Projects

The world as we know it is drastically changing due to multiple crises, why we must develop strategies for new ways of living, and even for our fundamental economic systems. Technology is likely part of that solution, and this requires technology design students to cultivate resilience and to learn how to think in fundamentally different ways. However, technology design educators today are not equipped with materials for teaching students to re-consider alternative economic systems. Design as a discipline has been historically bound to the logic of production, consumption, and profit; what has been critiqued as the narrow limits of “entreprecariat” design work (Lorusso, 2019). Designers are funneled into service roles for corporations, producing value that rarely benefits their own communities, at best creating local services, but at worst contributing directly to a cascade of environmental issues due to extractionist practices elsewhere. In parallel, technologists often find their skills captured by monopolistic companies whose infrastructures drive further extraction and dependency. Often, these dependencies cross borders, currently involving deeply problematic ties with anti-democratic politics. Through desk research of best practices and ethnographic methods involving professionals in the field, this project explores how teaching materials can be developed to foster resilience by introducing alternative economic models in technology design education. The expected impact is to provide materials that teachers in higher education can use in technology design education to equip future professionals to address the polycrisis by advancing societal change rooted in post-growth values, collective practices, and even anarchist pre-revolutionary thinking.Description

This project explores how practitioners who design, develop and procure AI technologies in the public sector understand and navigate ethical challenges. While ethical guidelines for AI are widespread, they often remain abstract and disconnected from real-world practice. This study adopts a practice-oriented approach to ethics examining how ethical concerns emerge within everyday activities such as design and procurement, shaped by social, organisational, and technical factors.

The project pursues a threefold aim: (1) to provide a series of case studies for an in-depth understanding of the practices and ethical challenges faced by AI practitioners, (2) to map the strategies used by Danish municipalities to address the ethical issues AI practitioners navigate, (3) to develop toolkits that support AI practitioners in embedding ethical principles.

Focusing on Denmark's municipalities the project aims to support responsible, inclusive, and effective use of AI in the public sector.Description

Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that affects approximately 3–6% of school-aged children and is marked by persistent difficulties in understanding numbers, carrying out calculations, and comprehending arithmetical concepts [28, 24, 26, 6]. These difficulties can have a profound effect on a child’s learning, self-confidence, well-being, and participation in both academic and social contexts. Studies emphasize the need for individualized, engaging, and multisensory training environments for children with dyscalculia [14]. Augmented Reality (AR) technologies make it possible to seamlessly integrate digital content into the child’s physical environment, enabling multisensory, embodied, and context-based learning experiences. In addition, AR has the potential to significantly increase learners’ motivation, engagement, and attitudes towards the subject matter [1]. Nevertheless, research on dyscalculia remains limited [9, 17, 27], and in particular, little is known about how AR can be leveraged to support children with dyscalculia in mathematics training. The project (CountAR) aims to address this gap in research by investigating the central research question: how Augmented Reality can be designed to support children with dyscalculia in training mathematics in primary school? To address this question, the project will follow an educational Design-Based Research (DBR) methodology [21, 11, 29] and Participatory design approach [2], with iterative development of interventions in collaboration with dyscalculia experts and educational practitioners in primary schools. The main outcomes will be: 1) Co-design of ARbased educational interventions for dyscalculia together with experts, 2) Development of a prototype based on the co-design process, and 3) Preliminary evaluation with children to assess usability, engagement, and motivation.Description

We investigate the experiences with implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare. Implementation of AI in healthcare has proven to be complicated and fraught with difficulties. Hence, the many expectations to and investments in AI over the last decade is contrasted by the few examples of successful implementation of healthcare AI in Denmark as well as internationally. We have seen successful cases in Denmark and internationally, but even more project that that have stalled or been terminated. There is a need for collecting experiences and gaining an overview of implementations of AI in order to identify furthering and hindering factors in implementation processes. As one of the most digitized countries in the world, Denmark is an apt place to do this.

The project will apply qualitative methods and selected cases to develop an empirically based overview that will provide the basis for richly facetted and empirically based case examples of implementation experiences, as well as overall guidance and frameworks for implementing AI in healthcare. Cases will be selected with an aim of variety considering cases of AI for decision-support, diagnosis, or prediction on the one hand and cases of AI being implemented, in-use or being scaled.Description

The physical design of social robots plays a significant role in how they are perceived, as well as which social and emotional abilities are attributed to them. Robots today are often designed with a childlike and cute appearance, as existing research has shown that this can evoke strong emotional reactions in users and help to make the robots appear more friendly and trustworthy.

The challenge with this design choice is that such robots, through their physical form, are often attributed unintended and undesirable human social and emotional traits. Additionally, the childlike appearance can be perceived as patronising, which may lead to the robot not being accepted in the home.

When designing social robots for the future, it is important that their design provides an appropriate level of information about the robot's possibility for social coordination, without the user necessarily attributing human characteristics to the design.

The goal of the ACUTE project is to explore precisely this balancing act between sociality and the robot’s form. The project will investigate a new visual category of social robots for the home, inspired by the objects we surround ourselves with daily, rather than imitating living beings or machines, thereby generating new knowledge about how we as humans understand and decode social traits in robots.
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