Journal Staff

Our society is faced with a number of major challenges. Critical matters like financial tension, pollution, and safety and health issues prove to be difficult to solve with just one simple answer. In many cases these major challenges cannot be unravelled by traditional means and solutions, but require a radical approach to move towards a more sustainable and balanced society. To reach a new equilibrium we need to confront today’s challenges by exploring new ways of thinking and working. By doing so, it is necessary to develop new frameworks, methods, and tools in order to come up with new systematic designs, which create opportunities to transform our society.

Data-enabled design for social change: Two case studies

Smartness in contemporary society implies the use of massive data to improve the experience of people with connected services and products. The use of big data to collect information about people's behaviours opens a new concept of "user-centred design" where users are remotely monitored, observed and profiled. In this paradigm, users are considered as sources of information and their participation in the design process is limited to a role of data generators. There is a need to identify methodologies that actively involve people and communities at the core of ecosystems of interconnected products and services. Our contribution to designing for social innovation in ecosystems relies on developing new methods and approaches to transform data-driven design using a participatory and co-creative data-enabled design approach. To this end, we present one of the methods we have developed to design "smart" systems called Experiential Design Landscapes (EDL), and two sample projects, Social Stairs and [Y]our Perspective. Social Stairs faces the topic of behaviour change mediated by sensing technologies. [Y]our Perspective is a social platform to sustain processes of deliberative democracy. Both projects exemplify our approach to data-enabled design as a social proactive participatory design approach

Designing research prototype for the elderly: a case study

This paper describes a research study regarding intergenerational story sharing of the elderly living in the nursing home, including four iterations, applyinga Research-through-Design approach. It started from an exploration prototype named Interactive Gallery(1st iteration), and its findings helped to narrow down our research area and define our research question.To answer it, the prototype named Slots-story (2nd iteration) and Slots-memento (3rd iteration) were designed and implemented, which focused on life story and memento story of the elderly respectively. While the 4th iteration aimed at facilitating intergenerational story sharing and sustainably. The above research iterations offer an example of how research prototypes supports to focus research area, and answer the research question in stages. We finally conclude witha discussion of insights on designing prototype for the non-tech-savvy elderly

Where fashion, jewellery and wearable technology meet

In this article we relate the fields of fashion, jewellery and wearable technology in terms of the emphasis on respectively social, personal and instrumental values. Moreover, we describe how the subfields of soft wearables, digital jewellery and fashion jewellery emerge on the intersections of these fields. The main contribution of the article is twofold. Firstly, we identify and explore the potential of the area at the cross-section of all three fields, which is so far hardly explored by academia. We discuss what it takes from design-researchers in the field of digital jewellery to explore the newly identified design space: broadening their frame of reference and changing their approach of wearable technology. We suggest to broaden the frame of references from Art Jewellery to jewellery in general. And, we advocate a shift in the perspective on wearable technology, from criticizing what it lacks to appreciating its merits. Within wearable technology, we find technological-sturdy artefacts, which can be used in a cultural probe in order to explore emergent behaviour, interactions and appreciation. Secondly, we argue that this overview should not be misunderstood as static and over-simplified. On the one hand, we need to be aware of the heterogeneity of each of the fields. On the other hand, we like to stress the relativity of the differences between the fields. Therefore, we emphasize the importance of looking at the overview on different levels of detail, cherishing and challenging both similarities and differences of fashion, jewellery, wearable technology, in order to explore the full potential of these three fields and all possible intersections

Co-refining interactive systems with older adults from function, form and interaction

Designing interactive systems that are pragmatic, attractive and easy to use for older adults is challenging. Participatory design, as an approach to enhance the mutual understanding between designers and end users, has been proved to be useful to improve the quality of design for older people. However, PD research has long been criticized for extensively dealing with the early-phase design while putting less emphasis on the later stages. In this paper, we argue for the importance of collaborative refinement when designing interactive systems for older adults. Through a case study, we describe our experience of co-refining the preliminary design of an interactive system with older participants from three perspectives: function, form and interaction. We also explored to adopt some potential PD methods and conclude by discussing the effectiveness of the chosen approach and methods

On the Role of External Representations in Designing for Participatory Sensemaking

Public issues demand highly complex collaborations in which different (public, private) stakeholders, each with their own complementary or conflicting interests, expertise and experiences, work toward public good. Typically, collaborative technological applications function to represent people’s ideas and to enable the exchange of representational messages between people. By contrast, we designed [X]Changing Perspectives ([X]CP): an interactive table-system for multi-stakeholder collaboration around public issues. The system aims, not to represent views but rather, to scaffold the emergence of situated meaningful couplings in face-to-face interactions. It helps people to align their visual attention, materialises their input and provokes associations. However, [X]CP does contain representations, such as symbols, tangibles and an interactive visualisation. In reflecting on its design and use, we analyse what these representations do, as seen from the perspective of embodied, participatory sensemaking. We explain how representations are not the foundational building blocks of the system, and how they do not have fixed meanings. Rather, as scaffolds, our representations add a layer of artificial structure that guides the ongoing interactive couplings between people, contributing to participatory sensemaking. Applying this approach to the design of mediating technologies for multi-stakeholder collaborations can open up new ways of interacting and understanding between stakeholders without disrupting their collaboration