At the age of a failing economic system and undeniable evidence of the effects humankind has had over the planet, it is necessary to look for alternatives to the way we live locally. This article explores the use of designing narratives and metanarratives to co-create imaginaries serving as the needed alternatives. This research starts by considering the historical factors to understand how industrialisation and the loss of traditional practices created a culture of disconnection from Nature in the Girona area, but also looks at why people start now reconnecting with it. The analysis is the foundation for speculative design practices to co-create a new local narrative of connection and regeneration. The project adopted the Integrative Worldviews Framework and used paradoxes to create possible future worldviews based on historical factors and literature. Citizens participated in conversational future-visioning workshops to develop and evaluate their local imagery of the previously created worldviews. This conversation-based exercise evidenced the potential of paradoxes in destructive futures to create imaginaries of regeneration. These imaginaries merge and form future stories. From the future narratives, the practice created cultural artefacts embodying a new culture of connection based on storytelling, traditional jobs, and a mythological understanding of Nature. Finally, as observed at the end of the project, these artefacts allow citizens to adopt them as their culture and expand their current worldview.
In this paper we explore the influence of the physical and social environment (the design space) son the formation of shared understanding in multidisciplinary design teams. We concentrate on the creative design meeting as a microenvironment for studying processes of design communication. Our applied research context entails the design of mixed physical–digital interactive systems supporting design meetings. Informed by theories of embodiment that have recently gained interest in cognitive science, we focus on the role of interactive “traces,” representational artifacts both created and used by participants as scaffolds for creating shared understanding. Our research through design approach resulted in two prototypes that form two concrete proposals of how the environment may scaffold shared understanding in design meetings. In several user studies we observed users working with our systems in natural contexts. Our analysis reveals how an ensemble of ongoing social as well as physical interactions, scaffolded by the interactive environment, grounds the formation of shared understanding in teams. We discuss implications for designing collaborative tools and for design communication theory in general.
MULTIFILE
Deciding what kind of smart cities do we, as a society, want is not only a political question but also a matter of envisioning possible futures. The speculative narratives that designers produce to support their imagination are called "Design Fictions." We share SUBMERGED, a cross-platform project that combines game design, interactive narrative, and urban exploration with the objective of empowering citizens to produce their design fictions. Following a "Research through Design" practice, we describe our process for creating SUBMERGED, we synthesize some critical insights from our experience, and we urgently call for a dialogue between semioticians and design researchers on these topics.
Given the increasing mortality rate of glaciers and mountains in the Alps and Iceland: What role can speculative design play in enabling humans and non-humans to face and respond to the death of glaciers and mountains?
Society continues to place an exaggerated emphasis on women's skins, judging the value of lives lived within, by the colour and condition of these surfaces. This artistic research will explore how the skin of a painting might unpack this site of judgement, highlight its objectification, and offer women alternative visualizations of their own sense of embodiment. This speculative renovation of traditional concepts of portrayal will explore how painting, as an aesthetic body whose material skin is both its surface and its inner content (its representations) can help us imagine our portrayal in a different way, focusing, not on what we look like to others, but on how we sense, touch, and experience. How might we visualise skin from its ghostly inner side? This feminist enquiry will unfold alongside archival research on The Ten Largest (1906-07), a painting series by Swedish Modernist Hilma af Klint. Initial findings suggest the artist was mapping traditional clothing designs into a spectral, painterly idea of a body in time. Fundamental methods research, and access to newly available Af Klint archives, will expand upon these roots in maps and women’s craft practices and explore them as political acts, linked to Swedish Life Reform, and knowingly sidestepping a non-inclusive art history. Blending archival study with a contemporary practice informed by eco-feminism is an approach to artistic research that re-vivifies an historical paradigm that seems remote today, but which may offer a new understanding of the past that allows us to also re-think our present. This mutuality, and Af Klint’s rhizomatic approach to image-making, will therefore also inform the pedagogical development of a Methods Research programme, as part of this post-doc. This will extend across MA and PhD study, and be further enriched by pedagogy research at Cal-Arts, Los Angeles, and Konstfack, Stockholm.
EHealth en mHealth maakt het mogelijk om fysiotherapiepatiënten meer bij hun behandeling te betrekken in de tijd tussen behandelingen bij de fysiotherapeut. Tussentijdse dataverzameling en terugkoppeling kan leiden tot meer betrokkenheid en zelfregie bij de patiënt, en bij de behandelaar meer inzicht in de effectiviteit van behandelingen en invloed van leefstijl daarop. Dit maakt beter gepersonaliseerde zorg mogelijk. Een patiënt heeft echter voldoende datageletterdheid nodig om gepresenteerde informatie goed te kunnen aflezen, en voldoende gezondheidsgeletterdheid om ook te kunnen begrijpen wat dit betekent voor de eigen gezondheid en mogelijke te ondernemen acties. Daarnaast heeft hoe data wordt gepresenteerd ook effect op het zelfbeeld van de patiënt-in-herstel, wat weer impact heeft op motivatie en dus op de effectiviteit van de behandeling. Binnen dit project onderzoeken we (1) in focusgroepen met fysiotherapeuten en artrosepatiënten wat hun eisen en wensen zijn voor een dergelijke oplossing en (2) wat voor maten op gebied van leefstijl, behandeling en uitkomsten relevant, bewezen en haalbaar zijn voor deze doelgroep. (3) Op basis van deze opgehaalde behoeften uit de praktijk en ontwerprichtlijnen voor datageletterdheid, gezondheidsgeletterdheid en effect op zelfbeeld vanuit de literatuur worden ontwerprichtlijnen opgesteld voor de terugkoppeling van data in health apps, en (4) komen we via speculative design co-creatiesessies met de stakeholders tot paper prototypes, op basis waarvan de design guidelines nog verder worden aangescherpt. In een vervolgaanvraag zal deze lijn verder worden doorgezet in appontwikkeling (of -uitbreiding), validatie van verschillende maten, inzet van data science t.b.v. decision support, verdere terugkoppeling naar patiënt en fysiotherapeut, en evaluatie van de gebruikerservaring in de praktijk t.b.v. verbetering van de app en de design guidelines. Hiermee willen we het maken van betere behandelbeslissingen ondersteunen door fysiotherapeuten en patiënten via inzicht in behoeften en mogelijkheden, en willen we ontwikkelaars van health apps ondersteunen met ontwerprichtlijnen t.b.v. datageletterdheid, gezondheidsgeletterdheid en gedragsverandering.
