Empathy In A Technology-Driven Design Process: Designing For Users Without A Voice Of Their Own,
2019
Design Research Society
Empathy In A Technology-Driven Design Process: Designing For Users Without A Voice Of Their Own, Elina Ilen, Camilla Groth, Markus Ahola, Kirsi Niinimäki
Nordes Conference Series
Smart textiles are often developed in sports- oriented contexts through technology-driven processes. In the medical context, practitioners themselves also invent and develop technological aids in response to needs that emerge in practice. In these cases, novel technology may be the first driver for design to secure functionality and reliability, but our study shows that these processes benefit from human-centric and empathic design approaches. The project develops smart textiles for infants with medical adversities, such as preterm birth, neonatal infections, or birth asphyxia, collaboratively with medical researchers. Our pilot research illuminates the need to use the interest group’s empathic understanding as …
How Can We Come To Care In And Through Design?,
2019
Design Research Society
How Can We Come To Care In And Through Design?, Li Jönsson, Ann Light, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl, Mathilda Tham
Nordes Conference Series
On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site …
What Matters When Turning Utopias Into Material,
2019
Design Research Society
What Matters When Turning Utopias Into Material, Philip Hector, Mikko Jalas
Nordes Conference Series
With an increasing number of open laboratories for cultural and technical experimentation in place, questions arise regarding how and with what effects they come about, what they mean to those who partake and how they organize themselves in order to satisfy those involved. Recognizing the way that these spaces reach of alternative technologies and alternative ways of being we conceptualize them as materialized utopias, which are fragile socio-material arrangements. Rather than articulating grand utopian or ecotopian alternative societies, we look at materialized utopias as the gradual tweaking, probing and fixing of things. We elaborate on this with the study of …
Navigating Care In Social Design: A Provisional Model,
2019
Design Research Society
Navigating Care In Social Design: A Provisional Model, Eva Knutz, Thomas Markussen, Tau Lenskjold
Nordes Conference Series
The aim of this paper is to show how the value of social design lies in the approach’s ability as a caring practice to foster change for vulnerable groups in society. Yet, to achieve such change, social designers must have a navigational tool that allows them to identify and steer through some of the value conflicts that are typically involved in public service care provision. To substantiate this claim, we rapport from two recent social design projects in the public sector dealing with care within criminal justice and healthcare. Building on these two projects we propose a provisional model for …
Caring For Diversity In Co-Design With Young Immigrants,
2019
Design Research Society
Caring For Diversity In Co-Design With Young Immigrants, Dagny Stuedahl, Henry Mainsah
Nordes Conference Series
This exploratory paper will ask questions about how we as co-designers and humanitarian designers engage with the outside and will especially be concerned with dialogues, interaction and knowledge production with young immigrants in co-design processes. We also will ask how we connect the questions arising from the histories of societies that participants bring into the co-design situation, how our practice and co-design understanding can handle cases where we cannot really grasp the complexity when religious, ethnical, personal and political experiences build the ground for collaborations. This becomes especially important in situations where complexity may ruin the co-design process and the …
Design For Sustainable Entangled Human-Nature Systems,
2019
Design Research Society
Design For Sustainable Entangled Human-Nature Systems, Emīlija Veselova
Nordes Conference Series
Humanity must rapidly transition towards sustainable futures. Reaching planetary sustainability requires care for nature and radical transformation of human-made systems. Human and natural systems co-exist in extensive, complex, multi-layered entanglement. Design for sustainability and, ultimately, all design, will need to be transformed towards design for sustainable entangled human-nature systems. This paper outlines six developments to support this transformation. It suggests that all design projects must (1) be viewed as interlinked to human-nature systems and their sustainability, (2) include natural systems and entities as key stakeholders, and (3) include transdisciplinary perspectives on the entangled systems and sustainability. Moreover, design could adopt …
A Tangible Understanding Of Chronic Pain,
2019
Design Research Society
A Tangible Understanding Of Chronic Pain, Christina Fyhn, Jacob Buur
Nordes Conference Series
Pain is essential as a warning system for the human body. For some people, however, pain develops into a chronic condition. What makes it particularly difficult to care for patients with chronic pain conditions is that pain is an individual, subjective feeling. Traditionally, medical experts recommend that patients express their pain experience on a numeric scale or with standardised terms, but patients find this too simplistic to convey their condition. Also, the challenge that pain is a social issue, affecting patients’ work and social life severely, urged us to look for alternative ways in which people might communicate their pain …
Does It Spark Joy?,
2019
Design Research Society
Does It Spark Joy?, Connie Svabo
Nordes Conference Series
The question is asked by Japanese clutter-clearing expert Marie Kondo in a Netflix program, where she helps North Americans deal with their many things and where she also teaches participants to fold their clothes in organized ways. The question ‘Does it spark joy?’ in my text is used in an intellectual act of folding together thoughts from situational aesthetics, vital materialism and a philosophy of mingled bodies - into a relational and processual ontology, which overcomes the subject-object divide, highlights the transcendence of self and promotes receptivity to the dynamic and open-ended character of the world. The mundanity of clothing …
Towards Sustainable Textile Materials: Potential Pathways And Dialogues Between Disciplines,
2019
Design Research Society
Towards Sustainable Textile Materials: Potential Pathways And Dialogues Between Disciplines, Pirjo Kääriäinen, Kirsi Niinimäki
Nordes Conference Series
The need to take care of our material environment has become urgent. New types of scientific collaboration have emerged, and designers are being invited to collaborate with top-level scientists. Several examples have shown that the creativity of designers can be brought into different kinds of scientific collaboration to enhance existing approaches and ways of working. This study investigates various design-science collaborations in the context of material research, all aiming to create sustainable textile materials. The empirical basis of this study consists of five material research and development projects. Our data identified five different approaches to materials; Transforming, Reinventing, Recycling, Biofabrication …
Who Cares? …But First, What Is The Who, And What Is Care?,
2019
Design Research Society
Who Cares? …But First, What Is The Who, And What Is Care?, Ian Coxon, Craig Bremner
Nordes Conference Series
What is Care? A word, a concept or a myth? In this paper we explore some of the key formulations of Care that should be considered if Care is to become instrumentalised in design. Primarily, we revisit that meaning of Care which could be of most value to design. After all, Care, at least to some, is the essence of what it means to be human. The goal of this paper is to prompt reconsideration of the many differing notions of Care and to stop for a moment to investigate one formulation of Care that contributes a way of clearly …
Waste, So What? A Reflection On Waste And The Role Of Designers In A Circular Economy,
2019
Design Research Society
Waste, So What? A Reflection On Waste And The Role Of Designers In A Circular Economy, Holly Mcquillan
Nordes Conference Series
This paper discusses research currently being undertaken which addresses the interrelated volume, value and cost of waste and the responsibility designers have in its creation. The paper begins by outlining the contemporary waste problem (in the fashion industry). Then utilising observations made during recent field tests – where waste reduction and elimination strategies were applied to existing designs – the impact that explicit and implicit design hierarchies and complexity have on waste minimisation attempts are discussed. Questions such as: is waste a problem in the context of proposed Circular Economy models? After all, if we have a Circular Economy, then …
Advanced Resilient Practices: Demythologizing Design Heritage,
2019
Design Research Society
Advanced Resilient Practices: Demythologizing Design Heritage, Fahrettin Ersin Alaca, David Muñoz Alcántara
Nordes Conference Series
This paper presents an international research, exhibition and forum project that has been developing since 2016. The project aims to demythologize design’s consumerist Utopias and sectoral hierarchies as a series of temporary artistic and design interventions. By socio-historical analysis of politics of design, the project involves blurring the borders between exhibition, archival display, and action research. This involves pushing forward Pratt’s “contact zone” as a technological site of embodied advanced practice of design critique together with the exercise of dissent foregrounding ecology of practices. The present paper focuses on the project’s methods and research outcome concerning the case of Finnish …
Rituals Of Care: Reimagining Welfare,
2019
Design Research Society
Rituals Of Care: Reimagining Welfare, Meike Schalk, Sara Brolundde Carvalho
Nordes Conference Series
The legendary Swedish welfare state model comprised, on its smallest scale, an infrastructure of ‘common rooms’ (gemensamhetslokaler). Here, we explore common rooms as a spatio-social concept inspired by ‘the commons’. We argue that common rooms were fundamental to the Swedish welfare state model until the 1990s, and that the divorce of the spatial dimension from the social apparatus contributed to their decline. Using recent common rooms (Gemeinschaftsräume) in subsidized housing in Vienna as our empirical example, we illustrate how collectivity is influenced by changing legal frameworks, with common rooms receiving new attention in recent sustainable housing policies. On the micro …
Finding Calm In A Perfect Storm,
2019
Design Research Society
Finding Calm In A Perfect Storm, Stella Boess, Elaha Zarabi, Christiaan Uythoven, Gerald Kraan
Nordes Conference Series
This paper presents insights from an exploratory study into the experience of orthopaedic rehabilitation that sought to support patients in self-care. In a research-through-design study, rough prototypes were generated and patient needs elicited. The project was a collaboration between an academic designer, a design agency, and an orthopaedic surgeon, and included perspectives from hand therapists and patients themselves. The study showed that patients greatly appreciate data support of hand rehabilitation exercises, because it helps them adjust and pace their perspective and experience of getting better. From a reflection on the prototypes in relation to the patient experience we also concluded …
Ecofeminist Understandings Of Care And Design For Sustainability Transitions: Towards A Theoretical Framework Of Work For The Degrowth Movement,
2019
Design Research Society
Ecofeminist Understandings Of Care And Design For Sustainability Transitions: Towards A Theoretical Framework Of Work For The Degrowth Movement, Eeva Houtbeckers, İdil Gaziulusoy
Nordes Conference Series
The starting point of this paper is a recognition of the need for transitions to sustainability. This exploratory paper is a stepping stone for development of a theoretical framework for ways of imagining and acting upon ecofeminist degrowth futures based on design for sustainability transitions (DFST). The aim of the framework is to conceptualise the role paid and un(der)paid work in and for such transitions. In this paper, we bring together previous research of design for sustainability DFST, degrowth, and ecofeminist understandings of care as gendered work. With references to the multi-level perspective of system innovations, DFST investigates the niche …
Caring With Others – Cultivating And Revaluing As Forms Of Everyday Designing,
2019
Design Research Society
Caring With Others – Cultivating And Revaluing As Forms Of Everyday Designing, Melisa Duque, Laura Popplow
Nordes Conference Series
In this paper we reflect on the notion of caring with in design research by discussing processes of cultivating and revaluing. Cultivating as a form of caring with other species. Revaluing as a form of caring with unwanted things. Both are addressed as everyday designing, ongoing liminal processes that have regenerative potential to revalue and care for/with dirty matters.
Affective Infrastructuring,
2019
Design Research Society
Affective Infrastructuring, Alicia Smedberg
Nordes Conference Series
This paper discusses the implications of care within infrastructuring processes, through the lens of a case study account and anecdote. The case study, located in Malmö (Sweden), is an on-going project exploring methods for citizen engagement within city planning. The paper seeks to exemplify how affect can travel - and accumulate - in interactions between public sector workers and citizens, and how this affective current means that each actor is simultaneously affecting and being affected by her surroundings.
Taking Positions: Institutions And Individuals In Public Sector Design,
2019
Design Research Society
Taking Positions: Institutions And Individuals In Public Sector Design, Maria Ferreira, Eeva Berglund
Nordes Conference Series
If recent decades have witnessed an expanded notion of design, here we explore such trends through the changing roles of public innovation labs and individuals within them. Recognizing the work of design scholarship in seeking to understand this influential and fast-changing field, we focus not so much on institutional form as on individuals doing design-led work in the public sector, whether or not they think of their work in terms of design. The paper draws on initial findings from ongoing work involving interviews and engagements with such labs in Latin America. We suggest approaching urban innovation labs with more attention …
Broadening Horizons Of Design Ethics? Importing Concepts From Applied Anthropology,
2019
Design Research Society
Broadening Horizons Of Design Ethics? Importing Concepts From Applied Anthropology, Johanna Ylipulli, Aale Luusua
Nordes Conference Series
This paper is a thought experiment: we explore how certain ethical considerations of applied anthropology might contribute to the evolving body of work on design ethics. To begin to consider ethical analogies between these two fields, we first align them on a conceptual level by scrutinizing how they both change relationships. Further, we introduce three central concepts and related debates of applied anthropology that could supplement discussions on contemporary design ethics: beneficence, collaborative approach and advocacy. The authors are specialized in (design) anthropology, architecture and human-computer interaction (HCI); in this paper, we draw from our respective fields and backgrounds.
Designing Care And Commoning Into A Code Of Conduct,
2019
Design Research Society
Designing Care And Commoning Into A Code Of Conduct, Cindy Kohtala, Jedediah Walls, We-Left Collective
Nordes Conference Series
Despite claims to being counterculture and a better alternative, grassroots activist design groups and free culture movements may replicate the marginalizing behaviours of dominant society, also in their governance and designs of their interaction platforms. We developed a code-of-conduct, or Community Guidelines, for our online commons-oriented group to nurture a sense of a caring and mutually responsible community. The guidelines aim to bring into online interaction the living person-to-person dialogic relationality we exhibit in collaborative work offline. Our social learning process could have implications for designing healthier online community protocols and platforms and be able to better tackle the challenges …
