Our research projects

Research projects at the Department of Informatics and Media.

The purpose of this project is to explore how media, disability and selves are conjoined, by asking questions about the potential dis/in/enabling aspects of self-discovery through the machine and about resonances between ADHD and the apps themselves. The project interrogates the archive through readings of texts and algorithms, and by combining ethnographic investigations with historical contextualisation. It will generate important knowledge and contribute to a diversified, post-anthropocentric theorisation of the extraordinary self in becoming – as well as an alternate understanding of our digital existence.

Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self

AI now reaches into every aspect of life, even what we think about as intimate and private. Simplified, AI takes in data, makes predictions, and suggests the best cause for action or interpretation. So far research has focused on grand scales of social transformation, with little attention to the intricacies of AI interactions that people already engage in.

Intimate AI: Young Women’s Self-perception and Embodied Knowledge in the Age of Automation

At the End of the World: A Transdisciplinary Approach to the Apocalyptic Imaginary in the Past and Present

AI impacts humans at the existential level, by influencing how we experience and think about time, vulnerability and finitude, and how we make sense of the world. AI also raises normative questions about the social and political futures we imagine and on how we should design the societal institutions and socio-technical systems in which AI systems are embedded. These simultaneous and multi-layered processes of design are inextricably intertwined. This project seeks to conceptualise and bring about existential, political and institutional design futures, by means of engaging both political and existential philosophy, so as to imagine and create new narratives for alternative AI Design Futures.

AI Design Futures

The field of AI is not immune to the replication crisis, and thus this project will focus on studying the research practices of AI research. Specifically, it will conduct an empirical analysis of AI-related research and replication practices to determine best practices that will be operationalised in a research replicability toolkit. The aim is that this project’s successful implementation will increase robustness and trust in published AI-related research results.

Addressing the Replication Crisis in Artificial Intelligence

Assistive AI, Disability and Norms of Being Human

The research project ABC for Meaningful Meetings will explore how physical meeting places can contribute to increased social interaction and strengthening of community, thereby breaking loneliness. The project, which runs over four years, is funded by Vinnova within the framework of the call Social sustainability in the physical environment and is carried out in collaboration between Uppsala University, Linnaeus University, the real estate company Sankt Kors and the non-profit association Gyllene Skräp which works to convey knowledge about sustainable development through experiences and educational tools.

ABC for Meaningful Meetings – to reduce loneliness and increase well-being in the local environment

What does it mean to trust the media? And how is trust (and mistrust) in the media formed in the everyday life of Swedish citizens? These questions will be explored in this research project that takes the rapidly changing media landscape and the reports on falling levels of trust in the media as a starting point.

Media trust and social imaginaries: A qualitative study on the meaning and formation of media trust

The Method Cards for Movement-based Interaction Design (MeCaMInD) project explores how we can make an actionable method card toolbox in the fields of interaction design and sport and movement. It is run as a collaboration and outreach Erasmus+ project, with partners in the domains of physical education and movement interaction design.

Mecamind

The purpose of the project is to understand how visibility strategies and visibility management shape the agency of LGBTQ rights defenders in contexts of state-sanctioned homophobia, as well as examine how development partners (un)intentionally influence visibility practices through rhetoric and funding preferences.

Navigating visibility in contexts of state-sanctioned homophobia: development actors and LGBTQ rights defenders in Uganda and Russia

The aim of the project is, by means of qualitative research methods, to develop knowledge about the challenges, tensions and pressures shaped by the proliferation of strategic communication in Scandinavian higher education institutions. The project takes its point of departure in the Scandinavian context, and it is structured into three sub-studies: the development of communicational strategies, plans and activities; professional ideals embedded in the production of promotional material; and multimodal content produced by universities.

Strategic Communication and Organizing in the Scandinavian Higher Education Sector: Towards the Promotional University?

The project "Measuring mediatisation" focuses on media reliance in everyday life, and how this can be measured. The project contributes with a longitudinal study of mediatisation as a process of social change which evolves differently in different spheres of society. Will new apps and place-based services make basic human realms such as love, work and health more reliant on media technology? How important will various media be for how people make their ways through local and global social contexts? How does the trend of "digital disconnection" impact the ways in which mediatisation evolves in society and our lives?

Measuring mediatisation

The digitalisation of everyday life does not stop at the most intimate areas of healthcare, such as sexual health, fertility, and reproduction. Today, many people use apps to track menstrual cycles, detect (in)fertile phases, or virtually follow foetal development. In other words, digital technologies allow for a novel external management of the reproductive system. In this project the project team study health care professionals, pregnant individuals, and the apps themselves in order to map out this new and unexplored area of reproductive health.

Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Impact of Reproductive Health Apps on Experiences of Pregnancy, Healthcare Professionals’ Work and Data Governance

In this project, the project team investigate how machine learning can support the personalisation of out-of-clinic physical training. The researchers combine current research into open-ended tools for instructed physical training, with approaches to interactive machine learning to make tools adaptable to the individual.

Interactive Machine Learning for Personalised Physical Training

The project examines the process of normalization of racism in the Swedish public sphere by looking at trajectories of Swedish political and media discourse. The study covers the period 2010-22 of a significant change in Swedish public language on immigration in the context of ongoing socio-political change including the growth of right-wing populism.

Immigration and the Normalization of Racism: Discursive Shifts in Swedish Politics and Media 2010-22

Some of our prior research projects.

The objective of the project Exploring the Role of Culture in Persuasive Design of E-Coaching for Informal Caregivers is to investigate persuasive technologies adaptive to needs of end-users and stakeholders, to provide a real-time e-coaching system to intervene at the right moment, given the “vulnerability” and dynamic demands of the target group (caregivers and relatives).

Exploring the Role of Culture in Persuasive Design of E-Coaching for Informal Caregivers (ENTWINE ESR10)

A large challenge today is to ensure that children have possibilities to be physically active outdoors. Play environments in residential areas and at schools are not prioritized in today's society in contrast to play areas that children cannot go to by themselves. Accessible and well known play environments are especially important for children with special needs physically or cognitively. The aim of this project is to increase knowledge in society about how play environments with a high play value can be built in the city that are accessible for all children.

Sustainable urban play environments

The basic idea of The Citizen Hub is to give the citizen / the individual easy access to the information in government registers but also to completely different register information – institutional facts – that the citizen has the right to access, for example from banks. The Citizen Hub will put the citizen at the center and provide the citizen with digitally directly transmitted information from several information sources.

The Citizen Hub – a citizen-centered information sharing service for open e-government

The overall aim of this research project is to analyse how contemporary racism and xenophobia are moulded in public, including online, discourses on immigration and refugees. As its central object of research, the project will look into how and why racist views become particularly widespread in Sweden at times of socio-political “crises” and how online racism interacts thereby with migration-related opinion journalism and discourses of political actors.

Interactive Racism in Swedish Online Media, Press and Politics: Discourses on Immigration and Refugees at Times of Crisis

In the domain of motor skill training, the project researches how playful training can be designed to be short and long-term effective and engaging. The target group chosen for study are children with sensory processing disorders (SPD), related to bodily awareness and movement mastery issues. The goal is to support the development of proprioceptive skills through playification, a strategy similar to gamification but with less emphasis on challenge, and more on the playful re-negotiation of activities within the participant group.

Improving children’s proprioceptive skills and motoric abilities through interactive playful training

This project aims to understand the inherent values ​​of the physical and the digital, by considering the physical and digital as building blocks that shape interactions between human actors and their spatial conditions. The aim is to provide a more elaborate understanding of factors that condition successful organisational interaction at the intersection of digital and physical space.

TROPHY: Managing the Digital Transformation of Physical Space

The project will develop new concepts and techniques to create responsive and adaptable IoT-enhanced play-environments, with a focus on public areas. These are based on learning for sustainable development and value-based issues such as inclusion and equality.

Playful Internet of Things

The project aims to increase public health through physical activity among young people. With the help of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and so-called gamification, the project aims to promote increased physical activity among young people based on their own premises and wishes. Through IoT technology public sports facilities and outdoor areas will become more inclusive and attractive for more audiences. The goal is to bring young people into sports and outdoor activities in public facilities using new methods to get them in motion and physical activity.

FOSF – IoT public health through sports and outdoor life

Museums serve as our collective memory, preserving and interpreting our shared culture and identity. The central challenge of the GIFT project is to create designs that facilitate meaningful interpersonal experiences. GIFT focusses on hybrid experiences, realised through mixed reality designs that overlay physical visits with digital content as a way to complement, challenge or reframe the experience of museum visits.

The GIFT research project

This project investigates the changing opportunities that digital technology offers for family social life. The Network Society is an expression aiming to explain how our lives today are affected by new digital technologies. In the network society, researchers agree that a number of changes have occurred in how society is organised. Globalization, individualization, and freer markets are some examples of processes that together with internet and digital technologies have allowed these changes. Yet, we still do not understand what these developments mean for our everyday lives.

Social Relationships in the Network Society

PDMS-projeket studerar införandet av ett nytt s k Patient Data Management System för intensivvård vid Akademiska sjukhuset i Uppsala. Vårt deltagande syftar till att skapa kunskap om komplexa införandeprojekt där ett nytt system rullas ut på olika avdelningar över tiden. Specifikt hoppas vi kunna lära oss mer om hur användares förväntningar och attityder till systemet påverkas över de olika faserna.

PDMS - Patient Data Management System

DRIVE, WP2: Creation and testing of new economic models

Project leader and contact at the Department of Informatics and Media: Steve McKeever

In this project the researchers have focused on play concepts that can work as an alternative design material when play environments are planned and built. This play concept supports the procurer in building play environments with a high play value as the design material requires certain qualities such as vegetation and natural materials. More details about the project “Digital and Physical Play Environments” in the national database Swecris.

Project leader and contact at the Department of Informatics and Media, Annika Waern.

Funding: Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). Description of the project “What is the significance of economic incentives for the choice of university education?” at SweCRIS website.

Project leader and contact at the Department of Informatics and Media: Pär Ågerfalk 

Former för utveckling och förvaltning av offentliggemensamma digitala resurser, beskrivning av projektet på Vinnovas webb.

Kontaktperson på informatik och media: Owen Eriksson 

The purpose of this project is to understand what happens when religious discourse, which has traditionally been characterised by hierarchies and structured practices, moves into contexts which are said to be anti-hierarchical and unstructured, and which explicitly aim at co-construction of meaning.

Ancient rituals in contemporary landscapes: An exploration of religious practices in social media

Purpose and goal: The project called The Mission's main goal was to implement and test a game to enhance Learning in the science center by adding a layer of digital technology. Through this Project the organisation has created a very promising product with a high future potential. This game makes the exhibit more attractive, broadens the target visitor group and creates a better platform to increase the interest in science and technology for all the exhibits displayed on Tomtits. The Mission is a great example of a product that fills a demand that has long been missing in the science center scene.

More details about the Vinnova funded project “The mission – curiosity unleashed” in the national database Swecris.

Project leader and contact at the Department of Informatics and Media: Annika Waern.

Finansiär/bidragsgivare: FAS. Kontaktperson på informatik och media: Pär Ågerfalk