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Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs) are becoming increasingly applied in a broad range of sensitive settings to address the needs and struggles of vulnerable or marginalized users. Sensitive settings include, for instance, CUIs mediating the communication difficulties of people with dementia or supporting refugees to cope with new cultural practices as a chatbot on a government website. While researchers are increasingly designing CUIs for such sensitive set tings, methods and participatory design approaches to address vulnerable user groups’ highly sensitive needs and struggles are sparse in research thus far. This workshop aims to explore how we can design CUIs for and in sensitive settings with vulnerable users in mind through the participatory design process. We aim to establish a working definition of vulnerability, sensitive settings, and how practice-oriented design of CUIs can be inclusive of diverse users.

Human interaction creates forms of power that establish themselves in theories and practices, becoming self-evident truths and norms with time. These might intentionally or unintentionally maintain certain power structures that in turn foster inequalities. From a crisis management perspective, power can be seen both as a hindrance and an opportunity of cooperation for peace. Crises and conflicts often erupt from complex interplay of power between actors and their interests. Simultaneously, international organisations use their authorised power to engage in conflicts to resolve them, often through crisis management and peacebuilding missions. In these missions, experts from different backgrounds are brought together to collaborate in the midst of entangled power dynamics. In this study, power is investigated from the perspective of Finnish experts in crisis management. There is a lack of research on practitioners' understandings and experiences of power. This thesis aims to illustrate power that is present in missions. This is also a personal reflection of the researcher to enhance her understanding of power and how to overcome situations where inequalities are involuntarily reinforced due to existing power structures. The study is a collaboration with the Crisis Management Centre Finland and the outcome of the thesis is created together with the institution. The research framework is built around critical theories (intersectionality, reflective practice, decolonised and respectful design) and participatory action research to engage the researcher and participants in depth to the unpacking of power and collect data that can be applied in the field of crisis management. Methods such as interviews, workshops, storytelling and mapping have been used. The researcher strives to showcase an alternative approach to design and encourages design practitioners to explore their capabilities beyond their own field. The findings indicate complex interrelations of several construc, Växelverkan mellan människor skapar makt i olika former som etablerar sig i teori och praxis. Med tiden blir dessa former av makt självklara sanningar och normer. De kan avsiktligt eller oavsiktligt upprätthålla vissa slags maktstrukturer som i sin tur främjar ojämlikheter. Från ett krishanteringsperspektiv kan makt ses både som problematiskt och gynnande i samarbete för fred. Kriser och konflikter bryter ofta fram i komplexa sammanlänkningar av makt mellan aktörer och deras intressen. Samtidigt använder internationella organisationer sin maktbehörighet för att engagera sig och lösa konflikter, ofta genom krishanterings- och fredsbyggareuppdrag. I dessa uppdrag möts experter med olika bakgrund för att samarbeta mitt ibland sammanslingrade dynamiker av makt. I denna studie utforskas makt utifrån finska krishanteringsexperters perspektiv. Det finns brist på forskning som fokuserar på experters förståelser och upplevelser av makt. Den här avhandlingen har som avsikt att åskådliggöra makt som är närvarande under uppdrag. Det här är även en personlig reflektion för forskaren för att förbättra hennes förståelse av makt och bemästra situationer av makt där ojämlikheter förstärks oavsiktligt genom existerande maktstrukturer. Den här studien har gjorts i samarbete med Krishanteringscentret i Finland och avhandlingens slutresultat har gjorts tillsammans med institutionen. Forskningsramen är skapad kring teorier om kritik (intersektionalitet, reflexivitet, avkoloniserad och respektfull design) och deltagande aktionsforskning för att engagera forskaren och deltagarna på djupet för granskningen av makt och för att samla ihop kunskap som kan tillämpas inom krishantering. Metoder såsom intervjuer, workshops, storytelling och tankekartor har använts. Forskaren strävar efter att uppvisa alternativa förhållningssätt till design och uppmuntrar designutövare att utforska deras förmågor utöver den egna branschen. Undersökningsresultaten antyder att makt konstrueras i flera olika skepnad

User onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users become successful when adopting your product, by providing them with the right tools to understand how a product works and what benefits it provides. The number of apps we daily manage on our mobile devices increases day by day, thus requiring a hard work by designers to create the best user onboarding experience ever. Since it represents the first interactive, direct experience that every user has of an app, every aspect of the funnel represents a significant opportunity for activation and retention of customers in the short- and long-term. In the wide landscape of mobile apps, brain training apps need to have an additional closer look at the onboarding experience they provide. For this type of apps, onboarding does not only encompass more common activities such as user registration and free trial activation, but also the possibility to develop an accurately personalized game experience, tailored to the user’s current cognitive skills and training objectives. Elevate is a successful brain training app available on iOS and Android devices. Recent monitoring of users’ retention and churn rates have shown a huge loss of customers during the onboarding process, thus generating the need to investigate on how to restructure the flow in a way that could help keeping more customers in the loop. The analysis of quantitative and qualitative data with respect to Elevate’s key success metrics has led to a redesign of the welcome pitch, the user registration process, and the post-registration up-sell screen. It has also brought changes to the immediate post-onboarding experience of the first training session, and to the re-onboarding of churned users. A/B tests have been carried out to analyze the behavior of different variants and choose the optimal new onboarding flow. First results show expansion of the onboarding funnel, strengthening of the benefit appeal, and acceleration in user motivation, all fa

Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection

The challenges of engaging communities to act for common good in their own neighborhoods requires a deliberative process of decision making, seeking out shared values (or differences) and supporting creative forms of mutually-beneficial problem solving. How can one facilitate emerging patterns of co-design, tactical action, and self-organizing for neighborhood change? In our experience, engaging community actors towards shared problem-solving, requires recognizing modes of trust and diverse stakes, activating social capital and neighborhood resources, while exploring out-of-the-box design interventions or urban tactics. Based on fieldwork conducted in the neighborhood of Troparev-Nikulino in Moscow, Russia, we discuss key challenges and lessons emerging through a pilot initiative and prototype platform developed in July-August 2012. It was conducted with the participation of a local activist group, Partizaning, students from Strelka, an urban design institute, and a cross-section of inter-generational members in the local community. The pilot included use of a prototype online platform, community de-briefings, and a network of mailboxes installed in the neighborhood to engage participants in the process of revealing problems, resources and solutions. Based on this exploratory fieldwork and co-design project, we devised a more comprehensive approach and online platform, MikroAct (www.mikroact.org), which leverages a combination of technology, interactive design, social media and local processes of cooperative action, to support neighborhood level self-organization based on principles of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, grassroots activism, collectivism, and participatory action research. MikroAct is being designed and piloted in selected neighborhoods in Moscow and New York City, to offer comparative insights as a scalable platform for use across community contexts. We expect that the site could also serve as a means for participatory research on neighborhood activism