Design Research Society Digital Library
Not a member yet
4839 research outputs found
Sort by
What did we actually design here and what purpose did it serve? Some generative metaphors for understanding service design in the Swedish public sector
No full textBuilding on the lead author’s experiences as a design practitioner in the Swedish public sector, we argue that Service Design as practiced today is often failing to attend to the design and delivery of actual public services. We explore the blank space we perceive between the rhetoric of evangelists for Service Design in the public sector in Sweden, the reality of working as a Service Designer in the Swedish public sector, and the reality of materialising public services. To explore this blank space, we present a number of generative conceptual metaphors for what, if not designing services, Service Designers or those adopting practices in the name of Service Design might be doing. We share a selection of these, in the hope of engaging the NORDES community in helping (re)integrate the rich tradition and conceptual frames of design as a materialising practice with the practice of designing and materialising public services
Delightful screen time visualizations: A sketching-based exploration
No full textUncontrolled smartphone usage and excessive screen time are detrimental to people’s wellbeing. Informing people about screen time behavior is one strategy to help them attain digital wellbeing—a pleasurable, efficient, and controlled relationship with smartphones and other everyday technologies. This paper presents a series of sketches that explore unconventional, delightful screen time visualization on smartphones, illustrating an alternative to conventional screen time graphs. By showcasing these design concepts, this paper seeks to promote analog sketching as a valuable off-screen practice for design research, as it involves immersion, patience, and reflection
A design-driven approach to distributed ledger technologies for small farmers communities: a case study in Portugal
No full textDistributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has the potential to transform the agri-food sector, empowering rural and underserved farming communities by enabling the creation of a more environmentally sustainable and socio-economically inclusive food system. Several PoC and pilot projects are running all over the world to test this specific use case. However, the success rate of these initiatives is still limited. A critical analysis of the state-of-the-art suggests as a possible explanation for the observed trend that the current research approach to DLT for agriculture is mostly technology-driven. This limits our ability to develop solutions that provide benefits to the communities they’re meant to serve, while potentially increasing inequalities and further marginalising these underserved groups. Achieving a sustainable and inclusive food supply chain entails a paradigm shift that goes beyond technological development to address how technology is socially constructed, thus implying the need for designing DLT applications around and together with users. By adopting a user-centred perspective to technology-enabled innovation, design can help shift the agri-food industry from being tech-centred to being people-centred. To explore the potential contribution of design for facilitating transformation and technology-enabled social innovation in the agri-food sector, we conducted a case study involving Portuguese small farmers which resulted in DigiFarm, a blockchain-based service concept. In this article, we detail the methodology adopted for the scoping and ideation of DigiFarm, concluding with a discussion highlighting the added value of adopting a design-driven approach to research and practice on DLT applications in the agri-food sector
Inheriting the Intangible Cultural Heritage and embracing innovation:Digital Rubbing leads a new Experience of Audience Interaction in museums
No full textIn the post-epidemic era, transforming museum life depends on adapting to the increasing digitization of museums and changing the traditional passive viewing mode of audiences. To achieve the goal of exploring new paradigms to guide the interactive new experience of museum audiences while inheriting and innovating intangible cultural heritage, this paper first selected Rubbing, a traditional Chinese craft that can replace the function of photography. Then, through literature analysis, it summarized the functions, cultural history, technical procedures, objects suitable for rubbing, and artistic forms of the rubbing technique. Meanwhile, it answers why to choose Rubbing and apply it to museums in digital form. Finally, the research team designed three ways to apply Digital Rubbing to museums and conducted user experience experiments. The results show that the three ways of applying Digital Rubbing to museum interaction are immersive, meaningful, interesting, creative, and artistic. They can activate the participation dynamics of museum audiences and potential audiences, making people\u27s museum life more beautiful
Is gift a token of gratitude or an imposition of identity? Facilitating positive consequences of gift-giving with receiver-centred design
No full textGifts are more than things; they represent and tie together human relationships. While people often treat it as a token of social interactions, the presentation of a gift could impose an identity that reflects gift-givers’ images of gift-receivers. Because gift-giving is a social behaviour situated in the cultural and economic context, the perceived value of gifts is greatly affected by the social norms and the consumer market, in which design plays an important role. In this paper, we first discuss how commodities can be transformed into gifts and what kinds of design activities influence such transformations. We found that most relevant designs for commercial gifts are giver-centred with less regard to the concern of gift-receivers. Second, we consider people to be designers themselves, so that each step of the gift-giving could be intentionally framed, influencing the consequences of giving a gift. To this regard, we want to help people identify what affects their perceived differences between thinking of a gift as a token of gratitude or an imposition of identity. We conducted a small design research by designing a gift-giving social game, which situated participants in an imaginary gift-giving environment to understand others\u27 gift preferences. Additionally, the game also helps designers to observe participants’ natural reflections on the past experiences and capture their interpretations of gifts and gift-giving based on different human relationships. By presenting preliminary findings from the game playtests, we hope to inform future design activities, either at an individual-level or collective-level, to facilitate positive consequences of gift-giving
Enhancing design competencies for students with special educational needs for future career development
No full textSome students with special educational needs (SEN) may have innate talents or interests in creative disciplines such as art and design. However, these students frequently face obstacles when pursuing a career in these fields. Difficulties and failures diminish these students’ confidence and sense of self-efficacy, in turn affecting their personal development. To tackle these issues, this study explores the possibility of enhancing the strengths in art and design of students with SEN and converting these strengths into relevant design competencies that can benefit their future careers. The study begins with a review of essential topics pertaining to students with SEN: teaching and learning theory, design competency and self-efficacy theory. Hong Kong is then explored as a case study to examine the effects and constraints of current art and design education in special schools and the career prospects for graduates with SEN. The conclusion proposes a potential solution that may considerably benefit these students and involves project-based design sessions for students with SEN who excel in art and design. To help students with SEN realise their potential and make meaningful contributions to the art and design industries, considering factors such as students’ learning styles, career goals, design-related competencies and sense of self-efficacy in addition to their artistic and creative aptitudes is critical
INTO: a remote communication tool featuring body language and the fusion of the real and the virtual
No full textThis article introduces a remote communication tool called INTO, which aims to recreate the experience of face-to-face communication between two people sitting across at a table. Beyond work, we also envision its application in learning, creativity, and entertainment. First, we review and analyse several existing remote communication tools to clarify our design goals. Then, based on human factors and existing work habits, we select the experience format. This design requires two sets of devices to be connected to each other, and the construction of the hardware is also explained in the article. Finally, we conducted experimental testing and summarized the characteristics of this device
(im)Mobile gendered identities: The relationship between mobility and identity
No full textCities are places of contestation where individuals and groups act in specific ways to access resources and opportunities. Mobility enables individuals to access these different resources. This paper explores the impact of spatial mobility on changing identities of urban marginalized women (UMW) from the peri-urban areas of Delhi, India. It examines the relationship between mobilities and identities through relevant literature supported by a study extracted from an extensive ethnographic research on daily mobilities of UMW. Unstructured interviews and GPS path tracking are used as methods of data collection. The analysis of the acquired data presents mobility as an intertwined phenomenon with hidden links with socio-cultural elements and identity-making. Further, by focusing on the daily mobilities of UMW, this paper reflects upon the impact of gender (a result of the socio-cultural context) on identity transformation
A systems thinking approach to codesign at a Montessori School
No full textIn this study, systems thinking and codesign principles are applied together to develop a process framework to identify leverage points for an intervention in a new Montessori school. We show how a series of codesign workshops with children, parents, teachers, and management generated insights into the importance of collaboratively codesigning with stakeholders while applying Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). This approach demonstrates the advantages of incorporating diverse perspectives and fostering group coaction. These findings add to the limited literature on the practical applications of process-focused SSM, as they have informed the development of a step-by-step plan for forthcoming data collection sessions at the school, which will be organized as a Summer Research Camp. The future Summer Research Camp project will focus on continuing to work with the stakeholders to codesign interventions in the system, by following the SSM cycle aimed at gaining an understanding of the systemic factors affecting the school
Design-driven Poverty Alleviation: an approach that turns Poverty Alleviation from a cost perspective to a resource perspective
No full text[Background & Challenges] Traditional poverty alleviation is a high-cost matter. In many cases, poverty alleviation is regarded as a ‘cost’ that a society needs to pay. However, the existing practices of Design for Poverty Alleviation still focused more on the application of product design and appearance improvement and had not fully tapped the potential of Design. [Objective] This study aims to use Design at a higher level to turn poverty alleviation from a ‘social cost’ to an ‘innovative resource’. [Method & Outcomes] This paper applies the Action Research method to propose and test the Design-driven Poverty Alleviation (DDPA) Framework, which consists of three core goals and three design principles: Goal 1, promoting economic development; Goal 2, promoting inclusive outcomes; Goal 3, promoting sustainable growth; Principle 1, use design from the strategic stage; Principle 2, introduce as many stakeholders as possible to build a new value network; Principle 3, build a product system with all hierarchy of needs. Subsequently, this study carried out the first Action Research Cycle in the Dongxiang case through action research and proposed a series of solutions to the four major issues