In the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies (DT) supported the design and implementation of solutions addressing new needs and living conditions. We describe Design for Emergency, a digital open design platform developed to ideate solutions for people's fast-changing needs in the pandemic, to analyze how DT can affect human-centered design processes during emergencies. We illustrate how DT: i) helped quickly collect and analyse people's needs in different countries, visualize such data, and identify design directions and problem spaces; ii) facilitated the creation of a virtual network of stakeholders and an open-innovation digital platform; iii) inspired the ideation of solutions responding to people's changing needs and affected their implementation. We discuss the implications of adopting DT in designing for and during emergencies, as well as their current and future potential to promptly respond to emergency situations through a human-centered approach.

Current solutions addressing misinformation on social media appear to rely on the misconception that misinformation is predominately spread by Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, the proliferation of false news is mainly due to humans. Solutions to curb misinformation should therefore emphasize human behavioral interventions, rather than focus solely on curbing AI bots. In this study, we analyze social media users' behaviors by means of a user journey. We create VisualBubble, a design probe that encourages reflection-oriented user experiences during news consumption on social media. We test our design probe with 10 users, to determine its effectiveness in increasing users' critical reflection on their news consumption behaviors. The initial findings show that VisualBubble can contribute to more critical attitudes towards the news that users are exposed to and, therefore, has the potential to mitigate social media misinformation.

Water distribution systems are undergoing a process of intensive digitalization, adopting networked devices for monitoring and control. While this transition improves efficiency and reliability, these infrastructures are increasingly exposed to cyber-attacks. Cyber-attacks engender anomalous system behaviors which can be detected by data-driven algorithms monitoring sensors readings to disclose the presence of potential threats. At the same time, the use of sonification in real time process monitoring has grown in importance as a valid alternative to avoid information overload and allowing peripheral monitoring. Our project aims to design a sonification system allowing human operators to take better decisions on anomalous behavior while occupied in other (mainly visual) tasks. Using a state-of-the-art detection algorithm and data sets from the Battle of the Attack Detection Algorithms, a series of sonification prototypes were designed and tested in the real world. This paper illustrates the design process and the experimental data collected, as well results and plans for future steps.