Things As Citizens

Master Graduation Thesis Louise Hugen

23 March 2018

Poster by Louise Hugen

In her graduation research Louise dived into the concept of Things As Citizens, and created a model for design qualities. She applied it to a autonomous air cleaning vehicle.

The aim of this graduation project is to identify design qualities for things with this kind of agency to perform appropriately during shared practices with citizens in the urban environment. The theme is Things as Citizens; as things are expected to behave conform to the behavior of a citizen in order to coexist with and to be accepted by citizens. The focus is the notion of co-performance in the smart city: a concept that regards the practices of humans and things with agency to be equally important.

The result is the design qualities model. In order to evaluate and validate the design qualities, a concept of things in the city is developed that serves as a demonstrator for the theme Things as Citizens. The concept is designed in the context of air pollution and is a provider and distributor of clean air. The implemented design cues of the concept represent the design qualities model, which is validated by the results of a qualitative study demonstrating to Dutch citizens the interaction with a physical prototype of the concept.


See also project page at Delft Design Lab-website.