Growing up, social constructs like roles, norms and values are being internalised and naturalised. Despite offering a sense of stability, such constructs also prohibit equality, justice and diversity, by pushing people into categories, roles and norms they do not represent. However, once internalised, social constructs fall under the surface of awareness, making their mitigation and re-framing a complex task. This also poses a great challenge for designers, who often aim to create fair and inclusive futures for those marginalised and discriminated against.

Attempts are made to mitigate bias by introducing artificial intelligence (AI). Technology however, often acts as a double-edged sword, having the abilities to both identify and mitigate bias, or amplify inequality, reinforce existing stereotypes and increase injustice.

Recognising both the potential but also the limitations of AI, this thesis explores the idea of reflexive designer-AI interactions, as a new form of human-machine collaboration towards more reflective design practitioners who are able to surface and dismantle and rethink personal and collective imaginings. Seeing a key role in reflection, often criticised behaviour of AI, like inconsistency, unpredictability and confrontation, are being explored as potentially meaningful for triggering critical and self-reflective thinking and decision making in design.

Following a speculative and introspective research through design approach, this thesis explores such reflexive interactions in the context of gender representation in child toys. The hypothesis is that the introduction of reflection and a change in mindset when engaging with AI, can be productive in terms of mitigating gender bias in child toys. In order to envision the situated designer-AI interactions, a speculative vision of the first gender fluid child toy company is introduced. This vision serves as a tool for presenting queer future AI-design practices, but also as a critique of current gender stereotypes in the design of children's toys.

Technological exploration insights are translated into four design tactics, resulting in designer reflection and bias awareness. Those tactics are applied and explored in practice, by designing three gender-ambiguous child toys. Each toy represents a new reflexive design-AI workflow. Each workflow differently illustrates human and non-human collaboration that surfaces, de-familiarizes and dismantles personal and collective imaginings of gender in toys. Additionally, these speculative practices also challenge the status quo in design, raising awareness about design and AI issues that need to be addressed further in the future.

Taking into account the insights from the experiments, as well as prototype testing with children and evaluating expert interviews, this project concludes that reflexive interactions – as proposed alternative to traditional human-AI interactions and in addition to the current design practice – are potentially productive to surface, dismantle and re-familiarize personal bias and collective imaginings. Furthermore, does this thesis suggest that AI’s often negatively described behaviour like confusion and inconsistency, also carry the power to trigger reflective practices that help surfacing and challenge bias. However potentially limiting factors like ecological, economical and social cost as well as ethical concerns are discussed.

his master thesis is the outcome of a journey into the New Service Development (NSD) practices of large organizations involved in business to business (B2B)  innovation. The scope of the project is to generate new knowledge on the challenges that organizations face to engage business customers into their internal innovation processes. Research shows that, in B2B settings, customer involvement is one of the critical success factors for meaningful service innovation. Structuring such engagements bring to less uncertain results.
In collaboration with the Innovation Labs of ING Bank, the project applies a service-centred design approach to understand the barriers for smooth customer involvement in innovation, defining a new process to structure the early stages of development taking into account the experiences of the stakeholders involved. Different research activities were conducted within the case study in collaboration with innovators, service designers, and front office professionals to explore the problem areas and define the most important challenges as experienced by professionals working on new service development in the context of B2B corporate finance. The research, both in literature and in the case study, has provided a picture of the intrinsic complexity of these processes, especially in the fuzzy front end, which is usually experimental, chaotic, difficult to plan and unpredictable. The challenges highlighted from the research are linked to a current barrier present between innovation Labs and the front office department of the bank, which is the one directly involved in customer-facing activities. This barrier prevents the smooth involvement of customers in new service development practices. Focusing on the challenges and using an iterative design approach, I have developed a new process and the tools needed to structure collaboration between the front office department and the innovation Labs to ultimately support customer-centricity in the fuzzy front end of innovation.The concept proposed specifically focuses on the role of Relationship Managers as key elements to facilitate and sensitize clients on collaborative solution development. By creating a new way of working based on trust and transparency, relationship managers will be enabled to have a proactive approach towards innovation, supporting internal projects in reaching out to the bank’s clients base for co-creation. The final proposal is centred on three main points: Providing a structure and a way of working to facilitate collaboration between the innovation Labs and colleagues working in the front office with client-facing roles.Providing tools to support the new role of RMs as a facilitator of innovation practices and mediator between customers and initiatives. Providing a customer-centric approach to solution ideation that focuses on real contextual understanding of the client’s problems to define solutions that bring real value to customers. The tools presented in the process have been tested with front office professionals in the case study through digital prototype testing.The results of the test show that the introduction of a common way of working between innovation and the front office department will greatly enhance trust in the innovation process and collaboration between the two areas of the organization. 

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

Today's mobile devices powered by batteries have kept feeding users endless entertainment and convenience, whereas always accompanied by some unfavorable experiences that is 'Always have to recharge'. The puzzle of battery life has been an inevitable limitation that could probably degrade user experience, even though smartphones, smart homes, and smart wearables are growing ever more advanced. A new technology named 'Energy Harvesting' emerges. As an enabler of battery-less devices, it has exceptional potential in replacing the battery as the power source for future mobile devices. On the other hand, however, accompanied by enormous potential, energy harvesting will also bring tremendous concerns. Current mobile device users have equipped the knowledge of handling the limited battery life and formulated a cognition towards energy in battery-based devices. In other words, the Current Energy partnership, meaning the interactive and cognitive relations between users and energy in battery-based devices, is built on the battery capacity limitation. However, such a partnership will not be compatible with the non-battery devices in which battery life is no longer a limitation.

The central aim of this research has been to explore the current and future Energy Partnership between users and future intermittently powered devices. The Research-through-Design methodology has been employed, embracing online surveys, user interviews, prototypes design, and user tests to launch a collaborative discussion with interviewees about the possibilities of the future Energy Partnership.

From a set of user studies and a systematic integration of previous research, the current EP Model is proposed to demonstrating the interactive and cognition process between users and the energy in battery-based mobile devices. The research found that the current energy partnership can be conceptualized as a balance between user and appropriate usage time. Building on the current EP Model and insights distilled from expert interviews, a hypothetical EP Model has been developed, articulating the transformation of Energy Partnership brought by energy harvesting technology. The hypothesis was then iterated twice through designing and testing the prototype simulating the energy behavior of intermittently powered devices.

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