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Mapping trends of the evolution in the retail sector: A case study of a design research project
No full textThe retail sector is evolving through the integration of physical and digital spaces, making omnichannel commerce the dominant model. This shift presents challenges and opportunities related to sustainability, consumer expectations, and strategic changes in businesses. This paper presents a design research project that maps promising trends and potential strategic business directions in the retail sector. 26 case studies were collected and analyzed through a design-led research process, identifying seven key trends in consumer behavior, technology integration, and business model evolution. These insights were validated through a webinar attended by industry professionals. The findings highlight the need for brands to rethink their relationship with products, stores, and customer interactions to foster innovation. Future research will refine these insights through sector-specific studies and collaborative workshops, further exploring how emerging trends shape retail strategies
Design Tensions Between Attractiveness and Inclusivity in Milan Public Universities: The Case of a Student Housing Orientation Service
No full textAs Milan public universities compete globally to attract economic capital and student flows, they simultaneously face growing challenges in addressing the housing affordability crisis affecting their student populations. This paper reflects on the design tensions emerging within the service ecosystem of Politecnico di Milano, starting from the shortcomings encountered during the development of the multidisciplinary research-action project StudMIHome: Students Living in Milan; a study on student housing conducted by three research departments of the university, with the objective of prototyping and testing a housing orientation service for students
Utopian visions or cautionary tales? Drifting through New Babylon in search of future living
No full textAlthough contemporary technologies are inherently systemic, much design still focuses on individual interactions rather than on effects of collective action across space and time. Current imaginaries of the smart city, where massive assemblages of humans and nonhumans co-perform, have largely focused on the optimization and automation made possible by new technological advances. As we humans contend with our collective earthly survival, the question of how to design desirable futures has become imperative. In this paper, we explore both possibilities and problems associated with the construction of futurist visions. Departing from a story set in the present-day, we move to examine the historical work of Constant Nieuwenhuys’ New Babylon as a characteristically utopian imaginary. Looking at New Babylon’s key ideas through the lens of our contemporary conditions, we reflect on the issues of play, control, and totalization, as well as the challenges and opportunities for designing future living
The Future of Digital Care_drafting Design Spaces
No full textThe paper presents the findings of a scoping review to explore the key themes within the digital care domain. The study not only encompasses the research methodology employed, which adheres to established guidelines for scoping reviews—research questions, screening, data charting, and visualization—but also explores the principal themes that emerged in the field of digital care. These themes include Distributed Care, Self-Care, and Health Booster Technologies, each of which is expounded upon in detail. The paper emphasizes how digital technologies, such as mobile applications, wearable devices, and IoT systems, have the potential to reshape the care paradigm by improving and enhancing self-management, care delivery, self-care, and mental health, augmenting overall well-being. Furthermore, the paper places an emphasis on the pivotal role of design in shaping future directions and stresses the importance of adopting a multifocal approach, including participatory and co-design, to navigate opportunities and challenges within this evolving domain
Virtual Reality for Assessment of Chronic Lower Back Pain in Physiotherapy - Task Selection, Design, and User Experience Evaluation
No full textChronic low back pain (CLBP) presents a significant challenge in healthcare, re-quiring effective tools for rehabilitation and assessment. This study explores the use of virtual reality (VR) for assessment of physical function in patients with CLBP, and investigates how movements and tasks can be designed for assessment purposes. The focus is on physiotherapists\u27 perceptions of using VR regarding task design, feasibility, and user experience. We conducted three design workshops with physiotherapists and HCI researchers, and designed three VR applications that we evaluated with six physiotherapy students. The study provides valuable insights into participants\u27 perceptions and highlights promising and challenging aspects of using VR in physiotherapy assessment. We found the approach to be useful and have potential. However, additional focus is needed on task design, measures of physical function, and designing for body size diversity. This study lays the groundwork for designing physiotherapeutic assessment of patients with CLBP
Envisioning transformation structures to support ethical mediation practices
No full textEthics is complex and situated, involving many stakeholders that impact the design of technology systems. Numerous methods and tools have been proposed to enable practitioners to address ethical issues in the workplace. However, little work has described how designers themselves understand and seek to respond to that ethical complexity. In this short paper, we present five transformation structures that visually and relationally depict how ethics might be addressed in a workplace setting. We base these structures on analysis of plans that 39 practitioners and students created in a co-design workshop to address an ethical concern in their job role. We evaluated the diagrams of these workshop plans and identified five different types of structures that could lead to potential transformation of ethical practices: parallel, linear, top-down, loopy, and gordian. We identify how these transformation structures differently inscribe expectations of ethical mediation and action, leading to opportunities for further support of ethical practices by practitioners
Guiding design students to sound-driven design from the base camp of semiotics
No full textThe lack of knowledge in the field of sound-driven design lags our educational efforts to teach BSc students about the role of sound in current design process methodologies. Teaching programs rarely include subjects dedicated to creating a coherent experience using data-to-sound strategies, sound informativeness, or the interactions that users have with product sounds. Understanding sound at the same level as other sensory cues prepares students to enrich the usability, attractiveness, and communicative qualities of products, services, and systems. This contribution aims to provide an integrative and multidisciplinary perspective of sound-driven design through the adaptation and application of the ‘Design Framework for Audible Alarms’ as a conceptual design tool in semiotics. The framework is exemplified through several design cases carried out in the sessions of the subject ‘Semiotics in design’ during two academic years, as part of the BSc in Industrial Design and Product Development Engineering
Co-design under the Bauhaus of the Seas Light-house Project: a New European Bauhaus case study in Lisbon and Oeiras
No full textThe Bauhaus of the Seas (BoS) is one of the Lighthouse projects of the New European Bauhaus initiative (NEB). The project promotes the application of the NEB values – sustainable, beautiful, together – to develop locally grounded De-monstrator Pilots and focus cities’ attention on the future of the oceans. A co-design approach is being applied in a series of participatory sessions with stake-holders, including nature/ecosystem experts, cultural institutions, local authori-ties and civic organizations, aiming at a consolidated collaborative approach. In this report we present the results from the co-design processes under develop-ment in Oeiras and Lisbon – two coastal territories involved in the BoS. Our findings reveal that co-designing in a multi-stakeholder participatory process pre-sents challenges, ranging from the discomfort of working in bottom-up decision-making settings to the difficulty of amplifying underrepresented voices, as well as the ethical, philosophical and practical challenges of involving other-than-human beings
Co-Design of a Loneliness Monitoring System with Older People and Stakeholders
No full textLoneliness in later life has been associated with frailty and earlier mortality. Sensor-based monitoring systems aim to help identify and prevent more severe forms of social isolation and loneliness at old age. The technological development requires an understanding how to reach acceptance and usefulness of the proposed technology in the wider system by involving those it affects. In this co-design study, we engage people that experienced loneliness after the age of 65 and stakeholders to collaboratively design a loneliness monitoring system that is embedded in wearables and smart home furniture. Such involvement will help inform the technology design at early stages. This paper contributes to literature on loneliness monitoring systems for older people that has lacked people and stakeholder involvement and a human-centered approach to design. We present found requirements for the positioning of sensors, symptoms and objects associated with loneliness, and recommendations for greater detection accuracy
Designing [The, With, Against] Sound [For]: Towards A Semantic-oriented Coding Scheme For Protocol Studies In Sound-driven Design
No full textSound-driven design is a collaborative and multidisciplinary design activity which uses sound as catalyst of the design approach. We present a semantic-oriented methodology and coding system to capture the diversity of sound-driven concepts that support the design process. We evaluate the methodology in a protocol study of a design team, composed of one sound designer, one acoustic engineer, one designer, and one expert user, engaged in exploring the listening dimension in the caregiving experience. We use linkographic analysis to integrate and evaluate our coding scheme. The methodology proves to be effective in revealing the semantic models of the participants and representing their semantic contribution to the design process. Two protocol studies in the same context are in progress to iterate the methodology and the coding scheme. The results are expected to provide a solid ground to devise methods and boundary tools to facilitate participation and co-creation in sound-driven design