Lone Malmborg

Designing for Sharing in Local Communities

The Sharing Economy has brought new attention to the everyday practice of sharing. Digital tools are changing both what we can do together across neighbourhoods and how we think about sharing our time, materials and skills. It is possible to design to boost resource management, economic wellbeing and social resilience by fostering sharing practices, but do different designs speak to different priorities in design for sharing?

Re)Searching the Digital Bauhaus

Interaction design entered the scene of design as computer scientists and engineers realized that technology is a design material rather than a neutral set of tools and machinery supporting life at work or at home. Since then, interaction designers have been actively involved in exploring new design concepts for anything from interactive websites to intelligent everyday spaces. Interaction design is even gaining prominence in areas such as service design and product design as it is becoming more evident that the old-school design emphasis on static form tends to neglect how things live in interaction with people. But where does interaction design come from and what foundations are relevant today? In this book, a group of authors ranging from the founders of the field to currently influential shapers of education and research provide their interpretation of experiences and challenges. The starting point for the authors is a re-capitulation of the call for a digital Bauhaus originally issued by Pelle Ehn in 1998. Then as now, the Bauhaus ambition is to re-align new technology with emerging social needs. But unlike the avant-garde thinking of the 1920-30s Bauhaus, the authors in this volume are advocating a strong sensitivity to participation and the indigenous creativityof the modern social fabric. The book offers its readers a broad view on the origins and foundations of the field of interaction design and identifies thought-provoking challenges facing interaction design today.

Design for Agency, Adaptivity and Reciprocity: Reimagining AAL and Telecare Agendas

It goes without saying that the developed world is facing significant challenges in dealing with the increasing demands of an ageing population, especially around health and care. It is also easy to understand why technology is seen as a key enabler for meeting this challenge. Application areas such as Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and telecare are receiving increasing governmental, industry and research attention, taking advantage of maturing and increasingly ubiquitous wireless, mobile and sensor-based technologies. However, to date, many of these advances have been largely driven by technology-utopian visions without real understanding for how such technologies come to be situated in everyday life and healthcare practice and what their potential is for enhancing new ways of living into older age. Further, there is limited evidence of their effectiveness to date, and the problems with adoption from the patients’ perspectives suggest it is timely to reflect on these experiences and reimagine new ways of approaching AAL/telecare from a broader socio-technical perspective. To this end, we propose AAL/telecare as modular infrastructures for the home that can be adapted and repurposed, starting with personal ‘quality of life’ and social needs (supporting peer care) and progressing to monitoring, physical and medical needs (supporting formal care) as relevant for a person and as needs evolve. This extends the adoption path to supporting healthy ageing, taking notions of agency, adaptivity and social reciprocity as core principles. We illustrate this with some examples and identify some of the associated technical and methodological challenges.

Living Labs as a Methodological Approach to Universal Access in Senior Design

In this paper we discuss the potential of using the Living Lab methodology as an approach to ensuring universal access when designing for senior citizens. Our understanding of Living Labs is based on a recent study of 32 Living Labs cases, identifying central activities and issues in different applications of the methodology. We describe a Danish Living Lab project initiated to design for better quality of life for senior citizens in Solund, a nursing home in Copenhagen. Two crucial concepts from the Living Lab methodology --- co-creation and context --- act as the core concepts for our analysis of user participation and universal access in Living Labs in general and in the Solund Living Lab specifically. In our conclusion we suggest areas that should be given special attention when designing Living Lab projects and selecting user participants.

Reframing design culture and aging

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole. ---Christopher A. Le Dantec, Editor

Negotiation of values as driver in community-based PD

Community-based PD projects are often characterized by the meeting of conflicting values among stakeholder groups, but in research there is no uncontested account of the relation between design and conflicting values. Through analysis of three community-based PD cases in Denmark and South Africa, this paper identifies and discusses challenges for community-based PD that exist in these settings based on the emergence of contrasting and often conflicting values among participants and stakeholders. Discussions of participation are shaped through two theoretical perspectives: the notion of thinging and design things; and different accounts of values in design. Inspired by the concept of design things, and as a consequence of the need for continuous negotiation of values observed in all three cases, we suggest the concept of thinging as fruitful for creating productive agonistic spaces with a stronger attention towards the process of negotiating values in community-based PD.

Writing participatory design: a workshop on interpreting, accounting and novel forms of reporting

This workshop asks participatory designers and researchers to consider how they write about their work and what role there is for novel approaches to expression, forms drawn from other disciplines, and open and playful texts. As we bring social science and humanities sensibilities to bear on designing with others; as we conduct experiments in infrastructuring and sociotechnical assemblages; as we ask what participation means in different contexts and types of futuring, can we find voice to match our innovations? How do reflexivity, positionality, autobiography and auto-ethnography fit into our reflections on designing? How far are we making our practice even as we write? Is the page a contemplative or collaborative space? Does the tyranny of the conference paper overwrite everything? Join us for this day of reading, writing and discussion about how we tell the stories that matter most to us.

Scripting: an exploration of designing for participation over time with communities

Abstract Designing participation over time is a challenge that is regularly discussed in the fields of Participatory Design (PD) and Codesign. This paper describes two living labs-cases concerned with designing IT during long-term engagements with communities. Both labs aim to enable participatory exchanges after the designer leaves and are thus confronted with challenges that transcend the time of the traditional design ‘project’. We addressed these challenges via defining the IT design process as scripting, which is a process that better articulates the participants’ different voices and timelines. In this process three types of scripts are made, supported by the facilitator role: personal scripts as portrayals of individuals’ views on issues in the community and timelines to address these; community scripts aspiring to combine personal scripts into pluralistic views on the community and scripts for action as ways to rehearse how the community might unfold after the designer leaves. Key to this approach is that diverse people’s views and timelines play a role in co-constructing IT platforms that support participation in the community over time. By creating IT tools that are enabled by and support scripting, designing for participation over time becomes a pluralistic endeavour.

Design culture for ageing well : Designing for 'situated elderliness'

The “Design Culture for Ageing Well: Designing for ‘Situated Elderliness’ ” special track focuses on everyday practices and notions of ageing that can be relevant to Human Computer Interaction (HCI). In collaboration with senior associations, designers and theoreticians we elaborate on how newer notions of ageing might inform HCI design. With this track, we concentrate on bottom-up practices of ageing in everyday life, such as used language (visual and verbal) and diverse practices of senior communities (e.g: in different cultures). Our ambition is to go beyond framing support for ageing through a disability-support assistive lens and explore new approaches to designing through ageing well and life experiences as sources for innovations.

Digital Creativity Journal: Editorial

We would like to take this page of introduction towelcome newmembers to our editorial board: Michael Nitsche, Stanislav Roudavski, Marian Ursu, Emma Westecott and Dag Svanæs. Hailing from North America, Australia, Great Britain and Norway, these new members represent diverse backgrounds and fields of expertise, each insightful to the topics discussed by Digital Creativity. We look forward to collaborating with them. We would also like to thank the members who are leaving for their contribution and efforts on behalf of the journal. Like the editorial board, the editorial team is also welcoming new members. Joining Lone Malmborg, Tony Brooks and Sue Gollifer are Tanja Andersen and Julia Sussner. We have included short biographies below of our team, to bring us all to the same page. More changes will be coming through the pipeline and we look forward to sharing them with you.