Research

AI in Aviation: Digital Flight Assistants

How is AI transforming the Aviation Industry? How do pilots, dispatchers, controllers, or cabin crews relate to automate technologies? And can we design AI systems to help, rather than replace, humans? The project invites participants on a co-design journey, where they can experiment with GPTs, train an AI model or fly our flight simulator. The challenges that emerge create a space to understand the fragility of AI systems and their socio-economic impact. Currently, we are building a virtual instructor to support trainee pilots and studying whether AI solutions can help foster increased psychological safety on the airplane.

Distributed Intelligence Stream // Researchers: Fabio Mattioli, Joe Brailsford

Andromeda

How do we build rapport with companion robots? And how do they change the workflow in an organization?

In this project we will conduct an ethnography of how humans (workers, engineers, users) relate to robots, build empathy with them, and look at the structural issues that affect those relationships.

AI in Action// Researchers: Fabio Mattioli

Sustainability in Hospitals

How can we help hospitals become more sustainable? In collaboration with medical institutions and other partners, this project looks at the reduction of singe use objects in the Parkville precinct. In 2024, we plan on starting with coffee cups. Through participant observation in cafes, co-design sessions with nurses, doctors, and patients, we aim at producing change models that maps and transforms the value chain of coffee consumption in hospitals.

Sustainability Stream // Researchers: Fabio Mattioli, Erin Fitz Henry, Meiling Zhou

Perceptions of Nature

How are millennials perceiving Nature – and how do they associate value to enterprises who promote biodiversity and sustainability in commercial projects? With our partners, we plan on using co-design and ethnographic methodologies to map attitudes towards and connection with nature and biodiversity. The project combines ethnographic and quantitative methodologies to develop a change model for caring for biodiversity and natural systems, with commercial partners such as banks. It also tries to understand how nature is commercialized in pop culture through lyrics and imagery of Taylor Swift.

Sustainability Stream // Researchers: Rachel Morgain, Cynthia Sear

Justice in the Metaverse

How should virtual spaces be designed to enable conflict resolution? What happens to the experience of justice when judges and other participants see and interact with each other as avatars in Web3 spaces? In this project, we interrogate the opportunities and limitations of immersive virtual court technology. Through an experiential and phenomenological ethnography of metaverse spaces, we aim at developing and testing a prototype for virtual courtrooms.

(In)Justice and Equality Stream // Researchers: Tatiana Dancy, Meredith Rossner, David Tait, Fabio Mattioli

Mapping housing finance inequality

How do Melbourne residents negotiate increasingly unaffordable mortgages? What kinds of emotional responses arise when trying to access or pay mortgage debt, and how does this shape peoples’ perceptions of the future? Drawing from participatory emotional mapping techniques, ethnography, and the construction of envisaged future scenarios, we will investigate the intersections between emotion, housing finance inequality and urban space in Melbourne. These data visualizations will reveal the lived effects of housing finance inequality.

(In)Justice and Equality Stream // Researchers: Rebekah Plueckhahn, Jeff Garmany, Fabio Mattioli