Ongoing projects
Exploring Extended Reality for Aphantasics
2026
Luis Quintero, Donald McMillan (Stockholm University), Sarah Clinch, David Petrescu (University of Manchester), Andrii Matviienko, Xiaoyan Zhou (KTH)
This project examines how immersive extended reality (XR) technologies (i.e., augmented and virtual reality) can be used to understand and enhance aphantasics’ cognitive strategies on different tasks, supporting them to create vivid visual representations. Exploratory work will be used to develop a portfolio of research directions for larger grant applications around cognitive augmentation and inclusive design for aphantasia. Human participants’ empirical work with immersion and visual imagery ability as independent variables will be used as proof-of-concept, producing a publishable paper and dataset.
Nordic Perspectives on Collaborative AI
for Blue-collar Work (CAI-BLUE)
2026-2029
CAI-BLUE investigates how collaborative AI agents – adaptive, interactive systems that work alongside human teams – can support communication, learning, and shared understanding in blue-collar workplaces.
CAI-BLUE advances the field of Responsible AI by promoting AI systems that align with Nordic traditions of participation and inclusivity. Rather than replacing human activities, AI agents are designed to support workers’ communication, collaboration, shared cognition, and wellbeing – ensuring that technological progress can empower all kinds of workers.
Funded by Nordforsk
Donald McMillan and Azar Raoufi (Stockholm University), in collaboration with Kaisa Väänänen, Thomas Olsson, Maria Hartikainen (Tampere University), Niels van Berkel, Rune Møberg Jacobsen (Aalborg University), Marit Christensen, Leon De Beer (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Shared Uses of Intimate Technology
2024-2027
(Vetenskapsrådet, Lampinen & Balaam)
This project examines how emerging intimate technologies within reproductive health come to be shared. The use of these technologies is often studied at an individual level, but we see an urgent need for research to engage with the social context of ‘use’. Our research is geared to understand how people come to share – and experience the sharing of – intimate technologies as well as how interpersonal relationships are entangled with their use.
Autonomous Systems and Robotics in Society
2025-2030
Autonomous Systems and Robotics in Society takes a human-centered and movement-focused approach to autonomous systems and robotics. We analyse and design human-robot interaction at three different levels, covering how individual human bodies move with robots in close, intimate proximity, how groups of people coordinate movement with and around robots, as well as how the spread of autonomous systems impacts society, in particularly the future of work, care, and labor.
The group bridges competencies in multi-modal interaction analysis, computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), human–computer interaction (HCI), human–robot interaction (HRI), and interaction design. We aim to study interactions with robots as they unfold in society, and to develop social scientific methodologies for the study of autonomous systems and robotics in situ.
Funded by WASP-HS
This project is a national research group, funded for 5 years. The group is led by Airi Lampinen (Stockholm University), in close collaboration with Hannah Pelikan (Linköping University), Madeline Balaam (KTH), and Katie Winkle (Uppsala University).
Past projects
AI in motion
2021-2025
(Barry Brown, Mathias Broth)
The goal of this project is to understand the new interactional public space of human and AI drivers. We see the emerging problems here as “relentlessly interactional” – in the moment by moment co-ordination of road users reflexively moving together. The project will document how humans change their expectations and behaviours when meeting AI-controlled vehicles, but also how those ongoing interactions in turn affect other road users.
Children and sustainability: Designing digital tools for collaborative survival
2023-2025
(Digital Futures, Helms, Lampinen, Schalk)
This project investigates children and digitalization for more sustainable futures. It draws upon feminist ethics of care and more-than-human theories of collaborative survival to examine new roles of technology in and for multi-species flourishing.
Ethics as Enacted through Movement – Shaping and Being Shaped by Autonomous Systems
2020-2024
(WASP-HS, Höök & Lampinen)
This project concerns how ethics is enacted and shaped in relationship to how autonomous systems are designed, focusing in particular, but not solely, on aerial drones.
Layering Trust in Intimate Digital Health Technologies
2021-2025
(Digital Futures Balaam & Lampinen)
This project will produce a landmark, large-scale qualitative study of Natural Cycles, the first algorithmic contraceptive on the market. We work from the standpoint that health choices, health behaviours, and critically, trust in healthcare service providers are interpersonal and socially constructed. Our research looks beyond the individual user, engaging also with the wider social context of ‘use’ when examining how trust is developed and maintained. Further details available at the project website.
Advanced Adaptive Intelligent Systems
2019-2024
(KTH Digital Futures, Iolanda Leite, Donald McMillan, Jonas Beskow, Britt Östlund, Joakim Gustafson and Christian Smith)
This project is focused on the development of socially assistive robots in people’s homes, education or health-care settings, as well as robots working alongside workers in small-scale manufacturing environments.
From tracking to hacking sleep
2019-2024
(Karlgren, McMillan, Brown)
This project explores how we can design using sleep tracking for people who live outside norm schedules, in particular through studying goals, perspectives and actions of sleep hacking.
Breastmilk Pumping and Workplace: Explicating Care Relationships
2018-2023
(Yadav, Balaam, Lampinen)
This study examines the experiences of working mothers who are lactating and expressing milk at their workplace.
Digital Futures Drone Arena
2021-2023
(Digital Futures, Mottola & Lampinen)
This project develops a novel aerial drone testbed, where drone competitions take place periodically to understand and explore the unfolding relationships between humans and drones. Further details available at the project website.
Economic Encounters for Human–Computer Interaction
2018-2022
(Vetenskapsrådet, Lampinen)
Economic Encounters for Human–Computer Interaction is focused on exchange platforms as an increasingly dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web. Simply put, exchange platforms are online forums which support the peer-to-peer exchange of labour, resources or goods.
Hacking
2018-2021
(Vetenskapsrådet, Brown)
The project is conducting multidisciplinary research that provide answers to the following broader research questions: What are the relationships between powerful stakeholders, and how will networks of control influence individuals and users? What new roles do people take when facing questions of security in IoT? What emerging changes in cultural and social behaviours can already be observed? How does the design of IoT devices and their infrastructures affect understandings of security? And lastly, how can technical IoT developments learn from social science work?
Implicit Interaction
2017-2021
(SSF, Brown & Höök)
This project is a joint collaboration between Stockholm University, KTH and RISE. The project is built around developing a new interface paradigm that we call smart implicit interaction.
From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy
2017-2021
(COST Action, Lampinen)
From Sharing to Caring aims to develop a European network of actors (including scholars, practitioners, communities and policy makers) focusing on the development of collaborative economy models and platforms and on social and technological implications of the collaborative economy through a practice-focused approach.
Algorithmic Systems, Power, and Social Interaction
2018-2022
(Kone Foundation, Lampinen)
Algorithmic Systems, Power, and Social Interaction is a multidisciplinary research project that analyzes algorithmic systems as part of social and societal interaction. We approach algorithmic systems from two perspectives: macro-conceptual analysis evaluates the societal role of algorithmic systems, while micro-level analysis examines everyday interactions between individuals and algorithmic systems.
Designing New Speech Interfaces
2017-2020
(Vetenskapsrådet and STINT, McMillan)
This project is focused around understanding non-system directed audio (such as ordinary conversation and environmental, ambient audio) as well as not only what the user says to the system, but how they say it in order to design new user interfaces with more interesting interactions.
Nordic Perspectives on Algorithmic Systems: Concepts, Methods, and Interventions
2019-2022
(NOS-HS workshop series, Lampinen)
This is a workshop series situated in the emerging area of critical algorithm studies and devised to connect scholars in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. The workshops are geared to bring a Nordic perspective to the social studies of algorithms and improve conceptual frameworks and methods for addressing problems pertaining the social implications of algorithm systems.
Ongoing projects
Funded by Vetenskapsrådet
The aim of the grant is to support a constellation of researchers in preparing a future large scale application to establish world leading excellence clusters. The name AnthroTech reflects the recognition that we are living in the Anthropocene. Technological systems are deeply entangled with human activity and increasingly shape the social, political, and ecological conditions of life.
AnthroTech Cluster of Excellence (ACE)
2025-2026
Airi Lampinen, Donald McMillan (Stockholm University), Asreen Rostami (RISE), Madeline Balaam, Iolanda Leite (KTH), Thiemo Voigt (Uppsala University)
As intelligent systems become embedded in homes, transport, education, hospitals and governance, the consequences of their design and deployment become more significant. AnthroTech adopts a relational understanding of intelligent systems. Success is not defined solely by computational performance. Instead, it depends on the capacity of these systems to be socially legible, culturally responsive, and procedurally accountable. These qualities cannot be engineered in isolation. They emerge through interaction in real contexts, which raises important questions of control, responsibility, and relationality that current frameworks of design and governance struggle to address.
Nordic Perspectives on Collaborative AI
for Blue-collar Work (CAI-BLUE)
2026-2029
CAI-BLUE investigates how collaborative AI agents – adaptive, interactive systems that work alongside human teams – can support communication, learning, and shared understanding in blue-collar workplaces.
CAI-BLUE advances the field of Responsible AI by promoting AI systems that align with Nordic traditions of participation and inclusivity. Rather than replacing human activities, AI agents are designed to support workers’ communication, collaboration, shared cognition, and wellbeing – ensuring that technological progress can empower all kinds of workers.
Funded by Nordforsk
Donald McMillan and Azar Raoufi (Stockholm University), in collaboration with Kaisa Väänänen, Thomas Olsson, Maria Hartikainen (Tampere University), Niels van Berkel, Rune Møberg Jacobsen (Aalborg University), Marit Christensen, Leon De Beer (Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Shared Uses of Intimate Technology
2024-2027
(Vetenskapsrådet, Lampinen & Balaam)
This project examines how emerging intimate technologies within reproductive health come to be shared. The use of these technologies is often studied at an individual level, but we see an urgent need for research to engage with the social context of ‘use’. Our research is geared to understand how people come to share – and experience the sharing of – intimate technologies as well as how interpersonal relationships are entangled with their use.
Past projects
AI in motion
2021-2025
(Barry Brown, Mathias Broth)
The goal of this project is to understand the new interactional public space of human and AI drivers. We see the emerging problems here as “relentlessly interactional” – in the moment by moment co-ordination of road users reflexively moving together. The project will document how humans change their expectations and behaviours when meeting AI-controlled vehicles, but also how those ongoing interactions in turn affect other road users.
Children and sustainability: Designing digital tools for collaborative survival
2023-2025
(Digital Futures, Helms, Lampinen, Schalk)
This project investigates children and digitalization for more sustainable futures. It draws upon feminist ethics of care and more-than-human theories of collaborative survival to examine new roles of technology in and for multi-species flourishing.
Ethics as Enacted through Movement – Shaping and Being Shaped by Autonomous Systems
2020-2024
(WASP-HS, Höök & Lampinen)
This project concerns how ethics is enacted and shaped in relationship to how autonomous systems are designed, focusing in particular, but not solely, on aerial drones.
Layering Trust in Intimate Digital Health Technologies
2021-2025
(Digital Futures Balaam & Lampinen)
This project will produce a landmark, large-scale qualitative study of Natural Cycles, the first algorithmic contraceptive on the market. We work from the standpoint that health choices, health behaviours, and critically, trust in healthcare service providers are interpersonal and socially constructed. Our research looks beyond the individual user, engaging also with the wider social context of ‘use’ when examining how trust is developed and maintained. Further details available at the project website.
Advanced Adaptive Intelligent Systems
2019-2024
(KTH Digital Futures, Iolanda Leite, Donald McMillan, Jonas Beskow, Britt Östlund, Joakim Gustafson and Christian Smith)
This project is focused on the development of socially assistive robots in people’s homes, education or health-care settings, as well as robots working alongside workers in small-scale manufacturing environments.
From tracking to hacking sleep
2019-2024
(Karlgren, McMillan, Brown)
This project explores how we can design using sleep tracking for people who live outside norm schedules, in particular through studying goals, perspectives and actions of sleep hacking.
Breastmilk Pumping and Workplace: Explicating Care Relationships
2018-2023
(Yadav, Balaam, Lampinen)
This study examines the experiences of working mothers who are lactating and expressing milk at their workplace.
Digital Futures Drone Arena
2021-2023
(Digital Futures, Mottola & Lampinen)
This project develops a novel aerial drone testbed, where drone competitions take place periodically to understand and explore the unfolding relationships between humans and drones. Further details available at the project website.
Economic Encounters for Human–Computer Interaction
2018-2022
(Vetenskapsrådet, Lampinen)
Economic Encounters for Human–Computer Interaction is focused on exchange platforms as an increasingly dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web. Simply put, exchange platforms are online forums which support the peer-to-peer exchange of labour, resources or goods.
Hacking
2018-2021
(Vetenskapsrådet, Brown)
The project is conducting multidisciplinary research that provide answers to the following broader research questions: What are the relationships between powerful stakeholders, and how will networks of control influence individuals and users? What new roles do people take when facing questions of security in IoT? What emerging changes in cultural and social behaviours can already be observed? How does the design of IoT devices and their infrastructures affect understandings of security? And lastly, how can technical IoT developments learn from social science work?
Implicit Interaction
2017-2021
(SSF, Brown & Höök)
This project is a joint collaboration between Stockholm University, KTH and RISE. The project is built around developing a new interface paradigm that we call smart implicit interaction.
From Sharing to Caring: Examining Socio-Technical Aspects of the Collaborative Economy
2017-2021
(COST Action, Lampinen)
From Sharing to Caring aims to develop a European network of actors (including scholars, practitioners, communities and policy makers) focusing on the development of collaborative economy models and platforms and on social and technological implications of the collaborative economy through a practice-focused approach.
Algorithmic Systems, Power, and Social Interaction
2018-2022
(Kone Foundation, Lampinen)
Algorithmic Systems, Power, and Social Interaction is a multidisciplinary research project that analyzes algorithmic systems as part of social and societal interaction. We approach algorithmic systems from two perspectives: macro-conceptual analysis evaluates the societal role of algorithmic systems, while micro-level analysis examines everyday interactions between individuals and algorithmic systems.
Designing New Speech Interfaces
2017-2020
(Vetenskapsrådet and STINT, McMillan)
This project is focused around understanding non-system directed audio (such as ordinary conversation and environmental, ambient audio) as well as not only what the user says to the system, but how they say it in order to design new user interfaces with more interesting interactions.
Nordic Perspectives on Algorithmic Systems: Concepts, Methods, and Interventions
2019-2022
(NOS-HS workshop series, Lampinen)
This is a workshop series situated in the emerging area of critical algorithm studies and devised to connect scholars in Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. The workshops are geared to bring a Nordic perspective to the social studies of algorithms and improve conceptual frameworks and methods for addressing problems pertaining the social implications of algorithm systems.