3132 research outputs found
Sort by
Anticipating Futures: Forecasting and climate preparedness for co-located hazards in India
Get PDFANTICIPATE examines how different actors forecast and prepare for co-located hazards under conditions of climatic uncertainty and whether and how these practices can inform practices of anticipation and preparedness. Despite significant advances in climatic sciences that enable seasonal forecasting of extreme events, the co-occurrence of floods and droughts – which we conceptualise as co-located hazards, combined with the underlying systemic complexities of locally situated knowledge create a situation of radical uncertainty.
ANTICIPATE examines how diverse actors can work together to identify and examine changing patterns of how extreme climatic events are understood in locally grounded and appropriate ways. We focus on the Indian state of Gujarat, where extreme variability (floods and droughts) has pushed pastoralists and dryland farmers to the limits of coping. Integrating ethnographic, participatory and creative approaches with atmospheric modelling, ANTICIPATE is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaboration between academics, disaster specialists and design researchers across the UK and India
Curious Controversies: A systemic design lens to understand value conflicts in the smart city
Get PDFThis paper explores sociotechnical controversies in the smart city context and proposes that controversies are valuable concepts for systemic design research and practice due to their multi-dimensional nature. Smart city visions and initiatives tend to be sources of friction and debate: multiple perspectives and expectations come together, leading to value tensions. In our work, we conceptualize controversies as a constellation of value tensions in the public realm. In this work, we stress the importance of embracing controversies and explore how to stimulate ethical deliberation regarding the soft impact of technologies in smart cities. Using an exploratory workshop approach, we empirically examine smart city controversies and propose that such controversies consist of conflicting concerns and value tensions at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of system analysis. Our findings indicate that value tensions can arise within (inter-level conflict) or across these levels (intra-level conflict). Controversies can contain both types of conflicts. This analysis highlights the complex nature of sociotechnical controversies and how a better understanding of controversies may eventually help grapple with complexity in systemic design research and practice. Moreover, dissecting a controversy in this way into its formative elements allows for triggering ethical deliberation on smart city practices, as it reveals pressing value tensions
Employing Choice Infrastructure and Choice Posture to Achieve Positive-Sum System Outcomes
Get PDFStable systems are not necessarily healthy ones. Many ostensibly stable systems in organisational, commercial, and civic contexts are instead characterised by zero-sum dynamics, in which participants are forced to compete for a narrow set of scarce assets rather than satisfying their needs from a state of pluralistic abundance. Insights from behavioural science indicate that conditions of scarcity and competition can have a significant influence on how choices are prioritised and made, suggesting that a behavioural perspective on how people consider options and trade-offs when making decisions under uncertainty can contribute to understanding behaviours in these zero-sum situations. Further, the need to consider value from both individual and communal levels suggests that augmenting these behavioural insights with an understanding of system-level functions can illuminate strategies for reframing value definition and exchange and help reframe zero-sum conditions into positive-sum ones. However, where behavioural design focuses on narrowly defined behavioural change, and immediate decision-making environments in the form of choice architecture, achieving positive-sum outcomes may demand paying greater attention to choice infrastructure, or the more systemic processes, functions, and conditions that underlay and shape behaviours. In addition, encouraging positive-sum outcomes will also benefit from understanding how individuals’ specific and non-generic stances on value inform their personal choice postures or inclinations and predispositions toward options that are shaped by personal experience. This paper proposes that behavioural insights seen through the lenses of choice infrastructure and choice posture can build on current systems and behavioural design approaches, achieving more equitable, positive-sum solutions to system challenges. It then examines Chicago’s transportation policy related to fines and fees through these lenses to demonstrate how they might be applied to real-life challenges
The Unsustainable Loop Of Sustainability
Get PDFThe greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.
Sustainability has been a fad word for decades. It has been overused and inter-mingled with other “green words” such as recyclable, eco-friendly, biodegradable, and so on. The unsustainable loop of sustainability refers to the current trend of marketing products as sustainable alternatives to the existing products but not being sustainable to begin with. This is powered by the emergence of the term greenwashing and its wide adoption. We look at the false perception of sustainability as an elite or luxury term by the masses and the reasons behind this perception. We target how we, as designers, can create interventions in this domain and bring about more sustainable solutions
Envisioning the Metaverse
No full textThe Internet: we are surrounded by it, and it’s growing at a fast pace; it’s constantly evolving, changing the way we experience it. We have already gone through 3 phases of the internet web 0, 1 and 2. The next phase of the internet, or “web 3” as we call it, is going to modify how we interact with the virtual world. Metaverse is a part of that next phase.
It is a virtual universe made up of various virtual world platforms running on the blockchain. Users on metaverse platforms have a virtual avatar through which they can interact with each other and carry out various activities.
Despite what numerous people have to say, we know that the metaverse is inevitable. In such a scenario, it becomes our responsibility to foresee the opportunities as well as the threats, and we must work towards making a more humane metaverse and improving our overall digital presence. This is what our project is about, envisioning the metaverse. Foreseeing everything, positives and negatives alike.
In this project, we have tried to deconstruct and then reconstruct the present system of the metaverse and derived the following outcomes:
- Mapped model of the present Metaverse System.
- Our metaverse model with a few modifications and interventions in the areas of Platform, Hardware, Communities, Lifestyle, and Infrastructure.
- Metaverse Manifesto for a more Humane Metaverse
- A set of Method Cards
- Design Fiction Installation – We built a fictional scenario set in the future
- Centred on digital footprint and made an installation – ‘Digital Ash’
How to read the map?
Our Map is in the form of a timeline starting from 1957. And we have jotted down all the important events that happened since then. We tried to study how these events influenced and shaped the metaverse that is today.
The year is denoted on the road, and the artefacts that you see kept on the road are marking significant advancements in VR technology. The first strip from the bottom (in purple) notes down all the literature and movies that came into the picture and shaped the current scenario (D&D, Snow Crash, Ready Player One etc.)
The middle strip (in yellow) notes the VR devices, and the topmost strip contains the era (web 1, web 2, web 3 etc.).
Our timeline continues to a bigger platform, which signifies the current scenario (2020–2022). This is also represented by different sectors, Communities, Economy, Lifestyles, Hardware, Infrastructure, and Platforms. The pits represent the Problems, and the Saplings represent opportunities from each sector, respectively.
Towards the right, we have an iteration of a metaverse using the findings from our research. We divided it into the same sectors as before Communities, Economy, Lifestyle, Hardware, Infrastructure and Platform. Labelled are our modifications to the current system
Objects in the Familiar: Systemic contexts of production
Get PDFThe importance of systems thinking is often emphasised in the context of current global challenges, but the discussion around systemic interrelationships can often have an abstract and inaccessible feel. This paper starts as an invitation to have a discussion around concepts related to systems thinking in a more accessible setting. It does this by bringing ideas around systemic perspectives into an embodied mode while exploring the design process of a familiar artefact, i.e., biscuits. The familiarity with the process frees the designer-researcher to focus on the interrelationships and wider considerations in the process of conceptualisation and production. This then offers a way to easily access the notion of complexity and introduces complementary ideas around visually mapping relationships. The paper visually traces the internal dialogue inherent in creating biscuits as edible design objects and also as products of a process. In doing so, it helps contextualise the ways in which designers design objects that take part in systems and, in turn, the ways systems often influence how the product is produced. The intermingling of design and research modes is used as a reflexive learning opportunity following a developmental approach and has synergies with Research through Design (RtD). Practice, research, and visual documentation bring to light the presence of a set of pre-acquired, dynamic yet blurry knowledge constructs that seem to be part of implicit processes of negotiation and selection, which I call pre-sets.
Pre-sets consist of both explicit and implicit knowledge constructs that influence choice-making in variable proportions in the design process. While significant research was conducted on materials and methods during the process, final decisions included knowledge constructs that were present before this research. Pre-sets seem to be combinations of preconceptions, previously gained practical and conceptual knowledge, and previous lived experience that can be continually changed or modified due to various factors. They are present throughout the conceptualization process, can guide experience and interaction with various systemic levels, and are operationalized in varying degrees through the process of designing. Since the object needed to be produced in certain ways that satisfied notions of sustainability, which in themselves are changing, the exploration also lays out the negotiation and tensions present in creating sustainability-oriented products
Participatory Sensemaking Through Visualising Conversations
Get PDFBoth conversations between people and finding ways to visualize complex phenomena are important topics for sensemaking in systemic design research. This presentation introduces the COCOnUT and TaCo projects, which together create a system that extracts words from conversations, visualizes them using a diagrammatic approach, and enables participants to combine and annotate them in near-real time, using a tangible interface. Particularly in multi-stakeholder contexts such as democratic deliberation, or participatory policy-making, the ability for participants to see what is being said (and what has been said) by themselves and others and to investigate and interact with themes emerging from the conversation—ideas that have been re-stated or reframed, terms used to mean different things, different terms used to mean the same thing, ideas which should be grouped together, and so on – are all part of a process of understanding each other’s understanding. Ongoing work will explore possibilities for this kind of tool as part of participatory sensemaking in design and conversation processes
Scaling Up: From labs to systemic change
Get PDFThe current societal challenges require different stakeholders to act on different systemic levels. Design is seen as a valuable approach to addressing these challenges. Whereas earlier studies provide insights into the practices designers need for systemic design, there is a lack of understanding of the practices designers need to scale up and create the needed impact. This paper describes a study on two extensive case studies that created systemic impact and what the project leads did to create the scale and impact they achieved. From these case studies, we found that creating a governance model, an action-driven approach, storytelling, and navigating can help to scale up and hand over to other stakeholders.
The governance model was set up in both cases to ensure national and local ownership. Developing the tools and methods during the process that could be handed over to others and are self-explanatory scale up was enabled in both cases with limited budgets and time.
Both cases required and wanted to create an impact where action on the work floor was required. In both cases, the strategic challenges were translated into smaller local experiments. With an action-driven approach, these local labs and experiments were connected to learning at a larger scale and provided insights into all sorts of challenges for implementation and scaling up.
In both cases, storytelling was used and helped in gaining traction and support throughout the process. The stories of people in the system were used to create an understanding across the different sectors of how different perspectives and people experience the problem and solutions and their accompanying needs. Also, in both cases, media attention helped to create awareness at the right levels to increase the impact and give an enormous boost to the scale-up of the projects.
In both cases, the project leaders left room for intuiting. At some point, they felt the need to slow down, speed up, involve different people, strengthen their relationships, or grasp opportunities. Both teams had a clear view of the process to follow and the aim to achieve but left room in their processes to grasp the opportunities and drift away when they felt they needed to do something differently
Syntegrity for Designing Designing
Get PDFThis paper presents a cybernetic structure adopted in an architecture design course that makes two interrelated shifts in the usual approach to architectural education and practice. One is the shift from teaching to learning, a shift from teaching design by framing and solving problems to what John Chris Jones names ‘designing designing’. The other relates to the transcendence of the usual participatory processes that, by over-relying on the professional’s culture, end up patronising socio-spatial groups and instead build a more conversational design approach. The shift from teaching to learning draws on Seymour Papert’s mathetics and the idea of peer-to-peer learning, which focuses on the centrality and responsibilities of the students in the educational process. Drawing on Vilém Flusser, the idea of responsibility extends from the learning process to the design practice and focuses more on its intersubjective and dialogical aspects than on the object itself. To reinforce this approach, we bring in ideas from Cedric Price, such as value-free and enabling, that point towards a wider and more open approach to design. From the teacher’s point of view, the challenge is to build a structure that does not impose ideas but offers them up for discussion so that students can build their own collective critical understanding. In order to enable such a structure, we have been experimenting with the dialogical strategy of Team Syntegrity proposed by Stafford Beer. However, somewhat different from Beer’s original protocol, which is directed to help decision-making, we have experimented with the syntegrity model in different contexts and with a diversity of purposes. One of the essential features that are crucial to our experience is the different roles the students play in each round as advocates, critics, and observers. In this paper, we discuss a dialogical experiment in which we adapted Team Syntegrity in a design project that linked students and a community-based in a Brazilian mining district. Our intention was to collaborate with a local theatre group and help with the renovation of their headquarters without resorting to conventional problem-solving techniques. The result was that not only did both students and the community become acquainted with the “designing designing” strategy, but the theatre group was able to see the renovation of their headquarters and the design of a building as part of a broader and more complex series of questions concerning the whole neighbourhood
Systems for Innovation: Towards a model of requisite variety through intercultural conversations
Get PDFIn today’s working environments, collaborative teams are composed of diverse individuals—from different cultures, nations, religions, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. Thus, there is an urge to understand and embrace differences. Yet, many teams and organisations fail in this endeavour because they lack specific tools to benefit from the power of diversity. In this paper, we present case studies from applying systemic design principles for designing for intercultural conversations as a way to embrace requisite variety in flexible and collaborative ecosystems. We describe a workshop experience that acts as a microcosm of a design team experience. The workshop allows participants to experience a system that is open to a variety of inputs and demonstrates the diversity of perspectives that may meaningfully apply to simple abstract artefacts. This paper shows how surfacing a variety of mental models through objects is both possible and effective in cross-cultural teams. In doing so, we demonstrate how design teams can endeavour to look at a problem space from multiple perspectives, benefiting from the power of diversity. The results include a general understanding of different interpretations of culture and boosting openness to otherness and intercultural awareness. As contemporary workplaces continue to diversify, developing a richer understanding of the value that cross-cultural teams can bring offers a path towards a more positive working environment