Exploring art therapy techniques within service design as a means to greater home life happiness

This thesis presents new theories and creative techniques for exploring ‘designing for home happiness’. Set in the context of a primarily unsustainable and unhappy world, home is understood as a facilitator of current lifestyle practices that could also support long-term happiness activities, shown to promote more sustainable behaviour. It has yet to be examined extensively from a happiness perspective and many homes lack opportunities for meaningful endeavours. Service Design, an approach that supports positive interactions, shows potential in facilitating ‘designing for home happiness’ but its tools are generally employed for visualising new systems/services or issues within existing ones instead of exploring related subjectivity. Art therapy techniques, historically used for expressing felt experiences, present applicable methods for investigating such subjective moments and shaping design opportunities for home happiness but have yet to be trialled in a design research context. This thesis therefore explores how Art Therapy and Service Design can be used successfully for ‘designing for home happiness’. A first study proposes photo elicitation as a creative method to explore, with participants from UK family households, several significant home happiness needs. Subsequently, art therapy techniques are proposed in Study 2 through two bespoke Happy-Home Workshops. This gives way to the Home Happiness Theory and Designing for Home Happiness Theory, which enable designers to design for home happiness. The Designing for Home Happiness Framework emerges from these studies proposing a new design creative method delivered through a workshop with specialised design tools and accompanying process for creating home happiness designs (i.e. services, product-service-systems). Through two Main Studies the framework is tested and validated with design experts in two different contexts, Loughborough (UK) and Limerick (Ireland), confirming its suitability and transferability in ‘designing for home happiness’. Resulting concepts support collective home happiness and social innovations by facilitating appropriate social contexts for their development. Overall, this research is the first to combine art therapy techniques with service design methods, offering original theories and approaches for ‘designing for home happiness’ within Service Design and for social innovation. Collectively, this research delivers new creative methods for service designers, social innovators and designers more generally to investigate and support happier experiences within and outside the home for a more sustainable future

Emergent Alternative Home 2050

Designing for a time beyond the immediate future has potentials for new dialogues. This approach challenges the designer to reconsider the point of departure, societal, contextual and other dynamics, techniques and available materials. Endeavors such as this also promote the opportunity to envision architectural inventions, and new concepts better suited for future. My project aims to find a prototype home for the future 2050, envisioning a design solution for a tropical urban environment. A series of chronological scenarios across a selected time line investigates the preferred future home. An architectural genealogy and emerging techniques suitable for the context are presented to solidify the overarching theme. My design proposal provides the necessary proof or evidence for this doctorate project, and tests my hypothesis for a synthetic organic Emergent Alternative Home 2050. Biotechnology, nanotechnology and biomimetic manifestations propagate a reductive, performative, and generative design. In turn, this leads to investigation of accurate, efficient, near intelligent, mass fabricated, low cost materials, components and systems. Self-assembly, flexibility and positive environmental footprint are forecasted for the future home 2050

Going Zero

Correctly guessing the future costs for energy is like winning the lottery. No one really knows how high prices may rise, but once it is revealed, future energy costs could be life changing. Now, imagine owning a home where it does not matter how outrageously high energy prices become. Remodeling or designing a home to achieve net-zero energy will lessen the burden of fl uctuating energy prices. Today it is easy to create a comfortable home that is not 100% dependent on an electric company but making the commitment towards change may be the most diffi cult aspect of the whole process. This Doctorate Project will explore the procedures for creating a net-zero energy home (ZEH), including an overview of the issues that were encountered as the research unfolded

My boy builds coffins. Future memories of your loved ones

The research is focus on the concept of storytelling associated with product design, trying to investigate new ways of designing and a possible future scenario related to the concept of death. MY BOY BUILDS COFFINS is a gravestone made using a combination of cremation’s ashes and resin. It is composed by a series of holes in which the user can stitch a text, in order to remember the loved one. The stitching need of a particular yarn produced in Switzerland using some parts of human body. Project also provides another version which uses LED lights instead of the yarn. The LEDs - thanks to an inductive coupling - will light when It will be posed in the hole. The gravestone can be placed where you want, as if it would create a little altar staff at home. In this way, there is a real connection between the user and the dearly departed

Designing for and with vulnerable people: The Dem@Care "toolbox" approach

We describe the challenge set to us within the Dem@Care project, of designing a multi-component system to support safety, enablement, and diagnosis for older adults with dementia. Specifically we discuss the system as it relates to home-based enablement. Person-centred care is the gold standard in dementia care, which we incorporate into technology design by engaging in a user-led, participatory approach. The result of our considerations is the Dem@Care “toolbox”, a solution which addresses the challenge of providing home-based, person-centred care and enablement for older adults with dementia, utilising sensor technologies. The current text describes the toolbox and the terms of its future deployment

The Shifting Sands of Labour: Changes in Shared Care Work with a Smart Home Health System

Whilst the use of smart home systems has shown promise in recent years supporting older people's activities at home, there is more evidence needed to understand how these systems impact the type and the amount of shared care in the home. It is important to understand care recipients and caregivers' labour is changed with the introduction of a smart home system to efficiently and effectively support an increasingly aging population with technology. Five older households (8 participants) were interviewed before, immediately after and three months after receiving a Smart Home Health System (SHHS). We provide an identification and documentation of critical incidents and barriers that increased inter-household care work and prevented the SHHS from being successfully accepted within homes. Findings are framed within the growing body of work on smart homes for health and care, and we provide implications for designing future systems for shared home care needs

Home as riskscape : exploring technology enabled care

Funding: Royal Society of Edinburgh (Grant Number(s): 62651); Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (Grant Number(s): RIG008250).The growth and spread of ubiquitous smart technology to deliver public health outcomes at home, and its relationship with risk, urgently requires greater scholarly attention, not least given COVID‐19. Theoretically informed by both critical geographies of home and risk scholarship, this paper uses data from interviews with professionals in Scotland designing and implementing technology enabled care (TEC) for current and future homes. It explores the organisation of risk in the context of TEC, and the importance of this in relation to home. Drawing on geographical writing on home, and the riskscape, I argue that the smart home is a contemporary manifestation of the riskscape with implications for ideas of intrusion and inequality, and the experience of home.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Anticipating technology-enabled care at home

Funding: Royal Society of Edinburgh (Grant Number(s): 62651), Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland (Grant Number(s): RIG008250).The spread and growth of ubiquitous smart technology to deliver public health outcomes, particularly within/at home, urgently requires greater scholarly attention. This paper uses data from interviews with professionals in Scotland who are designing and implementing Technology-Enabled Care (TEC) for current and future homes. Theoretically informed by both critical geographies of home and futures scholarship, this paper presents a three-part framework – “homes-that-are,” “homes-that-ought,” and “homes-to-be” – to explore the techno-solutionist accounts of home, bringing to bear the messiness and complexity of home, both its conceptualisation and experience. It highlights prediction as an emerging form of anticipatory practice, generating new questions and conceptualisations about the openness of futures. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance of understanding the underlying assumptions of those who make decisions when planning for future TEC and housing; about who they imagine they are planning for, and how diverse these futures are.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Housing affordability among generation Y in Malaysia a conceptual analysis / Amira Aishah Mohd Shoed and Geetha Subramaniam.

Over the past few years, the house prices in Malaysia have experienced a huge value development and turned into a stress pattern for those who want to own a house, especially first time home buyers. This conceptual paper will examine issues of housing affordability among young Malaysians who have intentions of buying a house. The persistent increment of house prices have influenced the capability and ability of individuals to buy houses. The issue is extremely serious among the first time home purchaser, particularly the Generation Y. Thus, this paper will discuss some of the reasons behind this issue and also examine the current government housing policies which are in place to help home buyers. This conceptual study would form a theoretical framework for further empirical work to be done by future researchers and which can be used by policy makers and stakeholders in designing affordable housing for Generation Y in Malaysia