Browsing by Author "Lu, Yichen"

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    Co-designing a chatbot for and with refugees and migrants
    (2019) Chen, Zhifa; Nieminen, Mika; Lu, Yichen; Department of Design; Muotoilun laitos; Taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu; School of Arts, Design and Architecture; Lucero, Andrés
    An information portal, HandbookGermany.de, is developed to support the integration of refugees and migrants into society in Germany. However, the information-seeking process is exhausting, cumbersome, and even confusing if refugees and migrants are not proficient at using web services. In light of this, a chatbot-based conversational service is considered as an alternative to enhance the information-seeking experience. For the purpose of designing products and services for refugees and migrants, a great deal of research proposes employing co-design methods as an effective means. The overall aim of this thesis is to explore, understand, and define possibilities of improving refugees and migrants’ experiences of social integration by proposing an engaging and efficient chatbot solution. Furthermore, this thesis aims to explore the necessity of co-design approach as a critical methodology to develop solutions. Therefore, the main research question in this thesis is how can a co-design approach contribute to designing a chatbot supporting social integration within the context of refugees and migrants. User experience, problems, and needs are unveiled in depth by listening to migrants and refugees’ problems, behaviors, and expectations (i.e., document studies, questionnaires, cultural probes, and expert interviews), and observing how migrants interact with the chatbot (i.e., participant observations and empathy probes). The research findings are then transformed into design questions. The designer, developers, and migrants jointly generate concepts leveraging generative toolkits in co-design workshops. By using surveys, the Method for the Assessment of eXperience (MAX), and property checklists, the resulting concepts are later validated with refugees and migrants. As research through design, this thesis draws three conclusions. Firstly, the co-design approach benefits defining problems in the complex context of refugees and migrants by supporting them in expressing ideas and thoughts. The defined problems can then be converted into design questions that promote the proceeding of the design process. Secondly, the co-design approach helps to develop mature concepts, which lays a foundation for the final design. Thirdly, the utilization of co-design tools plays an essential role in validating and refining the solution efficiently, as they make ideas concrete and visible so that refugees and migrants can easily reflect on them throughout the whole design process.
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    Creating a chatbot for and with migrants: Chatbot personality drives co-design activities
    (2020-07-03) Chen, Zhifa; Lu, Yichen; Nieminen, Mika P.; Lucero, Andrés; Department of Computer Science; Department of Design; Department of Media; Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction and Design (HCID); Computer Science - Software and Service Engineering (SSE); Professorship Nieminen M.; Encore; Department of Computer Science
    Information portals are usually created to support the integration of migrants into a host country. However, the information-seeking process can be exhausting, cumbersome and even confusing for migrants as they must cope with time-consuming information overload while searching desired information from lists of documents. Chatbots are easy-to-use, natural, and intuitive, and thus could support information-seeking. There is a lack of research that engages and empowers migrants and other stakeholders as co-design participants in chatbot development. We explored how migrants can be empowered in designing a chatbot that supports their social integration. Using a co-design approach, we conducted a series of activities with migrants and other stakeholders (i.e., online questionnaires, empathy probes, surveys, and co-design workshops) to first understand their expectations regarding chatbots, and then co-design a personality-driven chatbot. We found that chatbot personality can drive co-designing a chatbot as design goals, design directions, and design criteria.
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    Design for Pride in the Workplace
    (2016-07-04) Lu, Yichen; Roto, Virpi; Department of Design
    Background Pride is one of the most meaningful experiences in daily life. Many psychological studies emphasize self-oriented and event-based achievements as the main sources of pride, whereas work from organizational management considers pride as a collective attitude derived from other-focused activities and fostered by the sense of belongingness. Taking the interdisciplinary aspects of pride into account, this article addresses the challenge of how experience design can contribute to pride experience in the workplace. Methods By cross-cutting theories from psychology and organizational management, this study introduces a framework of dynamic pride. The data includes 20 experience design cases that were specifically devoted to positive experiences in the context of the metal and engineering industry. 33 pride-related experience design goals were analyzed and categorized into the framework of pride. Results This study introduces the social and temporal dimensions of pride experience at work. The pride-related experience design goals fall into four categories: self-focused short-term pride, self-focused long-term pride, other-focused short-term pride, and other-focused long-term pride. Accordingly, the extracted design strategies of these goals were mapped to each type of pride. Most of these design strategies were clustered in the categories of self-focused short-term pride and other-focused long-term pride. Conclusions This study reveals the design strategies for dynamics of pride in the workplace varying from evoking self-achievement in individual interactions with tools to maintaining long-term motivation of self-competence development, and from highlighting one’s contribution in face-to-face collaborative work facilitated by interactive tools to fostering co-experience of organizational pride throughout social events.
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    Experience goals in designing professional tools : evoking meaningful experiences at work
    (Aalto University, 2018) Lu, Yichen; Roto, Virpi, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Design, Finland; Muotoilun laitos; Department of Design; Taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu; School of Arts, Design and Architecture; Hyysalo, Sampsa, Prof., Aalto University, Department of Design, Finland
    For most adults, work is an important part of life. Experiences at work are shaped considerably by the workplace context wherein professional tools often play a crucial role. Given this significance, this doctoral research is concerned with human flourishing at work as mediated by professional tools and work-related service touchpoints. This dissertation concentrates on prioritising meaningful experiences as high-level design goals in the early phase of the design process, which enables a creative approach to professional tool innovation. In the last three decades, the societal change from the materialistic to the experiential has boosted business-to-consumer design practices with a focus on experiential quality. Compelling consumer experiences in daily life have raised the bar of people’s expectations for desirable experiences at work. In contrast, current work tool design in the business-to-business setting is mainly driven by product performance criteria, system productivity, and cost efficiency. The value of meaningful experiences at work as a catalyst for employee flourishing seems largely neglected in work tool design. This dissertation therefore proposes to shift the orientation of work tool design from product-centred problem solving towards experience-focused possibility seeking. This research follows Hassenzahl’s proposition of experience design, to think intended experiences before concrete design outcome. To maintain the designers’ focus on experiential objectives throughout the design process, this dissertation introduces a key conceptual instrument of inquiry into design practice, namely, the experience goal (Xgoal). This dissertation defines Xgoals as high-level design objectives that concretise the intended momentary emotion or lasting meaning that a person feels about a product or service to be designed. The main challenges of Xgoal setting and realisation correspond to a design abduction process in which designers constantly experiment with tentative Xgoals until a preferable match between the two emerges. Thus, this research investigates Xgoal setting and utilisation for work tool design in the specific context of the Finnish metals and engineering industry where traditional problem-solving engineering design dominates. Theoretically, this research utilises the multidisciplinary lenses of positive psychology, organisational management, and possibility-driven design thinking to study Xgoals in creative design practice. Methodologically, this dissertation extracts data from 20 master student projects that collaborated with heavy industry companies. These projects were deliberately designed for meaningful experiences at work in relation to professional tool innovation. The analysis of these project reports emphasises design reasoning for Xgoal setting and utilisation in design activities. Finally, Xgoals as designerly instruments were evaluated in expert interviews. The findings of this research first indicate that Xgoals with in-depth meaning can lead a possibility-driven design process because Xgoals define the in-depth reason for design opportunities rather than a means to a solution. Xgoals can facilitate the considered design space expansion from the main product towards a product-service system and from styling towards human-product interaction, face-to-face communication, and organisational strategy. Second, the findings suggest that the mechanisms of meaningful work can complement a Positive Design Framework, and further propose Xgoals in terms of design for virtue, personal significance and pleasure intertwined with the meaningfulness of work. Third, this research uncovers design strategies for experiences of pride at work along social and temporal dimensions. Finally, this dissertation suggests the generative, reflective, and communicative functions of Xgoals in design practice. This research contributes a theory-inspired and design case-based approach to tool design for evoking meaningful experiences at work. Future studies on this could concentrate on applying the proposed framework and design strategies to other domains, and further develop context-dependent Xgoal setting and utilisation methods for possibility-driven design.
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    Mapping Experience Research Across Disciplines – Who, Where, When
    (SPRINGER, 2021-09-17) Roto, Virpi; Bragge, Johanna; Lu, Yichen; Pacauskas, Darius; Department of Design; Department of Information and Service Management; Encore
    Human experiences have been studied in multiple disciplines, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) being one of the largest research fields with its user experience (UX) research. Currently, there is little interaction between experience researchers from different disciplines, although cross-disciplinary knowledge sharing has the potential to accelerate the development of UX and other experience research fields to the next level. This article reports a research profiling study of almost 52,000 experience publications over 125 years, showing the breadth of experience research across disciplines. The data analysis reveals the disciplines that study experiences, the prominent authors, institutions and countries in experience research, the most cited works by experience researchers across disciplines, and how UX research is situated on the map of experience research. This descriptive research profiling study is a necessary first step on the journey of mapping the landscape of experience research, guiding researchers towards understanding experience as a multidisciplinary concept, and establishing a more coherent experience research field.
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    The new retail touch - Mixing and matching as a catalyst of new retail transformation
    (2019) Han, Fei; Lu, Yichen; Department of Design; Muotoilun laitos; Taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu; School of Arts, Design and Architecture; McGrory, Peter
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    Seeing industrial services through experience lens - Revealing a customer experience map to design for an experiential service in B2B context
    (2016) Hu, Yue; Lu, Yichen; Lindborg, Iiro; Muotoilun laitos; Taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu; School of Arts, Design and Architecture; Mattelmäki, Tuuli
    Nowadays, more and more companies become aware of the importance on experience investment, which not only brings customers pleasant and meaningful interactions during the business but also supports the company to formulate key brand differentiator compared to other competitors. Through the theoretical background research, it has been found that there is still a lack of academic studies and design cases about investigating industrial services with experiential thinking in business-to-business context. As a branch of UXUS research program, the thesis work relies on the case study in cooperation with Rolls-Royce Marine that deals with B2B transactions with customers. It depicts the exploration on how the customer experience map could be constructed under the product context ‘UUC azimuth thruster’ to support refining its industrial service through utilizing experience lens for the near future. Starting with project background introduction and study context definition, the objectives of this thesis have been framed as three research questions, which comprise of discovering the way to promote internal understanding on UUC customer journey as well as bringing the big picture of UUC customer service experience to in-house staff, and enhancing the focused service from the experiential aspect within a short-term outlook. After representing the literature review from both academic and practical domain, the in-house research is described about applying semi- structured interviews to map the industrial service process with touch points. It documents the identification regarding key service interactions and the internal standpoints about the customer service experience. The customer study process is explained then as collecting first-hand customer experience within the targeted UUC service scope, the information of customer journey context has been enriched at the same time. T o Integrate the internal and external study results, the first outcome of this thesis - UUC customer experience map has been uncovered to Rolls-Royce Marine. By identifying the key opportunity from the customer experience map, the thesis continues to illustrate the process of utilizing the experience goals for ideating the experience-driven actions that Rolls-Royce Marine could take on future service development. The developed concept is presented in detail as an experiential service story which has been further built up through information architecture, the flow of interaction and wireframes establishment, and Hi-Fi prototype creation. Lastly, the two outcomes of the thesis have been evaluated by internal experts to determine the directions for the following implementation. Through the in-house assessment, the customer experience map has been regarded as a valuable and meaningful tool that could help mapping the UUC customer journey and the related customer service experience. The re ned UUC service concept has also achieved quite positive feedback from the evaluators, which aims to boost the user experience both inside and outside the organization.
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    Where design and law meet - An empirical study for understanding legal design and its implication for research and practice
    (2019) Ji, Xiaoyu; Lu, Yichen; Department of Design; Muotoilun laitos; Taiteiden ja suunnittelun korkeakoulu; School of Arts, Design and Architecture; Roto, Virpi
    This thesis explores the notion of legal design and proposes its process. The research, conducted through a literature review and expert interviews, provides both academic and empirical findings regarding the subject. Through the literature review, this thesis argues that legal design is an evolving discipline that incorporates many design methods into its framework. First, this study illustrates how the influence of design in the field of law led to the exploration of legal design. Regarding legal design, designerly thinking and doing, including visualization, human-centered design, the design thinking process, and participatory design methods, have been utilized to improve communication of legal documents as well as the user experience of legal services and legal systems. The changed perspective of viewing the mass as the end-user of the law rather than only legal experts and the collaborative, multidisciplinary exploration drives law and design professionals to explore a more radical form of collaboration—legal design—as a new research topic. In the process, the designer who becomes familiar with the legal context and the lawyer who learns designerly think-ing and doing can each claim to be a legal designer. Expert interviews offer empirical knowledge of real-world legal design practices. For instance, through the analysis of the seven collected case projects and expert interviews, this thesis illustrates the understanding of legal design from the standpoint of two parties—designers and lawyers. The insight being is to create a space for legal design at the intersection of design, law, and technology. To explore the space, a legal design process generated from the interviews is proposed. Based on the legal design process, this study suggests three roles designers should assume when engaged in a project with law stakeholders. This thesis also suggests embedding the system thinking within the legal design framework and encouraging the use of more service design methods in the legal design process in order to tackle the complexity of the legal challenges. This thesis conducts explorative research to understand legal design from a design researcher’s perspective. Thus, its limitations include the research methods, the selection of the interviewees, and the scope of the collected case projects. The legal design framework proposed in this study, therefore, needs to be further validated and supported by more comprehensive data.