Finding what fits: Explorative self-experimentation for health behaviour change

Changing a specific health behaviour can be highly com- plex and is often influenced by many personal, social, and environmental factors. Therefore, interventions that aim at behaviour change cannot be one-size-fits-all solutions, and no behaviour change technique is effective for everyone. One potential solution could be to support individuals...

Home and Healthcare: The prospect of home adaptation through a computational design decision-support system

This paper presents ongoing research to define the framework of a computational design approach based on the ideas of spatial analysis and spatial synthesis to implement multi-criteria evaluations and provide evidence of the performance of the design alternatives in the specific case of home adaptation for healthcare at home. The European health...

Towards a Human Centred Approach for Adaptive Façades: An Overview of User Experiences in Work Environments

Adaptive façades are multifunctional systems that are able to change their functions, features, or behaviour over time in response to changing boundary conditions or performance requirements. As one of the significant developments in the façade industry over the last decade, the adaptive façade offers an intelligent solution that can decrease...

Remote contextmapping and prototyping during lockdown, a study case

In co-design, solutions are generated to serve people’s needs, short term and/or long term, through their involvement in parts of the design process. Methods like contextmapping and explorative prototyping serve these participatory processes. They help designers to step into the users’ shoes, to explore design solutions from and with their...

Know-me: A toolkit for designing personalised dementia care

Personalisation is a crucial element in providing person-centred care for people with de-mentia. This paper presents the development and evaluation of a design toolkit to facilitate the work of designers and healthcare professionals in personalising dementia care. This toolkit, named “Know-me”, was grounded in the findings of Ergonomics in...

Objective comparison of two cushions: pressure distribution and postural perceived discomfort

Designing seats is crucial not only for health issues but also for the (dis)comfort perception. The seat pan design could be mainly influenced by two factors: pressure distribution and seat contour. For seat pan discomfort, the lower average pressure is accompanied by less discomfort. Moreover, a seat contour with a large contact area is...

Discomfort Threshold Evaluation for Hand and Elbow Regions: A Basis for Hand-Held Device Design

This study aimed to analyse the discomfort threshold (that could be linked to sensitivity or sensation) of different regions in hand and elbow to support hand-held devices' design. Indeed, there are no studies regarding the hand and elbow discomfort threshold or sensitivity. To overcome these literature gaps, the discomfort threshold of hand...

Designing sexuality and intimacy care for adolescents and young adults (AYAs) with cancer

Adolescents and Young Adults (AYAs) with Cancer are making the transition from childhood to adulthood while handling the burden of cancer. During this extraordinarily challenging time in their growth and development, sexuality and intimacy, an important aspect of AYAs’ wellbeing, are often insufficiently addressed by the healthcare providers,...

Escaping the emotional blur: Design tools for facilitating positive emotional granularity

In human-product interactions, pleasure has many different shades. We can, for example, be proud of using an eco-friendly detergent, be all aflutter in anticipation of a planned trip when looking at a calendar application or experience a feeling of cathartic relief when playing a mobile phone game. Although these experiences are all pleasurable,...

Understanding networked collaboration: Fields and patches of interactions

The increased complexity in Product Service Systems development goes hand in hand with complex heterogeneous networks. A Human-Centred Design approach has been taken to understand such networked collaboration and to develop a framework having user-experiences guiding communication and collaboration among parties. The current work elaborates on...

The fragility of human-centred design

In human-centred design (HCD), researchers and designers develop products in cooperation with the potential users of these products. They attempt to give users a voice or a role in their projects, with the intention of developing products that match users' needs and preferences. This approach is especially interesting in the information and...