Research in interaction design builds knowledge around the concepts and practices involved in creating and using interfaces that mediate between people and computational systems.
In the last decade, interaction design has found itself in a rather unique position. As an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon many domains such as Human Computer Interaction (HCI), product and graphic design, informatics, art, engineering and critical practice, it has grown the potential to situate itself in a critical position between emerging technologies and culture. Our take on interaction design draws on a purposefully broad range of contexts and approaches from HCI, product, graphic design and visualisation, media, communication and also from particular approaches to prototyping and crafting with electronics and software. In particular, we investigate emerging modes of doing exploratory design research that result from the newfound relations between product, interaction and communications design. Our communicative design research methods are aimed at exploring emerging technologies that work from a design informed position with distinct qualities of hands-on making and form-giving, where tangible materials and prototypes are formed alongside visualisation and other mediating processes.
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Understand and capture long-term sustainability in ecological crises by imagining and investigating future life forms and styles. Read »
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This project assembles the body of transdisciplinary PhD outputs in Design at AHO in the form of compilation based and monograph type theses, supported by institutional, national and international research funding. Specific PhD projects in addition each have their own project page and links to related larger projects and research networks. Read »
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SEDNA (“Safe maritime operations under extreme conditions: the Arctic case”) is a research project that is developing an innovative and integrated risk-based approach to safe Arctic navigation, ship design and operation. Read »
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ONSITE seeks to strengthen the Norwegian maritime industry by developing knowledge that can secure an efficient feedback loop between field studies carried out in maritime operations and design processes onshore. Read »
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This 7th Nordic Design Research Conference comes at a time when earlier social, political and economic conditions, expectations and frameworks are under pressure, and indeed change, globally. Relations between design and power are today perhaps more present that before and them are seemingly strongly polarised. What then are design practitioners, educators, researchers, policy makers and activists, among others, to make of these changes and how are they to engage in effecting informed, ethical, participative and meaningful change? Read »
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Anticipation 2017 is a unique, radically interdisciplinary forum for exploring how ideas of the future inform action in the present. It brings together researchers, policy makers, scholars and practitioners to push forward thinking on issues ranging from modelling, temporality and the present to the design, ethics and power of the future. AHO is represented on the Organising Committee by Professor Andrew Morrison and has funded the conference website. This conference brings fresh input from design inquiry to this futures event. Read »
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The inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities in the workplace is limited. It is challenging to find, secure and keep suitable jobs. The majority go directly on to disability income after finishing high school. The InnArbeid project investigates how to improve this transition from school and into a working life. The aim is to develop services and technology that enable young people with intellectual disabilities to make use of their abilities in the workplace. This will bring about benefits both to the individual – in terms of improved quality of life – and for society at large, in terms of reduced expenses and an increased value creation. Read »
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PERFORM – Making Movement Matter is a transdisciplinary, practice-based research project that explores digital and visual engagement with kinaesthesia – our awareness of body position and movement. Through digital tools and improvisational workshops the aim is to examine how a heightened experience of kinaesthesia may play a role in identifying new, ethically responsible pathways to efficacy and social agency. Read »
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Commissioned by the AHO Board as a Review of Research, the Quality for Impact project aims to build knowledge about research at AHO and its relation to wider professional, educational, commercial and societal impact. The qualitative nature of the study will help develop situated knowledge about a diversity of approaches and insights in ‘design’ based inquiry. Read »
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The primary deliverable for this project is the free, open source Vega platform, intended for publishing digital and media-rich academic research in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and sciences. This content-management system will be a ‘turnkey’ publishing platform for print-like and scholarly multimedia journals, books, and data sets. The platform includes features that will help editors and publishers provide an accessible, secure, sustainable, flexible, open, free, and collaborative environment for authors and readers to engage with building and reading multimedia-rich, peer-reviewed content. Read »
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This research project is about exploring and bring forward new knowledge about the evolving practice of healthcare service design in the context of design labs. It was carried out using action research as an approach, through establishing four embedded design labs inside three different large hospitals in Norway over a period of six years, to study how healthcare service design is practiced and may be advanced in design lab settings. Read »
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The Centre for Connected Care (C3) aims to accelerate adoption and diffusion of patient-centric innovations that change patient pathways and delivery systems, empower the patients and increase growth in the healthcare industry. The ambition is to bring together different stakeholders to research and co-develop new knowledge, infrastructure and healthcare services. Read »
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Service Design is rapidly expanding to include the provision of services for health and well-being. DOT is an AHO strategically funded initiative into the design-driven investigation of providing improved and new services for ‘welfare technology’ and person-centred health development. DOT refers to ‘Design for offentlige tjenester’ in Norwegian. Read »
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The project facilitates knowledge transfer between ongoing research projects and research and development projects in industry. It arranged and facilitated meeting between academia, industry and design service providers. Read »
It is important for marine industry to harvest data from ongoing marine activities to ensure development of competitive ships and equipment. The study involved planning, carrying out and analyzing of multiple field trips to vessels operating in the north sea. Read »
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The requirements of designing for immersion and designing for interaction present a range of dilemmas and opposing forces. This research project attempts to shed some light on how to untangle some of these conflicting requirements, from both a theoretical and a practical standpoint, in the particular context of art installation environments – spaces that are open to the public and promise to reward visitors with some kind of ‘experience’. Read »
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Matters to do with methods are often underplayed in design research – energy that goes into designing is not always turned onto experimentation in research methods. We see a need to more fully explore how richer relationships can be built between the techniques of designing and the methods of researching in a qualitative mode. Read »
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This PhD is a study of the designs of commenting sections in online magazines and newspapers. Read »
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The mediation of research to a variety of audiences is becoming increasingly important. How are we to depict, demonstrate and convey our design practices while at the same time communicating our analyses of them and their connection to other studies? What can the various domains of design bring to the presentation of design research and what roles can interaction and communication design play in mediating our processes, methods, rhetorics and insights? How can we make apparent the character of project-based and collaborative inquiry? Read »
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The goal of this PhD-project is to develop frameworks and practices within design research that support early-phase exploration and shaping of emerging technologies. Read »
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UBV is a design practice driven research project. By actively participating in the development of an innovative new control bridge for large ships, we seek to investigate design practice in context of Norwegian maritime sector. The goal is to develop both an understanding of and developing strategies for the inclusion of experience oriented industrial and interaction design practice inside large scale maritime projects. Central in UBV is to incorporate design practitioners holistic approach to product experiences which includes aesthetical and personal aspects in addition to function and usability considerations. Read »
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What if we could redefine the whole bridge environment and change everything from the room layout to furniture design, and from the fundamental interaction techniques to details on the screen? This is the scope for the researchers, designers and engineers developing the Ulstein Bridge Concept (UBC) project. Together we aim to create research and designs that can direct the development of the future ship bridges of offshore service vessels. Read »
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Touch is a research project that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. We are developing applications and services that enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. Touch consists of an inter-disciplinary team involved in social and cultural enquiry, interaction/industrial design, rapid prototyping, software, testing and exhibitions. Read »
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The goal of the RHYME project is to improve health and life quality for persons with severe disabilities, through use of “co-creative tangibles”. These are ICT based, mobile, networked and multimodal things, which communicate following musical, narrative and communicative principles. They are interactive, social, intelligent things that motivate people to play, communicate and co-create, and thereby reduce passivity and isolation, and strengthen health and well-being. Read »
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This thesis analysis how the vast deployment of network and computational technologies into our spatial environments is prompting us to reconsider what “products” are, what they are made of and how they are designed. Moreover, I argue that we through a material and communicative design practice can contribute to foster agency and understanding, for both designer and the wider public sphere, within this sociotechnical context. Read »
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This project focuses on researching and developing innovative social media services to promote social engagement and participation among youth. These services are developed mainly to support a group of organizations that promote social engagement among youth. These organizations are NRK, Edda Media (media), Plan Norway (humanitarian), and Kongsvinger Kommune (local government).The project is lead by the market research agency OPINION. AHO will conduct the research for this project together with independent research organisation SINTEF. Read »
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This thesis research makes a case for full-body movement as a creative material in explorative design processes of movement-based digital interactions. The thesis is positioned within the domains of and intersections between digital technology, performance and communication. Read »
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A technique emerging from recent developments in lighting and computing is the use of three-dimensional arrays of controllable lights (LEDs) to create dynamic visual experiences that occupy physical space and can be explored from within. These techniques can be used to give the impression of presence, movement and form within physical space. The Ocean of Light project builds on previous experience to explore both the creative and artistic potential of such systems, principally when incorporated into interactive public art projects. Read »