Social Elements: Room 5
Polytechnic Institute of Lisbon
Virtual Design Education as a Collaborative Practice: Trans-border Design Practice - the Design of a New Course View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sheeraz Wania
Society establishes borders through cultural expectations, norms, and rituals. The pandemic has prompted a new wave of globalisation for the service economy, and for designers it will likely alter the way we live, work, and earn a livelihood. Now, more than ever, the need to connect with a more global design perspective is crucial for the design students entering the real world. The world is becoming smaller and the last two years has made us challenge our perspectives. This pandemic has accelerated our arrival into this new future; a future that can be exciting but also daunting for our students if they are not prepared for the same. This course has been designed with that focus in mind. It will help students experience design from a varied global lens. It will encourage them to look outward towards different geographies and cultures, diachronically and synchronically, and to come up with and construct projects based off a diversified design narrative. Issues of language, society, equity, politics, information and sustainability will be looked at through the lens of colour, icons, brands, information graphics and images, to foster a more aware and inspired designer. This course has been designed with the key focus of making connections and hence get a better understating of our world through the lens of design. Through this paper, key attributes, objectives, learning outcomes and the proposed modus operandi for this course are shared, with the hope of informing and potentially garnering support and interested academic partners, from around the world.
Embedding and Embodying Narratives through Inclusive Design: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of the Roles and Applications of Narrative Within and Beyond an Inclusive Mobility Design Process View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cara Shaw
Narratives facilitate the communication of individual and collective experiences, perceptions and interpretations of reality, enabling the depiction of authentic personhood as well as societal identity. Designers inherently embed and embody narratives through their work, positioning design as an agent of narrative. As a practice of inclusion, it is critical to advance the archetypal role of design from passively upholding dominant narratives, to becoming responsible for proactively uncovering, interrogating and scaling a diversity of narratives throughout the design process, with input from a range of project stakeholders. A conceptual framework is proposed, which frames design as an agent of narratives through three strategic narrative stages: (1) acknowledgement and capture, (2) negotiation and speculation, and (3) embedding and scaling. This research focuses on the third stage of this conceptual framework, exploring how narratives could and should be embedded and scaled within a design process, focusing on the context of healthcare product design. The case study of designing an upper-limb exoskeleton for young people with disabilities is used in this research to explore the potential roles and applications of narratives at various stages of a design process. A qualitative study and a mapping exercise are conducted with a multidisciplinary group of project stakeholders to capture their thoughts and expectations on how narratives could and should be embedded within, and scaled beyond the project-specific design process. The values of incorporating narrative into an inclusive design process are discussed, and practical guidelines are provided for designers seeking to embed and embody narratives in their work.
Design Thinking, Gamers Playing, and Human Interaction: Including Gamers at the Center of Our Design Process View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gabriel Patrocinio
This paper is a part of a PhD thesis considering the methodology of gamification applied in interaction design; using this methodology to engage student participation and develop a collective game. Our study object is a personal project called Halag, an education platform to learn tools about game develop. In this paper, we present how the Design Thinking methodology helps us to focus on the discovery process and find new elements that our users were involved and guide us to develop our project. Then, we present an overview about how is the relevant included the users in our creative process in their point of view, listen, hear, and feel the real perspective about who will going to use our project, not only on the first step that research phase, but also during all the design process. We start the platform based in a traditional school and get the main components of learn methods and adapt that on the Halag, like a digital school with game design theme. After including our users in those projects, we find new opportunities to add more value in our platform, not only a way to search methods to learn and develop a game, but also, how to include interaction and socialization in the platform. It is not only focused on the fun and playful aspects of the game design, but also the human interaction that is an important aspect in game field research.
Reflection of Sufism on Industrial Products in Turkey
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ege Kaya Köse, Ayse Ozge Agca
The sources of design inspiration can be socio-cultural elements and concepts in the creative processes. While metaphors and analogies enrich concepts, they can be powerful tools for designers in developing new products. When we examine products made by these methods, designers can combine many cultural, traditional and belief structures with the user and benefit from creating the product's shape. In this study, we want to discuss the role of socio-cultural influence on the industrial design process and user's perspective by comparing "Sufi" products in Turkey. For this reason, we focus on four products designed by faith-shaped inspiration and produced industrially through analogy and metaphor approaches. First, we identified potential users by classifying the products using these two design methods. Then, we presented these products to potential users as a set that includes the images of the products, the conceptual words and images, product stories and templates where users can write their approaches. As a result of the mini-workshops, we compared designers' analogies or metaphors and users' perspectives through this set. In addition, we observed how the same socio-cultural element inspired the designer and how this inspiration reflected on the user through a product. With this set, we anticipate increasing the interaction of designers and users with products designed with analogy and metaphor methods in creative design processes.
