Design Studies最新文献

In paediatric wards, establishing therapeutic rapport with children requires employing friendly gestures or an understanding gaze, an aspect inhibited when clinicians wear facial personal protective equipment (PPE). In this case study we explore how interactions in three scenarios of a paediatric ward might inform the design of child-friendly PPE. We show how our research methods involved healthcare professionals, parents, and children to identify problems and solution pathways. Our findings indicate that PPE for paediatric wards need to be a system design solution considering emotions, engagement, communication, education, and sustainability factors. We discuss three aspects of conducting design research in healthcare contexts: working within high-risk environments, ethics in design for healthcare projects, and the translation of findings within the regulatory landscape.

In this article, designs that exclude unhoused people from urban public spaces are explored. Drawing from the research project ‘Exclusionary Design: Social Exclusion in Public Spaces’, this article incorporates insights from people who live or have lived unhoused, examining urban design from their perspective. Through a postphenomenological analysis, this article illuminates how design can contribute to creating social exclusion and introduces a model for typologizing exclusionary design. The typology comprises five categories: 1) Urban furniture, 2) Technical installations, 3) Barriers, 4) Absence of ‘material’, and 5) Signs. This typology can serve as a practical operational tool for anyone involved in design and decision-making processes related to urban public spaces.

Although contemporary children's learning environments highlight promoting physical and social development–related play behaviours and safety, there are no valid means to analyse children's dynamic, complex behaviours. To address this limitation, the paper explores the impacts of agent-based simulation on architects' trade-offs in designing children's play-oriented learning environments. To simulate children's subtle behavioural responsiveness to the given environments, this paper adopts reinforcement learning (RL) as a method to develop autonomous play behaviours. A comparative experiment was conducted with 14 professional architects to investigate the capacities of the RL-powered agents. The systemic qualitative analysis indicates that the RL agent supported the coordination of complex physical constraints and new insights into child-oriented dimensions when evaluating the learning environment design.

Real-world design projects often involve designers and non-design professionals from the same or different organisations. Power asymmetries permeate such projects. However, prevailing design research implicitly assumes that framing—an essential practice that pervades the design process—unfolds within relatively equitable interpersonal negotiations. The dynamics in framing across the individual and collective levels under power asymmetric conditions remain largely underexplored. We conducted a cross-level analysis of 48 early-stage product design sessions, drawing on a field study conducted at a design consultancy. Our findings reveal how power asymmetries infiltrate and shape frame evolution, starting from individual proposals to eventual collective acceptance. This research extends framing theory in design research by reconceptualising framing as a power-laden, cross-level practice.

Peirce, founder of pragmatism, developed a new sense of aesthetics focused on design. He reimagined aesthetics in a chain of “normative sciences” that links the design of means to function and function to good ends. Peirce realized that means-end reasoning is amoral and needs ethical guidance. He thought, like Aristotle and Mill, that the fix would be finding a higher end that was both good and desirous and could be used as a moral test for specific ends and means. The discovery of this end would be the result of inquiry, but he realized that inquiry itself had normative constraints that functions as a higher end. I show how these normative constraints can be applied to the study of design.

Inspiration is vital for designers. This study builds on findings on inspiration examples for problem-solving tasks and extends those to styling tasks by exploring the influence of examples on styling criteria. The generation of inspiration examples in this study is grounded in design literature and practice. This study identifies primary styling criteria (i.e., personality coherence, visual coherence, and originality) to evaluate the design outcome. The results indicate that designers who received near-field examples that communicated an intended meaning compared to designers who did not receive any examples generated concepts with a higher personality coherence yet with a similar level of originality. Also, near-field visual examples increased visual coherence. Thus, different design criteria need specific examples.