Helping young designers design for children: evaluating toys and possible values

When designing for children, it remains important not only to emphasise elements such as ergonomics and usability but also values, that can be translated into pleasurable user experiences for children. While methods such as interviews are commonly used to better understand our users, interviewing children can be a challenge. Experience as part of a year project on designing toys for children highlighted that children might answer questions in a surprising way, or students might struggle to ask questions that are not suggestive. To overcome some of these difficulties, we developed a Value Matrix, that can help students to explore the various values or incentives children might have while playing. This Value Matrix can subsequently be used to scan existing toys or new concepts and translate these insights into toys that consist of a wider variety of values children like to experience in a game or toy. We evaluated this tool with 118 first year Industrial Product Design students. Our results show that the Value Matrix gives students guidance and support while designing

Open source guilds:enabling micro­ businesses to create a sustainable community of practice?

This paper outlines how the concept of open source guilds was developed through undertaking a pilot action research project with three micro-businesses in the North West of England as co-researchers. The research initially aimed to explore how a virtual guild could enable micro-businesses to move towards sustainability by creating a community of practice based on open source principles. However, research findings raised the issue of both the business and its community needing to become sustainable. The open source guild addresses this issue by adding the proprietary aspect of the original medieval guilds, enabling a micro-business to defend its core intellectual property while creating a sustainable community based on shared values that operates both off-and on-line

In pursuit of rigour and accountability in participatory design

The field of Participatory Design (PD) has greatly diversified and we see a broad spectrum of approaches and methodologies emerging. However, to foster its role in designing future interactive technologies, a discussion about accountability and rigour across this spectrum is needed. Rejecting the traditional, positivistic framework, we take inspiration from related fields such as Design Research and Action Research to develop interpretations of these concepts that are rooted in PD׳s own belief system. We argue that unlike in other fields, accountability and rigour are nuanced concepts that are delivered through debate, critique and reflection. A key prerequisite for having such debates is the availability of a language that allows designers, researchers and practitioners to construct solid arguments about the appropriateness of their stances, choices and judgements. To this end, we propose a “tool-to-think-with” that provides such a language by guiding designers, researchers and practitioners through a process of systematic reflection and critical analysis. The tool proposes four lenses to critically reflect on the nature of a PD effort: epistemology, values, stakeholders and outcomes. In a subsequent step, the coherence between the revealed features is analysed and shows whether they pull the project in the same direction or work against each other. Regardless of the flavour of PD, we argue that this coherence of features indicates the level of internal rigour of PD work and that the process of reflection and analysis provides the language to argue for it. We envision our tool to be useful at all stages of PD work: in the planning phase, as part of a reflective practice during the work, and as a means to construct knowledge and advance the field after the fact. We ground our theoretical discussions in a specific PD experience, the ECHOES project, to motivate the tool and to illustrate its workings

Working Ethically in Participatory Research with Children

In this paper we present the ABCD framework for working ethically with children and young people in participatory design studies. This framework covers A – Agreement and consent made between all participants and interested parties; B – Behaviour of the research team towards the activities, requiring them to examine their motivations and to be honest in their interactions with children; C – Classroom experience in participatory sessions during which children are encouraged to discuss the nature of their participation, and D – Dissemination of the work and planning appropriate follow on activities to ensure that children are informed about the outputs from their contributions. We discuss the process by which we developed the framework, the challenges raised by working in this way with children and the role of values in participatory research

LAUGH: Designing to enhance positive emotion for people living with dementia

Dementia comprises a number of degenerative neurological diseases. It is a complex condition and each person’s experience and symptoms are different. There is a growing awareness of the need for well-designed products and services to assist with dementia care and to enhance wellbeing. This paper presents research investigating the design of playful objects for people with late stage dementia. The investigation described is a preliminary stage in the LAUGH (Ludic Artefacts Using Gesture and Haptics) project; an AHRC funded international, interdisciplinary design research project. People living with dementia, informal and professional carers, health professionals, art therapists, charity representatives, arts practitioners and designers are informing the research through a series of expert group participatory workshops and case study interviews. Observation, discussion, video, photography and investigation. Findings presented in this paper focus on the importance of emotional memory and emotional expression in the care of people with late stage dementia; the value of sensory triggers and props to stimulate emotional remembering; and the importance of designing to promote high quality social connections

Values in computing

Whether it is in the form of software, system architecture or interface design, anything digital is inevitably affected by values: the organizational values of the project sponsor, the values of the research partners, and the values of each developer and designer. Some values (e.g. commercial success, academic prestige) are easier to quantify than others (e.g. social justice, care for the environment) with the latter often dismissed in decision making processes as lacking of measurable ‘evidence’. However, less easy to measure values are not less real: they are simply less visible. The aim of this one-day workshop is precisely to investigate mechanisms which give more exposure to those values in computing that are less frequently considered. We do so by bringing together practitioners from different computing backgrounds (e.g. software engineering, interaction design, information systems) who have first-hand experience of trying to represent on an equal footing all human values in computing

Project Office; Unleashing a ‘Force for Good’

In 2013 The Leeds School of Architecture (LSA) at Leeds Beckett University (LBU) launched Project Office (PO), defined as ‘a design and research collaboration of staff and students. It is an architecture consultancy concerned with ethical, social and resilient architecture and design. We work with like-minded communities, organisations and individuals’ (Warren and Stott, 2014). PO has 12 ‘Rules of Agency’, which are expounded in this paper to demonstrate its ethical principles and how to occupy a space concurrently within the academic institution and architecture practice. These are: • To be ethical • To be environmentally resilient and informed • To advocate participatory design methodologies for staff, students and collaborators • To working only with clients who lack financial means to realise their projects • To generate research impact through practice related research output • To create opportunities for student engagement with a range of educational and formative experiences • To comply with established ARB and RIBA validation criteria and EU directives for architectural education • To develop architectural pedagogies • To cause the production of architectural live projects as defined by Anderson and Priest (2016) • To express the contribution of students as a force for good. • To have fun • To cultivate a space for an inclusive and virtuous practice that is inspiring for all participants The paper asserts that the Practice-Related Research at the core of PO’s work has a significantly positive social impact. It argues that educators of prospective architects have a societal responsibility not only to expose students to the social impact of their practice but also to make it the heart of pedagogic purpose. PO achieve this despite the changes witnessed in universities, where neo-liberalism defines their trajectory, having found a way to exist that puts a value, ‘a sense of care’ (Mountz, et al., 2015) on all people collaborating with students, work colleagues, stakeholders, clients and also ourselves

Beyond the smart city:reflecting human values in the built environment

The paper presents a work in progress that will develop a tool for mapping and reflection upon human values within the context of the ‘smart’ city. As the rise in ‘smart’ city initiatives and implementation of technologies within the urban environment become more evident, citizens face irrevocable changes to their environment and their lives within the city. Such a reliance upon technological strategies to fix cities’ ills and a drive for constant innovation within the ‘smart’ city is largely being driven by technology companies and city leaders. Citizens must live with the consequences of such strategies which have the potential to change their environments in momentous ways. In order to develop new technologies within the urban environment Living Labs are becoming increasingly prevalent, enabling designers of technologies to engage with multiple stakeholders, including citizens, in the design and implementation of new products. We present a work in progress that develops a tool for the mapping of and reflection upon, human values in order to avoid unnecessary technologies being imposed upon citizens. Furthermore, we seek to engage those currently driving the ‘smart’ city agenda in envisioning an alternative future where consideration of citizen’s values and the effectiveness of the city takes priority over technology implementation for the sake of efficiencies. We present the need for this new tool as it goes further than existing methods in its potential for enabling citizens to develop clear understanding of the values present in the ‘smart’ city environment

Values-led Participatory Design as a pursuit of meaningful alternatives

Copyright © 2015 ACM. Participatory Design (PD) is inherently concerned with inquiring into and supporting human values when designing IT. We argue that a PD approach that is led by a focus upon participants' values can allow participants to discover meaningful alternatives - alternative uses and alternative conceptualizations for IT that are particularly meaningful to them. However, how PD works with values in the design process has not been made explicit. In this paper, we aim to (i) explicate this values-led PD approach, (ii) illustrate how this approach can lead to outcomes that are meaningful alternatives, and (iii) explain the nature of meaningful alternatives. We use a PD case study to illustrate how we work with participants in a values-led PD approach towards meaningful alternatives

Service Design in HCI Research: The Extended Value Co-creation Model

In this paper, we discuss what it means to practice service design in an academic research setting. For a long time, the primary focal point of design research has been the users—of their experiences, needs, desires, and values. By contrast, designers have been relatively anonymous and unlocatable. In shift to the service-centric design paradigm, we argue that it is important to recognize design researchers as distinct stakeholders, who actively interact with systems and services with a goal to fulfill their own values and achieve desired outcomes. In practice, typically the role of designer is that of a design consultant working for (or rather on behalf of) the client. By contrast, in academic research settings, the role of designer is that of a design researcher working with their own research agenda.We provide a case study of a service design research project aimed at developing new digital services for public libraries. We encountered a series of issues with a complex set of values at play, in which design researchers emerged as distinct stakeholders with specific sets of research questions, goals, and visions. The main contribution of this paper is a model that (a) clarifies the position of design researchers within the sociocultural context in which they practice design, and (b) visualize how their positions impact the value co-creation, and in turn, the design outcome