Door de digitale transitie ontstaan nieuwe type publieke ruimtes en nieuwe manieren waarop burgers en overheden zich tot elkaar verhouden. Het lectoraat Civic Interaction Design verkent de rol van interactieve media en digitale technologieën in deze ontwikkeling. Samen met bedrijven, overheden, ontwerpers, culturele instellingen en studenten onderzoekt het lectoraat hoe het ontwerp van onder meer interactieve ervaringen, digitale platforms en online diensten bij kan dragen aan het maatschappelijk leven. Hoe kunnen publieke waarden op het gebied van democratie, diversiteit en duurzaamheid worden verankerd in een opkomende netwerk- of platformsamenleving
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Purpose Worldwide, there are 30 million people with dementia (PWD) in 2009 and 100 million in 2050, respectively.These numbers show the need for a change in care for PWD. Leisure is one of these care aspects. Leisure activities can support PWD in several ways: meeting basic needs, providing comfort and social interaction, and reducing boredom, agitation, and isolation. An exemplary activity targeted at meeting these needs is ‘De Klessebessers (KB)’ (The Chitchatters), which aims to stimulate social interaction among PWD and provide comfort with supporting technology. This is innovative since technology for PWD generally concentrates on safety and monitoring activities. The activity comprises a radio, television, telephone, and treasure box. Method This study’s focus follows from the original aim of the KB-designers; to stimulate social interaction. In a nursing home and day care centre, the KB game was played with different groups of PWD (n=21: 12 females, 9 males, mean MMSE=17, range 3-28). In the morning KB (with technology), and in the afternoon an activity called ‘Questiongame’ (without technology) were played for 45 minutes. These activities were played twice in a two-month period, and outcomes were compared in terms of impact on social interaction. Group sizes ranged from 3 to 8 PWD assisted by 1 or 2 activity therapists. Two researchers observed the players during the activity with the Oshkosh Social Behavior Coding (OSBC) scale, which encompasses both verbal and nonverbal social and nonsocial behaviour. These behaviours can have a person-initiated and otherinitiated character (quantitative study). A total of 6 activity therapists were interviewed on the KB afterwards (qualitative study). Results & Discussion The quantitative results showed significantly higher scores for KB for the total of social interaction compared to Questiongame. Most of the behaviour is other-initiated (activity therapist). PWD with a lower MMSE score showed more non-verbal behaviour. For PWD with a MMSE score below 7, there was no difference in social interaction between the two activities. According to the qualitative research, KB triggered more social interaction, since the movies and music were stimulating the players to initiate a conversation, to which other players responded. The results of this research correspond with earlier research, which concludes that leisure activities with technology can show positive results on well-being.
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In this study, we compared the impact of audio-, video-, and text-chat interaction on target language use during online learner-learner interaction and on learner affect amongst adolescent learners of German as a foreign language. Repeated measures and ANOVA analyses revealed a high percentage of target language output in all conditions for all four tasks, especially in text- chat. Audio-chatters produced the most output and used the most meaning negotiation, compensation strategies, self-repair and other-repair strategies. Learners in all conditions gained in enjoyment, willingness to communicate and self-efficacy. Anxiety reduced for text-chatters. Task effects partly determined the quantity of L2 output, while condition effects determined meaning-oriented and form-focused processing.
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Developing and realizing an innovative concept for the Active Aging campus in two years, where students, teachers, companies, residents of surrounding Campus neighborhoods will be invited to do exercise, sports, play, meet and participate. This includes, on the one hand, providing input with regard to a mobility-friendly design from an infrastructural perspective and, on the other hand, organizing activities that contribute to Healthy Aeging of the Zernike site and the city of Groningen. It is not only about having an Active Aging campus with an iconic image, but also about the process. In the process of realization, students, teachers, researchers, companies and residents from surrounding districts will be explicitly involved. This includes hardware (physical environment / infrastructure), software (social environment) and orgware (interaction between the two).
Renewable energy, particularly offshore wind turbines, plays a crucial role in the Netherlands' and EU energy-transition-strategies under the EU Green Deal. The Dutch government aims to establish 75GW offshore wind capacity by 2050. However, the sector faces human and technological challenges, including a shortage of maintenance personnel, limited operational windows due to weather, and complex, costly logistics with minimal error tolerance. Cutting-edge robotic technologies, especially intelligent drones, offer solutions to these challenges. Smaller drones have gained prominence through applications identifying, detecting, or applying tools to various issues. Interest is growing in collaborative drones with high adaptability, safety, and cost-effectiveness. The central practical question from network partners and other stakeholders is: “How can we deploy multiple cooperative drones for maintenance of wind turbines, enhancing productivity and supporting a viable business model for related services?” This is reflected in the main research question: "Which drone technologies need to be developed to enable collaborative maintenance of offshore wind turbines using multiple smaller drones, and how can an innovative business model be established for these services? In collaboration with public and private partners, Saxion, Hanze, and RUG will research the development of these collaborative drones and investigate the technology’s potential. The research follows a Design Science Research methodology, emphasizing solution-oriented applied research, iterative development, and rigorous evaluation. Key technological building blocks to be developed: • Morphing drones, • Intelligent mechatronic tools, • Learning-based adaptive interaction controllers and collaborations. To facilitate the sustainable industrial uptake of the developed technologies, appropriate sustainable business models for these technologies and services will be explored. The project will benefit partners by enhancing their operations and business. It will contribute to renewing higher professional education and may lead to the creation of spin-offs/spinouts which bring this innovative technology to the society, reinforcing the Netherlands' position as a leading knowledge economy.
Drones have been verified as the camera of 2024 due to the enormous exponential growth in terms of the relevant technologies and applications such as smart agriculture, transportation, inspection, logistics, surveillance and interaction. Therefore, the commercial solutions to deploy drones in different working places have become a crucial demand for companies. Warehouses are one of the most promising industrial domains to utilize drones to automate different operations such as inventory scanning, goods transportation to the delivery lines, area monitoring on demand and so on. On the other hands, deploying drones (or even mobile robots) in such challenging environment needs to enable accurate state estimation in terms of position and orientation to allow autonomous navigation. This is because GPS signals are not available in warehouses due to the obstruction by the closed-sky areas and the signal deflection by structures. Vision-based positioning systems are the most promising techniques to achieve reliable position estimation in indoor environments. This is because of using low-cost sensors (cameras), the utilization of dense environmental features and the possibilities to operate in indoor/outdoor areas. Therefore, this proposal aims to address a crucial question for industrial applications with our industrial partners to explore limitations and develop solutions towards robust state estimation of drones in challenging environments such as warehouses and greenhouses. The results of this project will be used as the baseline to develop other navigation technologies towards full autonomous deployment of drones such as mapping, localization, docking and maneuvering to safely deploy drones in GPS-denied areas.
