Learning Environments Research Group — 2025 in Review

It’s been a while since our last update, and 2025 gave us a lot to celebrate. Three doctoral defenses in New Media marked a year of ambitious, boundary-crossing research in learning, interaction, and socio-technical design across our group.

We began the year with MA Jana Pejoska’s thesis, “Contextually responsive interaction design — Design ideation for dynamic contexts.” Her work takes on a persistent blind spot in user-centered design — the tendency to flatten social, cultural, and business contexts into a narrow concept of “the user.” Jana proposes a framework for contextually responsive interaction that integrates HCI, cognitive science, and the philosophy of technology with practical design methods. By foregrounding embodiment and situated cognition, she demonstrates how remote interaction tools—ranging from ubiquitous computing to AR/VR—can adapt to dynamic environments. A working prototype and a new ideation method illustrate how to diversify design perspectives and reduce bias, showing in co-design and iterative evaluations that context-aware approaches yield more responsive, user-aligned solutions.

In late spring, MSc Jeongki Lim defended “Creative Learning Agents: Computational Co-Creativity and Relational Artifacts in Education.” Jeongki advances a timely conversation about AI in education by reframing AI not merely as a content generator but as a relational participant in the classroom. Through three mixed-method studies, he shows that when AI is situated with clear pedagogical and relational intent, it can positively influence creative engagement—though it remains distinct from human peers in goals and behaviors. The thesis offers two core contributions: a theoretical system for positioning AI as an autonomous, relational agent in learning environments, and a conceptual model—the Creative Learning Agent—designed to support creativity in academic and industrial settings. The result is a set of practical implications for curriculum and strategy that help educators integrate AI without undermining students’ creative development.

We closed the year with Avner Peled’s compelling defense, “Intergroup Contact with Participatory Telerobotic Puppetry: Tricksters in the face of intractable conflicts.” Avner introduces participatory telerobotic puppetry as a novel, technology-enabled peacebuilding method that maintains a tangible connection to place while enabling cross-border performance. Drawing on literature in social psychology and human–robot interaction, and working with Tech2Peace, he developed an open-source toolkit and a participatory process that uses puppets—and their capacity for dual narratives—to create a safe, playful space for dialogue and “radical empathy.” The project not only facilitated difficult conversations but also produced guidelines for future boundary-crossing workshops and a follow-up intervention responding to the events of October 2023.

Taken together, these theses demonstrate the values that animate our group: design that is contextually grounded, pedagogy that treats technology as a social actor rather than a mere tool, and research that ventures beyond the lab into lived, contested spaces with prototypes. Whether refining how we ideate for dynamic interaction contexts, exploring AI as a peer-like collaborator in creative learning, or design new rituals of encounter across divides, the work of 2025 expands what learning environments can be and do.

We extend our warmest congratulations to Jana, Jeongki, and Avner, and our thanks to the examiners and opponents for their examinations. As we look ahead, these contributions open exciting directions for collaboration across remote social interaction, creative AI in education, and participatory technologies for social change. If you’d like to connect around any of these themes, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Peace.