Innovation in Urban Planning

Härnösand and Nykarleby are two cities facing similar challenges: Sparsely populated regions, ageing population with young people moving away and society turning multicultural and -lingual. Both cities need to develop inclusive, digitally supported ways of including residents in planning and decisionmaking. Their regions share many similarities, but there are also differences in both circumstances and challenges that merit comparison and exchange. Urban planning is one example of a sector where there is need of new tools and ways of working to create paths towards a sustainable society.  

Åbo Akademi Experience Lab will focus on digital transformation, especially the meetings between human and technology including the context where they occur. We use user research methods and human-centred design to analyse and design not just digital interfaces but the processes where they are included as well. 

Innovation in Urban Planning will result in a pre-study on the need to develop new dialogue tools for the citizens, identify the potential of new technology and enhance the innovation capacities of the municipal organizations. 

Innovation in Urban Planning is funded by the Interreg Aurora programme. 

Contact: Kimmo Rautanen, project manager (ÅAU), Kimmo.rautanen (at) abo.fi 

SoRoMa

[en/sv]

Alla elever får inte det nödvändiga stöd som de behöver i klassrumsmiljön. Lärarna är ofta underbemannade, vilket gör det svårt att erbjuda den grad av individuell handledning som skulle behövas.

Med detta i åtanke syftar projektet SoRoMa (Sociala robotar i matematikundervisningen) till att ta några inledande steg mot att erbjuda individuell handledning till elever som behöver det. Genom att använda ett unikt tillvägagångssätt med ett matematikbaserat kortspel, använder detta projekt en social robot som handledare. Med hjälp av AI-teknologi anpassar sig roboten till situationen under handledningen.

Projektet finansieras av Högskolestiftelsen i Österbotten.

SoRoMa

[en/sv]

Not every student receives the necessary support within a classroom setting. While a one-to-one setting often would be for the best, the reality is that teachers often are understaffed, making this hard to achieve.

With this in mind, the project SoRoMa (Sociala robatar i matematikundervisningen) aims to make some preliminary steps towards providing individualized tutoring to students who need it. Using a unique approach involving a math-based card game, this project employs a social robot acting as a tutor. With the help of AI-techonlogy the robot is meant to adapt to the situation unfolding during the tutoring.

The project is funded by Högskolestiftelsen i Österbotten.

Mattias Wingren

APOLLO2028

The overall objective of the Horizon Europe-funded APOLLO2028 project is to provide health and care workers, organisations, and healthcare system funders and policy makers with research-backed innovative solutions to help improve mental health, wellbeing, and capacity to be more resilient to changing environments (especially daily pressures and extreme events) at the workplace. The originality of the project is to consider resilience in health care in a holistic approach to build individual, team and organizational capabilities to face the next extreme events and daily pressures. Therefore, we will study individual factors affecting resilience, group factors, organizational factors, and develop a model involving all types of factors. This model will serve as a basis for the production of guidelines to be disseminated to health and care workers, their managers, as well as policy makers and health systems funders. We will also develop an AI-based system to support in the identification of stress factors and recommend actions. We will involve all the stakeholders in a co-design work to finalise our solutions. We will also review the cost effectiveness of our solutions. The main impact of our project will be a reduction of stress factors at the workplace, and an improvement of resilience of all the health and care workers. We will ensure our solutions are disseminated to all EU member states and adapted to the specifics of each of their health care systems.

Experience Lab leads a work package focusing on individual resilience. We are developing new measures of resilience based on daily measures of affective reactivity to workplace stressors, and exploring organizational factors that explain why people differ in their level of resilience. We are also heavily involved in the co-creation of a scenario analysis tool, where health care leaders will explore effects of leadership decisions in a simulated organization.

The project is led by University of Montpellier, France.

Other members of the consortium:

Bocconi University
Trinity College Dublin
Karolinska institutet
Kaunas Universiity of Technology
Vilnius University
Eötvös Loránd University
Massachusetts General Hospital (teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School)
University Hospital of Montpellier
Centre Hospitalier Universitaire De Nîmes

Funding from:

Horizon Europe
HORIZON-HLTH-2023-CARE-04-02: Resilience and mental wellbeing of the health and care workforce

https://apollo-2028.eu/

Daniel Ventus

INTAKT

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Prokrastinering, det vill säga att frivilligt skjuta upp ett avsett beteende trots att detta förväntas ha negativa konsekvenser, är en vanligt förekommande svårighet bland högskolestudenter. Prokrastinering kan ha negativa följder för studenternas studieframgång och välmående.

Inom projektet INTAKT kommer vi att öka förståelsen för orsaker till prokrastinering bland finlandssvenska studerande genom att använda ekologisk momentan bedömning (d.v.s. studenterna svarar flera gånger dagligen på frågor om huruvida de just nu prokrastinerar, och om relaterade faktorer.) Baserat på våra fynd kommer vi tillsammans med studenter att samskapa en skalbar digital intervention för att minska prokrastinering och träna hälsofrämjande färdigheter för minskat psykologiskt lidande och ökad produktivitet. Interventionen är händelsestyrd, vilket innebär att en app erbjuder hjälp omedelbart i de stunder när hjälp behövs. Interventionen testas i en randomiserad studie. Den slutliga interventionen kommer att vara fritt tillgänglig att använda efter projektets slut.

Projektet genomförs av Experience Lab, och stöds av två referensgrupper. Den vetenskapliga referensgruppen stöder i innehållsmässiga och metodologiska frågor och består av forskare från Uppsala universitet, University of Paderborn och Oxford University. Den kliniska referensgruppen bidrar till utvecklingen av interventionen och rekryterar deltagare, och består av studiepsykologer vid Novia, Helsingfors Universitet, Svenska handelshögskolan Hanken, Arcada och Åbo Akademi.

Projektet finansieras av Svenska kulturfonden och Svenska folkskolans vänner.

Projektets hemsida: www.abo.fi/intakt

INTAKT – Procrastination

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Procrastination, which is voluntarily postponing intended behavior despite expected negative consequences, is a common difficulty among university students.

Within the INTAKT project, we will increase understanding of the causes of procrastination among Swedish-speaking Finnish students by using ecological momentary assessment (i.e., students respond multiple times daily to questions about whether they are currently procrastinating, and related factors). Based on our findings, together with students, we will co-create a scalable digital intervention to reduce procrastination and train health-promoting skills to decrease psychological distress and increase productivity. The intervention is event-driven, meaning an app offers immediate help when needed. The intervention will be tested in a randomized study and will be freely available for use after the project ends.

The project is conducted by Experience Lab and is supported by two reference groups. The scientific reference group supports content and methodological issues and consists of researchers from Uppsala University, University of Paderborn, and Oxford University. The clinical reference group contributes to the development of the intervention and recruits participants, consisting of study psychologists from Novia, University of Helsinki, Swedish School of Economics Hanken, Arcada, and Åbo Akademi.

The project is funded by Svenska kulturfonden and Svenska folkskolans vänner.

Project website: www.abo.fi/intakt

Daniel Ventus

iFeelMath

When it comes to elementary school students, the relationship between math anxiety and math performance is still relatively unexplored. Therefore, within the project iFeelMath at Åbo Akademi University and the University of Oulu, we will follow 400 fourth-grade students on five occasions up to sixth grade. The project aims to provide answers to the classic “chicken or the egg” question, i.e., whether it’s math anxiety that affects performance, performance that affects math anxiety, or if the relationship is mutual.

The project is also one of the first to adopt a situational perspective in research to promote our understanding of the mechanisms behind the relationship between math anxiety and performance. In this part of the research, we will observe students at the Experience Lab while they do math tasks. The focus will be on both students’ self-reported experiences of math anxiety and physiological data using skin conductance.

With this design, we can see how students’ physiological responses (skin conductance) are linked to individual math tasks, enabling the modeling of situation-specific relationships and how these are connected to students’ self-reported math anxiety over time.

The project leader is Johan Korhonen, professor of educational psychology at Åbo Akademi University .

Funding from:

Daniel Ventus

iFaceMath

The iFaceMath project’s aim is to investigate the dynamics between situational emotions, motivation, and math task performance. Applying novel technology, primary school students’ emotions are detected by facial expressions while they are performing math tasks. We set two research questions: 1) What kind of emotions are detected during performing typical multiplication tasks and playing a math game, and do these emotions differ depending on the type of activity? 2) How do detected emotions, situational interest and math performance are related to each other during performing math tasks?

Experience Lab plans and carries out the data collection for the project as part of the larger project “iFeelMath” focusing on exploring students’ math anxiety, led by Prof. Johan Korhonen.

Daniel Ventus

ReCoCreaYouth

ERASMUS+ ReCoCreaYOUTH aims to help local governments and NGOs to enhance the relevance of their activities for local groups of youth, by improving their readiness to co-create, through new methods and tools for more inclusive youth participation, and piloting them with youth on local topics of joint concern. The project will result in guidelines for (mid-size and smaller) municipalities and NGOs that face similar challenges but lack knowledge of co-creation to facilitate democratic changes, innovations and youth empowerment.

The consortium is led by Karlstad University (Sweden) and consists of ten partners from four countries, among them Åbo Akademi University and the cities of Vasa and Nykarleby.

The project team at ÅAU is a collaboration between Experience Lab, Regional Studies, and Vasa Övningsskola.

Contact: kimmo.rautanen@abo.fi

Kimmo Rautanen

Digital4All

The overarching aim of the project “DIGITAL4ALL – Building the capacity of universities to develop digital strategies to serve all learners” is to support higher education institutions in designing and providing digital learning experiences that are inclusive and equitable for all, through appropriate strategies and practices. The project supports a digital transition where participation of all students is established, especially those at risk of marginalisation due to diverse needs. It provides educators with digital and pedagogic competences and strategies needed to provide student-centred experiences.

To achieve the above objectives and address the priorities, the partnership creates a set of tangible outcomes, including an innovative toolkit, a training course, and an e-learning platform, and a repository of open education resources on digital inclusion in higher education.

In addition to being involved in all project activities, Experience Lab is co-leading a work package investigating the state-of-the-art of digital equity and inclusion in higher education. 

The project is co-funded by the European Union and the duration of the project is 1.12.2023-30.11.2025. It is led by Åbo Akademi University.

Project partners are:

National University of Ireland

Innovade LI LTD, Cyprus

All Digital, Belgium

International Hellenic University, Greece

University of Nicosia, Cyprus

Anette Bengs

IncludeMe+

The project Inclusion, Participation, and Peace Building through Mediation in Media (IncludeMe+), aims to empower higher education institutions, media, civil society organisations, and students to become responsible and active collaborators in shaping the future of communication, to promote and establish inclusion, participation, and peacebuilding across Europe. The project will increase participation and civic engagement by raising awareness and understanding of the context and values of the European Union, the principles of unity and diversity, and by providing new ways of thinking about and creating media content. 

To achieve the above objectives and address the priorities, the partnership creates a set of tangible outcomes, including a report based on participatory action research on the topic, an innovative training program accompanied by a training and transferability guide, and a video vox pop showcase docuseries.

Experience Lab is coordinating the project, which is led by Emmanuel Acquah, Associate Professor in Education at Åbo Akademi University. In addition, Experience Lab is involved in all project activities, ranging from dissemination to research and the design and development of the outcomes.

The project is co-funded by the European Union and the duration of the project is 1.12.2023-31.5.2026.

Project partners are:

University of Barcelona, Spain

International European University, Ukraine

European E-learning Institute, Denmark

Momentum Marketing Services Limited, Ireland

Outside Media & Knowledge, Germany

European University Continuing Education Network, Belgium

TC Tuzla Kaymakamligi, Turkey

Anette Bengs

MetaCity

How do you make a city pleasant, productive, accessible and easy to interact with? These are issues that are being worked on within the URBACT program, which consists of networks of cities around Europe that work together to strengthen the development of localities by exchanging experiences and building networks between regional and local actors.

Åbo Akademi University’s Experience Lab is the first academic project partner in URBACT, which today includes all EU member states and also Norway and Switzerland.

The Metacity network , which focuses on small and medium-sized cities, aims to increase competitiveness of small and median tech-aware cities, benefiting from the opportunity to enhance service efficiency and citizen satisfaction provided by the metaverse. By integrating metaverse technologies, cities can create immersive digital environments for education, healthcare, tourism, and public services, enabling streamlined communication, remote access to services, and personalized experiences, levelling the playing field with larger cities. Metaverse-driven urban planning fosters innovation, economic growth, and ensures that citizens have access to cutting-edge solutions, ultimately improving their overall quality of life.

Experience Lab works with the city of Nykarleby in Metacity. The network also counts actors from nine other European countries participate, including Härnösand in Sweden, with which we will collaborate closely, and is led by Fundão in Portugal, with whom we have collaborated in previous URBACT and INTERREG Europe projects.

https://urbact.eu/networks/metacity

Kimmo Rautanen