Kekulé is a digital notebook for the information era developed as a result of this thesis investigation. It is designed to cater to different learning preferences and help move individuals move through the cycle of learning in meaning-making, abstract conceptualization, experimentation, and transforming knowledge to new understanding.

This research addresses the need to explore the cultural, social, and aesthetic implications of robotic technologies in the home. This work takes a critical design approach, where design artifacts are situated in the context of use in order to challenge existing thoughts and provoke new ideas. Using this approach, we can question the role and behavior of home robotics beyond the practical functionality of current, commercial robots.

The realization of functioning design artifacts is central to this exploration. The development process grounds the design in reality and forces it to confront the details of physical experience in addition to enabling multisensory interaction. Ultimately, the design artifacts examine and extend the cultural, social, and aesthetic experience of domestic robots.

Through the research and synthesis phase, two types of procrastination and the core reasons — the fear of failure for decisional procrastination and avoidance as passive defiance for behavioral procrastination — were identified and because I found that these reasons are rooted in the social realm of one’s identity, the suggested solution was focused on facilitating one’s social interaction with other people. Two keywords—consequence and confidence — were selected as symbolic terms for current and future sources of motivation that will help people avoid procrastination.

This thesis project explores design opportunities for next-generation personal health records. The result is IBConnect, a digital personal health record platform for patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease. By navigating data within a personal health record as a means to explore online community knowledge, patients using IBConnect can manage their individualized illness experience by discovering actionable, relevant and contextualized knowledge. In turn, patients are encouraged to track and contribute more to the IBConnect community enabling access to new knowledge, a resource highly valued by patients.

To help women better meet their everyday health needs without skipping a beat, the Lady Business project asked if ordinary restroom vending machines could be developed to offer a wider range of products, including some that don’t yet exist. I researched the current experiences of women accessing contraception, seeking treatment for common infections, receiving care at clinics and pharmacies and spent a fair amount of time poking around women’s public restrooms.

Women I interviewed expressed frustrations with the way they currently obtain female health care. Long waits, feelings of shame and lack of access to needed products are common complaints.

The Lady Business self-service female health care concept I designed was created with a do‑it‑yourself (DIY) attitude in mind. By making products such as self-diagnostic kits and contraceptions more available, the self-service could empower women to take responsibility for their health by giving them tools to monitor and care for themselves. Surprisingly, much of the medical technology desired in these products already exists, but women either didn’t know about it or it simply isn’t offered.

To bring the Lady Business idea to life, I conducted workshops with women to develop aspects of the self-service. Then I designed prototypes of the vending machine and products to be sold inside, based on their needs and suggestions.

Based on insights from my research, I designed a new comprehensive communication system focused on telling stories and connecting individuals. The system integrates resident input and government output within an interactive interface called the PGH Hub. In order to test the ideas behind my design, I built an interactive prototype of the PGH Hub and conducted experience prototyping sessions with eight residents. Participants exhibited a positive attitude shift around the prospect of interacting and communicating with government while using my prototype. This initial success is an indication that shifting the basic framework of government-resident communication away from a customer service model toward a shared investment model results in more effective and satisfying tools for the job.

This is the starting point for my thesis. Given the massive number of digital storage and cloud computing services, the folder system is no longer the best way to store information. We are confused about where to save information, how to name our folders, and where to search for them. The parent-child relationship within the folder system no longer works best to manage our digital data. What could replace this metaphor, so we can retrieve files easier and faster?

This project is not about problem-solving, but rather it is about finding opportunities. This was focused on not just designing one singular product to replace the desktop metaphor, but rather designing ways to guide other designers and developer out of thinking the conventional way. The process started from historical research. I researched how the digital context in computing system has evolved from the early 1980s. Then, I looked at what current issues are and user behaviors. Findings from the historical research were linked to the synthesis of current issues and user research and these links helped me come up with three design opportunities : data structure, contextual information, and search preference.

Based on design opportunities, I proposed a new file management system, Arium. The data structure of Arium is social ontological and files are networked through their social relationships. Arium is a platform that can exist across devices and in the cloud. It can exist in a virtual server, or become a surface that can access personal archives from certain devices. It is networked with other services such as email, social networking, and cloud storage services, and it provides unified notifications to its users. This collected information across external services will contain such powerful contextual information that it will enable Arium to create social relationships between digital data and their owners.

The Internet has changed the way we experience stories, although like any new technology, it was used to curate long before it was used to create. As entertainment industries collapse, producers both castigate the Internet as the culprit and embrace it as a panacea. For narrative designers, the Internet is a global stage where the house lights are on 24/7. It is a mediated performance that self documents and offers an endless supply of props for audiences eager to become participants in immersive experiences. Most importantly, it outlines the future for a new form of narrative art called transmedia storytelling.

For producer Turo Drakvik, “This form of storytelling is native to the Internet in the same way that the novel is native to print.” Transmedia narrative content unfolds in non-linear arcs across multiple platforms that are best situated to evidence the storyworld, and it blends media arts with performance-based arts and game systems. The role of the audience has been fundamentally changed. Rather than spectators, they are now encouraged to be invested co-creators of the experience.

My thesis focused on experiments that examine how storytellers might use the Internet and digital media platforms to create participatory storyworlds. To explore this emerging medium, I created the first transmedia comedy—a 4 week immersion called Love and Luck(y)—and documented roles, artifacts, and principles for future storytellers.

Sojourner House is an organization that works with formerly homeless female addicts and their children. Sojourner House’s MOMS Program (Motivation, Opportunities, Mentoring and Spirituality) provides long-term housing and services for these families. Over the course of nine months I worked with the MOMS organization to create a new photography-based service. The outcome is a compelling and fun set of photography activities. These activities are meant to strengthen relationships between the children, their families and the Sojourner House community.

When working with people and organizations everything revolves around the trust and relationships that are formed. Developing relationships became the most important part of my design process as well as the goal of the final artifact we produced. This paper documents my work.

The “Start with Sustainability” framework combines two models for—the Triple Bottom Line and the Life Cycle Analysis. The framework juxtaposes them to reveal more comprehensive concerns about the social, environmental and economic attributes of product life cycles. The solution then provides a set of critical questions at the intersections of these models, enabling the designer to better recognize the interdependencies between their design and other complex problems. These questions are asked in the form of a deck of cards that also include resources to aid designers to discuss and address these problems.

In response to user testing, “Start with Sustainability” also includes a website for further participation and additional resources. The website would serve as a participatory way to build a repository of resources that can be customized towards the needs of different disciplines within product design.

As a case study, The China-US Business Leaders Round Table (CUSBLR) provided a unique platform to explore the use and impact of facilitation on improving the level of discussion and participant engagement in business communication. My goal was to remodel the round table conversation as a facilitator. The experience of learning how to facilitate uncovered a number of insights and connections between facilitation and other domains, including design, leadership, and improv. This project therefore documents a process of inquiry and offers a new framework for understanding facilitation.

The final design focused on social interaction through travel and knowledge of a place. It is a service called ‘My City Counselor’, which allows elders to share their knowledge about local places they know well. This tool is designed to support the elderly in building new relationships or in maintaining close existing relationships by providing useful local information or by sharing common memories.

Adagio Health’s transitional home, Healthy Start House (HSH) served as a case study in which to explore the intersection of design, service and social innovation. The metrics of success outlined by the county for HSH include attaining permanent housing and employment or education. Using a co-creative process, exploratory and generative research uncovered that the service had no clear route to assist the women to develop core competencies to meet the county’s metrics of success.

Rather than create a new extension of the current service, this design solution focuses on amplifying the resources and infrastructure already in place to improve the current service delivery. The solution includes an ideal plan for the HSH staff to work with the clients to comprehensively develop their core competencies, and an expanded view of how a money management system helps the clients meet the county’s metrics. We hypothesize, through this system, clients will re-enter society smoothly, armed with the skills and knowledge needed to provide for themselves and their children. While the design generated much enthusiasm from all stakeholders, the concept would benefit from further testing and iterations over a longer length of time to understand if it can, indeed, improve learning and performance outcomes and create sustained behavior change.

Rather than relying on simple transactional exchanges of information in service, a customer’s journey could be enriched by framing service touchpoints as individual opportunities for learning. Learning activities occur in everyday life via interactions with society, artifacts or programs, and often involve the pursuit of knowledge or skills without the structure of a formal curriculum. This study explores how learning might function as a channel for strengthening multi-faceted trust relations in service through integration into programs and artifacts.

In this project, an auto repair shop was investigated as a case study in technical service, given its long inglorious history of customer mistrust. Through exploration in the context of a local mechanic shop, prototypes for experiential and transformative service learning were implemented, tested, and re-shaped into a four-part framework designed to improve technical communications

With the face of such impairments in their physical, mental and social health, many elderly cannot help but are being institutionalized or sent to specialized places like nursing homes, which provide them professional care. However, a study indicates that most Americans prefer to stay in their homes as they get older since they can maintain their social connections to neighbors and friends, be close to their medical caregivers in town as well as attain emotional comfort and security with familiar surrounding and environments. On top of that, Americans of all ages value on keeping their ability of independence and autonomy by controlling their lives in general.

Various health care-aid devices and services appear to offer specific support to health care activities for the elderly in their homes. However, such aids have more focused only on when the elderly’s health is degraded or on very specific areas such as tracking health data like blood pressure, blood sugar and calorie intakes.

The elderly need comprehensive understanding about their health problems, healthy daily habits and timely interactions with their families and caregivers, in order to keep independent living safely in their places. Smart Home technology has much potential to support the elderly’s independent living as well as interactions with others. To better understand this, we conducted a user-centered design project which looks at the management of the elderly’s health enabled by Smart Home technology.

Lawrence D. Burns, former Vice president of Research and Development at General Motors and author of Reinventing the Automobile Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century talks about two driving factors that will shape the future of the automobile. These factors are energy and connectivity (Burns et al., 2010). We would add a third one, which is control. If we address these three factors we might be able to bridge the gap between how we drive today and how we will drive in the future and thus create more cohesive future automated driving systems.

With this project, the author aims to prove that design and designers have an important role to play in helping this type of organization reach their goals without approaching the situation from a problem-solving, artifact-based angle. Instead, the author deliberately departs from a discipline-specific design approach to engage strategically with an organization devoted to social impact; through this relationship she uses design methodology in a non-traditional setting to show that the power of fully immersive collaboration is greater than the power of design alone.

The result is a set of design recommendations for a systemic model of replication that is both sensitive to the organization’s culture and forward-thinking in its approach. This model, paired with the introduction of a new job position and virtual assistant, is a comprehensive proposal for helping the organization plan for future growth. It is meant to provide a foundation for what is possible, a framework for visualizing the potential, attainable next steps.