This paper examines how design space for engaging with complexity was constrained, negotiated and expanded within a Dutch public sector organisation providing occupational disability services. While systemic design calls for transformation and embracing complexity, practical understanding of enacting this within a political-administrative context remains limited. Through critical analysis of a participatory action research project, we trace six key moments where possibilities for transformation were opened up or constrained: from processing the initial individual-centric framing, through recognising relational complexity, to translating insights into interventions. Our analysis reveals tensions between systemic aspirations and organisational realities: while the project successfully reframed reintegration from an individual-centric to relational understanding, translating this perspective into design interventions proved challenging. The paper offers actionable insights for systemic design practice in public sector contexts, demonstrating both the promise and limitations of design for transformation and systemic change within established organisational environments. ... Read more

This half-day symposium at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE), TU Delft, explores ethics, values, and culture in design research and education across IDE's three departments: Human-Centered Design (HCD), Strategic Product Design (SDE), and Design for Interaction & Social Innovation (DOS). The program features four 20-minute presentations of four IDE researchers (Özkaramanll, Colombo, Secomandi and Singh) from the three departments, followed by Q&A and a final panel moderated by Tassinari, addressing Design Anthropology for Social Change; Design under Pressure: Exploring the Tensions in Design Ethics; Designing for Mutual Recognition and Human Freedom; and Designing Feminist AI: Towards Inclusivity and Empowerment. An accompanying exhibition of provotypes, developed by approximatively 400 master students, creates a material dialogue with researchers. The symposium is conceived as a dialogic and generative space of encounter and co-creation, engaging researchers, educators, PhD candidates, and students, aiming to generate internal discussion within IDE, strengthening the dialogue across the departments on the ethical and political implications of its ongoing design research and pedagogy and connecting it to the international design community through PDC Places. By hosting this event, IDE creates a plural, reflexive space that acknowledges the entanglements of design with patriarchal, colonial, and anthropocentric frameworks while exploring embodied, feminist, and decolonial ways of knowing, practicing, and teaching design, inviting participants to collectively reimagine what it means to do and teach design otherwise. ... Read more

This paper examines how design space for engaging with complexity was constrained, negotiated and expanded within a Dutch public sector organisation providing occupational disability services. While systemic design calls for transformation and embracing complexity, practical understanding of enacting this within a political-administrative context remains limited. Through critical analysis of a participatory action research project, we trace six key moments where possibilities for transformation were opened up or constrained: from processing the initial individual-centric framing, through recognising relational complexity, to translating insights into interventions. Our analysis reveals tensions between systemic aspirations and organisational realities: while the project successfully reframed reintegration from an individual-centric to relational understanding, translating this perspective into design interventions proved challenging. The paper offers actionable insights for systemic design practice in public sector contexts, demonstrating both the promise and limitations of design for transformation and systemic change within established organisational environments. ... Read more

There is renewed interest in leveraging design in the public sector to address complex societal challenges. While collaborations between designers and public sector organizations hold potential, they often face significant challenges, leading to minimal uptake and impact of project outcomes. Hence, in this article, we investigate implementation as a practice, namely the practice of turning ideas into action. The study retrospectively explores implementation challenges in collaborations between external designers and public sector organizations. Based on a multiple case study, we identified eight implementation challenges across initiative, organization, and system levels, along with 13 design practices that help address these challenges. Our findings highlight that effective implementation requires designers to navigate inherent tensions between temporary and enduring elements, situated and systemic approaches, and stabilising and transforming organizational practices. This research contributes to understanding design’s impact in the public sector by proposing a tension-driven framework for implementation, emphasising the need to shift focus from generating meaningful ideas to strategically orchestrating their practical realisation and sustainable impact. ... Read more

As the DRS Special Interest Group on Design Ethics, we frame design ethics as an invitation to care and argue against reducing it to a methodology, framework, checklist, toolkit, or an afterthought. This broad framing acknowledges that ‘ethics’ can carry multiple meanings in different contexts (e.g. responsible, critical, democratic) and can be approached from various theoretical perspectives (e.g. historical, cultural, speculative). Consequently, we recognize the need for a nuanced and reflexive discussion on why, where and how ethical questions and dilemmas intersect with design research and practices. For this, we aim to look back with critical historical awareness, while also looking forward with cautious optimism.
We welcome both theoretical papers that unpack specific conceptual perspectives and practice-based explorations (e.g. in communities, organizations, policy-making). We invite submissions that are inspired by:
1. Responsible design and innovation: What are the ethical and societal implications of design for innovation (processes, strategies, artifacts)? How to nurture an ethical awareness and accountability in design and innovation practices?
2. The ethics of collaboration: What are the main questions concerning power, agency, and positionality that design should recognize and address in inter/transdisciplinary settings?
3. Ethics in education: How to embed critical-ethical reflection in design education?
4. Aesthetics of design: How do the value-laden imagery of design shape our perception of the world? What does this aesthetics say about design as a discipline?
5. Ethics for social and climate justice: What is the role of design in preventing/perpetuating social inequalities and the exploitation of natural resources?
The track will result in an edited book of selected papers.
... Read more

The idea that technologies influence society—both positively and negatively—is not new. This is mainly the terrain of the philosophy and the ethics of technology research. Similarly, design research aims to help create new technologies in line with individual, social, and societal needs and values. Against this backdrop, it seems essential to expose relations between design and philosophy of technology research, particularly from a methodological perspective. The main goal of this paper is to suggest a preliminary overview of methods and approaches that can inspire and inform interdisciplinary collaboration and, with that, systematic engagement with ethics in design processes. Through interdisciplinary exchange, we propose a preliminary typology of ethics-informed methods and approaches based on two main dimensions, namely theory-grounded approaches to theoretically-flexible techniques and assessment to accompaniment. This mapping intends to help navigate the ethical qualities of selected methods from both disciplines, and it aims to create a platform for fruitful interdisciplinary conversations. ... Read more

What society experiences today as morally questionable design—from gendered toys for children to public benches that prevent sleeping—can be considered the aftermath of an underdeveloped foundation for systematic ethical reflection in design methodologies. Although designing is an inherently moral activity, research on how to recognize and handle ethical questions and moral dilemmas in early (conceptual) design activities is scarce. In this article, we use an interdisciplinary lens to analyze and respond to the challenges of bridging moral psychology, ethics of technology, and design methodologies. For this, we introduce the concept of moral engagement in design, which is inspired by Moral Disengagement Theory. Finally, we propose five preliminary considerations for enacting moral engagement in design practices. These considerations form an interdisciplinary bridge to help us reflect on the moral dimensions of methodological choices in conceptual design practices. ... Read more

We identify a dilemma currently faced by designers and design researchers concerning how best to use the influential nature of design to change people's behavior in a way that benefits society. This dilemma exists because, even though designers can create products that can exercise control over individual freedom, such products are made necessary because people seem resistant to sacrifice their freedom for the good of society. Various approaches have arisen to respond to this dilemma—ranging from the technocratic to the democratic with “libertarian paternalism” somewhere in between—but we have found that they all share a paternalistic way of treating individual freedom as a “barrier” to be overcome to achieve social goals, such as sustainability, crime reduction, public health, and social justice. Instead of tackling this issue head-on, this interdisciplinary work challenges this dilemma and, drawing from the ethics of Simone de Beauvoir, argues that freedom is not merely a value to be weighed against other values in design practices but is instead the basis of all moral values ... Read more

The influence of design on wellbeing and happiness in research is growing across various design domains, including products, services, systems, and environments. Despite the existence of theories addressing wellbeing and happiness, a challenge remains to bring them to life through applied design studies and reflections involving these domains, which we touch upon in this editorial. In this theme track, we focus on contributions from design in fulfilling the societal need to promote wellbeing and happiness, aligned with the conference theme: Resistance, Recovery, Reflection, Reimagination. The insights from the papers presented in this editorial underscore the complexity of designing for wellbeing, encompassing individual and community levels across various domains. Embracing a multidisciplinary approach, leveraging technology, deepening our understanding of human behavior, and exploring innovative interventions that enhance well-being reflect our growth as a Special Interest Group within the Design Research Society. ... Read more

This chapter introduces six insights from emotion knowledge that support a structured approach to emotion-driven design activities. In design processes, these insights can be used to structure consumer insights, to stimulate creativity, and to support communication within the design team, with clients and with consumers. The first three insights broaden the emotion repertoire by detailing how diverse, mixed, nuanced, and even negative emotions can enrich consumer experiences. The other three insights focus on the causes of consumer emotions. The fourth insight explains how emotion measurement can help understanding what people really care for. The fifth insight focuses on consumer dilemmas, indicating how these can be used to design emotionally relevant products and services. The sixth and final insight shows how opportunities for emotion-driven design can be increased with design that addresses emotions that are experienced in the context of consuming products and services. ... Read more

Users often have conflicting concerns (i.e., dilemmas), such as ‘embracing change vs. following tradition.’ Design can resolve these dilemmas through simultaneously fulfilling conflicting user concerns. This paper proposes three abstraction levels for framing user concerns when formulating dilemmas. In a large-scale industry project, we identified that dilemmas can be formulated
and resolved at different abstraction levels. Based on these preliminary findings, we developed a structured way to formulate dilemmas, which involves using three different types of concerns (i.e., product-, activity-, and identity-focused concerns). In this framework, product-focused concerns represent the most concrete concern level and identity-focused concerns
represent the most abstract level. Sixty master-level design students were asked to formulate a dilemma evoked by a product of their own choice and to create design ideas to resolve this dilemma. The results showed that dilemmas involving all concern levels can be an input for ideation, with the ‘most abstract yet informative’ dilemma being the most inspiring. In addition,
we found that design can resolve dilemmas in several distinct ways, where each dilemma-resolving strategy comes with opportunities and challenges.
Consciously formulating and examining alternative dilemma formulations
can create opportunities that might otherwise not be considered as input
for ideation. ... Read more

Personal dilemmas can be valuable starting points for user-centred design. Since dilemmas prevail in everyday life, designers can identify many dilemmas relevant for a given design brief. It can therefore be a challenge to choose a target dilemma as a means to frame an appropriate problem space. To address this challenge, this paper proposes seven qualities of 'design-worthy' dilemmas. These key qualities were derived from a cross-comparison of four dilemma-driven design cases, and were clustered in three categories: 1) relevance for target users; 2) potential to inspire design ideas; 3) meaningful formulation of conflicting concerns. The qualities of design-worthy dilemmas explicate the considerations designers have when selecting a target dilemma, and thus, they can facilitate introspection and discussion in problem framing. In addition, the case studies demonstrate the main activities involved in dilemma-driven design, namely discovery, definition, and application. ... Read more

This paper suggests that designers can frame user behaviour in terms of the conflicts between long-term goals and immediate desires (i.e. self-control dilemmas), and address these conflicts by facilitating the pursuit of long-term goals. A phenomenological study provided an understanding of self-control dilemmas and the strategies people use to deal with these dilemmas. Based on this understanding, this paper proposes a framework for analysing self-control dilemmas and three supporting design strategies. The framework can act as an analysis tool when distinguishing between long-term goals and immediate desires, and the design strategies can facilitate generation of ideas that can address self-control dilemmas. Understanding these human principles offers novel opportunities for products, services, or policies that contribute to subjective well-being ... Read more

You have bought a bag of candy to keep yourself entertained while watching movies in the comfort of your home. Your intention is to keep the candy bag in your cabinet for several weeks, and to only treat yourself with some candy when watching movies. However, you somehow find the bag emptied while watching your first movie. And although eating the delicious candy by the handful was certainly enjoyable, you also feel guilty for finishing the entire bag at once. This is only one example of many dilemmas we encounter in everyday life. In this thesis, dilemmas are defined as experiences with three main ingredients: (1) mutually exclusive choices, (2) conflicting concerns, and (3) mixed emotions. Figure 1 shows the framework of dilemmas, which illustrates these ingredients related to the conflict between enjoying candy while watching a movie versus eating moderately to maintain good health (see Chapter 5). The articulation of these three ingredients enables us to provide a more elaborate definition of dilemmas:
People experience a dilemma when they are faced with two mutually exclusive choices, both of which touch upon their personal concerns, and the simultaneous fulfillment of both choices is challenging, if not impossible, to obtain or achieve. Because of this challenge, people experience both positive and negative emotions toward each alternative. ... Read more

Traditional design approaches stimulate the creation of products that make daily interactions more efficient, comfortable, and pleasant. In contrast, provocative design approaches, such as critical design, have a different focus: they aim to challenge the status quo through products that expose assumptions and stimulate discussion. In this paper, we argue that intentionally triggering personal dilemmas is a novel design approach that may be a means to enabling self-reflection. In line with this, this paper proposes three design strategies for triggering dilemmas. These strategies are explained through existing designs and supported by design ideas created using them. Our findings indicate that triggering dilemmas is a counter- intuitive design intention, which can be supported by exercises that facilitate perspective taking and stalling moral judgment. We conclude with a discussion on the overlap between triggering dilemmas and other provocative design fields.

... Read more

A potent way of designing for emotion is to design for concerns. However, people have multiple, and often, conflicting concerns. Such conflicts create emotional dilemmas: One may need to spend a Sunday afternoon working to meet a deadline, and at the same time, wish to attend a birthday party. In this paper, we consider conflicting concerns as a design opportunity: Any of the concerns can be a starting point for designing products or services that appeal to the users. However, we propose that the tension created by the conflict can be more inspiring than the involved concerns in isolation. In this paper, we present an analysis of 109 existing products through which we identify three directions these products seem to use to address users' dilemmas. These directions are resolving dilemmas, moderating dilemmas, and triggering dilemmas. We discuss the similarities and differences between these directions and their potential contribution to design fields such as designing for emotions and designing for subjective wellbeing. ... Read more

This chapter introduces six insights from emotion knowledge that support a structured approach to emotion-driven design activities. In design processes, these insights can be used to structure consumer insights, to stimulate creativity, and to support communication within the design team, with clients and with consumers. The first three insights broaden the emotion repertoire by detailing how diverse, mixed, nuanced, and even negative emotions can enrich consumer experiences. The other three insights focus on the causes of consumer emotions. The fourth insight explains how emotion measurement can help understanding what people really care for. The fifth insight focuses on consumer dilemmas, indicating how these can be used to design emotionally relevant products and services. The sixth and final insight shows how opportunities for emotion-driven design can be increased with design that addresses emotions that are experienced in the context of consuming products and services. ... Read more