Rethinking Realities
Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon
Collaborative Design Methodologies and Mental Health: Defigne - a Public and Health Case Study in Intellectual Disability Sector View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session João Bernarda
The “defigne” project, a collaboration with Cercica, develops intervention methodologies responding to the limitations of intellectual development disorder in different contexts. The strategy proposes the progressive integration of design in organizations, seeking to analyze the degrees of influence of each intervention agent in the collaborative creation process implementation. This collaboration paved the way for the integration of creative methodologies in the social innovation sector, more specifically in direct action with users, encouraging and facilitating the development of new techniques resulting in potential innovative activities and products with a view to increasing efficiency in the execution of tasks or obtaining information on the impact on the user's quality of life. These actions aim to achieve a more sustainable future with the improvement of the quality of life of these communities and more efficient procedures that can accelerate the proposed objectives. Taking into account the stages of design integration, the project aims to develop new services procedures and products through collaborative actions between the agents. This procedure will trigger a set of potential materials/objects/services, which, due to the potential of rapid prototyping tools, can be built without recoursing to third parties and with the added value of a real-time improvement to users' responses/capacities.
Deconstructing the Design Process: Past, Present and Potential Futures View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Natalie Badenduck
This paper examines the history and evolution of ‘the design process’ including an assessment of its modernist underpinnings and an investigation into the impact of the Design Methods and Design Thinking movements. Such investigations will provide an explanation of how the design process developed and the ways in which it impacts contemporary practices and pedagogies, including an assessment of how design projects can be both informed by and influence the design process through the examination of interactions between the two. Based on a literature review and findings from an international qualitative research study (conducted by the author, working with interior architecture and design students, educators and practitioners in Toronto, New York, London, Glasgow and Berlin between Sept 2019 and March 2020), this study also introduces new design process diagrams that offer a wider range of potential approaches to the generation of creative projects. The aim of such frameworks is to promote a greater acceptance of diverse, nuanced and personal approaches to the act of designing beyond existing paradigms.
