https://scholarworks.unist.ac.kr/handle/201301/36 2026-05-13T06:18:01Z 2026-05-13T06:18:01Z GARZA, BERTHA PATRICIA BARRERA https://scholarworks.unist.ac.kr/handle/201301/91508 2026-04-23T08:48:37Z 2026-01-31T15:00:00Z

Title: Making as Catalyst for Intuition in Design Thinking Bertha Patricia Barrera Garza Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology Author(s): GARZA, BERTHA PATRICIA BARRERA Abstract: Design thinking has become a buzz word in the last decade or so and has been an approach to solve complex problems when the traditional solving methodologies seem to have limitations. However, its origins are not in the business world, but in the area of design, where research explores the internal process that a designer follows in order to fulfill a design brief. Our aim is to understand the role of making and intuition during a design thinking process. Based on my own previous experience facilitating design thinking workshops, the thesis aims to explore the opportunity of making as driver for enhanced participation, engagement, and intuitive judgment in design thinking activities. Design thinking is a group of mental processes that have the ability to help solve difficult or wicked design problems. Intuition and intuitive judgment are important to design thinking as participants engage a design challenge to explore potential solution ideas. Making, which has always been represented in design thinking, is positioned through reference to constructivism, constructionism, and embodied cognition. This then provides an operational definition that I apply across four empirical studies, studies A-D. The first two studies, A and B, explore design thinking workshops, which follow the traditional design thinking methodology. The workshops test the role of making in enhancing intuitive judgment in design thinking and presents the results of a workshop study that investigates the impact of making on both designer and non-designers' ability to use their intuition in design thinking sessions. The study found that making at the beginning of the design thinking workshops increased the frequency of high-level, intuitive decisions as an indicator of the application of intuition regardless of the participant's status as a designer or non-designer. In study C, I conduct an expert interview approach to interview 16 design thinking facilitators from around the globe. The analysis of interview responses provides a broader understanding of intuitive judgment in design thinking and how practitioners view the opportunity to make. Emergent themes include storytelling, play, and safe-space as important aspects of making in design thinking. Our final study, Study D, employed an autoethnographic approach, whereby participation in an international design thinking workshop provided opportunity to further explore the concept of safe-space, emergent from the expert interview study. With the use of a diary as my data collecting tool, I apply the LICW (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) approach to analyze the resulting diary entries. The study indicates how emotion and intuition are related; the more negative emotion is present the less opportunity for intuitive judgement, being instead replaced by rational thought. This result correlates with the experts in their definition of safe-spaces in design thinking. The study suggests how, and it what ways making may be applied within design thinking contexts to enhance engagement and support intuitive judgement, for both designer and non-designer. Findings may contribute to understand where and how to apply making in support of design thinking. Results also have implications for understanding the relationship between making, design thinking, and intuitive judgment. Keywords: Design Thinking; Making; Design Intuition; Design Process; Design Making Major: Department of Design

2026-01-31T15:00:00Z Kim, Nari https://scholarworks.unist.ac.kr/handle/201301/91509 2026-04-23T08:48:38Z 2026-01-31T15:00:00Z

Title: Translucent Privacy Author(s): Kim, Nari Abstract: Shared spaces such as shared housing and open-plan offices provide opportunities for communication and collaboration but also introduce challenges to individual privacy. In these environments, occupants continuously interpret one another’s social cues to coordinate behaviors, yet differences in cultural background and communication style can lead to privacy misalignments. This dissertation investigates how systems can support individual privacy in shared spaces by facilitating mutual understanding through social translucence—a framework emphasizing visibility, awareness, and accountability as the basis for social coordination. Adopting a Research through Design (RtD) approach, this study explores the application and extension of the Social Translucence Framework to privacy management across three design cases. Based on insights from related work, four design strategies were developed to guide the design of systems. Each case was evaluated through a three-week field study conducted in real shared environments, revealing how the proposed design strategies were manifested in practice and how they shaped occupants’ coordination and privacy-related experiences. The findings demonstrate that translucence- based systems can support the negotiation of social boundaries and foster awareness of others’ needs in shared spaces. Building on these insights, the dissertation proposes an Extended Social Translucence Framework for Privacy, outlining design considerations regarding what and how to visualize information, and how to balance individual responsibility and system-level intervention. This work contributes (1) empirical insights into how translucence-based systems affect privacy experiences in everyday social contexts, (2) practical design strategies for developing privacy-supportive interfaces in shared environments, and (3) an extended theoretical framework for understanding and designing social translucence for privacy. Major: Department of Design

2026-01-31T15:00:00Z Park, Haeun https://scholarworks.unist.ac.kr/handle/201301/88313 2025-11-06T00:58:33Z 2025-07-31T15:00:00Z

Title: Emotion Engine with Dynamic Characteristic Changes for Multimodal Emotion Expression in Social Robots Author(s): Park, Haeun Abstract: This thesis proposes and validates a novel multimodal emotion engine that enables social robots to express emotions dynamically and adaptively through facial expressions, motion, and sound. Traditional emotion expression systems in social robots often rely on rule-based logic and discrete transitions, limiting their ability to reflect the fluid, context-sensitive nature of human emotional expression. To overcome these limitations, the proposed system integrates a continuous affective state model grounded in a Linear Dynamic Affect-Expression Model (LDAEM), allowing robots to respond to stimuli from sensors, temporally sensitive expressions. The engine incorporates multiple sensory inputs---including facial recognition and touch---and transforms them into a dynamic internal emotion vector within a defined affective space. This emotion vector drives multimodal outputs in real time through three channels: (1) facial expression using customizable control points (CPs) that were co-designed by users; (2) motion trajectories derived from user-demonstrated miniature manipulations to reflect expected emotional gestures; and (3) synthesized sound patterns mimicking emotional vocalizations, recorded and processed using Sonic Pi. These multimodal expressions are modulated by dynamic parameters such as damping ratio, which governs expressiveness and liveliness of the output. A series of three structured user studies were conducted to investigate key research questions (RQs). For RQ1, which concerns how the system resolves conflicting emotional stimuli across modalities (e.g., positive touch versus negative facial cues), the findings reveal that users tend to perceive robot emotions as more aligned with negative stimuli. This suggests that priority weighting is applied to negative stimuli in the emotion integration process. For RQ2, the system's dynamic characteristics were modulated using various damping ratios to assess perceived liveliness and naturalness. Results indicate that while increased dynamic expressiveness enhances liveliness, naturalness peaks at moderate dynamic levels across most emotions, with surprise being an exception. Each emotion exhibited distinct optimal dynamic settings, emphasizing the need for emotion-specific modulation strategies. RQ3 explored the smoothness and believability of emotion transitions. A direct transition model (Proposed Model) that connects current emotional CPs to the next emotional state was compared against a state-reset model (Baseline Model), which first returns the robot to a neutral expression before transitioning to a new emotion. Participants overwhelmingly rated the proposed Model as more natural, continuous, and emotionally believable, supporting its effectiveness in real-time interactions involving abrupt emotional shifts. The proposed emotion engine advances the state of the art in social robot design by enabling expressive, context-sensitive, and user-personalized emotion expression. Through multimodal fusion, dynamic control, and user-in-the-loop customization, this research provides a robust framework for designing emotionally responsive robots that can adaptively engage in natural human-robot interaction. Major: Graduate School of Creative Design Engineering

2025-07-31T15:00:00Z Jang, Sangsu https://scholarworks.unist.ac.kr/handle/201301/86400 2025-04-04T04:48:32Z 2025-01-31T15:00:00Z

Title: Design and Evaluation of Digitally Augmented Everyday Objects for Supporting Self-Recording in Daily Environment Author(s): Jang, Sangsu Major: Department of Design

2025-01-31T15:00:00Z