Doctoral Thesis Defense: Snorre Hjelseth

Snorre Hjelseth is set to defend his PhD thesis “Simulation and Design” at AHO on Friday 12th of February

The Doctoral Thesis Defence will take place at at AHO on Friday 12th of February.

Trial lecture 10.00: “The role of participation and facilitation in design processes with expert users in the maritime sector.”

Disputation 12.00

PhD thesis​

In the maritime sector, users are involved in complex safety critical operations carried out in very difficult and shifting conditions. Working in such setting is a major challenge for mariners and currently human failure is the main cause of maritime accidents.
In this thesis I investigate how we may use real-time interaction in simulation and game engines to support user-centered design within the maritime sector. I raise two major challenges for applying user-centered design in the maritime domain. First, it is very difficult to account for the complexity of maritime context in on-shore design situations. Second, it is difficult for designers to gain access to user context as part of the design process. Due to these challenges, I argue there is need for new approaches to handle the holistic design process necessary to understand relations between existing events and future scenarios in terms of context, operation, tasks, technology, systems and users. I propose that applying computer-simulated scenarios in user-centered design can help relieve the aforementioned problems and so position user-centered design in a more central role in maritime innovation.

Candidate​
Snorre Hjelseth is an industrial designer with special interest for design thinking in maritime and offshore innovation. His PhD research is focusing on visualization and simulation as a means in interdisciplinary design processes.
Snorre received his Master’s degree in industrial design from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT). He is now working as a design researcher at AHO in the ONSITE research project.

Supervisors
Professor Andrew Morrison, main supervisor.

Professor Jan Capjon and Associate Professor Kjetil Nordby, co-supervisors.

Adjudication Committee
Dr. Sean McCartan, First Opponent
Dr. Astrid Twenebowa Larssen, Second Opponent
Dr. Trygve Ask, Third Member and Coordinator