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In this study, we introduce a new approach to addressing the complexities of health systems challenges, which we name the Ecology of Design Briefs. This approach offers a structured framework for delivering key leverage points within these challenges and creating a conceptual space for feasible design opportunities. Acknowledging the limited reach of individual design solutions in tackling the complexities of health systems challenges, our approach draws on the ecology concept of Transition Design. The utilisation of the Ecology of Design Briefs results in a collection of interconnected specification documents for design projects that guide the creative process, working together synergistically to tackle the complexities. This approach was applied to enhance hospital care experiences for individuals with acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Hospitalisations for this group frequently lead to multidimensional negative experiences, and addressing these issues is closely linked to resolving underlying health systems problems. Our findings suggest that the developed briefs provide comprehensive, mutually reinforcing, and detailed insights necessary for understanding these challenges. This study contributes to health systems problem-solving by conceptualising the Ecology of Design Briefs as an approach and documenting its application in a hospital care setting.

This article reflects on how patient education tool design can benefit from a co-creation process with patients and key stakeholders involved, using a case study in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) care. Unfavourable hospitalisation experiences for COPD patients are often linked to organisational issues and health literacy challenges. This study presents insights from a year-long co-creation practice involving COPD patients, a family member, healthcare practitioners, and hospital managers, aimed at developing patient education tools to enhance health literacy concerning the hospitalisation process. The primary outcome is a set of patient education infographics that can be integrated into digital platforms or printed formats. For such co-creation practice, we found that setting clear creativity expectations and using methods such as user journey maps empower participants. Balancing the power dynamics between patients and healthcare practitioners enables culturally relevant and patient-centred tools. In addition, family members play a crucial role in both co-creation process and care journey, while hospital managers ensure tools align with clinical practices. We also advocate for an ecological perspective towards intervention development, acknowledging diverse needs emerged from the co-creation process. Future research should implement strategies in further individualising infographics to improve their effectiveness.

Choosing the appropriate design process is critical for the effective implementation and long-term sustainment of interventions aimed at addressing public health challenges. To address this need, we proposed a Transition Design model to identify and deliver sustainable solutions for complex healthcare problems. This model generates system-level health-intervention initiatives that can synergistically function, particularly during the development and implementation phases, to enhance healthcare delivery. Drawing from a case study on addressing the challenges of hospitalisations and early discharge for people with acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (AECOPD), we reflected on the process and analysed the outcomes. Although further testing for the initiatives is warranted, this study contributes to the evolving discourse in design research on systems solutioning for public-health challenges.

This paper explores how a performance piece can enact and embody conceptual ideas to illuminate what truly matters in the experience of being together. By combining linguistic expression with performative embodiment, the work begins to articulate a new poetics of togetherness—one that offers a scaffold for discourse in psychology and technologically mediated human interactions, while also reshaping how we imagine future relations with Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI).

Central to this investigation is the development and use of a novel video-conferencing system, NUNA, designed in a teleprompter style to enable natural eye contact and mutual regulation during remote interactions. The system was used in a performance titled When I Becomes We, in which performers and participants engaged through NUNA to explore different kinds of presence and a shared sense of togetherness, what we call “interpresence”. This approach expands the idea of presence beyond information exchange and task performance, instead offering an embodied experience of togetherness and opening up to other aesthetics of being together.

The paper argues that the enacted performance within an interdisciplinary research setting contributed to a reframing of fundamental questions in psychology and human-technology interaction. A central outcome is the concept of interpresence, which is proposed as a key framework. Interpresence is situated as shaping how we imagine futures with ASI. Unlike dominant narratives that tend to abstract or disembody human agency, interpresence offers a calm, relational scaffold at the centre of the AI storm in which the human remains actively and meaningfully in the loop.

Press release: 

The performance will see artists experiment with new forms of networked social interaction. At the heart of the installation will be the Nuna machine itself, a kind of teleprompter with specific software and a robotic camera. The Nuna allows users to authentically experience eye contact in the virtual world. It is designed to identify new opportunities for transforming detached online meetings into “real” personal connections. Major ventures within the same realm have recently been launched by Google (Project Starline) and Apple (Vision Pro). What makes the Nuna stand out (except that it works, right now) is the immediate control over eye contact and time delay, factors that are central in the human system for being together in a moment, and in its extension gives clearer understanding of what’s missing in normal online interactions. Combining the Nuna technology with an artistic investigation of the phenomena of interpresence, this project breakes new ground within multiple fields.

Working across design, art, AI, psychology, neuroscience, and mathematics, the Interpresence Intstitute are using all available methods for putting focus on that special feeling of being present, together. The team: Christoffel Kuenen, Umeå Institute of Design; Gabriel Bohm Calles, Academy of Fine Art ;Niclas Kaiser, Dept of Psychology; David Risberg, Umeå Institute of Design; Performers: Amalia Wänman, Peter Andersson (friday & saturday), Lollo Aurell (friday), Sef Aurell (saturday).

Summary of the performance/exeperiment: 

When the sound stops working in the middle of a concert. When a speaker is interrupted by a member of the audience and chooses to listen and respond. The show we expected stops and another kind of contact becomes possible. When the form is broken, we become visible, or rather, our capacity for contact comes to the fore and becomes apparent to us. Niclas Kaiser's and Emily Butler's theory of social breathing focuses on this ability which, like hearing, is something we cannot turn off and which shapes our entire world without us noticing.

During the 70s, the artist Dan Graham worked with mirrors, video cameras and monitors to create shifts in our perception of time, the present, and ourselves. In Time Delay Room, he shifted the viewer's experience away from the work to their experience of themself as a viewer. On a wall, two monitors show the room they are mounted in but from two different angles. When the visitor enters, they expect to see themselves on the screens but the room remains empty. Only after an eight-second delay do they see themselves stepping into the left monitor while the right keeps showing an empty room. Only after another eight seconds do they appear on the right one as well. Eight seconds is the limit of what we can hold in our immediate memory and perceive as the present. The result is that the visitor can never fully identify with what they see on the screens, but instead gets stuck in a constant observation of themselves.

The artist Janet Cardiff has worked with hearing and sound as a starting point for over 30 years. In installations and audiowalks (voice-guided walks), she has explored both the associative power of sound and hearing as one of our primary senses. In the work The 40 part motet we encounter the sound recording of a choral piece, but Cardiff has recorded each of the singers alone and presents the work with a loudspeaker for each voice. 40 speakers in a ring together manifest the striking discrepancy between the embodied voice and our expected experience of a sound recording.

What is happening here and how is it related to our work? The philosopher and dancer Susan Kozel has for many years worked on formulating phenomenological experiences of a technologically expanded corporeality. In her book Closer, she describes what phenomenologists call the 'pre-reflective' state. A state that allows us to step around preconceived notions and meet and experience something new. We can visit this state (never dwell) in several ways. Partly by simply arresting our assessing and categorizing the situation, but also through, for example, improvisation. As a performing artist, Kozel easily draws parallels to music and dance when she describes the role of improvisation in her work and that of others. By changing, among other things, rhythm and tempo, an experience can go from slow and contemplative to fast and changing. She further says that improvisation can be used to break up the everyday and thus make the invisible visible. There is a strong relation between improvisation and play.

Graham and Cardiff both manage to engage their viewers bodily. The works are open in such a way that any meaning is subordinate to the fact that in a pre-reflective stage we know how to deal with them and simply start to play. In documentation of Graham's Time Delay Room, we see visitors bewilderedly waving to themselves with no response. Once they realize what is going on, many laugh and get caught up in a kind of strange game of contact with themselves.

Visitors to The 40 Part Motet  immediately begin to interact with the work. They walk along the rows of speakers, approach them from behind, try to create their own sections and find the nearest voices. Some experiment with walking past the speakers at different speeds. Others are left standing with a big smile on their face.

Nuna provides the possibility of eye contact in a screen conversation. Here, Nuna breaks the expected, normal experience and potentially enables a contact previously reserved for the direct meeting between people in the same room. This is a technique that until now only existed in science fiction. In Star Trek where Captain Picard addresses alien captains directly through the 'main viewer'. But also in 1984 where the training instructor suddenly addresses Smith personally and scolds him for not performing the movements correctly. The fact that the technology is new creates a window for spontaneous play. The same isolation of a particular experience of what it means to be human occurs here as in Graham's and Cardiff's work. By further handing over the ability to manipulate both the degree of eye contact and the delay of sound and image to the visitors, we hope to create a similar environment of play. By shaking up the form, our natural ability for making and keeping contact comes to the fore. When is it there? When does it break? How do we maintain it and what tests can it withstand?

This is our first experiment with Nuna, which will form the basis for developing artistic investigations based in clinical psychology of the natural and automatic processes that enable all human contact. 

The covid-19 pandemic has severely limited the possibility for people to meet physically, which forced many individuals and organizations to employ online meetings as their predominant mode of communication. A potential problem with the unprecedentedly central role of online meetings in a wide range of everyday activities is the disruption it may cause to intersubjective experiences, an intuitive mutual understanding of the participants and their thinking of themselves as a group, a "we". To address this problem, about half a year into the pandemic we conducted an exploratory study, in which the informants (N=36) completed a survey, comprising a set of Likert scales and open-ended questions focusing on "team spirit", moment-to-moment coordination, emotions, and the sense of presence in online and physical meetings. The results indicate that online meetings may present particular challenges regarding the experience of "we-ness", and different types of online meetings can be experienced differently. Implications of the results for further research are discussed.

Design deals with matters of aesthetics. Historically, aesthetics in industrial design refers to the designed artifact: aesthetics of objects. When designed artifacts include digital technologies, aesthetics in design refers to what happens between people and artifacts as well: aesthetics of interaction. Now that these artifacts increasingly mediate our social lives, what aesthetics in design quite obviously also refers to, is what happens between people.

This dissertation proposes an aesthetic of being together, as a necessary addition to current notions of aesthetics in interaction design practice, when it engages with digital systems that are part of people’s social life. It does not answer the question what Aesthetics is in general, instead it examines the work that particular notions of aesthetics do in interaction design practice.

The practice based design research assembled in this dissertation starts from current notions of aesthetics in interaction design to explore the social experiences that mediated interactions between groups of people offer. What I found, through designing digital systems, is that current notions of aesthetics in interaction design are not conducive to addressing the kind of social experience people have with such systems. On the contrary, current notions actually inhibit interaction design to approach any experiences that cannot in the first place be conceived of as useful in terms of instrumental task performance. Yet, being social is hardly like performing a task or using other people in that sense.

An aesthetic of being together is a proposition of a different fundament for interaction design practice. In addition to referring to properties of things and qualities of interacting with things, it refers to the kind of relations that come to expression between people interacting with each other with these things. Consequently, interaction design needs to resolve basic issues in what it considers and brings to expression, i.e. people’s relations with things and people at the same time. This requires (re-) considering what the designed thing is, what interaction is about and what the role of design is in bringing those to expression.

My work contributes to the field of interaction design research an example of how, through practice, fundamental issues can be addressed. By orienting one set of concepts, ways of working and objectives into a different design situation, tensions built up that exposed foundational issues with that frame of reference, while pointing to the different fundaments needed to enable design practice to engage such situations.

The results of the practical experimentation led to the articulation of a series of structural mechanisms of mediating systems.  These mechanisms provide material handles for interaction designers on how experiences of being present with others take shape. They configure the relations of artifacts and people in different ways than current notions of aesthetics afford. This theoretical investigation is then synthesised in the form of a new logic of expression for interaction design practice: an aesthetic of being together.

Design research is regarded to be a mode of inquiry particularly suited to engage with complex topics. In our work, we are interested in unpacking the complexity at the heart of an embodied aesthetic experience. In this article, through our digital and physical artefacts and a methodological reflection, we illustrate an ongoing design research project that a multi-disciplinary team of interaction designers, professional dancers, software developers, artists and 3D modelling experts are carrying out to develop insights on how to understand this complexity and how to use such insights as inspiration for interaction design-related projects. By embracing combinations of design, new technologies and simple visualisation tools, the project investigates the complex and hidden expressivity embedded in the skills of dancers in a programmatic design research approach. This investigation leads to insights on different levels. Firstly, cycles of formulation, realisation and reflection on design programs express parts of this complexity and this lets new research interests emerge. Secondly, as a body of work, reflecting on these cycles exposes how our “drifting” within this programmatic approach has started to unveil the complexities inherent in our research program. In this article we aim at contributing to the growing understanding of what designerly ways of knowing might be and how a practice aimed at expanding and contributing such knowledge unfolds.

In this paper, we report on an ongoing design research project MoCap Tango. Tango is a form of partner dancing in which two bodies sense each other in a dynamic, physical dialogue that is known for its subtle complexities, beauty and intimate experience. In MoCap Tango, we explore how we can use our skills as designers to highlight and unravel these embedded qualities and use them as inspiration in designing interactions. Using an optical Motion Capture System and custom-made passive markers, the movements of two world-class tango dancers are visualized in real- time. We present our motivation for this project, describe the first prototype and conclude with reflections on what this prototype revealed in terms of design opportunities and its relevance for the TEI community. 

The design process to create a wetsuit with heating system is shown in this paper. The wetsuit concept was inspired by characteristics of amphibians, so it was proposed a product that provides freedom of movement and adaptability into several environments. An intuitive interface without buttons or display based on human body language was created to activate the heating system of a wetsuit.