Societal transitions are inherently comprised of wicked problems, requiring new systemic problem-solving approaches. Framing lies at the core of problem- solving, as it connects a specific problem to a promising solution space. In our study we look at reframing in the context of societal transitions, which is the practice of developing an original frame, to open up new routes for transformative design interventions. Based on literature from the fields of design and transitions, we have developed a theoretical model of a ‘Transition Design Frame’ (or TD frame), which can serve as a foundational stepping stone in the process of designing interventions to foster societal transitions. The TD frame model proposes four components that marry societal problems with behavioural solutions: 1) a societal issue, 2) a transition strategy, 3) a systemic lever and 4) a behaviour change mechanism. Through workshops with experts from three innovation agencies in the Netherlands we evaluate our model by applying it to their existing transition design cases, each addressing a different societal transition, and assess how the model can best support their reframing practice. This report presents work in progress (WiP), as we are currently collecting the data for our study with the agencies. At RSD12 we expect to be able share the results of the study and discuss their implications for both research and practice.@en

Excessive animal protein consumption has led to calls for a plant-based protein transition. Plant-based diets can be fostered by design interventions, yet their effect on dietary choices depends on the framing that is chosen. The aim of this study was to understand which transition design frames (TD frames) are prevalent in existing consumer interventions in the Netherlands, to help transcend the dominant substitution pathway with alternative strategies for intervention. We explore framing through the lens of design, examining human-made interventions in a transition context, to complement the discursive lens that is common in transitions literature. Based on 62 existing consumer interventions and eight expert interviews, we identified eight TD frames. We find that market regulation and cultural interventions are strategic avenues to pursue. Reframing opportunities involve inclusivity, system breakdown and integrating multiple frames into single interventions. We observed that a design lens helped elucidate frame types that have not previously been identified in transitions literature.

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The increasingly transdisciplinary context of design, where designers collaborate with other disciplinary and domain experts, means there is a growing need to evidence the effectiveness of design methods. We address this need in two ways. First, we propose a ‘chain of evidence’, from motivation to claims, operationalising this in a systematic assessment framework. Second, we systematically review current design method research. Our results reveal that while all links in the chain of evidence are reported across the literature and best practices can be identified, no individual paper either reports all links or consistently achieves best practice. Our framework and results demonstrate the need for standards of evidence in this area, with implications for design method research, development, education, and practice.

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Tactile experiences are a pivotal part of consumer behavior and choice. However, very little is known about why consumers esthetically appreciate touching products. The principle of Unity-in-Variety, stating that consumers like to perceive variety but only when this variety is presented as a coherent whole, has been shown to partly explain consumers' esthetic appreciation in the visual domain. We theorize that the psychological mechanisms underlying the esthetic principle of Unity-in-Variety are modality-independent, and therefore that this principle also applies to consumers' tactile esthetic appreciation. Across three studies, using existing products and novel 3D printed product designs systematically manipulated along the perceptual dimensions of unity and variety, we show that both unity and variety independently contribute to tactile esthetic appreciation. Furthermore, because unity and variety are inherently partial opposites, esthetic appreciation of products is highest when both unity and variety are simultaneously maximized.

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Reminiscing on memorable travel experiences is a common practice amongst many travellers. This study introduces positive psychology interventions – cultivation of character strengths and savouring strategies - to examine memorable and meaningful tourism experiences (MMEs). Although both interventions aim to increase well-being, little research has been conducted on their roles in enriching MMEs. MMEs are fundamental to understand as part of the travel reminiscence process. MMEs could be heightened by connecting tourists’ past experiences with their character strengths (capacities for ways of behaving). Savouring, on the other hand, facilitates the connections to places. The reminiscence process helps tourists gain self-knowledge and make well-being oriented choices in their future journeys. In so doing, this research study created an interactive strengths-based journal that facilitated tourists to incorporate their character strengths in their past MMEs. The narratives were structured to connect explicit experiential components, such as tourism activities, with implicit psychological factors, such as emotions, character strengths, and values. Data collection involved ten tourists of diverse nationalities who created 51 MME narratives. Participants were then invited to savour their strengths used, reflect on their narratives, and express their behavioural intentions for their next trip. Data analysis, using grouped frequency distributions, found that MMEs were associated with the moderate strengths rather than the signature (prominent) strengths of the participants, such as curiosity and gratitude. Appreciation of beauty and excellence was the most dominant strength observed. The findings showed participants preferred their future journeys to be congruent with their character strengths. Theoretical and practical implications for tourist experience research are outlined.

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Introduction: Designing artificial intelligence (AI) to support health and wellbeing is an important and broad challenge for technologists, designers, and policymakers. Drawing upon theories of AI and cybernetics, this article offers a design framework for designing intelligent systems to optimize human wellbeing. We focus on the production of wellbeing information feedback loops in complex community settings, and discuss the case study of My Wellness Check, an intelligent system designed to support the mental health and wellbeing needs of university students and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: The basis for our discussion is the community-led design of My Wellness Check, an intelligent system that supported the mental health and wellbeing needs of university students and staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our system was designed to create an intelligent feedback loop to assess community wellbeing needs and to inform community action. This article provides an overview of our longitudinal assessment of students and staff wellbeing (n = 20,311) across two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results: We further share the results of a controlled experiment (n = 1,719) demonstrating the enhanced sensitivity and user experience of our context-sensitive wellbeing assessment. Discussion: Our approach to designing “AI for community wellbeing,” may generalize to the systematic improvement of human wellbeing in other human-computer systems for large-scale governance (e.g., schools, businesses, NGOs, platforms). The two main contributions are: 1) showcasing a simple way to draw from AI theory to produce more intelligent human systems, and 2) introducing a human-centered, community-led approach that may be beneficial to the field of AI.

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Although design objects have been and still are created to serve a function and perform well, they also have to look or feel nice. Aesthetic pleasure in the context of designed artifacts is a reflection of how well the designer did his or her job. This chapter argues that designers should aim at resolving conflicts in order to arrive at a beautiful design. These conflicts can be of different kinds, but always entail a tension between—metaphorically speaking—needs for safety and accomplishment. Various aesthetic principles, such as unity-in-variety, Most Advanced Yet Acceptable, and Maximum Effect for Minimal Means, are proposed that all follow this logic of striking a careful balance between opposing forces. The chapter concludes with some speculative suggestions on how this safety-accomplishment framework could also be used to predict the aesthetic pleasantness of design ideas, concepts, and consequences.@en

Topology optimization is increasingly applied to design consumer products, for which aesthetics plays an important role to consumer acceptance. In industrial design, it is known that preferences or taste judgement obey certain rules or principles. These principles are not directly quantifiable, but can qualitatively predict and explain aesthetic responses. In this paper, we empirically evaluate whether or not these design principles are effective for increasing the appealingness of topology optimized shapes. Our starting point is an overarching principle known as Unity-in-Variety. Variety stimulates our interests, whilst unity helps us make sense of a design in its entirety. According to this principle, aesthetic appreciation is maximized when a balance in unity and variety is attained. Since designs from topology optimization often exhibit remarkable complexity and variety, we hypothesize that increasing unity is the key to reach a balance and thus to elevate aesthetic appreciation in topology optimization. In our experimental setup, designs from topology optimization were manually post-processed, with the intention to increase unity, by following the “principles of perceptual grouping”, known as Gestalt principles. Our user study shows that in 11 out of the 12 pairs of topology optimized designs and their modified counterparts, the modified designs are perceived by the majority as visually more appealing, confirming our hypothesis. These findings provide a good basis for improving the aesthetic pleasure of topology optimized designs, either manually or ultimately by integrating them in the topology optimization formulation. It is expected that this eventually will contribute to a wider acceptance of topology optimization for consumer product design.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has put wellbeing on the global agenda like never before. Many businesses, organizations, and even governments have recognized wellbeing as a formal policy goal. This paper addresses the question of how to design complex systems to improve the wellbeing of their stakeholders. We present a case of helping a university adopt a systematic approach to wellbeing assessment and improvement during the COVID-19 crisis. To support the improvement of student and staff wellbeing, we adopted a cybernetic perspective. Practically, this involved focusing on the design of a feedback loop that used wellbeing assessments to inform organizational actions. We argue that “off-the-shelf” assessments of wellbeing are often insufficient for supporting a systemic response to data because they lack context-sensitivity and actionability. While a “cybernetic perspective” may evoke a sense of the inhuman or mechanical in the optimization of wellbeing, our case study suggests otherwise. At least from our perspective, a society that aims to improve wellbeing may look more like a deliberative or dialogical democracy than an automated AI system.@en

Personal technologies are widely used to capture the memorable and meaningful experiences travellers have during their journeys. These digital footprints serve as memorabilia for travellers to share and reminiscence about these special experiences. This study showcases an exploratory study of the creation of a travel diary from the traveller’s digital footprints to facilitate the expression of and reminiscences about memorable and meaningful moments. In this study, 15 participants were asked to share their memorable and meaningful travel experiences and were then instructed to use their photos and a set of prototyping tools to create a paper-based visual diary of their experiences. The goal of this study was to examine the process of creating a visual diary to understand the differences in how these experiences are recounted and the ways they are expressed. We used a Labovian approach to compare and contrast the participants’ oral narratives and visual diaries. As in comics studies, the visual diaries are analysed with respect to their spatio–temporal dimensions and the recurring patterns in these two narrative forms are discussed. Based on the results, recommendations are made regarding the future design of travel diary platforms.

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In this paper, we introduce a framework that conceptualizes a multi-stage process through which technology can promote sustained wellbeing. Intentional wellbeing-enhancing activities form the centerpiece linking direct product interaction to, ultimately, wellbeing. The framework was developed following a bottom-up–top-down approach by integrating theoretical knowledge from positive psychology, behavioral science and human–computer interaction (HCI)/design with empirical insights. We outline (a) the framework, (b) its five main stages including their multidisciplinary theoretical foundations, (c) relations between these stages and (d) specific elements that further describe each stage. The paper illustrates how the framework was developed and elaborates three major areas of application: (design) research, design strategies and measurement approaches. With this work, we aim to provide actionable guidance for researchers and IT practitioners to understand and design technologies that foster sustained wellbeing.

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Ob aufgrund der Finanzkrise, der öffentlichen Wahrnehmung eines massiven Überkonsums oder des globalen Klimawandels, immer mehr Designer*innen sind bestrebt, ‚der Gesellschaft etwas Gutes zu tun‘. Dieses Interesse scheint sich vor allem auf zwei Weisen zu manifestieren. Zum einen übernehmen Designer*innen und Designunternehmen bei der Produktentwicklung mehr gesellschaftliche Verantwortung.@en

Within the scope of Design for Sustainable Behaviour, the connection between behavioural change strategies and design idea generation has received limited attention. This paper highlights metaphorical thinking in product design to stimulate sustainable behaviour. In particular, the current study proposes a metaphor-based design method to guide designers on how to associate product features with behavioural and experiential cues through metaphors. We next report two design cases to evaluate this method. In the end, the shortcomings of current research and future developments are also discussed.@en

This paper introduces a framework for impact-centered design that maps the direct and indirect psychological, social, and behavioral effects resulting from human-product interactions, as well as the strategic pathways that designers utilize to achieve these effects. The framework was created through a series of expert workshops in which 186 design cases were analyzed. The framework includes three basic levels. At the base, user-product interaction evokes three types of direct product experience: aesthetic experience, experience of meaning, and emotional experience. The second level describes more indirect and long-term types of impact: on behaviors, attitudes, (general) experiences, and users’ and stakeholders’ knowledge. The third and final level represents the general quality of life and society. This paper details the characteristics of and theoretical models underlying the various impact areas, provides illustrative student design cases, and describes how the impact areas relate to each other and how design can influence them. Design research can help increase the designer’s influence by contributing theoretical models that explain the various relationships in the impact areas. We propose a three-part classification of these models to get an overview of the current state of knowledge of each impact area, and to discuss the different ways in which models can guide designers. In the discussion, we offer four action points to help set a concerted agenda for impact-centered design research.@en

Research in positive psychology indicates that sustained well-being is more determined by our actions than by our possessions. Products' contribution to well-being may thus be grounded in their potential to support well-being-enhancing activities rather than in their material value. In a laddering study, we investigated how products shape a range of well-being determinants, including activities, and well-being outcomes. Following a hierarchical structure, seven product experience qualities, six motivations, and seven activities were empirically found to be linked to long-term well-being. We describe these ingredients for sustained well-being in further detail and provide actionable guidance on how to address them by means of design. As the majority of product-supported long-term well-being outcomes were mediated by activities, we propose activities as most promising starting point in design for sustained well-being.@en

Our globalised world is encountering problems on an unprecedented scale. Many of the issues we face as societies extend beyond the borders of our nations. Phenomena such as terrorism, climate change, immigration, cybercrime and poverty can no longer be understood without considering the complex socio-technical systems that support our way of living. It is widely acknowledged that to contend with any of the pressing issues of our time, we have to substantially adapt our lifestyles. To adequately counteract the problems of our time, we need interventions that help us actually adopt the behaviours that lead us toward a more sustainable and ethically just future. In Designing for Society, Nynke Tromp and Paul Hekkert provide a hands-on tool for design professionals and students who wish to use design to counteract social issues. Viewing the artefact as a unique means of facilitating behavioural change to realise social impact, this book goes beyond the current trend of applying design thinking to enhancing public services, and beyond the idea of the designer as a facilitator of localised social change.@en

Over the past years, product designers have been involved in collaborative developments of smart material composites early on in the development process, to showcase creative applications of them. In these projects, the way the material is presented to the development team and the extent to which its properties are defined affect how designers understand the potentials and boundaries of the material and envision product applications. In the context of a European project, Light.Touch.Matters, we studied the attempt of designers to understand and prototype underdeveloped composites of thin-film organic light emitting diodes and piezoelectric polymer. Arguing for a collaborative exploration of the unique experiences that such underdeveloped composites unfold, we elaborate on a challenge designers face in understanding and prototyping the experiential qualities, specifically, the dynamic and performative qualities. The paper presents our design approach and complementary tools to overcome this challenge. It further discusses the applicability and limitations of the proposed design supports in the context of collaborative materials development and outlines future research directions.

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Esthetic principles describe the levels or combination of design dimensions that are esthetically appreciated. Current principles focus on dimensions connected to product design itself (e.g., unity and variety) or dimensions that refer to a product design's relationship to other product designs (e.g., typicality and novelty). However, product design also has a social significance—they help consumers shape their identity—and this social dimension has hitherto been overlooked in research on esthetic appreciation. In this paper, we propose and investigate the social esthetic principle “Autonomous, yet Connected.” In four studies, we show that a product's design leads to the highest esthetic appreciation if it strikes an optimal balance between nurturing the two seemingly opposite needs for connectedness and autonomy. Further, we show how conditions of safety and risk moderate the effects of the principle, which suggests our principle may have evolutionary grounding.

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