Cultural context and service design: developing critical and meaning-making capacity

This paper reports on the experimental introduction of a socio-cultural lens to the design process, to aid in mapping symbolic aspects of consumption: i.e. users’ expectations, aspirations and identification needs and the sociocultural rules at play in the context of the innovation. An action research intervention was implemented with design students to investigate how applied semiotics and cultural analysis methods support user research and meaning-making during the design process. Students were provided with theories, activities and templates to facilitate the exploration of global and local socio-cultural trends, positioning of innovation in the cultural category and mapping codes and other contextual socio-symbolic signifiers that influence users’ preferences and choices. Results indicate that cultural context analysis contributes to build critical thinking skills and capacity in designers, and enables a wider awareness of the mediating role of design in the acceptance and diffusion of innovations

Holistic outcome-based visualisations for defining the purpose of healthcare system

Various stakeholders in the complex healthcare systems often prioritise and pursue different purposes, values and outcomes. Understanding/sharing/negotiating the trade-offs between them is a critical action in the development and design of complex healthcare systems. Some approaches like work domain analysis or soft systems methodology attempted to map the complex interactions, but it remains unclear how those maps and visualisations are in line with how people conceptualise in practice. This study aims to explore how designers visualise complex system interactions using healthcare outcomes to define the purpose. A workshop was conducted with 23 designers to generate outcome-based visualisations. The results indicate that designers conceptualise the purpose of the healthcare systems in different ways. Complexity was expressed through organic circles and messy arrows. However, support elements are needed to conduct open visualisations. These results may play a role in developing a visualisation-based method to address the complexity of purpose definition in healthcare

Filling the gap: design and designers' potential to build happier sustainable societies

Few would disagree with the idea that the foundations of our current world place too much value on externalities such as materialism and money. Our world is currently driven by the economic system, economic growth, and its system relies on high consumption of goods and services. In order to maintain this growth, our present ‘material-centred culture’ has led these to be, in their majority, designed and marketed in unsustainable ways. Consequently, consumers at present buy and discard products more frequently. The manner and the degree in which products engage us, are in fact a mirror of our consumption behavior and our well-being trends; hence, directly proportional to the sustainability of our world. The level of engagement establishes stronger or weaker relationships with products as it influences the perception of our experiences, defining among other things our level of satisfaction. Unfortunately, increasing evidence suggests, that although economic growth has been increasing for the past 60 years or so, happiness & well-being, environmental and social capital, and sustainable lifestyles have been declining. Our economic system has failed us. This fact has set off alarm bells which have led countries around the world to invest in the development and implementation of new economic and well-being systems that improve the foundations of our world. Sustainable Design and Sustainable Consumption present good opportunities, with strong potential, to improve these foundations, and build more sustainable lifestyles and happier societies. Although the relationship between sustainability, design, and happiness has not yet been studied widely in a systematic way, there are already many indicators which show that we can live happily and more sustainably, with much less material items and less consumption. Through understanding the way in which design and the designer can contribute in a holistic way to sustainability, this paper proposes an initial theory of the design methods, and characteristics of sustainable products, services or systems capable of contributing to shaping and promoting society towards well-being and sustainable lifestyles underpinned by sustainable economic foundations. Followed by a discussion of the preliminary testing with sustainable design thinkers, the initial theory is validated and considers other interesting avenues in order to develop and test it further