In the literature, there are polarized views regarding the capabilities of technology to embed societal values. One aisle of the debate contends that technical artifacts are value-neutral since values are not peculiar to inanimate objects. Scholars on the other side of the aisle argue that technologies tend to be value-laden. With the call to embed ethical values in technology, this article explores how AI and other adjacent technologies are designed and developed to foster social justice. Drawing insights from prior studies, this paper identifies seven African moral values considered central to actualizing social justice; of these, two stand out—respect for diversity and ethnic neutrality. By introducing use case analysis along with the Discovery, Translation, and Verification (DTV) framework and validating via Focus Group Discussion, this study revealed novel findings: first, ethical value analysis is best carried out alongside software system analysis. Second, to embed ethics in technology, interdisciplinary expertise is required. Third, the DTV approach combined with the software engineering methodology provides a promising way to embed moral values in technology. Against this backdrop, the two highlighted ethical values—respect for diversity and ethnic neutrality—help ground the pursuit of social justice.

This paper presents a collaborative solution developed to enable people without prior Internet of Things (IoT) knowledge to ideate, conceptualise, role-play and prototype potential improvements to their work processes and environments. The solution, called the Karakuri IoT toolkit and method, was tested in two workshops with eight production leaders at a Swedish manufacturing company. Outcomes were analysed from the perspectives of materials interaction and instruments of inquiry. Results indicate the solution can help people conceive and prototype improvement ideas at early design stages.

As the global population continues to age, strategies that promote health and wellbeing among older adults are urgently required. This demographic faces an increasing burden of chronic diseases linked to inflammation(1), often associated with diets that are energy dense and nutrient poor(2). Importantly, the impact of these conditions can be minimised by adopting an anti-inflammatory dietary pattern, such as the Mediterranean diet(3). While there are numerous predictors of behaviour and an individual’s capacity for behaviour change, nutrition knowledge is a fundamental influencer of eating behaviours(4). However, knowledge of anti-inflammatory diets generally and the Mediterranean diet specifically is lacking among older adults(5), highlighting the need for effective educational programs targeting this group. Digital health technologies have the potential to provide cost-effective and accessible nutrition education, however, few technologies have been developed to meet older adults unique needs and preferences. To address this gap, this study aimed to explore the specific needs and design preferences of older adults for an online nutrition education resource. A total of 20 adults aged 55 years and older participated in one of four 2-hour participatory design workshops, where prompted discussion questions were used to explore their use of technology and scope their needs and preferences for an online nutrition education resource. All participants were regularly using a range of different devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, and computers) and reported being comfortable doing so. Participants wanted a website that could be accessed across devices (i.e., desktop and mobile friendly) that provided practical nutrition advice, recipes, and information on the link between diet and disease. A number of design principles were identified as essential to optimise the user experience, including large and simple fonts, use of dark type on a light background, and clear categories for easy navigation. To enhance engagement, participants sought a personalised resource that could be adjusted to suit their needs, provided up-to-date information, and allowed for easy content sharing with others, such as by exporting information as a PDF. Participatory design methods offer new knowledge for developing and refining existing and future digital health technologies that are appropriate and useful for the target audience. Specifically, the older adult participants were motivated to access a user-friendly web-based nutrition resource provided it was able to be personalised to their health and nutrition needs, offered practical solutions such as adaptations to portion size or in relation to cost, and was easily shareable with others. Given the limited availability of online, self-directed and evidence-based nutrition education resources for older adults, these findings provide valuable insights to shape digital health resources that cater to the needs and preferences of this population and have the potential to support healthy eating habits and contribute to reducing diet-related chronic disease burden.

Recent advances in machine learning have enabled computers to converse with humans meaningfully. In this study, we propose using this technology to facilitate design conversations in large-scale urban development projects by creating chatbot systems that can automate and streamline information exchange between stakeholders and designers. To this end, we developed and evaluated a proof-of-concept chatbot system that can perform design conversations on a specific construction project and convert those conversations into a list of requirements. Next, in an experiment with 56 participants, we compared the chatbot system to a regular online survey, focusing on user satisfaction and the quality and quantity of collected information. The results revealed that, with regard to user satisfaction, the participants preferred the chatbot experience to a regular survey. However, we found that chatbot conversations produced more data than the survey, with a similar rate of novel ideas but fewer themes. Our findings provide robust evidence that chatbots can be effectively used for design discussions in large-scale design projects and offer a user-friendly experience that can help to engage people in the design process. Based on this evidence, by providing a space for meaningful conversations between stakeholders and expanding the reach of design projects, the use of chatbot systems in interactive design systems can potentially improve design processes and their outcomes.

This paper contributes to an increasingly critical assessment of a policy framing of ‘financial resilience’ that focuses on individual responsibility and financial capability. Using a participatory research and design process, we construct a ground-up understanding of financial resilience that acknowledges not only an individual’s actions, but the contextual environment in which they are situated, and how those relate to one another. We inductively identify four inter-connected dimensions of relational financial resilience: infrastructure (housing, health, and childcare), financial and economic factors (income, expenses, and financial services and strategies), social factors (motivation and community and family), and the institutional environment (policy and local community groups, support and advice services). Consequently, we recommend that social policies conceptualise financial resilience in relational terms, as a cross-cutting policy priority, rather than being solely a facet of individual financial capability.

Designing for disability is a very specialised area as it requires interdisciplinary expertise, and designing assistive devices for children with communication disorder, is especially a challenge as these users are incapable of providing adequate and coherent feedback. With the adoption of participatory design approach, in collaboration with experts/professionals/educators, as pivotal stakeholders and a proxy for the end-users; a game-based, multi-sensory learning aid has been developed to train children on the concept of sense organs. Several concepts were generated and evaluated through special educator participation and based on a preliminary survey of external special educators as evaluators, the prototype was found to be suitable for the target user to enhance their communication skills. This paper captures a research through design perspective on the design of customisable solutions for beneficiary user groups, who are unable to offer feedback.

Today's global context of mass-produced items has resulted in an increasing ‘distance’, or alienation, between people and the origins of the items they buy and use: an unhealthy human-product relationship.

This observation permits the search for an alternative interpretation of well-being: a transformation that would support resilience and self sufficiency, and a better human product relationship or ‘a new partnership’, as advocated by various scholars.

In this paper, this new partnership is considered through supporting ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) product design: a scenario in which professional designers facilitate laypersons to design for themselves. Anticipating (1) the designer's responsibility, and (2) the layperson's innate desire to create, this paper introduces a ‘Design for DIY’ framework method to help bridge the knowledge gap between the product designer and the layperson.

The initial starting points of this study, complemented by a range of ‘Design for DIY’ studies, and an exploration of existing design frameworks and design models, resulted in the design of a ‘Design-for-DIY’ framework. This paper concludes with recommendations for the testing and further development of the Design-for-DIY framework.

In big companies, Circular Economy (CE) is being explored, nevertheless, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) struggle to follow because of particular barriers and a lack of practical guide. Here, we use Style & Design, a French industrial SME, as a case study to explore how SMEs can perform a successful CE integration. This article aims at proposing a multi-internal actor circularity diagnosis method. It focuses on building an inclusive and co-constructed therefore well-accepted and persistent integration of CE for SMEs, which is lacking today in the existing literature. This work relies on a mixed qualitative and quantitative data analysis applied on a corpus of 42 one-hour-long semi-structured interviews, with 37 different professions. We capture the view of the current and desired situation and identify CE barriers unique to each interviewed worker. We also connect with each worker and open the dialog for the rest of the CE deployment. The final goal is to assemble this worker-oriented diagnosis with quantitative diagnosis, like Life Cycle Analysis of the products and Material Flow Analysis of the factory, to diagnose a complete picture of an industrial SME circularity.

Remote and virtual centers have been studied for the past twenty years as an alternative to the traditional air traffic control tower environment. Designing such complex sociotechnical systems requires a systems engineering approach that appropriately integrates the human element as well as the technological and organizational components. In this paper, we identify the challenges of implementing this human-systems integration in the design of complex systems. We present the feedback we obtained from a series of semi-structured interviews with people involved in the development of military air traffic solutions. The participants' responses helped us establish methodological guidelines for designing and building a disruptive remote and virtual air traffic control center. We discuss how virtualized human- in-the-loop simulations in particular should help designers analyze user activity and be more flexible in system acquisition.

Recently, the design and digitalisation approaches have become increasingly utilised in the legal context, typically under the names of legal design and legal tech. One of their goals is to help legal practitioners be more efficient and to provide better quality and more comprehensive legal services. Also, given that both movements rely heavily on participatory and co-design, they will require increased support not only from design practitioners but also from design researchers and educators. Therefore, this paper investigates, from a design research viewpoint, the opportunities and challenges of developing and implementing legal tech, with a particular focus on legal practitioners. It reports on four cases of designing legal tech solutions and their implementation in a law firm. The main insights are related to the importance of value perception through participatory and co-design, the need for efficient and effective testing methodologies, and the opportunity to test a wide range of design methods and tools in the legal context. The paper also complements the legal design and legal tech literature with additional arguments on why designing in the legal context is challenging compared to designing in other domains.

The high prevalence of mental health problems among university students poses a challenge when developing effective interventions, with digital technologies emerging as a potential resource to address this problem. The inclusion of student input in the design and development of such interventions is critical to improving their impact. This study contributed to the initial phase of a research project that aims to adapt and evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of an early intervention for anxiety and depression based on digital technologies for university students. Three participatory workshops were conducted with 13 university students in Chile to inquire about the features and content that a mental health mobile app should include to meet their needs and preferences. The workshop transcripts were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. The results of this study highlight the value of modifications such as the personalisation of some features of the app. The students recommended incorporating topics related to university life and the possibility of contacting a mental health professional, as well as the inclusion of peer interaction or other forms of support.

Outside of community-led design projects, most participatory design processes initiated by a company or organisation maintain or even strengthen power imbalances between the design organisation and the community on whose purported behalf they are designing, further increasing the absencing experience. Radical participatory design (RPD) is a radically relational answer to the coloniality inherent in participatory design where the community members’ disappointment is greater due to the greater expectations and presencing potential of a ‘participatory design’ process. We introduce the term RPD to show how research and design processes can be truly participatory to the root or core. Instead of treating participatory design as a method, a way of conducting a method, or a methodology, we introduce RPD as a meta-methodology, a way of doing any methodology. We explicitly describe what participation means and compare and contrast design processes based on the amount of participation, creating a typology of participation. We introduce ‘designer as community member’, ‘community member as designer,’ and ‘community member as facilitator’ models and provide characteristics for the meta-methodology of RPD.

Effective stakeholder engagement increases research relevance and utility. Though published principles of community-based participatory research and patient-centered outcomes research offer guidance, few resources offer effective techniques to engage stakeholders and translate their engagement into improvements in research process and outcomes. The Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (Indiana CTSI) is home to Research Jam (RJ), an interdisciplinary team of researchers, project management professionals, and design experts, that employs human-centered design (HCD) to engage stakeholders in the research process. Establishing HCD services at the Indiana CTSI has allowed for accessible and innovative stakeholder-engaged research. RJ offers services for stakeholder-informed study design, measurement, implementation, and dissemination. RJ’s services are in demand to address research barriers pertaining to a diverse array of health topics and stakeholder groups. As a result, the RJ team has grown significantly with both institutional and extramural support. Researchers involved in RJ projects report that working with RJ helped them learn how to better engage with stakeholders in research and changed the way they approach working with stakeholders. RJ can serve as a potential model for effectively engaging stakeholders through HCD to improve translational research.

Inclusive musical instruments benefit from incorporating wearable interfaces into digital musical instrument design, creating opportunities for bodily felt experiences and movement-based interactions. In this article, we discuss the evolution of our inclusive design approach behind the design and performance practices of three wearable musical instruments. By focusing on the embodied, somatic, and tacit dimensions of movement-based musical interaction, we evaluate these case studies, combining the third and first-person perspectives. The design and implementation of the wearable sensing, utilizing the additive manufacturing techniques, are discussed for each instrument and its performer in specific cases of musical expression. This article further discusses how our approach integrates music performance as a crucial step into design and evaluation, utilizing these performance practices and such collaborative settings for improved diversity and inclusion. Finally, we examine how our design approach evolves from user-centered design to more participatory practices, offering people with diverse abilities a shared music performance space.

Artificial Intelligence offers a wide variety of capabilities that can potentially address people's needs and desires in their specific contexts. This pilot study presents a collaborative method using a deck of AI cards tested with 58 production, AI, and information science students, and experts from an accessible media agency. The results suggest that, with the support of the method and AI cards, participants can ideate and reach conceptual AI solutions. Such conceptualisations can contribute to a more inclusive integration of AI solutions in society.

This paper follows the form of an essay, it offers a narrative review inquiring conceptually about opening futures. The main research question is: What concepts could help elucidate the new position of designers when futures are open? Four branches of literature from design are addressed, considering their core approaches: participation, infrastructures, systems thinking, and narratives. Focus on these four approaches could lead to profound discussions about what it means to open futures and the current relevance of expert design.

Bullying and cyberbullying are global phenomena negatively impacting on children’s and young people’s (CYP’s) mental health and wellbeing and affecting their school social experiences and learning outcomes. Many interventions and prevention approaches have been employed over the decades, most impacting differentially, with some success in certain contexts and situations but not universally, suggesting the need for more contextualised, nuanced approaches at the whole school, community, individual and peer-group levels. The recognition of the importance of student and teacher voice in recent years has heralded interest in co-design practices to deliver more context-relevant interventions and prevention strategies. This article considers how participatory design and co-design practices can form part of the prevention and intervention repertoire for schools, teachers, counsellors and psychologists in their quest to understand and reduce cyberbullying and/or bullying (C/B) behaviours. Two case-study exemplars are provided that reflect the importance of context and student-centred relevancy to inform practice.

Integrated Natural Resource and Conservation Development (INRCD) Projects is an umbrella term for a variety of Integrated Conservation and Development Projects (ICDPs), a concept first introduced by the World Wide Fund for Nature in the mid 1980s to target practice-oriented efforts in developing countries; and Integrated Natural Resource Management (INRM) research and development projects introduced as adaptive management for fisheries, wildlife, forest, and rangeland to target analysis-oriented efforts in developing and developed countries. Both efforts seek to balance economic development and natural resource conservation. This paper reviews the literature over the past four decades in an attempt to determine which planning and execution methods lead to greater success. A thematic analysis revealed three broad areas of importance: community inclusion and income diversification, inadequate training and management, and inability to properly quantify data. A systems design optimization approach for such projects is advocated to support project decision making in these areas of importance.

The integration of users' perception in the design process is and important challenge for the optimization of products. This study describes how design recommendations can be drawn, from a perceptual experiment with a panel of subjects using a multi-objective interactive genetic algorithm (IGA). The application concerns the bi-objective optimization of the unpleasantness and the detectability of sounds for electric vehicles (EV). After a description of the experimental protocol for the assessment of the detectability and the unpleasantness of EV sounds (listening test), a set of optimal sounds (Pareto efficient) is defined with an IGA experiment. The analysis of these sounds, based on a probabilistic analysis of the selection process, leads to the definition of design recommendations. A second listening test, involving recommended sounds but also other design proposals, allows an evaluation of the validity of the approach. Results show that the sounds recommended obtain interesting performance, in particular to improve the detectability of EV sounds.