My goal in the PhD is to understand the relationship between playfulness and Agonism to propose a model of how to design agonistic spaces – spaces that invite and nurture contestation and disagreement – making use of attributes of  playfulness. I focus on playfulness that manifests in everyday life. For example, when a person steps only on the tiles of a certain color on a sidewalk, or when someone draws a mustache on a poster at the bus stop. Since playfulness opens opportunities for re-interpretations of real life, it shares similar characteristics to an agonistic space. Agonism is a concept from the political sciences that focus on nurturing the many different and conflicting voices existing in democratic processes. Agonism understands that existing systems are never complete and that creating spaces where contestation and disagreement can exist is an essential part of democracy. By combining elements of playfulness and Agonism, I aim to create design interventions, workshops, and installations that mediate constructive conflict though design. I will then develop these actions in two different contexts: (1) the gender gap and invisible legacies in digital making, and (2) safe spaces and activism in community centers.

(Nathalia Campreguer França, MSc)

In today’s fast-paced world, we all lead busy lives, and finding time for physical activity can seem like a daunting task. However, my ongoing PhD research delves into a fascinating concept called “Opportunity Times,” which can change the way we think about time management and our well-being.
Imagine those moments in your daily routine when you’re not tied up with meetings, work commitments, or other obligations. These are your Opportunity Times—precious pockets of time when you have the chance to do something good for yourself, like exercise.
The main goal of my research is to address a common concern: the feeling that we don’t have enough time for physical activity. I want to show you that these opportunities do exist, and they can make a big difference in your life.
Here’s what my research is all about:

1. Finding Your Opportunity Times: I develop simple techniques to help you identify these pockets of time in your day. Once you spot them, you realize that there are more opportunities than you might have thought.
2. Easy Ways to Get Moving: I’m working on practical ways for you to incorporate physical activity into your Opportunity Times without disrupting your daily routine. These are flexible strategies that can work for anyone, no matter how busy you are.

(Jan-Hendrik Sünderkamp, MSc.)

This research focuses on how a tangible and embodied technological layer can enhance and enlarge an existing public space to promote children’s informal learning (IFL). IFL is increasingly recognized as the basis for education, as children learn through social, creative, and playful interactions. IFL is rooted in daily lives and expands the children´s sphere of action beyond their confined social spaces in public environments and educational institutes. Using the urban area makes education more accessible to a broad group. Therefore, I will create conditions and structures that make informal educational processes possible and available. I seek to enlarge opportunity spaces by applying alternative experimentational approaches. By implementing design intervention in the public, I will playfully appropriate the existing and create opportunity spaces for IFL. The design intervention should open up children’s creativity, encourage social interaction, and enhance mental health, which is often neglected in the education system.

( Lisa Hofer, Mag.a )

The emergence of Augmented Reality (AR) technologies has revolutionized the way information can be presented, offering novel opportunities for data visualization and enhanced interactivity. However, investigating AR concepts outdoors, especially on-the-move, has proven to be a challenging task. Although previous work has examined use cases for using AR for everyday activities in urban environments, most of the contexts explored with people being on-the-move outdoors are in a conceptual stage and these contexts mainly regard AR from a utilitarian perspective. This thesis’ goal is to design and evaluate meaningful AR concepts that intend to assist people while on-the-move in a context sensitive and personalized manner, hoping to empower them by leveraging new forms of interaction while merging the virtual and physical world. I aim to contribute an overview of the design space for AR, while people are on-the-move, provide insights for meaningful AR visualizations, and establish design guidelines for such concepts.

(Eleni Stefanidi, MSc)

The menopausal transition involves complex, intersecting sociopolitical aspects, which make each individual’s experience unique. Today, technologies are embedded in everyday life, but they often take universalist assumptions about bodies that overlook marginalized experiences. Many technologies also embed heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions, thereby excluding a spectrum of gendered and embodied identities. This is also visible in relation to menopause. While menopause is part of many individuals’ life transitions, whether as a physiological process, a result of surgery, or linked to gender-affirming hormonal therapies, technologies are often designed with a narrow focus on cisgender women experiencing age-related hormonal change, resulting in the medicalization of menopause transition.

Positioned at the intersection of feminist HCI, feminist technoscience, and feminist crip technoscience, this project asks: whose experiences are made visible, and whose experiences are seen, and whose are silenced? Through this framing, the aim is to broaden the design perspective by including often-unheard voices whose bodies and identities fall outside normative assumptions, and to explore more inclusive approaches to designing for menopause transitions that trouble these narrow assumptions.

(Omleila Mohammadi, MSc)