Forschung/ Research
Positive and ethical ICT design for older people
Decreased social inclusion of elderly is dangerous as it can amplify age-related cognitive and physical impairments. Thus, AAL projects have started to aim at connecting elderly to family or community members besides common services (e.g. health monitoring, emergency detection). Despite these positive developments I believe that the view of elderly as fragile and in need of care is prevailing. I argue instead for approaching ICT for ageing focusing on positive and ethical design to promote social inclusion through reciprocity. Positive design aims at leveraging advantages of ageing. Ethical design processes consider (1) all stakeholders equally, i.e. people with strengths, weaknesses and needs; (2) stakeholders' values (e.g. independence), their definitions and tensions with other values; and (3) how systems adapt to users' changing needs and values over time. Using VSD I aim at creating services and technologies that allow for active and meaningful contribution of the elderly in society. Even though dependency on assistive devices and caregivers remains, people can feel independent as they return something to the community. Over time a positive image of elderly as confident, contributing members of society will be established.
Current projects: Care@Home, I don't fall
Values in Design
I recently got excited about working with human and personal values. How can we elicit them and what role do they play with regard to technology design? My work focussing on values is therefore twofold. On the one hand, I am building a tool that helps people to reflect on their values and preferences in order to enhance their decision making. On the other hand, a similar tool could be employed in the Value Sensitive Design process to help designers and stakeholders to find a common ground when talking about each others values and accounting for them in new designs. My colleagues and I have recently organized a workshop at the Interact conference on this topic. It covered very interesting topics presented by participants coming from the US, UK, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. Please have a look at the workshop website if you are interested: Values in Design 2011
Negotiation Support
Negotiation is a complex emotional decision-making process aiming to reach an agreement to exchange goods or services. Although a daily activity, few people are effective negotiators. Existing support systems make a significant improvement if the negotiation space is well-understood, because computers can better cope with the computational complexity. However, the negotiation space can only be properly developed if the human parties jointly explore their interests. The inherent semantic problem and the emotional issues involved make that negotiation cannot be handled by artificial intelligence alone, and a human-machine collaborative system is required. We are developing a new type of human-machine collaborative system that combines the strengths of both and reduces the weaknesses. Fundamental in these systems will be that user and machine explicitly share a generic task model. Furthermore, such systems are to support humans in coping with emotions and moods in human-human interactions. For this purpose we will contribute new concepts, methods and techniques. For integrative bargaining we will develop such a system, called a Pocket Negotiator, to collaborate with human negotiators. The Pocket Negotiator will handle computational complexity issues, and provide bidding- and interaction advice, the user will handle background knowledge and interaction with the opponent negotiator.
my TU Delft website.
see the WIKI of the negotiation project for details
Previous (at SICS, Stockholm)
FriendSense
The aim of this project is to design communication tools that allows for physical and emotional closeness between a group of friends. For detailed information follow this link: http://friendsense.sics.se/
Pieces of Identity
The Pieces of Identity is a system with two goals: to provoke a discussion concerning the relationship between privacy and mobile information technology during an inauguration event of a mobile technology research center, and to stir reactions contributing to the widening of the design space of privacy and information and communication technology (ICT).