic left organisations with no choice but to digitalise their onboarding programs. Therefore this study also aims to provide new insights about digital onboarding and the perception of employees that onboarded during this period.  The results show that digital elements can provide the employee with crucial information before entering the workplace for the first time, which reduces anxiety. Thanks to today’s technology it’s possible to use certain features that enhance the usability and the E-learning experience. Furthermore, the digital elements create unique challenges when it comes to social aspects, adaptation of culture and knowledge sharing. This means that certain activities, such as workshops and team building exercises, are more effective in a physical workplace setting rather than through digital technology. Finally the study provides new findings such as the importance of socialisation and cultural adaptation for decreasing drop-outs within IT-firms.

Online job platforms play a vital role in connecting job seekers with relevant opportunities. However, the effectiveness of these platforms hinges on the sophistication of their recommendation systems. While technical metrics provide valuable insight, there is a notable gap in the literature concerning the user experience (UX) of job recommendations systems. Job platforms often overlook how users interact with and perceive these systems beyond the accuracy of recommendations. This study aims to fill this gap by answering the research question, how can the recommendation system on online job platforms be enhanced to surpass traditional job listings, offering users more personalized and effective job matches? Partnering with a prominent job platform, Ledigajobb.se, the author employed a mixed-methods approach, including surveys and focus groups. The study reveals users’ openness to new career avenues, the importance of transparent communication, and concerns regarding platform accessibility and recruitment processes. The study contributes to job recommendation systems research that aligns more closely with user experience and expectations by adding empirical data and actionable insights for enhancing job recommendation platform performance and job seeker satisfaction.

Humans were made to move. Many hours in front of a screen leads to stiff bodies and a diminished bodily awareness. The aim of this project was to explore how technology can serve to increase our body awareness and adapt to our physical conditions in everyday life with focus on office spaces.

The study is explorative with a user-centered approach and a focus on embodied prototyping, where the user is a subject of design. Data was collected with recordings, interviews, and workshops. Reflexion-on-action, prototyping and iterations lead to the final outcome.

The final concept is a wearable that encourage people to move and stretch out more often and spontaneously throughout the day. It does so by vibration patterns along your spine and shoulders.

The idea of this concepts is to make people move often and regularly during the day; to react spontaneously to a reminder from the body, mediated by the vibrations. The system is thought to be self-awarding; if it feels good to stretch out, to extend the arms, to move – then you will want to do it again.

With the growing interest in digital ways to experience art exhibitions, HCI and especially experience-centred design research have in recent years begun to show promising results when implementing holograms into the social dynamics found in art exhibitions. However, as to why holograms can enhance engagement and immersion, more research can be done. This thesis seeks to explore holograms' unique characteristics through an iterative experience-centred approach through the theoretical lens of Flow and its ability to prompt for co-experience. In two studies with eight participants, a design workshop and a mini-exhibition, we uncovered four unique characteristics and two takeaways regarding its potential to design for co-experience. The results indicated that holograms were perceived as immersive and presented properties related not only to the hologram but also the environment, as to why. It was concluded that even though holograms can benefit art exhibitions, the social aspects could be explored further.

Projektet Nordic Knowledge on the Web (NKW) är ett samarbetsprojekt mellan högskolorna i Vasa, Umeå och Bodö. Målsättningen är att utveckla en gemensam webbaserad lärresurs innehållande pedagogiskt material i olika former. Projektets målsättning är att skapa en kanal för forskare och utbildare att sprida sin kunskap och marknadsföra sig internationellt. Samtidigt kommer högskolepersonal och organisationer att kunna, på ett smidigt sätt, ta del av den spetskunskap som finns på de universitet och högskolor som deltar i projektet. Under projekttiden kommer NKW även att titta på möjligheterna att utveckla näthelheter med större och mångsidigare interaktiva dimensioner. Deltagande universitet och högskolor är Vasa universitet, Umeå universitet, Högskolan i Bodö, SLU Umeå, Vasa yrkeshögskola, Åbo Akademi, Yrkeshögskolan Novia och Svenska Handelshögskolan i Vasa.

The Internet is rapidly growing in complexity, with increasing negative environmental and social impact. While heating and lighting are tangible examples of energy consumption, internet usage is not perceived as such. Therefore, it opens up opportunities for new, energy-efficient, slower, resource-saving and mindful protocols for the Internet to emerge.

I propose Glow OS, an operating system that enables individuals and communities to align their online activities with intermittent solar energy. This system aims to accelerate the transition to a fossil-free internet by promoting solar literacy in the spirit of joy.

The digital society of today is dramatically different than that of a decade ago. During the past decades computers have gone from being clearly visible and at the center of attention to becoming an integrated and omnipresent part of our everyday lives. Today, individuals are catching up on a reality where homes, workplaces and society to a large extent consist of microprocessors that collect, analyze and present information. With regards to news and information sharing, it may seem that the users, thanks to greater ability to choose content, hold the upper hand in this process. However, since these data are constantly collected and analyzed for various purposes by companies, for example in the media industry, the users’ choices may not be as unconditional as they may think they are.Using the Swedish media market as an example, this exploratory paper discusses the interdependency between people’s choices and the market-driven choices made by the media industry in relation to news, and the impact these choices may have on media consumption and the media market.

Combining surveillance and emotion analysis seems to be on the doorstep and companies are fighting for a competitive edge with Artificial Intelligence. Our study investigates the attitudes of customers towards retail AI emotion recognition implementations and how they can be used by retailers. What role can emotion detecting AI systems play in retail customer interactions? How do people interact with novel AI surveillance technology and the ethical and privacy implications especially involving emotions, in retail environments? Semi-structured interviews were conducted to gather data from participants to gauge acceptable practices as well as privacy and ethical considerations. Respondents provided varied responses to different scenarios, but most were open to data collection and emotional data processing. Through analysis of the data, several key themes were uncovered including Convenience, Control over Data and Expectation of Privacy. The understandings gained throughout the research point to a need for guidelines and regulations to deploy emotion detecting AI safely and considerately. Finally, recommendations are provided for the multitude of aspects that require attention in designing AI monitoring systems.

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) grows, government agencies have begun implementing them to reap the rewards. Skatteverket, a Swedish government has begun the process of implementing an AI tool for decision making. However, not much is known about how to design these AI tools. In order to address this gap, a research through design project was conducted. This project included a pilot study, two workshops as well as provotypes. The research questions for this study were; (1) How can an AI-based decision making tool be designed to promote trust and control for case managers working in government services?, and (2) How can explanations (XAI) of AI-based decision making processes be designed to promote trust and control for case managers working in government services? The results showed one major design implication for the first RQ as well as three design implications for the second RQ. The first design implication suggested that there is a need to design to elevate human knowledge. Keeping the case managers in the loop and designing for building a good gut feeling. The results for designing for XAI showed that they firstly wanted the explanations to ‘speak the same language as them’, using the same phrasing and laws as they use. Secondly, they want to understand the ‘why and how’ of the predictions and reasoning. And lastly, they wanted to be able to have different explanations for different workflows. This study provides a good start for understanding the user needs for XAI in AI tools and how to use provotypes to understand this.

The usage of conversational agents in domestic spaces is increasing every year and with this ethical issues that we have not anticipated will arise, both because these relationships are human-like and not human-like.This thesis shows that ethically responsible relations- hips between humans and conversational agents in private contexts and domestic environments are much more than conversational design. This project is not primarily focussing on designing dialogues, words, and voices but takes a closer look at the qualities and values these relationships are based on. It is looking at how agents are staged, using design fiction as a methodlogy and medium to raise questions around the impacts of these relati- onships. Furthermore, it is also pointing out some of the possible unintended consequences that could occur if these agents are staged, like personaswith human-like features or if technology goes in between human-human relationships.After multiple design explorations and realizing how complex human-agent and human-human re-lationships are, I realized that the best way to make an impact was not to provide solutions on how ethically responsible relationships between humans and conversational agents should look like. Instead, I have created a set of fictional design ar- tifacts in different future contexts. They aim to point out what designers who design for these relations- hips need to tweak and pay attention to to create more ethically responsible futures.As I created these design fictions, I aimed to find a good balance between humor, provocation, and abstraction to leave room for people‘s imagination. In addition, I am hoping to provoke enough for my audience to feel triggered to raise even more re- levant questions and point out further opportunities for other designers to build on my work.Finally, a fictional design organization was created, which I called “A(i)activists“. I see this as a space where the design fiction can live on and a great medium to communicate the project vision and mis- sion and create a small place for ongoing debates and input from a diverse audience.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been a defining trend for design, technology, and business in 2021. The value, legitimacy, and utility of NFTs is disputed: proponents highlight revolutionary economic and cultural potentials of an open, secure, and immutable ownership database, while opponents are displeased by the environmental issues and abundant wrongdoing in the ecosystem. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is relevant to HCI, and signifies important developments for future interactive products. To better understand the NFT phenomenon, and to inform future HCI research and design, we investigated the stakeholders in the NFT ecosystem and relations between them. Based on open data we mined from the social news website Hacker News, we contribute the first data-backed model of stakeholders in the NFT ecosystem. The model reveals a nuanced account of the outlooks of creators, owners, and technologists; identifies investment firms and auction houses as arbiters of knowledge and value; and presents implications for future research.

The pension system in Sweden today is a very simple system. Taxed incomes generate pension incomes, paid out monthly after retirement. Yet the topic seems riddled with emotions; guilt, shame and anxiety over what you should or should not do. Increasing inflation, population age and climate change are projected to pose big threats to pensions in the coming decades. By 2060, pension incomes are projected to diminish substantially. Yet the future brings hope too; the gender gap in pension incomes is today at 30% and is projected to go down to 4% by 2040 as the changing view on women in the workplace and policy making is evening the (occupational) field.

To learn about pension on the personal, professional and societal layers, I conducted conversations with professionals working for the pension agency, banks, savings solutions and researchers at economics and sociology departments at universities, as well as with individuals with pension planning on their minds (or not). The professionals argued that financial literacy teaches how simple the system is while the individuals feel overwhelmed and confused, showing that the system is not complicated but feels complicated. This dissonance became the space for designing.

I propose to look at money as an actor we have a relationship with, to scale away guilt, shame or anxiety and leverage the positives. Through the strategic use of reflection, we learn about our ongoing relationship with money; formed in childhood, and shaped by everyday life planning towards the future. Thus, we grow towards a life where money serves us by investing in our values, hopes and dreams. As we change our financial behaviour today, we change our relationship in the future.

The value of money does not start with the currency, but with the intention of use, in the hopes and dreams of a person that wants to spend their time with families and hobbies, not with stocks and funds. Looking at financial planning more holistically shows how the established system is biased, rejecting those that do not speak the language. We as designers can be mindful of this and make more inclusive tools to learn this financial language. Insofar the system can be changed is what I examine through speculative futures methods and designs.

The current article addresses the issue of how to design for meaningful experiences of wellbeing and social inclusion, supported by information and communication technology, among older adults. This is done with regard to a background study conducted for the purpose of collecting end user needs in order to inform design choices. Our design approach is influenced by the theory of Experience Design, in which design should be aimed at creating specific experiences. These experiences are considered to derive from a limited number of fundamental human needs. The study is framed as design research using the methodology of user-centred design as a guide for the creative process. Semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted with 25 older adults, identifying needs of autonomy, competence, relatedness, physical thriving, security, pleasure and stimulation. Design goals were set based on these needs and three interventions were designed and implemented accordingly.

We present our design of a digital service supporting social inclusion among immigrant women in an ethnically and socially diverse neighbourhood of a small Finnish town. The aim is to explore experiences and perceptions as well as potential barriers and challenges for using the web-based service. The case study is framed as design research having a strong user-centred design approach. We describe the design process and present the results of a mixed-method evaluation. The results are scrutinized from the perspectives of experience design. The analysis reveals a potential to facilitate social inclusion through the fulfilment of needs related to relatedness, autonomy, competence, pleasure and stimulations as well as popularity. However, some challenges in the interface design and communication of the security and purpose of the site were identified in the study. Significant differences were also found between immigrant women and local people regarding the need for this digital service.

This article showcases a digital solution for strengthening social inclusion and well-being of senior suburban residents of a socially diverse Finnish town. The study is framed as design research where research is conducted in order to feed into a design process. A background study was first conducted in order to identify the target group’s needs, abilities, and attitudes towards the neighbourhood. The results revealed positive attitudes towards the area and the need for relatedness, autonomy, competence, pleasure and stimulation, physical thriving and security. Following a User-Centered Design process we based our design choices on these results and developed a local geocaching solution incorporating storytelling. The aim was to encourage senior citizens to socialize, be physically active and to experience the local urban place. An interview-based evaluation with older adults (n=6) combined with an analysis of online cache log data, showed positive experiences of the solution.

IT consulting firms increasingly work distributed with employees based in different geographic locations. In this there is a difficulty in developing and maintaining good soli- darity and togetherness. Former research indicates that organizations need to frame and comply with strategies regarding distributed work in order to be successful and competi- tive. This inquiry purpose to study the requirements needed to invent solidarity and togetherness in IT consulting firms. In this qualitative research the empirical data is gathe- red through semi-structured interviews which is complemented with relevant literature. In order to create a distinct structure a theoretical framework with focus on social processes has been designed. By using the theoretical framework concrete strategies was formulated. The essence in this inquiry’s conclusion is the comprehension of invisible values in distri- buted IT consulting firms. Invisible values refers to none-measurable aspects in the social working environment. This inquiry results in a few concrete suggestions regarding te- chnical solutions that can support the social processes in distributed organizations. 

Gamification as an educational tool has been explored extensively in traditional academic contexts such as universities and schools. There is however a lack of research on the usage of games for educational purposes in organizations, and even less research has evaluated games’ potential in creating organizational awareness. To understand if companies could benefit from gamification, this study looked at how employees’ professional backgrounds, social interaction and context during a game experience can influence employees’ awareness of the organization. In order to do that, a digital game that portrayed the supply chain process of an industrial company and focused on specific key aspects was built and tested with 17 employees in a large international organization. The results show that digital games can further both awareness of the organization by letting employees play and experience key aspects of the delivery process. The most noticeable increase in awareness were with the participants whose work is not directly involved in the supply chain.

Today’s generation is born with digital devices like computers, tablets, smartphones, and gaming consoles. Children’s passive engagement with digital mediums (digital devices and the content they offer) has become a primary concern for parents because it limits children’s learning opportunities through physical play. In this digital age, we cannot completely take away these devices from children’s sight. Still, we can create more situations and contexts that encourage children to reduce their time with digital mediums and/or convert children’s passive engagement into an active engagement.

This research-informed design project aimed to understand children’s (aged 8-11) motivations, aspirations, likes, dislikes, and engagement with different physical and digital activities in their daily lives. Learning from different phases of the design process was applied to design a proposal that helps increase children’s physical play during their engagement with digital activity.

Method: Findings from the exploratory research led to a few opportunity areas, which were further investigated using research through the prototyping method. User personas, their needs, and their involvement in different activities inspired me to define a few design principles I followed throughout the project to evaluate my design decisions. I set my initial research question as “How might we integrate ‘digital mediums’ with the qualities of ‘physical play’ to provide our children more exciting growth opportunities.” I could probe, test, observe, learn, and finally prototype a few scenarios that enabled children’s physical play during the digital activity.

Result: The final concept is “animo- A tool to engage children in a storytelling activity through physical play.” The concept combined children’s current interest in digital mediums with their interests in the creative activity of drawing and doodling. It creates opportunities for children to build the creation by COMBINING two or more objects or mediums, by ENGAGING in physical play and/or with the surrounding, and SHARING the creation that increases their social interactions.

Children learn drawing, handwriting, animation, and storytelling skills. They become more curious, observant and notice more the living and non-living things. Bringing feelings and emotions to their drawings increases their expressive and imaginative abilities. They develop empathy, love, and care by sharing their creation with others. Small recognitions of their creation give them a sense of being noticed and encourages them to explore more. Animo helps children learn storytelling through animation, but more than that, it exposes them to the infinite possibilities of learning through physical play.

This thesis explores the stigmas and taboos surrounding youth health centers in Sweden and how this might be hindering young people to visit the youth health centers. It’s exploring how this can be challenged and how the threshold can be lowered by involving the informal support system and bringing the youth health center to the youth arena which allows for a more informal type of support and guidance. The youth health centers in Sweden have been around since 1970 and are a well known and established form of healthcare, yet the majority of the visitors are young women. How come? I’ve been working from the hypothesis that there is a need for more youth to seek help but that they for various reasons don’t manage to make it all the way there. There are many stigmas surrounding topics that the youth health center is dealing with, such as sex, depression, or domestic violence. This is especially true for young people on the edge between childhood and adulthood. Using a human-centered design approach this project has through the involvement of adolescents, midwives and youth workers among others, been exploring challenges and finding opportunities where interaction design can be used to improve the situation for the youth that do not make it to the youth health centers but that want and would benefit from their services. The final design proposal is an ambassadorship, aimed towards adults already part of the informal support system, that will enable youth to feel more empowered to seek help. It is set up to reach the youth in new ways, in an informal manner to bring the solution to the youth and to create a more comfortable space for them to open up within. Part of this is also a service for youth to effortlessly get in contact with the youth health center and to create personal connections to its personnel through link cards and video presentations. These connections are there to prepare the youth and to lower the bar of contact by building trust and humanize the help-seeking process. To make it clear that they are not trying to contact an institution but a person.

Robotic telepresence systems enable humans to be present physically and socially in a distant environment. Robotic telepresence technology is the latest in the line of communication technology development. The unique feature of such technology is that its users can act in a distant environment and interact with other people through these systems. The robot is the user’s physical avatar through which they act. This thesis aims to understand how people connect to the world through robotic telepresence. The aim includes addressing how humans operate the robotic telepresence system, how the robotic telepresence supports performing actions in a distant location and supports social interaction, and how a human experience being in a robotic body.

The thesis is based on five studies, reported in five papers, that explore different aspects of robotic telepresence. The theoretical foundations consist of activity theory and phenomenology, two traditions that are arguably compatible and complementary. The concept of remote embodiment is proposed to describe the relationship between the human and robotic telepresence systems. Remote embodiment is a phenomenon, design concept, and feature that enables robotic telepresence to be used in a wide variety of activities. Furthermore, I use the concept of remote embodiment to outline possible futures of robotic telepresence.

Robotic telepresence technologies are becoming ever more usable and affordable, as well as increasingly available as consumer products. In the coming years, a significant number of people are likely to encounter the technology for the first time, and many, if not most, of them are going to be “non-technical” users, that is, people who do not have special technical knowledge and skills of IT-professionals. Therefore, understanding how nontechnical users are getting familiar with robotic telepresence technology, how they perceive the technology, learn to control it, and relate it to their everyday work practices, is a topical research issue. This paper reports an empirical study, in which eight non-technical users, office workers who were not IT-professionals, were introduced to robotic telepresence and provided with a practical experience of acting as pilots of a remotely controlled robot. In follow up interviews the participants were asked to reflect on potential uses of the technology in their professional activities. The participants could successfully acquire basic navigation skills and reached a high level of spatial presence, but experienced problems with developing a "new body image”. When reflecting on the potential of the technology for supporting their work, the participants envisioned a number of benefits associated with remote physical mobility. The impact of the technology on the quality of workrelated social interactions was expected to be generally positive but somewhat limited.

The paper reports a study in which two aspects of interaction design - human interaction with technology and acting through technology were analyzed in the context of participatory sessions having the focus group format. The sessions were conducted as a part of redesigning a novel digital artifact, a web-based project management tool. An initial prototype of the artifact was introduced to two different groups of participants possessing expertise in, respectively, human-computer interaction (HCI) and teaching and learning, a key target application domain for the tool. Re-design suggestions provided by each of the focus groups were found to address issues with both user interface and functionality of the prototype. The main difference between the groups was in whether they primarily focused on interaction efficiency or artifact's integration into a larger social and technological context. Implications of the study for further development of participatory methods in interaction design are discussed.

The general problem addressed in this paper is supporting a more efficient communication between remote users, who control telepresence robots, and people in the local setting. The design of most telepresence robots does not allow them to perform gestures. Given the key role of pointing in human communication, exploring design solutions for providing telepresence robots with deictic gesturing capabilities is, arguably, a timely research issue for Human-Robot Interaction. To address this issue, we conducted an empirical study, in which a set of low fidelity prototypes, illustrating various designs of a robot's gesture arm, were assessed by the participants (N=18). The study employed a mixed-method approach, a combination of a controlled experiment, elicitation study, and design provocation. The evidence collected in the study reveals participants' assessment of the designs, used in the study, and provides insights into parti.cipants' attitudes and expectations regarding gestural communication with telepresence robots in general.

The aim of the workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss the present and future of ecological perspectives in HCI. The participants will reflect on the current uses and interpretations of “ecology” and related concepts in the field. The workshop will assess the potential of ecological perspectives in HCI for supporting rich and meaningful analysis, as well as innovative design, of interactive technologies in real-life contexts.

Samhället sätter stora förhoppningar till att digitaliseringen ska utveckla hemtjänsten, men kunskap saknas om konsekvenserna för brukare, omsorgspersonal och chefer. Det finns många frågor att besvara. 

Living in this era of digitalization, we witness AI-powered tools becoming increasingly common in every field, their ability to perform decision-making has been particularly beneficial in the context of healthcare and triaging. However, the opaqueness of algorithms/models makes the behavior of these AI models complex and difficult to follow, thus affecting the reliability of AI models and their decisions. For this reason, there is a need for approaches that can justify AI model’s behavior, one way is through explanations, i.e. explainable AI (XAI). However, the explanations should be tailored in such a way that they can adjust to each user’s knowledge level, thus providing understandable reasoning. The adaptivity of explanations/XAI can be improved by assessing the explanations through evaluation metrics. Prior studies have focused on technical accuracy of these explanations, diverging from user-centric approach, thus neglecting the subjective quality of these explanations. This study explored these gaps through a literature study and user-centered approaches, such as Workshops involving healthcare professionals and UX-designers. Various aspects and metrics emerged from these Workshops, paving the way for prototyping an interface in conjunction with formulating an evaluation framework representing a set of metrics needed to evaluate such XAI systems.

This study aimed to explore the implementation of fairness in intelligent agents to enhance their interactions in our social space. Two distinct investigations, an experiment, and a focus group, were conducted to examine the impact of unfair treatment by non-anthropomorphic and anthropomorphic agents, where we sought to answer the research question: How does experiencing unfair treatment from agents with different appearances influence individuals' perceptions, satisfaction, and trust? The experiment encompassed four experimental conditions combining fair and unfair behaviours with agents displaying human-like or non-human-like appearances. User enactment, Experience prototyping, and the Wizard of Oz technique were employed during the experiment. The focus group aimed to delve into the concept of fairness and its relevance to agents in greater detail. In summary, the study's findings indicate that fairness is a significantly important consideration in agent design. However, the complexity of designing a fair agent proves challenging, due to the subjective and contextual nature where it entangles with various factors.

The overall purpose of this project is to develop an immersive storytelling experience that connects with both physical and social environment. To be specific, it focuses on the old prison in Umeå which was closed in 1981 and nowadays serves as a hotel. There are abundant historical materials related to the old prison preserved, and how might we transform such textual, historical information into relatively interactive experience. By collaborating with Hotell Gamla Fängelset ( Umeå’s Prison Hotel ), the result turns out to be an application in combination with augmented reality (AR), to build a guided tour that brings history to life at Umeå’s Prison Hotel. The tour not only demonstrates the plight of the prisoners, but also showcases the reform to humanized treatment over time, at the end linking back to the cozy hotel where the guests are staying. After users experience the tour application, it stimulates people’s imagination of the prisoners’ story and raises their awareness towards the cultural heritage that has always been forgotten.

Despite advances made in modern electronic devices, their use by older people is significantly lower than for younger people. They experience difficulties using devices due to a combination of physical, cognitive and ‘generational’ differences. Many studies try to adapt devices to make them more usable, but they do not consider how older people feel in terms of attitudes towards technology or their existing habits. Seven participants were interviewed about their current use of technology, as well as their attitudes to modern technology, and a personal inventory was created for each participant. The interviews generated themes relating to how participants feel that technology is not made for them, barriers to their use, and generational differences as well as arguments against modern technology use and perceived negative aspects of technology. Some design considerations were created and illustrated using features from the most commonly used devices that suited the interviewees’ attitudes, behaviours and opinions.

In recent years, low-code development has become increasingly popular, enabling developers to write less code and focus on the objective. However, while proven efficient, little attention has been given to how developers experience working in these development environments. This is significant as providing unpleasant experiences could reduce the benefits of low-code platforms by leaving the developers unhappy. As such, this study aims to gain an understanding of developer experience in low-code environments. The study was conducted with an IT-company recently specialized in low-code solutions, where participants were chosen based on having prior experience with low-code development. This ensued in interviews with six low-code developers as well as a project leader. Main positive experiences found were, feeling more productive, improved customer relations, focus on the objective, shared developer understanding, and quick learnability. Key negative experiences found were, having work constrained, limited freedom and creativity, inadequate documentation, and overview, and having poor and unsafe teamwork capabilities. To the best of my knowledge this is the first study to explore developer experience in low-code development environments and stands as groundwork for future studies in low-code developer experience. 

Due to the increased level of digitization in society the retail sector must adapt and follow the digital footprint to survive on the market. As a result of the digital development, e-commerce has become a major part of the retail industry. The purpose of  this study is to understand and contribute knowledge of how the consumers attitude and expectations towards the in-store retail has changed and how it will affect the function of the physical store in the future.  In this study we will focus on generation  Z since they constitute the majority of the retail consumers and will have a significant impact on the future of retail. To explore this field, we used a qualitative approach, and the data were obtained through semi-structured interviews with consumers from generation Z. Additionally we initiated the study with a survey to get an essential understanding of the behaviors of generation Z as consumers. The primary findings of this study are the correlation between the consumers general attitude towards the digitization of society and their expectations on the integration of digital innovations in in-store retail. The characteristics of generation Z are demands on a seamless and convenient shopping experience which we can see differentiate depending on the type of product the consumer aims to purchase. Finally, as the study shows that generation Z has a generally positive attitude towards new technology and is adaptable, we mean that the stores’ focus should not be on what type of technology they integrate but how the technology can satisfy the consumers' needs and expectations.  

Digital assistants such as Google Assistant and Alexa are becoming more and more common in people's homes through smart speakers. Technologies that assist with stress management have increased as well, leading to an abundance of stress management applications for different devices. However, there is a limited amount of research regarding how advanced digital assistants could support stress management and be integrated into users' daily activities. Therefore, our study explores how people anticipate that they would relate to an advanced digital assistant in the future and how they would integrate it into their everyday activities for stress management. Our study shows that important aspects of digital assistants relate to their objectivity, personalization, and adaptability in terms of type of interaction in different contexts. The study also finds that privacy and control, such as a mute function or an on & off function, are desired in order to adjust the digital assistant and integrate it into everyday activities. Finally, stress management with digital assistants is highly personal and how users would relate to and integrate digital assistants into their everyday activities for stress management is unique to each user.

It is becoming more common to replace or augment human-based decisions with algorithmic calculations and evaluations using artificial intelligence (AI). Facial analysis systems (FA) are examples of how AI in particular is intertwined with both the most mundane and the most critical aspects of human life. Exploring images for the purposes of face detection, recognition and/or classification, FA shows an entanglement between human identity, self-presentation and computation. In this chapter, we discuss automated facial analysis technology from a queer theoretical standpoint, focusing on the concerns and risks when systems like FA are used in a binary way to categorize, measure and make decisions based on computerized assumptions about gender and sexuality. Further, we discuss issues of privacy, bias and fairness related to FA technology as well as potential improvements, for example, by using participatory design. Finally, this chapter suggests that a queer perspective on FA can create new ways to relate to technology.

Digitization of data offers more opportunities for future health and medicine care due to the availability of information technology in our everyday lives. Several studies have provided us with insights in designing persuasive eHealth services, but only a few studies have investigated the design of a persuasive eHealth application by using presently available smartphones and while including the target group. By pursuing an iterative design process, three smartphone application prototypes were created and tested with senior citizens by using cognitive walkthroughs, use case scenarios and semi-structured interviews. The results indicated that the target group involvement had positive influences on the design of the prototypes, with user insights uncovering setbacks and opportunities in the design. Thus, the study presents a set of primary characteristics for designing a persuasive eHealth application to be usable with smartphones and how the iterative design process with the involvement of senior citizens shaped the design.

Driven by a critique of Ishii et al’s recent vision of Radical Atoms we call for a debate on the different conceptual paradigms underlying the TEI community and its activities. TEI was initiated to share and connect different perspectives, but we feel conceptual debate is lacking. To fuel this debate, we start with comparing two paradigms by examining the Radical Atoms proposal and balance it from our design-led perspective. Our aim with this paper is to revive the richness of TEI’s multidisciplinary approach.

This paper presents an exploratory work on using Large Language Models (LLM) in User Experience (UX) design. Previous research shows that UX designers struggle to envision novel designs and to prototype with AI as a design material. We set out to investigate the question of how designers can be sensitized to LLMs, and their implications for the professional role of UX designers. Using autobiographical design, we develop a prototype of a digital workspace (the “PromptBoard”) for designing and prototyping chatbots utilizing ChatGPT. A design sprint workshop with six participants is performed, in an effort to answer the research questions by working with the PromptBoard. Discussions and participant-designed artifacts are analysed using thematic analysis. Findings include that participants are able to express design ideas and successfully create chatbots using the tool but express a conflicting sense of lacking creativity or ownership of the results. Implications to the field of UX design are discussed.

Swedish healthcare are in need of radical changes to meet the requirements from both the government and the patients to create organisational working methods that better support the patients through their healthcare processes. Digitalization of patient data has been going on for decades in order to increase participation and understanding among patients in their care processes. However, availability of information does not ensure understanding. Therefore, resources should be devoted to create conditions to enable participation. The purpose of this study is to explore how visualization of patient data in the patient’s journal can affect the consultation in the encounter between the doctor and the patient. Qualitative interviews were conducted with both patients and doctors. The study suggests that a visualized digital journal could represent a educational tool and contribute to a greater understanding between the patient and the doctor, required that it’s features correspond rather comlex visualization. According to this study, greater understanding in the patient would reasonably generate more and different questions than today, which would not necessarily improve the efficiency in the konsultation. According to the study, greater understanding in the patient would reasonably generate more and different questions than today, which would not necessarily improve the efficiency in the konsultation. Furthermore, a visualized patient's journal may influence the salutogenic effect in the care process why demands regarding the way the resource should be used has to be established.

Financial moments are deeply embedded in everyday life and affect all people's lives and activities. People make on a regular basis a lot of financial decisions which are related to day-to-day survival, different banking products, investments, insurance, taxes and much more. Managing all these activities can be intimidating, especially for young people who are transitioning to the adult world. This thesis explores how design can support young adults in improving their financial wellbeing with focus on personal freedom and collective engagement. Aim of the project has been to reimagine the interactions that young people have with financial data and translate numbers into concepts they can relate to, in order to design for more caring and inclusive financial services. The proposed solution is a practical answer to the challenges of emerging adulthood, the nuances of financial independence and the act of togetherness. It is developed with the aim to fit with the existing financial ecosystem and technology. More specifically, the end product is a mobile banking service, Donut, that enables young people to dream, plan and manage their finances with a social twist.

Remotely-controlled technologies are no longer limited to military applications, such as unmanned military airborne weapons or explosive diffuser robots. Nowadays we can see more and more of remotely controlled devices used as medical equipment, toys, and so forth. One of the most recent areas of interest is robotic telepresence, also known as Mobile Robot Presence (MRP), which provides the ability to interact socially and professionally with other people and even objects in remote locations. One of the known issues with using remotely-controlled devices is the cognitive overload which their operators (pilots) experience and MRP pilots are no exception. However, despite vast research on different ways to address this in military or medical scenarios, little has been done regarding MRPs. This thesis study aims to make a contribution in closing that gap by suggesting a method, developing a prototype implementing it; then conducting an empirical assessment of the method and the prototype as a part of a broader study on MRP, supported by Swedish Research Council. I have suggested a method comprised of a Secondary-task (ST) method and Subjective Rating Scales (SRS), in which the latter act as an evaluation method for the former. Both of them were used in an overarching study in search for the best control device amongst four chosen devices. I collected and analyzed secondary task performance data (e.g. response time, error rates), subjective user ratings, explicit rankings, and observations recordings. My analysis of the collected data shows that using a monitoring and response face recognition secondary task is a plausible method for the assessment of MRP pilot’s cognitive load.

This paper elaborates on design visions for computing, by attending to the values expressed in ideals around post-industrial ways of living. Such ideals highlight finitude not only as a challenge to overcome, but as an aesthetic quality, captured by notions of preciousness. We discuss three themes: to embrace possibilities within limits, to resist fantasies of unlimited power, and welcoming complexity as an inherent feature of the living.

Ajna is a musical cabinet made from a rich composition of acoustic materials and designed to perform digitally composed music. In this paper, we aim to unpack the design as well as key aspects of the design process that lead up to this unique artwork. We base our analysis on interviews with its two creators as well as on observations of Ajna performing in different contexts. From the perspective of interaction design, we first analyse the process of its making through the negotiations between physical form, temporal from, and the interactive gestalts. Lastly, we place these negotiations in a larger picture of bricolage as a design approach. Based on this we then discuss the qualities of bricolage in interaction design.

More-than-human design represents a paradigm shift that decentralises the human in relation to the rest of the living world. As part of this movement, scholars call for a new worldview that recognizes the interconnectedness between human and non-human beings. Prior studies have focused on the experience of human-human connections, leaving the more- than-human largely unexplored. Addressing this gap, this study explores design strategies for fostering feelings and reflections of interconnectedness towards the more-than-human world and associated emotions. With a research-through-design methodology, two workshops were conducted, resulting in six key design strategies and an "interconnectedness experience framework". The strategies were evaluated through a prototype in partnership with AquaPrint, a Swedish company that up-cycles fishing nets into designer furniture. Future research should evaluate the strategies individually and in combinations as well as in a field setting. The presented framework and strategies are intended for practitioners as inspiration in design projects to promote noticing the more-than-human world, and encouraging a posthuman perspective. 

As a result of the rapid development of technology and the implementation of it in work environments, productivity and profit can increase for an organization. Email has led to much shorter ways of communication but there are also less positive aspects of technology. Technostress, information overload and email overload are all three effects of this new ubiquitous digital era. We ask how individual information workers manage and reply to incoming email, to extend our knowledge regarding the effects of email overload on information workers, and to identify their coping strategies in their work life context. This knowledge can be used by practitioners, designers and researchers to develop email as a service further. By conducting nine qualitative interviews with information workers employed in three different organization, we found that balance in email management is important to utilize the full potential of the service, and it would be useful for individuals, as well as organizations, to establish clear rules regarding email use both within work hours, as well as on leisure time.

In recent years, many PC and console video games have seen a shift towards live service models as a means of generating recurring revenue through in-game purchases called microtransactions. Microtransactions have been linked to the concept of dark patterns—design patterns that favour the service at the expense of the end user—due to their possible negative impact on the user experience. One widespread yet poorly studied microtransaction is the battle pass, particularly from a player perspective. In order to investigate playerattitudes to dark patterns found in battle passes, we conducted two studies, by looking at battle passes found in 19 games, and by carrying out a series of discussion workshops, to identify dark pattern commonalities in battle passes, and to find out how players perceive and experience dark patterns in battle passes, respectively. Data was analysed by means of reflexive thematic analysis in both studies. The results show that battle passes attempt to drive increased player engagement and spending in a number of ways, and further that players have complex—and often contradictory—relationships to battle passes.

In recent years, research on explainable AI (henceforth, XAI) has intensified, responding to the societal challenge that many algorithmic approaches (such as machine learning or autonomous intelligent systems) are rapidly increasing in complexity, making it difficult for citizens to understand their assistance and to accept the decisions they suggest. There now exists a large body of approaches pushing forward many ideas of how algorithms should be made explainable or even be able to explain their own output. However, the users’ perspective is rarely taken into account seriously. Obviously, not only research dimensions but also putting into operation a true involvement of the users are missing.

In this meeting, we therefore gathered scholars from different disciplines to account for the question of how explanation generation can be tailored to the users and their way of understanding. Starting this 4-days meeting, we proposed that, rather than being ‘delivered’ by the explainer, explanations become tailored when they emerge at the interface between the explainer (or explaining system) on the one hand and explainee (the receiver of an explanation) on the other hand. Both are active participants in shaping explanations during a social interaction. We thus considered social interaction to be the key to the involvement of the users. 

Algorithmic management is establishing itself as an emergent technology that creates value for businesses all over the world. It has however led to an epidemic of wellbeing issues among workers managed by it. Recently human-computer interaction researchers have started to investigate how to design it in ways to instead foster wellbeing. This thesis builds on the aforementioned growing field of research and aims to contribute by conducting a research through design study through the lens of Self-determination theory by answering the research question: “What worker-centred design guidelines can be formulated to ensure that algorithmic management systems foster wellbeing and motivation in retail environments?”. To answer this research question, contextual inquiries and design workshops with retail workers informed the formulation of eight guidelines for designing algorithmic management for wellbeing and motivation. The guidelines are to be seen as a foundation when designing retailstore algorithmic management systems to motivate workers using the system, ratherthan lowering their sense of wellbeing

This article discusses how the artifact of Research through Design (RtD) is changing due to data technology. The article firstly reviews the character and role of the prototype in RtD traditions informed by practices of skillful crafting and industrial design manufacturing. It then describes the move of RtD to data-enabled practices to offer a conceptualization of artifacts as connected things, that is, decentralized objects that actively collapse the division between design participation, user interaction and the creation and distribution of products and services. By considering connected things as capable of ‘making’ things too, the article positions the changing character and role of the RtD artifact in relation to three key shifts in design practice: (1) the agential shift towards the inclusion of things as partners in design, (2) the temporal shift towards always available opportunities for co-creation, and (3) the infrastructural shift towards unstable forms of value. The article concludes with a discussion on the implications of these changes for how knowledge might be generated, critiqued and shared in future data-enabled RtD practice.

This study investigates the perspectives of healthcare professionals regarding the

integration of consumer health applications and patient-generated data into healthcare

practices. Through semi-structured interviews with five healthcare professionals from

different regions in Sweden, this thesis explores key features that are most valuable to

health professionals in enhancing health personnel-patient collaboration as well as how

patient-generated data from self-tracking applications can be best integrated into

healthcare practices towards achieving health goals. The findings reveal a positive

attitude towards these applications, with healthcare professionals recognizing their value

in promoting patient engagement, facilitating data-driven decision-making, and

enhancing collaboration between patients and providers. However, concerns regarding

data reliability, privacy, and the need for seamless integration into existing workflows

are highlighted. The study contributes to the understanding of healthcare professionals'

perspectives and provides insights into the design and potential adoption and effective

implementation of consumer health applications in healthcare settings.