From BoP to ToP and vice versa daily practices in settings with limited resources to inspire designers

This paper reviews the methods and practices that reflect subconscious behaviours of people in daily lives. Cases, studied for this paper, show how practices of people living in poor settings, who are members of the base of the economic pyramid, contribute to designers, belonging to the top of the economic pyramid, in designing better products...

Designer-centred design research

This paper demonstrates how a reworked conceptualization of method takes into account the designers’ goals as well as the nature of their activity. In that, the paper seeks to make a conceptual step in how we as design researchers approach and influence what designers do in their practice. This paper presents careful observation of and...

Mapping children's experiences: Adapting contextmapping tools to child participants

Within the area of user-centered design, Contextmapping is an approach to participatory user experience research that provides designers and user researchers with a clear workflow and hands-on toolkit. It acknowledges the user as the expert of his or her own experiences and aims to deliver rich insights to designers: deep, authentic and...

Forming a mindset: Design students' preconceptions about the usefulness of systematic methods

Teaching students to use systematic design methods effectively is not straightforward. While method teaching often focuses on the procedural aspects of method usage (e.g., what steps to take and in what order), effectively using a systematic method entails more than following its ‘instructions’. As noted by Andreasen [1], students need to be...

Nature-inspired design strategies in sustainable product development: A case study of student projects

In design practice, Nature-Inspired Design Strategies (NIDS) can be applied when developing sustainable products. However, knowledge on how this actually helps designers is lacking. This study explores the effects of applying Cradle to Cradle and Biomimicry in student projects, as compared to using Ecodesign. The findings indicate that NIDS...

The ambiguous role of methods in design education: Initial findings from the Delft method study

Flexibility of choice and perceived impact of using design methods

Designing for sustainable food practices in the home

Activities around food have implications for the environment, personal nutrition, identity, and social relationships. As a way of understanding how daily routines evolve, practice theory (a theory of social action from sociology) provides a framework through which the complexities around consumer food habits can be understood and reveal avenues...

A Culture-Inspired Approach to Gaining Insights for Designing Sustainable Practices

This paper explores a design method to generate insights for designing less resource-intensive forms of everyday life. This study takes the assumption that looking at cultural diversity can widen the variety of insights which can be used as a source of inspiration for designing sustainable practices. However, there is a lack of clear-cut...

A Culture-Inspired Approach to Designing Sustainable Practice: A study of sustainable bathing practice for the Living Lab project

Introduction: This study explores a method to designing less resource-intensive forms of everyday life. The method is geared toward the early phase of product development, which is the generation of insights and design ideas. Looking at daily behavior, one can observe clear differences between different cultures. From this observation, the study...