Amid discourses that portray young people’s changing relationships to text as jeopardizing democratic society and warranting urgent interventions, this paper maps primary students’ conceptions of reading through three cartographies—simple, complex, and potentializing— using survey responses, logbooks, and co-creation sessions with 10–11-year-olds. Drawing on two Swedish Research Council–funded projects (“The Heart of Reading” and “How Hot Is the Book-Bot?”), it reveals how a simple, abstract cartography reinforces normative binaries of readers as either enthralled or disengaged. The complex cartography, grounded in students’ concrete experiences, uncovers the spatial, temporal, bodily, and emotional dimensions shaping classroom reading. Potentializing cartographies capture students’ curiosities, affirmations, problematizations, and individual variations in bodily and spatial preferences, showcasing diverse ways reading might unfold. Employing an interdisciplinary, post-qualitative cartographic approach, the study problematises and pluralises the concept of reading, moving beyond narrow literacy discourses and the perceived “reading crisis”. It argues that leveraging students’ openness to develop embodied, self-directed reading practices can enrich primary reading instruction. Ultimately, this work emphasizes the transformative power of questioning and reimagining conventional definitions of reading.

The motivation to read among children in Nordic countries has seen a noticeable decline in recent years. This study explores the design of social robots for stimulating interest in reading among fourth-grade students (age 10–11). We used a combination of conceptual design methods to engage teachers and students from four classes in two Swedish schools in co-creation workshops. Ideas on functions, qualities, and robot designs were generated, and based on this a set of ten distinct design concepts were created: the Facilitator, the Librarian, the Coach, the Buddy, the Assistant, the Narrator, the Creator, the Apprentice, the Portable, and the Gamer. The strengths and weaknesses of different designs were evaluated, resulting in a final design named ‘The BookBot,’ aiming to inspire and engage students in book reading through discussions of book content, character portrayal, and personalised book recommendations.

Public transportation in urban environments should be inclusive and accessible to offer this service for all people. This research aims to identify issues in the development of autonomous shuttle services in future public transportation systems for children with intellectual disabilities. An issue-based information system (IBIS) analysis was retrospectively conducted based on a concept generation phase. Four concepts were evaluated by five experts. The findings show that the main tensions in this context can be categorized as interaction, physical, and independence. Interactive elements can both create value and lead to confusion for the target group. The physical design of concepts affects feasibility, viability, and perception. Independence is a desired quality for the target group but often comes at a price of less independence for other stakeholders such as family members. Finally, the study suggests that there are tensions between the qualities of integrity, cognition, and user experience.

Prototyping methods are commonly employed iteratively throughout the design and product development, typically ranging from early low-fidelity to later high-fidelity prototypes. We present a case study focusing on prototyping a receptionist agent migrating between three platforms (a monitor on the wall, a mobile phone, and a physical robot). More specifically, we compare virtual reality (VR) and physical (real world) prototyping methods. The two methods are compared in terms of fidelity and usability. The breadth of features, the degree of functionality, and the interactivity were similar. However, the aesthetic refinement differed. The VR prototyping method also had much higher prerequisites in terms of equipment and skills, and the learning curve for the designer was steep. Both methods were equally efficient in user testing, but the VR method revealed more usability issues in the efficiency category, while the physical space method revealed more issues in the effectiveness category.

Self-driving buses will be part of the public transportation system of the future, and they must therefore be accessible to all. The study reported in this paper examines the user experiences of 16 children with mild intellectual disability riding a self-driving bus. The qualitative analysis, performed by iterative affinity diagramming, of interviews, observations, and a co-design session with five of the children, suggests that familiar situations were characterized by contemplation and curiosity, while unfamiliar ones were characterized by surprise or confusion. The temporal structure of past, present, and future situations in the field of attention played a significant role in the children’s experiences. This leads to design considerations for an explainable interior of self-driving buses.

Emerging technology for public transportation is often not fully aligned with an inclusive design strategy. Many people with intellectual disability experience their needs and desires not being fully considered. Responding to this problem, the purpose of this study is to investigate how children with mild intellectual disability experience self-driving buses. On each bus, a person called "safety driver" monitors the ride and takes control if a problematic situation arises. The purpose is also to investigate what roles support persons and safety drivers play. In addition, the research aims to propose improvements in how the design of these self-driving buses can better motivate children with intellectual disability to use them in support of their agency. To address this, we arranged and studied seven rides on self-driving buses, for 16 children diagnosed to have mild intellectual disability, and their support persons. Interviews with the children were held after the rides, and both the rides and interviews were video recorded. The analysis was in part inductive but also employed a theory based on motivation: self-determination theory. For several children, the bus worked as a vehicle for a social sightseeing tour of the local environment, and the current design did not hinder such an experience. Overall, many of the children had a positive experience, but there is room for improvement regarding the design of the buses. Some children expressed curiosity and a few frustrations with how the bus behaved in traffic. For instance, it was difficult for the children to understand why the bus braked for things that were hard for them to perceive. From observation, it appears that the accompanying support person and safety driver played an important role in making children safe and shaping the social environment on the bus. The support persons were also essential for some children to ride the bus at all. The safety driver provided the children with information about how the bus worked. Both the safety driver and the support person had a positive impact on the children's experience. To meet the children's needs and skills, and to improve their motivation for riding the buses again, the buses need to decelerate less abruptly, have easier and consistently designed seatbelts, and communicate what they do, see, and signal more clearly. We argue that further studies at this level of detail are crucial to ensure that new technologies are indeed designed for everyone.

Early user involvement in the design of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) is fundamental for usability and otherwise good user experience. In this paper, we present a combination of methods used in the remote conceptual design of a virtual receptionist for a university department. The study builds on two workshops with potential users. The first was a bodystorming workshop in virtual reality (VR) with four researchers at the department, and the second was a desktop walkthrough workshop on an online whiteboard with five students at the department. Proposed solutions from the workshops were deconstructed using a morphological chart into a pentad of parameters: agent, act, scene, agency, and purpose. New design concepts were then composed by combining solutions. Sketching was used to further detail and present the generated concepts. Our analysis of the workshops indicates that the bodystorming workshop had an aesthetic perspective on embodied interaction while the desktop walkthrough workshop had a more instrumental perspective on usability. The combination of embodied but remote ideation methods with morphological chart structured by the pentad is novel to not only the IVA field, but also to interaction design in general. Finally, the conceptual design of a novel cross-platform IVA is proposed.

The roles of human operators are changing due to increased intelligence and autonomy of computer systems. Humans will interact with systems at a more overarching level or only in specific situations. This involves learning new practices and changing habitual ways of thinking and acting, including reconsidering human autonomy in relation to autonomous systems. This paper describes a design case of a future autonomous management system for drone traffic in cities in a key scenario we call The Computer in Brussels. Our approach to designing for human collaboration with autonomous systems builds on scenario-based design and cognitive work analysis facilitated by computer simulations. We use a temporal method, called the Joint Control Framework to describe human and automated work in an abstraction hierarchy labeled Levels of Autonomy in Cognitive Control. We use the Score notation to analyze patterns of temporal developments that span levels of the abstraction hierarchy and discuss implications for human-automation communication in traffic management. We discuss how autonomy at a lower level can prevent autonomy on higher levels, and vice versa. We also discuss the temporal nature of autonomy in minute-to-minute operative work. Our conclusion is that human autonomy in relation to autonomous systems is based on fundamental trade-offs between technological opportunities to automate and values of what human actors find meaningful.

This paper describes a research project that explored the use of mobile augmented reality combined with outdoor education in a Swedish primary school. Special attention was paid to mobile augmented reality (AR). Project documentation and communication were reviewed, three iterations of design and usability evaluations of the Minnesmark mobile AR platform was made. Observations and interviews were held with teachers and students. The results describe early experiments, and both the opportunities and challenges that faced the participating teachers. The opportunities included connecting the outdoor learning environment and the indoor learning environment, directing the students' focus, posing questions and affording actions, rendering symbols and timelines visible, providing a point of entry to the context and the narrative, and facilitating conceptualization. Challenges concerned how to make pedagogical use of the landscape, producing or choosing content, structuring processes, setting up student groups, and aligning activities and content with learning objectives. It is concluded that the teachers and the students used the mobile augmented reality to make places in the local environment, outside the classroom, the starting point to increase the authenticity of the teaching.

This research-through-design study explores how computer simulations of drone delivery traffic can be used in service design. It investigates how computer simulations compared to a desktop walkthrough can inform the design, and how simulations can be used to facilitate a citizen perspective in service design. A workshop where participants evaluated a simulation of the drone delivery service was compared to a workshop where the participants took part in a desktop walkthrough. The results showed that the participants discussed many of the same aspects, but there was a difference in the perspectives taken. The participants using the simulation took more of a community perspective and discussed dystopian risks, and they also used the simulation to compare distance and speed. The participants in the desktop walkthrough took more of a customer perspective and a technology perspective. It is concluded that the simulation helped participants gain common ground of dynamic aspects of intense drone traffic and that the aerial view lifted the perspective from the service encounters and service users to that of the surrounding society.