She Ji-The Journal of Design Economics and Innovation最新文献

In 2023, earthquakes struck Turkey, Syria, and Morocco, while torrential rain and floods hit Libya. When faced with images and eyewitness accounts of disasters, conscientious designers ask: how can design help in natural disaster readiness and response? Design and disaster management are rarely overlapping disciplines, resulting in little critical analysis on the role of design and designers in the context of disasters. This paper offers an overview of design for disaster. It acts as a guide and call for action, informing policymakers, managers, and other stakeholders on the contribution design can make to this challenging area. A case study approach is taken for exemplification and argumentation. Turkey serves as a poignant geographical example: rich in design capability, yet facing high risks from natural disasters. Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara forms the institutional case, notable as one of Turkey’s most research-intensive universities—and one that also possesses design for disaster experience. The major contribution of the paper is a preliminary framework on design for disaster readiness and response, directed at practical efforts and policymaking in what is an emerging inter- and trans-disciplinary field. Designers, design thinking, and design innovation can all take a role.

This two-part article explores the concept of emotional connoisseurship—the art of appreciating lived emotional experiences in emotion-driven design (EDD). In Part 1, we aim to establish and position the concept within the current EDD theoretical landscape. We first review the concept of connoisseurship, its origins, development, and relevance to professional practices. Second, building upon the existing design literature, we scrutinize the relationships between design connoisseurship and design expertise. We then conceptualize emotional connoisseurship as an essential skill that designers aspiring to practice EDD must actively cultivate, along with learning EDD theories, methods, and tools. After that, we reflect on how previous EDD research outcomes (i.e., emotional granularity design tools) can support the development of a designer’s emotional connoisseurship, especially in a schema-oriented or top-down manner, and argue the need for a sensibility-oriented or bottom-up approach. Part 1 sets the stage for Part 2. Part 2 will detail our pedagogical initiative supporting the self-cultivation of emotional connoisseurship among novice designers through a sensibility-oriented approach.

Public sector organizations increasingly use artificial intelligence to augment, support, and automate decision-making. However, such public AI can potentially infringe on citizens’ right to autonomy. Contestability is a system quality that protects against this by ensuring systems are open and responsive to disputes throughout their life cycle. While a growing body of work is investigating contestable AI by design, little of this knowledge has so far been evaluated with practitioners. To make explicit the guiding ideas underpinning contestable AI research, we construct the generative metaphor of the Agonistic Arena, inspired by the political theory of agonistic pluralism. Combining this metaphor and current contestable AI guidelines, we develop an infographic supporting the early-stage concept design of public AI system contestability mechanisms. We evaluate this infographic in five workshops paired with focus groups with a total of 18 practitioners, yielding ten concept designs. Our findings outline the mechanisms for contestability derived from these concept designs. Building on these findings, we subsequently evaluate the efficacy of the Agonistic Arena as a generative metaphor for the design of public AI and identify two competing metaphors at play in this space: the Black Box and the Sovereign.

The distinction between wicked and tame problems has been a major influence on design and numerous other fields since it was developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by design theorist Horst Rittel and urban designer Melvin Webber. The characteristics of wicked problems continue to resonate today, helping make sense of the complexities of contemporary challenges. Wicked and tame refer to types (rather than degrees) of difficulty, but what defines these types is not simply the domains in which problems occur, as in the dichotomy between scientific and social contexts originally put forward by Rittel and Webber. To clarify the distinction between wicked and tame, I ground it in the cybernetic concepts of variety and constraint, building on Rittel’s references to the cybernetician Ross Ashby. Understood in this way, wicked and tame do not refer to problems, or to the situations in which problems arise. Rather, wickedness and tameness are dynamics of possibilities (variety) in how multiple aspects of problems are perceived and responded to across the relationships in which designing (in its broadest senses) is embedded.