Incentives for Manufacturers in Certifying Medical Equipment for Low- and Middle-Income Countries: Unveiling the Potential of Appropriate Medical Equipment Label

Medical equipment supplied to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are often substandard and inappropriate to the contextual needs. The majority of equipment entering these countries are donated or financed by external agencies. Procurement of equipment also happens through public tendering. However, the assessment and management of the...

Re-africanised: A post-developmentalist approach to infrastructure and public space in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

Many cities in Africa are confronted with the challenges of a rapidly expanding population, urban geography and the service provision it requires. Also Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s main economic and cultural city, is with 6 million inhabitants and a project population of 10 million by 2030, classified as one of the fasted growing cities in Africa....

Stitches: Blending landscape fabric through the golden threads of spatial identity in San Riku coastline, Otsuchi, Iwate, Japan

Disaster prevention and coastal protection of Otsuchi have affected the livelihood and the daily pattern of lifestyle of the regular Otsuchian. This work represents the alternative to a typical top down prefectural level demand for a line based infrastructural solution to disaster prevention and creates the required importance of livelihood,...

Constructing Atmosphere: In Search of Atmospheric Architecture

We all refer to it in our daily lives; we talk about a concert as having a good vibe, we talk about a social situation as being ‘gezellig’, we talk about the impression of a part of town as being gloomy and we even talk about the mood of a day as having a sense of anticipation. Atmosphere is a familiar conversational subject, but at the same...

Designing a clear and fudgeable Electronic Health Record

Goal Create a highly usable design concept of an Electronic Health Record system (EHR) for inpatient care Research Almost fifty hours of observing and interviewing physicians at work gave insights about their use of patient data and their needs of a system to control it. The hospital environment is highly interruptible and people are greatly...

Once more, into the soup

In one of the earlier essays in this department, we discussed a number of acronyms all having to do with system design, and all having the form "x-centered design." The purpose of that essay was to demonstrate a broad framework within which to understand human-centered computing (HCC), and also to show the various convergences and divergences of...

Googlized Contextual Design