Research at the Department of Media, Design, Education and Cognition

The research program “Pedagogy, Culture and Leadership” examines how central ideas about pedagogy, Bildung, democratic education, ethics, sustainability, equality, freedom, professionalization, leadership, and teaching manifest itself in Danish, Nordic and international educational politics and educational research. Additionally, there is focus on how these ideas are being understood, translated, and realized by leaders and educators in educational and pedagogical contexts and practices. 

Grant holder: Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen

Period: 2019-2022

Grant holder: Lasse Nielsen

Period: 2021-2023

Core idea and purpose

Rationing between competing health care needs is unavoidable (Bognar & Hirose 2014; Ubel et al. 1996). Such rationing ought to be morally justified. It is generally accepted that in order to be morally justified, rationing must be non-discriminatory and cost-effective (Baron 1995; Rawlins & Dillon 2005). Given conventional concepts of cost-effectiveness, resources spent on old and disabled people are spent less cost-effectively, ceteris paribus, than resources spent on young and non-disabled people. Yet since giving lower priority to such groups can be discriminatory, we face a health care trilemma involving the following three claims:

1. A morally justified scheme of health care rationing does not discriminate against any groups (The Non-Discrimination Claim).
2. A morally justified scheme of health care rationing is cost-effective (The Cost-Effectiveness Claim).
3. A cost-effective health care rationing scheme discriminates against old people and disabled people (The Incompatibility Claim).

These three claims form a logically inconsistent set. Hence, we must reject at least one of them. Unfortunately, each of them is very plausible and widely accepted (Ubel 2001; Dolan et al. 2005; Nord et al. 1999; Persad et. al 2009; Sundheds- og Ældreministeriet 2016). The Non-Discrimination claim reflects that people should not be treated differently on the basis of membership of socially salient groups, e.g., rationing should not be racially discriminatory. The Cost-Effectiveness Claim reflects that health care resources should be spent in ways that maximize the goodness of health care outcomes, i.e., we should avoid waste. The Incompatibility Claim reflects the widely shared assumption that health care cost-effectiveness means maximising the sum of QALYs (QualityAdjusted Life Years) (or some related unit, e.g., DALY) within the relevant budget constraints (Gold et al. 2002; Bognar 2008, 2010, 2011; Singer et al. 1995).1 Ceteris paribus, a treatment that saves the life of an old patient will result in fewer extra life years and at a lower level of health than the same treatment offered to a younger patient (Brock 1989, 2004, 2009; Tsuchiya 2000). Accordingly, we will get more QALYs from spending a fixed amount of health care resources on young rather than on old people. Hence, cost-effectiveness favours giving lower priority to and thus discriminates against elderly patients (Harris 1987; Farrelly 2008; John et al. 2017). A similar argument applies to disabled patients, since, ceteris paribus, on standard measures of QALY one extra life year for a disabled person results in fewer extra QALYs than an extra life year for an ablebodied person (cf. Dolan et al. 2005; Gold et al. 2002; Hadorn 1991; Harris 2005; NICE 2008). This project explores how we should respond to the healthcare trilemma.

Grant holder: Ane Qvortrup

Period: 2021-2022

Grant holder: Maja Klausen

Period: 2020-2022

Grant holder: Ane Qvortrup

Period: 2023-2025

INSPECT Societal Security after COVID 19
- Inquiring Nordic Strategies, Practices, Educational Consequences and Trajectories

The restrictions and insecurities following from COVID 19 have negatively affected many students' learning and well-being, and the two-year-long pandemic has disturbed some of the fundamentals of students’ existence (their worldviews, understanding of themselves, and educational aspirations and plans). Based on our knowledge about these short-term consequences, there is reason to worry about the Nordic schools' strong tradition around establishing the best conditions for the individual student's learning, well-being and development in both a Bildung and a lifelong learning perspective. However, the medium to long-term consequences of COVID 19 cannot be easily deduced from the short-term consequences that we have experienced and researched so far. Time and political and educational efforts are factors that can amplify or mitigate immediate consequences. The INSPECT project collects systematic knowledge about strategies and efforts applied in different national, regional, and situational contexts across the five Nordic countries, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland, during and after the pandemic. Furthermore, the project investigates the medium to long-term consequences of COVID 19 for different groups of students. The project thus offers solid knowledge about the long-term consequences of COVID 19 that can help the Nordic schools to maintain their strong traditions and ensure social security going forward.

Grant holder: Anette Grønning

Period: 2022-2025

Coordinators: 

• Jens Jørgen Hansen, Department of Media, Design, Learning and Cognition, University of Southern Denmark jjh@sdu.dk
• Rikke Toft Nørgård, DPU, Aarhus Universitet rtoft@edu.au.dk

This project aims to fill the gap regarding the teaching of prosody to second language (L2) learners. We analyze real conversation with conversation analytic (CA) methods in order to identify the prosodic features that are used by native speakers to fulfill certain communicative tasks and compare them to L2 learners’ prosody. Once we have identified a linguistic feature as a candidate for a trouble source, we use Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) experiments to investigate communicative functions of that feature in a controllable way.

The project is funded by DFF - The Danish Council for Independent Research

Grant holder: Nikolaj Elf

Period: 2021-2024

INNOTOUR is a WEB 2.0 platform for education, research and business development in tourism. It is dedicated to innovation. INNOTOUR is an experimental meeting place for academics, students and enterprises. Launched in 2009, INNOTOUR is based on content created by the users.

In a wider perspective, the platform and associated research are considered to be of importance for the continuous amendment of innovation and competition policies for the tourism sector as well as to facilitate international interaction and knowledge dissemination. New educational and scientific collaborative practices are developed to build interdisciplinary bridges between international campuses. INNOTOUR introduces a culture of creativity that is tolerant of failure in order to encourage students and researchers to question established ideas, to go beyond conventional knowledge, and strive towards originality. INNOTOUR is an inviting structure open to students, researchers and business users from all over the world. Joins us, share your experience and learn from others!

INNOTOUR is created by the Centre for Tourism, Innovation and Culture, University of Southern Denmark.

Grant holder: Ane Qvortrup og Anders Ljungdalh

Period: 2022-2026

Grant holder: Nikolaj Elf

Period: 2022

The research project Multimodal literacy practices in L1 – a Nordic perspective, or simply MultiL1, explores developments in the teaching and learning of so-called multimodal literacy practices. This implies an expanded semiotic approach to the teaching and learning of ‘reading and writing’ within mother tongue education (also known as L1).

The project is motivated by the idea of developing bilingual teaching materials in order to support the integration of German employees in Denmark and Danish employees in Germany and at the same time support relevant agents such as job centres to manage challenges related to cross-border commuting. 

This project is funded by the European Fund for Regional Development

Grant holder: Line Krogager Andersen

Period: 2021-2023

Grant holder: Nikolaj Elf

Period: 2018-2023

Grant holder: Emanuela Marchetti

Period: 2021

This project starts as a spinoff of the Rethicare project, which is being conducted in cooperation with the Bauhaus University in Weimar.

The goal of these projects is to investigate the design of innovative robot technologies for healthcare addressing the needs of aging adults, eventually affected by various degree of dementia.

The Rimephas project is primarily concerned with the Covid-19 epidemic and how public caring institutions and schools are addressing the increasing need for hygiene practices. The prototypes developed through the project focus on investigating healthcare from a playful perspective, trying to create technologies for hand sanitization which could be useful and amusing. In that respect, the design of the prototype has explored zoomorphic and abstract shapes for the device, narratives and animations to create amusing instructional videos for children in primary schools and teenagers in gymnasiums.

Grant holder: Mikkel Gerken

Period: 2018-2022

Grant holder: Lasse Nielsen

Period: 2015-2022

In two related projects, we aim to enhance inter-Scandinavian spoken language comprehension between Danish, Swedish and Norwegian.
In one project, we develop a tool that gives Scandinavian native speakers the opportunity to familiarize themselves with how the other Scandinavian languages sound, both with sound and in visualizations.

In the other project, we develop a concept for the development of teaching materials for the teaching and selfstudy of prosody in order to increase the mutual comprehension between young speakers of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian; furthermore, we develop exemplary teaching materials for the intonation (speech melodies), stress patterns and other prosodic information that supports speech comprehension.

The projects aim to promote the Nordic languages and cultures by describing their intonation systems and language-specific prosody; by developing a tool that can visualize Scandinavian intonation; by presenting an outline for suitable teaching materials; and by publishing scientific articles about the prosodic patterns in these languages and about pedagogical approaches to the teaching of these patterns. 

The projects are funded by Nordplus.

Grant holder: Rikke Schubart

Period: 2018-2021

Ali is a part of the human-robot interaction laboratory at the Department of Design and Communication. In his PhD project, he investigates the effects of activity and recipient design in robots for the purpose of engaging communication partners. He also examines the role of social and telepresence robots in facilitating everyday interactions, intercultural communication, and second language learning. Moreover, he aims to explore emotionality in robots’ communicative capabilities and its effects on the engagement and attitude of their human interlocutors.

Ali can be reached at aa@sdu.dk

The project examines the interlink between organizational development, storytelling and sense-making. More specifically it explores organizational narratives in relation to organizational development in a qualitative single-case study.

The case study is the transformation process of University of Southern Denmark (SDU) towards becoming a sustainable university with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as the primary organizational strategy. The narratives are ethnographically explored through interviews, observation and field study of the material culture.   

Keywords: organizational change, organizational development, organizational culture, change process, sense-making, communication, storytelling, narratives, neo institutionalism, sustainable leadership.  

Anne can be reached at annely@sdu.dk

Ozge received her BSc and MSc in Industrial Product Design from Gazi University in Turkey. In her master’s degree, she focused on the relationship between Nomadic people’s material culture and lifestyles and the effects of industrial developments on them. In 2018, she got the scholarship from Turkish Ministry of Education and in 2021, she started her Ph.D. education in the University of Southern Denmark. Her research area is about young people’s personal energy consumption and self-tracking methods of where, when, and how young people use energy resources. She examines the role of the designer in this process and which data collection and physicalization methods trigger creative solutions to personally consumed energy resources and self-healing processes.

Ozge can be reached at ayoz@sdu.dk

Birthe’s project aims to build an understanding of how tourism practitioners make sense of and work with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of their everyday practice. It is an exploration of the space between formal sustainable development strategy and local tourism practice where nuances and interpretations of the SDGs unfold in ways that tourism practitioners locally identify with.
Adopting a Research-through-Design approach grounded in a collaborative tourism design (tourism co-design) methodology, this project engages different ways of being, knowing, and doing in tourism in order to identify latent potentials and create opportunities for sustainable tourism development.

Keywords: Sustainable Tourism Development, Tourism Co-design, Tourism Practice, Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs Contextualization, Sense-making

Birthe can be reached at menke@sdu.dk

In her PhD project, Inger-Marie adopts and develops a democratic approach to design-based research (DBR) in HE. The focus of the project is the theory-driven design of interventions in close collaboration with practitioners. The study investigates how to integrate computational thinking (CT) with computational things in the context of two case studies involving teachers and students from Media Studies and Philosophy at the University of Southern Denmark.

The theoretical framework consists of CT, computational things, situated and embodied learning and design for learning. The interventions designed consist of The Media Systems Game and idea generations tools that support students in decomposing core models and provide students with tangible representations of abstract subject concepts. Furthermore, the game and tools require students to engage in logical thinking and in working algorithmically; the idea is that students learn through CT.

The first iteration of the interventions was carried out in spring 2021, and the data collected will be used to change and improve the interventions before the next iteration in spring 2022.

The study is part of the project Designing for situated computational thinking with computational things which is funded by IRFD.

Inger-Marie can be reached at imc@sdu.dk.

Jessica’s PhD research project centers on the theoretical concepts of collaborative learning and phronesis. Using a using a mixed-methods and grounded theory approach, Jessica will study ethical decision-making in interdisciplinary design collaborations among ethnographers and engineers.
The three-year project will include a period of ethnographic fieldwork among ethnographer-engineer collaborators, followed by a qualitative survey and expert interviews.

Working from sociomaterial and social ethics perspectives, she aims to analyze the negotiation of cultural values and situated knowledge as processes of collaborative learning, and to describe the social arrangements key to effective phronetic decision-making.

Jessica can be contacted at jesor@sdu.dk

Kristian is conducting his dissertation within Library and Information Science. His project examines how the awareness and knowledge of library values can support the strategical development of library activities and library evaluation. An essential step in his project is to establish a reliable and robust foundation of how critical stakeholders understand library value and how values appear at libraries.

Consequently, such knowledge will take us closer to understanding how library values can act as valuable assets to public library institutions. 

Kristian can be contacted at krms@sdu.dk

Rosalyn received her Master’s degree in Business Communication and Communication Design from the University of Southern Denmark. In her Ph.D., she investigates persuasive dialog design in human-robot interaction and factors influencing persuasiveness in communication in general. Through controlled experiments and ethnographic field work she investigates different aspects of human-robot interaction, user engagement, and dialog design.

Rosalyn can be reached at rla@sdu.dk

Safinaz has an MA and a Ph.D in French Language Teaching where she investigated avoidance strategies in political news interviews from a conversation analytic perspective. Currently, she is a PhD fellow at the Department of Design and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. She is conducting a research project on micro-organisation of collaborative encounters in innovative workspaces under the supervision of Johannes Wagner.
Her research draws on Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology and aims to unpack how the professional, interactional, material, and spatial settings of the workplace contribute to the innovation process, creativity, and eventually to the production of new technologies in high tech software companies.

Safinaz can be reached at safinaz@sdu.dk

My research project Between art and mass production - Axel Salto and the Royal Copenhagen Porcelain Manufactory examines the artist’s role and the collaboration with the company during the 1950s. I explore mainly the media discourse and the visual mediations of this partnership and the interlink between branding, sales promotion and strategic marketing campaigns in connection with international exhibitions such as Triennale di Milano, Design in Scandinavia, 1954-57, and The Arts of Denmark, 1960-61.

Theoretically and methodically, this project enrolls in a design cultural context and a central aim is to investigate how the partnership between Axel Salto and the manufactory is mediated to the consumers through different types of written and visual material, as well as through the networks of actors involved in the mediation.

Keywords: Danish Modern, branding, mediation, mass production, designer culture.

The PhD project is generously funded by New Carlsberg Foundation and CLAY Museum of Ceramic Art.

Susanne can be reached at sbruhn@sdu.dk