As a postdoc you work in a team of design researchers and interaction design students on methodological development in HCI design research within the context of future energy use. Specifically, you will build on the teams' existing research in co-performance
[1], non-humanist design
[2] and rich interaction
[3].
Important challenges for HCI design lie in the shared agency, shared intentionality, and increased complexities in the relationships and interactions between humans and technologies. Systems of smart things, characterized by Internet of Things (IoT), distributed intelligence, and Big Data, as examples, extends and transcends current physical computing to enable and challenge designers to design holistically and systemically in regard to human-technology practices, transformations, and impacts. To address these challenges and leverage the opportunities for designers, there is a growing need for post-human design research and design strategies that extend past human-centered approaches. These approaches will enable researchers and designers to stay on top of and anticipate the role of smart systems in everyday life and educate future designers of such systems to responsibly deal with the potential effects of this shift in role of both technologies and humans.
To further this research agenda, you will work within the context of energy use, and in particular the challenge of transitioning towards sustainable energy systems that support desirable future ways of living. We see in this domain that the meeting of the challenges and innovating on the opportunities of designing systems of smart things is both relevant and needed. With shifts towards renewable energy provision, it is clear that smart systems (including humans and things) are needed to match increasingly distributed and fluctuating patterns of supply with patterns of use. At the same time, developments towards the smart home are shown to increase levels of energy demand of households. Energy (and climate change) are topics that are high on national (NWA) and international (H2020) research agenda's.
Your tasksThe objective of this postdoc position is to contribute to establishing a research agenda and research outcomes that address the challenges and opportunities of designing (for) systems of smart things in the domain of sustainable and desirable energy futures. Focus will lie on supporting the team in developing post-human design research strategies and design methodologies drawing on ideas of co-performance, non-humanist design, and rich interaction.
Your tasks are threefold. Firstly, you will help articulate and publish past and current research achievements related to education.
Secondly, you will support the team to develop better links between fundamental design research taking a post-human perspective and the needs and interests of academic, industry and other partners through the execution and facilitation of research through design studies
Thirdly, you will support and contribute to the positioning of the research and communicating of that positioning externally to develop consortium partners to tackle national (NWO), European (e.g. Horizon 2020) and international grant applications (Trans-Atlantic Platforms). This includes assisting the team in building a network in energy through partner scoping and visits, and organising partner seminars and workshops to jointly work towards a consortium as the basis for future proposals.
[1] Lenneke Kuijer and Elisa Giaccardi. 2018. Co-performance: Conceptualizing the Role of Artificial Agency in the Design of Everyday Life. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 125, 13 pages
[2] Ron Wakkary, Doenja Oogjes, Sabrina Hauser, Henry Lin, Cheng Cao, Leo Ma, and Tijs Duel. 2017. Morse Things: A Design Inquiry into the Gap Between Things and Us. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 503-514
[3] Frens, J. (2006). A rich user interface for a digital camera. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 10(2-3), 177-180.