Musical Viruses for graceful seduction

The +++ Wearable Player is a result of the application of the Rights through Making approach in designing wearables. This approach aims at designing systems, whose use empowers people towards the materialization of values (e.g. human rights). The +++ Wearable Player system elaborates on the previous project Sound Experience, and introduces the concept of viral music exchange as a motivating factor in the context of social health. This paper describes the morphological genesis, the functional aspects and how they have been implemented in a fully working experienceable prototype. The design process and its outcomes are illustrated, in the framework of the “changing behaviour” design trend

Informed consent. Legal obligation or cornerstone of the care relationship?

: The topic of informed consent has become increasingly important in recent decades, both in the ethical-deontological field and as a duty of law. The review covered all sentences issued by the 13th section of the Civil Court of Rome during the period January 2016-December 2020. During this period, 156 judgments were found in which a breach of consent was required; in 24 of these, specific liability was proven, and the corresponding compensation liquidated. Moreover, 80% of the cases concerned the lack of information provided. The most involved branches were those related to surgical areas: general surgery, plastic surgery and aesthetic medicine and orthopaedics. The total amount of compensation paid was EUR 287,144.59. The research carried out has highlighted how, in a broad jurisprudential context, the damage caused by the violation of the right related to informed consent is considered, and how it impacts on the economic compensation of damages. Additionally, it showed that the areas most affected by the information deficit are those related to the performance of surgical activities, which are characterized by greater invasiveness and a higher risk of adverse events. The data reported underline the exigency to consider informed consent not as a mere documentary allegation but as an essential moment in the construction of a valid therapeutic alliance, which is also useful for avoiding unnecessary litigation that is becoming increasingly burdensome for healthcare systems all over the world

Molecular mechanisms of cell death: recommendations of the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death 2018.

Over the past decade, the Nomenclature Committee on Cell Death (NCCD) has formulated guidelines for the definition and interpretation of cell death from morphological, biochemical, and functional perspectives. Since the field continues to expand and novel mechanisms that orchestrate multiple cell death pathways are unveiled, we propose an updated classification of cell death subroutines focusing on mechanistic and essential (as opposed to correlative and dispensable) aspects of the process. As we provide molecularly oriented definitions of terms including intrinsic apoptosis, extrinsic apoptosis, mitochondrial permeability transition (MPT)-driven necrosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, pyroptosis, parthanatos, entotic cell death, NETotic cell death, lysosome-dependent cell death, autophagy-dependent cell death, immunogenic cell death, cellular senescence, and mitotic catastrophe, we discuss the utility of neologisms that refer to highly specialized instances of these processes. The mission of the NCCD is to provide a widely accepted nomenclature on cell death in support of the continued development of the field

Experiencing sound through interactive jewellery and fashion accessories

In this paper we report the results of a series of experiments conducted as part of a participatory Research through Design (RtD) project [1] which aims to develop interactive jewels for deaf women. The project moved from the idea of bringing mindful attention to aesthetics in designing for disability, exploring cross-modal sensory associations. Our jewels detect ambient sound and represent them with light patterns, vibration patterns, and shape change. Preferences can be set through an app that allows to record sounds of interest (e.g. doorbell, a household appliance) and to notify them through visual or tactile feedback of the jewel. In order to design meaningful cross-modal sensory associations between sounds in input and behaviours of the jewels in output, we engaged hearing and deaf people in an experiment on the association of light patterns to sound types. Preliminary results show the difficulty in associating light patterns to sound types without listening to the sound during the task. On the contrary, when the sound was preliminary heard, there was a higher possibility to associate it with the correct light pattern. Even if the results of the experiment are preliminary due to the small sample size of participants and the limited number of sounds used in the study, nevertheless they gave us insights about the design of the jewelry system and for follow up studies

Dreamy eyes: Exploring Dynamic Expression in Human-System Interaction

This paper describes the Emotional-Perspective design, a graphical-user-interface platform built to explore expression mappings. The platform utilizes emotional and social skills by shifting from representational and discrete to expression rich, contextualized and continuous-sustained interaction paradigms. A remote robot-view, used to control an assistive robot, allows people to take on the perspective of the robot and thereby explore its action-possibilities in context. This view is extended with a dynamic graphical layer (filters and shape-changing mask). This layer is expressively mapped to the robot's 'feelings' constituted by its internal conditions and direct interaction with its surrounding (environment and person). The Emotional-Perspective design will be evaluated to address the expressive mapping and the emergence of meaning in interaction

Itinerarium: Co-designing a tangible journey through history

This paper presents the co-design process of Itinerarium, an educational game designed to engage children of primary school in learning history through interactive play. The research drives forward a codesign methodology articulated in different settings (an archaeology lab, a Fab Lab and a primary school), with the aim to embed the local practices and knowledge into creative outputs. The design case shows that cross-competence, collaborative teamwork, inspiring design contexts and collaborative making are quintessential to scaffold participants' knowledge and skills. However, in order to fully contribute to the design process, participants have to be involved at specific stages of design: domain experts are fundamental in an early design stage and during testing, whilst children are effective co-designers during middle stages when prototypes are available. Designers have the fundamental role of materialising ideas with aesthetic qualities and drive the co-creation process

Gaming Archaeology: Playful Learning for Children With Different Abilities

Archeo is a collaborative modular game that combines storytelling and constructive play. It was designed as a primary school kit to engage children from 8 to 10 years of age in manipulating, discovering and building narratives associated with an archaeological find, a mysterious object found at an excavation site. The game was experimented in a primary school in Siena (Italy). Initial trials involved twenty-two 8-year-old children and their teachers. The group included 6 children with mild cognitive disabilities and learning disorders. Children were divided in 4 groups, each of which was facilitated by an expert. Each group included at least one child with a mild cognitive disability. Results show that the game was inclusive and collaborative, since all children contributed to the achievement of the final goal, regardless their cognitive ability. Interestingly, there were no remarkable differences in retention of the story. All children remembered most of the details of the story, even if the children with a mild cognitive disability summarized it in fewer sentences, whilst children with typical development showed richer narrative competencies. Manipulation and collaboration were the winning factor in the game. By building and constructing together, children successfully mastered abstract elements of the story as well as very concrete building blocks of the game

Comparison between cementitious and geopolymeric mortars with the same mechanical strength class

In the perspective of environmental sustainability for the rehabilitation and restoration of masonry buildings, the properties of geopolymeric mortars were studied and compared with those of traditional cement-based ones with the same mechanical strength class and workability. To this aim, four different geopolymeric and cement mixtures were manufactured in order to obtain mortars belonging to R1  10MPa, R2  15MPa, R3  25 MPa and R4  45 MPa strength class. In particular, geopolymeric mixtures were prepared with a sodium silicate/sodium hydroxide equal to 1:1, by using different concentration of the solutions, and sand/fly ash proportion equal to 2.7:1. The respective four cementitious mortar mixtures were prepared with water/cement equal to 0.5, 0.65, 0.9 and 1.1 by weight. Geopolymer mortars behave better than cement ones in terms of lower elastic modulus, higher water vapour permeability, lower capillary water absorption and higher resistance to salt crystallization

Remixing playware

In this paper, we describe the concept of remixing playware, which allows sampling and remixing of both physical and functional (e.g. music content) aspects of a system. Such remixing playware has a number of distinguished features which are explained in the paper: user-configurable modularity, which allows the user to interact and manipulate with samples; user-guided behavior-based system, which allows music compositions to emerge from the way performer interacts with the instruments that provide the primitive behaviours; intelligent sampling as the ability of creating samples that allow anybody to remix with the samples ensuring an engaging outcome. The paper exemplifies remixing playware with a variety of implementations in RoboMusic concerts, the virtual MusicTiles app, the physical MagicCubes, the physical dices in Peter Gabriel concerts, and the S'n'S system. These examples focus on music creation and performance, based upon the concept of RoboMusic, and it is argued that the concept of remixing playware extends to many other application areas of playware