Supporting food design with consumer research: from inspiration and validation to participation and integration

To increase practical relevance, scientific research on food design is slowly shifting toward studying real-life food situations, letting go of experimental control to allow creative freedom, and studying design considerations during the creative process. On the other hand, some chefs and food designers have started to develop collaborative...

A Sustainable Product-Service System (PSS) Design for Retail Food Loss and Waste: Research Through Design

Towards Personalised Dementia Care: Approaches, Recommendations and Tools from Design

According to Person-Centred Care, as far as possible, people with dementia should be cared for in a way that takes into account their personality, life experiences and preferences. Personalisation is hence the core of Person-Centred Care, yet the approaches, recommendations and tools are lacking for this purpose. Therefore, the author...

Encountering ethics through design: a workshop with nonhuman participants

What if we began to speculate that intelligent things have an ethical agenda? Could we then imagine ways to move past the moral divide ‘human vs. nonhuman’ in those contexts, where things act on our behalf? Would this help us better address matters of agency and responsibility in the design and use of intelligent systems? In this article, we...

Design Strategies for Promoting Young Children’s Physical Activity: A Playscapes Perspective

This paper develops a set of design strategies for promoting young children’s physical activity. These strategies are developed by taking the design perspective of Playscapes as a starting point. Playscapes suggests that three play qualities are key in promoting young children’s physical activity: free, bodily, and dispersed play. We present two...

Digital Methods for Mapping Landscape Spaces in Landscape Design

With the growth of digital technology, the possibilities increase for landscape architects to gain a deeper understanding of landscape compositions and their spatial-visual characteristics. Despite the fact that digital methods are acknowledged to be useful for thinking about landscape space, in practice their potential is often still...

Design as Research in Landscape Architecture

Research through design (RTD) is a frequently used concept in the day-to-day practice of education and research in the field of landscape architecture. RTD as a concept usually refers to a research method in which spatial design plays the leading role. The underlying premise is that design is a form of research and involves a culture of thought....

The wardrobe as a system: Exploring clothing consumption through design fiction

This study offers a new perspective on clothing consumption by uncovering the systemic nature of the wardrobe. The research builds on systems theory and aims at drawing a map of the wardrobe as a system with particular structure and behaviour. By co-designing fictional 'smart wardrobe' services with experts and discussing these services with...

Teamwork Gamification: A designer's perspective

The possibilities of applying game elements for positive behavior change in non-game contexts (i.e. gamification) seem limitless, ranging from politics to treatment of mental illness. However, the number of applied gamification studies is still limited. Our research (part of CRISP G-Motiv) aimed to contribute to the knowledge about designing and...

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,...

Structuring roles in Research through Design collaboration

In Research through Design knowledge is generated, but not always captured and shared effectively. When working in a multidisciplinary team of, e.g. designers, design researchers, academic researchers and domain practitioners confusion about<br/>roles, processes, and results easily occurs. In a series of three Research through Design cases we...

Entrepreneurial universities meet their private partners: Towards a better embedding of the outcomes of cross-sector collaborations

In the past decades, universities’ involvement in socio-economic development, which goes along with their teaching and researching activities, has defined a new role for them in society’s ecosystem. This new role is often referred with the term of “entrepreneurial” university, whose objectives are positive societal, economic and environmental...

RELAX! inherent feedback during product interaction to reduce stress

For this research different experiments were conducted that indicate that people make rocking and rolling movements with a pen when they feel stressed; that when nervous movements are counteracted this results in more control over a situation; and that people prefer objects with moving parts when they are stressed. Embedding sensors in a pen...