RETAINING WAYS OF CO-CREATION

The design space of future mobility services is considered a wicked problem, as many stakeholders from the public and private sectors need to collaborate to create sustainable future services. Recent years have shown a growing interest in utilizing urban living labs (ULL) and similar quadruple helix approaches toward addressing wicked design challenges. However, when engaging in co-creation through living labs, many actors also see potential in adapting methodology and new ways-of-doing, to appropriate it and improve readiness for tackling other wicked challenges. The article draws upon a ULL initiative in the mobility service context to explore the main challenges for ULL partners to retain the ways-of-doing that develops in co-creation activities. Through our study, we identified that cocreation needs to be grounded in the known, to facilitate search and co-appropriation of the unknown as key for retaining ways-of-doing in ULL initiatives

TAILORING CO-CREATION FOR RESPONSIBLE INNOVATION: A DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACH

It is hard to predict the impact of technology on society before it is developed enough. For example, the issue can be attributed to the need for more cross-sectoral collaboration in the design process. However, a solution for anticipating such outcomes has been proposed through the quadruple helix innovation model, which states that the involvement of government, academia, industry, and the public is essential in innovation systems. The question of how this collaboration can successfully be staged to foresee possible impacts is an empirical endeavour. This paper presents an iterative case study of how ethnographic material can be used to ongoingly tailor speculative co-creation to facilitate responsible innovation (RI) principles. The result is reflected through two lenses; the tools developed in the project to facilitate co-creation activities and the stakeholder reflections evoked through these tools

Experiencing the Future Car: Anticipatory UX as a Social and Digital Phenomenon

In order to be innovative and competitive, the automotive industry seeks to understand how to attract new customers, even before they have experienced the product. User Experience (UX) research often provides insights into situated uses of products, and reflections after their use, however tells us little about how products and services are experienced before use. We propose anticipation theory as a way to understand how shared experiences between people in an online discussion forum relate to UX of cars before they are actually experienced in real-life. We took an ethnographic approach to analyse the activities of members of a self-organised web-based discussion forum for Tesla car enthusiasts, to understand how product anticipation emerges in a digital-material setting. Our study identifies how anticipatory experiences create UX of car ownership which evolves through members’ engagement in a self-organised online community enabled through the digitalisation and connectivity of the car, and how such car experiences generate new forms of digital anticipation of the car. We conclude that the shift towards digitalisation of cars and subscription services creates a need for more interdisciplinary research into spatial and temporal aspects, where socially shared anticipatory experiences are increasingly important for the overall UX

WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE ELECTRIC CAR CHARGING ‘SMART’?

In this paper, we argue that the electrification of cars is not simply a move from fossil fuel to electric energy. It also integrates the car into the household energy system in ways that challenge assumptions that car charging is made ‘smart’ primarily through AI-powered app-based digital services that help the user to make energy-, and cost-efficient decisions in terms of when to charge the car. As we will demonstrate in this paper, our design ethnographic study of how nine households learn to charge their cars according to their family routines and values shows how smart charging is not merely due to specific technological features. Instead, charging habits evolve through anticipatory experiences of what smart technologies come to mean to family members through their use. Based on our research, we recommend a smart charging service design that affords multi-operation ability, co-learning ability and social accessibility

The missing link in learning in science centres

Science centres have been identified as an important resource in encouraging teenagers to choose higher education in science and technology. This is of interest to society, since there seems to be a problem in getting sufficient numbers to do so. And accomplishing this is sometimes described as a fatal question for a nation's future prosperity and development. Still, there is an international trend where teenagers fail to visit science centres. Through research, little is known about what is interesting or useful to the public, as well as how to reach those who are ‘unengaged'. Considering teenagers as exponents for what distinguishes today's society makes their apparent unwillingness to participate in science centres interesting to study with regards to what culture, history and ideology these centres were initially produced. Hence, from this point of view, what is missing in science centres that would make them interesting for the young people of today? Many studies of learning in science centres have come to focus on visitors who visit voluntarily and how well the embedded messages in the exhibits have been acknowledged by these visitors. This study focuses instead on teenagers who are reluctant to participate in science centres, with their perspective of science centres as the point of departure, specifically what kind of social activities are formed in their encounters with science centre exhibits. This encounter is regarded as an encounter between the two different practices of the science centre and the teenagers. The applied theoretical perspective is mainly assembled from socio-cultural theories of learning. This research is a microanalytic study of five teenagers who were equipped with video cameras and asked to film a visit to the local science centre, Teknikens Hus. The films were later discussed in a focus-group interview consisting of the teenagers and the researcher. Visual ethnography provided the theoretical framework for this research design. The results showed that the teenagers want to use exhibits to have the authority of interpretations and the possibilities to contribute to the meaning of the activity. At the same time, they want to use the exhibits in a way that the activities become places for developing social identity. To negotiate the meaning of the exhibits there is a need for an openness that may be constrained by too inflexible and limiting exhibit designs. This pattern is described as two different forms of participation in the exhibits; ignoring or extending the intended meaning of the exhibits. Meaningfulness also demands a closeness created by connections between the exhibit and the user's personal experiences. This pattern is described as two different ways in which the teenagers identified the exhibits; exhibits which they dissociated from or to which they had an ongoing relationship. Providing a space for negotiation seems crucial to inviting teenagers into opportunities of meaningful experiences, even more significant than any specific physical feature in the exhibit. The teenagers' agenda, in which forming practices where they can express themselves and contribute to the meaning seem to be very important, appears not to be greatly enabled by science centre exhibits. In this situation they learn to not participate. Science and technology represented in this matter show a ‘ready-made' world that they cannot change. The missing link in learning in science centres is here described as the part of the meaning making process where the teenagers get to re-negotiate the meaning of the activities in the centre and use the exhibits as tools to accomplish this.Godkänd; 2006; 20061201 (haneit)</p

Tracking down learning : How do self-trackers talk about mundane learning experiences

This paper will reflect on the preliminary findings from a newly launched project that investigates how the embodied knowledge that emerges through the use of self tracking technologies informs how people experience, perceive their bodies, and imagine and orient their actions towards the futures of their bodies. The first group of participants are collected from a loosely organised group known as Quantified Self, whose members are driven by the idea that collecting and analysing detailed data about their everyday activity can help them improve their lives. The preliminary findings will map and qualitatively analyse the user-produced content on the QS-website in relation to how self-tracking practices in everyday life are accounted for. It will focus on the verbal categories and narratives through which participants discuss their technologies, bodies, and their biographies of self-tracking, specifically when talking about how self-tracking become part of embodied, experiential and mundane learning experiences.Body-monitoring: measuring, imagining and sharing the body in a mediatized worl

The Missing Link in Learning in Science Centres

Science centres have been identified as an important resource in encouraging teenagers to choose higher education in science and technology. This is of interest to society, since there seems to be a problem in getting sufficient numbers to do so. And accomplishing this is sometimes described as a fatal question for a nation’s future prosperity and development. Still, there is an international trend where teenagers fail to visit science centres.   Through research, little is known about what is interesting or useful to the public, as well as how to reach those who are ‘unengaged’. Considering teenagers as exponents for what distinguishes today’s society makes their apparent unwillingness to participate in science centres interesting to study with regards to what culture, history and ideology these centres were initially produced. Hence, from this point of view, what is missing in science centres that would make them interesting for the young people of today?   Many studies of learning in science centres have come to focus on visitors who visit voluntarily and how well the embedded messages in the exhibits have been acknowledged by these visitors. This study focuses instead on teenagers who are reluctant to participate in science centres, with their perspective of science centres as the point of departure, specifically what kind of social activities are formed in their encounters with science centre exhibits. This encounter is regarded as an encounter between the two different practices of the science centre and the teenagers. The applied theoretical perspective is mainly assembled from socio-cultural theories of learning.   This research is a microanalytic study of five teenagers who were equipped with video cameras and asked to film a visit to the local science centre, Teknikens Hus. The films were later discussed in a focus-group interview consisting of the teenagers and the researcher. Visual ethnography provided the theoretical framework for this research design.   The results showed that the teenagers want to use exhibits to have the authority of interpretations and the possibilities to contribute to the meaning of the activity. At the same time, they want to use the exhibits in a way that the activities become places for developing social identity. To negotiate the meaning of the exhibits there is a need for an openness that may be constrained by too inflexible and limiting exhibit designs. This pattern is described as two different forms of participation in the exhibits; ignoring or extending the intended meaning of the exhibits. Meaningfulness also demands a closeness created by connections between the exhibit and the user’s personal experiences. This pattern is described as two different ways in which the teenagers identified the exhibits; exhibits which they dissociated from or to which they had an ongoing relationship. Providing a space for negotiation seems crucial to inviting teenagers into opportunities of meaningful experiences, even more significant than any specific physical feature in the exhibit.   The teenagers’ agenda, in which forming practices where they can express themselves and contribute to the meaning seem to be very important, appears not to be greatly enabled by science centre exhibits. In this situation they learn to not participate. Science and technology represented in this matter show a ‘ready-made’ world that they cannot change. The missing link in learning in science centres is here described as the part of the meaning making process where the teenagers get to re-negotiate the meaning of the activities in the centre and use the exhibits as tools to accomplish this

The empty meeting place : Museum metaphors and their implications for learning

This article argues for a need to scrutinize the meeting-place metaphor that is commonly used by museum practitioners, when describing the museum role in society as an informal learning environment. The metaphor indicates that there is an ambition that people should use the museum locality for meetings with others. However, there is no clear direction for what the meetings are for, who is setting up the meetings and around what and based on who’s agenda the desired meetings should be formed. As a means to push this discussion further, i. e what the meeting-place metaphor means, how it is perceived and what it does to how learning environments are designed, the article will re-visit empirical data from a study of how Swedish museum workers verbally give form to what newness in museums may consist of in their museum. The examples from the empirical data is discussed from a theoretical perspective on place as socially produced and occurring as people move through. My contribution question if the meeting-place metaphor as it is conceived by museum practioners is contra-productive to the one single purpose that all museums strive for, to attract a lot of visitors. The central question I am pursuing is if this way of using the meeting-place metaphor is obsolete and if so, what new routes may be taken in finding other metaphors more in line with how the museum can fit into contemporary mediatise society.

Sensory experiences of digital photo-sharing—“mundane frictions” and emerging learning strategies

Digital technologies are increasingly ubiquitous in everyday life forming part of the way we live and experience the world. This article will specifically scrutinise how mobile phone cameras, digital photographing and the use of web-based photo-sharing sites and communities become part of the meaning-making practices through which the everyday is lived and understood. In doing so, I advance the concept of “mundane friction” through which to discuss the experience, meaning-making and pedagogy generated through operating screen-based technologies. Indeed, media participates in everyday worlds beyond its role as a provider of content and for communication. The question that will be addressed here is how this media presence can be understood from an embodied and sensory perspective, and is based in a study of sensory aspects of teenagers use of web-based photo-diaries. Further, this discussion leads to questions of how an appreciation of digital visuality as more than representational acknowledges the meaning of mundane friction caused by habitually touching, rubbing, clicking, pinching through media technologies as part of the sensory emplacement process that establish people as situated learners. In turn, problematising this tangible friction as pivotal for understanding digital visuality gives reason to argue for research methods that acknowledge digital visual material as more-than-visual and theory that moves toward the unspoken, tacit and sensory elements of learning in everyday practices. Thus, the aim of this article is to elaborate on the embodied, the methodological and the pedagogical dimensions of “mundane friction” in meaning-making activities, and its pedagogical implications