Browsing Dissertations and Theses by Title
Now showing items 6-25 of 57
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Choices on Top of Choices: A Case Illustrating the Dialectic Impact of User Technology Choice
(2013-07-23)This dissertation is an instrumental case study of the dialectic impact of user technology choices on systems where users have high autonomy - more ability to choose technologies. The high autonomy context of the case ... -
Community Safety Together: How Reflection and Radical Imagination Can Help Us Build the Worlds We Need
In this dissertation, I explore human-centered design approaches to support community-driven projects that aim to reinforce self-determination and grow networks of support and care. The context in which I approach this ... -
Comparing Language Communities: Characterizing Collaboration in the English, French and Spanish Language Editions of Wikipedia
Is Wikipedia a standardized platform with a common model of collaboration or is it a set of 312 active language editions with distinct collaborative models? In the last 20 years, researchers have extensively analyzed the ... -
Conceptions of Trust: How Designers Approach Usable Privacy and Security
(2013-11-14)Designers who create user interfaces are frequently required to ask users for personal information. For the user, this is a "trust question": Do I, the user, trust the system or entity that is asking me for this information? ... -
Construction of Interactive and Intelligible Distance Cartograms
Travel time is a critical proxy that people rely on for assessing a cost of travel from one place to another. Although information about travel time is an important part of people’s spatial information exploration, ... -
Coordinating the Commons: Diversity & Dynamics in Open Collaborations
(2014-02-24)The success of Wikipedia demonstrates that open collaboration can be an effective model for organizing geographically-distributed volunteers to perform complex, sustained work at a massive scale. However, Wikipedia's history ... -
Coordination in Commons-Based Peer Production Communities: Evaluation, Analysis, and Design for Emergent Systems
Traditional organizations are often relatively structured, involving hierarchies of individual agents driving progress through production, with well-defined boundaries between internal requirements and external expectations ... -
Design and Implementation of Conversational User Interfaces for Health
Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) have the potential to support users across varied health domain areas. Yet barriers remain to the implementation and adoption of CUIs, such as lack of trustworthiness and consideration ... -
Designing Engaging Conversational Interactions for Health & Behavior Change
The recent popularity of chat and voice-based conversational interactions fueled by advances in natural language processing (NLP) has opened up opportunities for re-imagining user interactions in health & behavior change ... -
Designing for Human Supported Evidence-Based Planning
Behavior planning is a technique that can help people bridge goals with the actions that will help them accomplish those goals. Although more than half of all Americans set goals for changing behavior every year, people ... -
Designing for Temporal Motivation
Time is an inseparable factor in human behavior, affecting how people think and what they value. The temporal dynamics of human perception has been a long-standing topic of interest in a broad range of disciplines including, ... -
Designing Guided Asynchronous Remote Communities to Support Teen Mental Health
The majority of teens experience challenges with stress and depression in the United States. However, they lack the resources to access traditional face-to-face mental health care and participate in Human Computer Interaction ... -
Designing Playful Technology for Young Children's Mealtime
This dissertation examines the role technology plays in various relationships between parents and young children at family mealtimes, which constitutes a recurring routine in family lives. Mealtimes are important for young ... -
Designing Technology for Inclusive Play
Inclusion is an approach, commonly known within education, in which individuals with and without disabilities meaningfully and equitably participate in the same setting. For children, inclusive programs support the development ... -
Designing to Account for Patients’ Personal Values in Collaborative Care for Multiple Chronic Conditions
In this dissertation I reexamine the nature of human values and the relationship between values and design by reporting on the VITAL project—Valuing Important Things in Active Lives. This project aimed to improve health ... -
Designing to Support Sense of Agency for Time Spent on Digital Interfaces
App designers often exploit psychological vulnerabilities to maximize clicks, views, and time on site. When people attempt to resist such media use, their failure rate is higher than for any other temptation in everyday ... -
The Effect of Linguistic Explicitness and English Language Proficiency on the Credibility of Online Medical Information
(2011-12-06)Perceived credibility is important to consumers of online medical information because it frequently forms the basis for making treatment choices. While credibility is important to users around the globe, most medical Web ... -
The Effect of Visual Design and Information Content on Readers’ Assessments of API Reference Topics
Software developers must learn and use an increasing number of application-programming interfaces (APIs) to create applications and web sites. To apply these APIs in the increasingly short development time that modern ... -
Engineering Student Development: Supporting Self-Authoring Engineers
(2013-07-23)In this study, engineering undergraduate students constructed a preparedness portfolio in a portfolio studio--the pedagogy at the center of this study. To explore and understand this pedagogy, the construct of self-authorship ... -
Exploring Sustainable Materials through Interaction Design Practice
Responding to concerns about the environmental impacts of human-computer interaction, this dissertation explores what it means to pursue design activities focused on ecological limits: what designers’ tools and skills might ...