INTERACT Research Group

The research group focuses on understanding and supporting participatory design, user-centered design, value co-creation, user driven innovation and human interaction with information technology (IT) based services in divergent everyday life contexts. Generally, the research group acknowledges that IT has become intertwined and embedded in almost all parts of our everyday life, including leisure and civic activity, thereby establishing new forms of participation and design. Hence, “users” cannot be considered as passive consumers anymore, but at least as value co-creators and content producers if not even as (co-)designers and innovators. This calls for reconsidering the traditional understandings of the roles of users, service providers and designers as well as for different development approaches that place emphasis on empowerment and inclusion in designing, shaping, innovating and co-creating information technology in everyday life. The roots of the group are in Information Systems, Human-Computer Interaction, European Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Participatory Design, and Activity Theory research communities.

The major recent research themes of the group are the following:

Artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, ethics, AI and data literacy
Understanding and strengthening children’s participation and agency in issues concerning their life.
Usability and UX research (UX Lab)
Games and gamification
Digital transformation in various contexts, including the taxi industry
Understanding and advancing emerging design approaches such as sustainable, ethical, empowering, critical, speculative, futuring, relational, more-than-human design approaches
Understanding and supporting open and democratic development approaches, such as democratizing debates on AI futures, DIY and making, and open source software development

The INTERACT research group has strong background in multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research, combining perspectives from both human and information technology oriented disciplines and has established a transdiscplinary research center to support the efforts in University of Oulu. The group relies mainly on qualitative, participatory, and constructive research approaches. INTERACT researchers have been in involved in developing nexus analysis as a research strategy and are interested in further development of it.

INTERACT research group conducts Information Systems and Human Computer Interaction research.