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From Data Points to Well-being: A Design Framework of Self-Tracked Data through the Lens of Positive Psychology
No full textThe Quantified Self movement has grown, with more people using self-tracking tools to monitor everything from physical activities to emotional well-being. This study investigates the interplay between self-tracking practices and positive psychology, highlighting their collective potential to boost personal well-being. Integrating self-tracked data with principles like strengths, resilience, and personal growth allows for the transformation of mere metrics into compelling stories. The paper presents a de-sign framework that is influenced by classroom projects and the examination of data presentation in health and fitness apps. This framework manages the complete data lifecycle—from collection and organization to interpretation, presentation, and finally, harnessing data—with an aim to nurture positive emotions, acknowledge personal significance, and encourage growth. It seeks to merge the self-tracking data process with key tenets of positive psychology, turning raw data into actionable insights that foster positive behaviors and enhance the effective-ness of self-tracking tools in promoting user well-being
A bottom-up transformation: Design empowering chronic disease management types and strategies
No full textAs the population ages, chronic disease management (CDM) has become a challenge for current public health services. Previously, designing for patients with chronic diseases often saw them as passive objects of design, hindering their agency. Understanding patients\u27 agency is very important for health management, but the empowerment approach in the health field is often a disguised paternalism. This study aims to use the empowerment theory to reframe the possibility of the design empowering CDM and propose corresponding means of empowerment. We identified four types of design empowerment in CDM and articulated specific empowerment strategies through case studies. Our study therefore enriches the theoretical landscape regarding the role of design empowerment within CDM, offering insights for amplifying the voice of design at the crossroads of empowerment and CDM
Transitions to Multispecies Futures in the Design Classroom
No full textSustainability Transitions and Futures is a mandatory course of the Creative Sus-tainability master’s program in the Department of Design of Aalto University de-livered jointly by the co-authors. It aims to provide a basic understanding of how sustainability transitions projects unfold in practice and the ways through which designers can contribute to these projects as part of interdisciplinary teams. For two consecutive years, we focused on multispecies sustainability. We have pro-vided the students with the necessary theoretical and critical lenses through a curated selection of guest lectures from fields including law, philosophy, urban ecology and planning. For the practical part, the students in groups reimagined the Aalto University campus in the year 2050 as a multispecies campus and de-veloped pathways to demonstrate how their visions can become anchors for re-directing campus development plans. This paper reflects on our experience and provides pointers for systems change-related courses to engage with post-anthropocentric future-making
Benefitting systemic citizens and sustainable knowledge heritage: Building a digital platform ecosystem and community for knowledge co-creation
No full textAdvancing collective capacities relies on innumerable small ‘nano’-actions by individuals which govern, if effectively combined, any institutional (knowledge economy) and societal performance (knowledge society). In this endeavor, scaling people and knowledge connectedness present a key systemic strategy. Successive evolutionary ceilings have been overcome by general-purpose technologies such as language, toolmaking, writing, printing, computerization, and the web. But, as digitization is spreading, digital dividends are not. Facing widening opportunity divides, the elephants in the room are the entropy caused and the attention squandered by today’s ever-accelerating abundance of replicated, fragmented, outdated, and unvetted content. Any solution to this unsustainable wicked state ought to mitigate these constraints by affording systemic citizens the ease of utilizing and contributing to the transdisciplinary knowledge heritage. Using the ‘citizen-led design approach’ theme as a macroscope, the concept and mission of a longitudinal research and start-up project is presented for building a digital platform ecosystem and community for knowledge co-creation
Human-material interactions as practice for care
No full textIn this paper, we report on fields of knowledge and experiences that are accessed through Human-Material Interaction. We describe the experiences of people who worked creatively, in a process-oriented, slowly observing and exploring practice with one material for four months, and who shared these experiences and their interpretations with us in interviews. Based on references to the realities of their lives, they shared individual narratives, which testify to an appreciative and caring approach to the respective material and, beyond that, to the environment, society, and the respective self. In our analysis, we identify Human-Material Interaction as access to learnings, interpretations, relationships, and feelings which leads us to argue that this way of relating to the environment is a practice for care. We further propose this practice as beneficial for education, sustainability, and future challenges, to promote diverse, interested, and involved perspectives
Coastliners Lab: Mapping for Environmental Spatial Justice at the Water’s Edge
No full textCoastliners Lab is a trans-media critical mapping practice that focuses on the border conditions of bodies of water and how they shape socio-material processes of human and environmental relations in urban and extra-urban settings. The lab works with a deep cartographic layering of aerial photographs, historical maps, news reports, video footage, field notes, interviews, and more to explore embodied map-making methods that define new roles for design toward spatial justice. It highlights agencies and political ecologies underlying the contested anthropogenic impacts on the margins of transforming landscapes. Istanbul’s political and ecological struggles with the surrounding bodies of water have been the birthplace of the lab. This paper will introduce the initial context of Istanbul, theories, cartographic experiments, and ongoing practices of the Lab to discuss emergent mapping methodologies as a design medium to engage with spatial justice
Quant-Ethico: An Approach to Quantifying and Interpreting Ethical Decision Making
No full textDesign researchers have previously sought to describe, model, and represent the cognitive processes of designers. In parallel, researchers in HCI and STS have identified a range of frameworks to describe the ethical and value-related char-acter of design activity. We have identified a productive gap between these two sets of literature—namely, the role of analytic methods in describing ethical de-cision-making as one aspect of design complexity. In this paper, we describe and explore an approach for quantifying the ethical character of design decision-making, building upon existing critical approaches from HCI and STS literature. Through a series of visualizations at varying temporal scales and numbers of inter-locutors, we seek to describe the ethical complexity of design activity, grounded in a set of ethically focused lab protocol studies. We describe the implications of our approach for mixed methods researchers, including the role of quantitative methods in describing temporal aspects of ethical design complexity
Visioning and managing change: analyzing strategic designers\u27 approaches in salient podcast episodes
No full textStrategic design considers strategy as the core deliverable of practice, where designers are intentional about creating change. However, there is limited research that reveals change as a deliverable in these projects. The purpose of this study is to understand how experienced practitioners do strategic design and to identify their approaches for behavioral, organizational, and social change intentionally. With many experienced strategic designers invited to podcast shows, we analyzed the content of salient podcast episodes. This qualitative study uncovers themes, methods and approaches that expert strategic designers use to implement intentional change. We found that strategic designers embed themselves in particular situations for long-term collaborations while developing powerful visions of change. They develop actions around managing and creating structures to manifest those visions of change, such as facilitating multi-stakeholder participation and recruiting agents of change
Tinder, I Don’t Like This: Identifying Desired User Interaction Qualities to Support Intimacy Building in the Online Environment
No full textAs internet became the primary source for relationship formation, reports have emerged of negative experiences, poorer mental health and lower wellbeing. The design of online dating services influences user behaviours and can either support or inhibit relationship formation. To foster successful online relationship formation, understanding desired interaction qualities is crucial. This exploratory study presents a survey involving 100 participants from 23 nationalities across 5 continents. It identifies five key desired interaction qualities: excitement, comfort, safety, trust, and reciprocity. While trust emerged as the most vital for intimacy building yet often lacking in the online environment, excitement and playfulness were identified as even more important qualities to foster intimacy building. The paper contributes to the under-researched field of design for relation making and guides designers and dating app companies through presenting how desired interaction qualities can support creation of positive online interactions and streamline relationship formation
An Eye-tracking Experimental Study on the Influence of Background Visual Effects on Consumer Purchase Behavior in Live Streaming Sales
No full textLive streaming sales have emerged as a prominent trend in global retail, following the COVID-19 pandemic.This study aims to investigate the influence of different forms of background in live streaming sales on consumer purchase behavior through eye-tracking experiments. The study involved 25 participants (15 males). Four distinct background conditions were implemented. The obtained results were analyzed and discussed based on the affordance theory and context effect theory.The findings revealed that under the original background condition, participants tended to primarily focus their attention on the product. In the absence of a background, participants exhibited the longest gaze duration on the product and facial features of individuals. A background consistent with the theme of the product not only enhanced participants\u27 overall attention towards the product but also significantly increased their revisit frequency to the background. A background inconsistent with the theme of the product attracted considerable attention from participants