There are currently limited guidelines on how to design complex assistive technologies (ATs), which necessitates expertise beyond that possessed by designers, occupational therapists (OTs), or end-users. To address this issue, we conducted a series of four participatory workshops to study various configurations of OT-designer-user collaboration in co-designing do-it-yourself (DIY) ATs for an older adult with mobility impairment. We then proposed a specific co-design framework for such OT-designer-user collaboration.

The user has been very well defined over the last decades. With human-centered design becoming more widely applied within various industries, the user's needs are being taken into account more than ever. What is often overlooked is the user's counterpart: the non-user. Integrating the non-user into modern development projects provides great additional value. This paper is compiling current definitions in order to analyse them within the context of product development and to make a contribution toward a comprehensive definition of the non-user that can be applied to various disciplines.

The design community can contribute significantly to the success of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in Africa. Currently, alignment of the design research community on sustainable development goals in Africa is not well understood. In this paper, we review relevant literature and identify trends in research topics studied and in patterns of collaboration between researchers. We find differences in topic representation and collaboration trends between African-based and non-African based researchers. Understanding these differences better will be important for future research.

Healthcare systems are under strain, this creates a challenge for designers to develop solutions for better health and care delivery. This paper presents a sandbox of illustrative design themes used to improve health systems based on state of the art research projects. These were collated from presentations at The Second International Meeting on Healthcare Systems Design Research, held at DTU-Technical University of Denmark. Attending groups were mapped based on their research keywords, target journals and methodologies in order to gain insight on the communities research landscape.

In this paper, the authors propose a culture-centred tool called Speculative Ethnography to support the practice of design for the speculative future. Most explorations of tools and techniques of design for the speculative future focus on materialising the speculation. Instead, Speculative Ethnography provides a guideline to help designers define their speculation through the scientific imagination of the plausible future. It ensures the effectiveness of design for the speculative future and supports the interaction of culture and design for the speculative future.

How can we design and engineer research that leads to the development and effective implementation of complex healthcare interventions? We advocate for a systems design-based approach when initiating clinical research to anticipate the proposition of complex interventions. Using cognitive care as an example, we investigate how hybrid design-inspired methodologies can promote organisational effectiveness and how strong clinical evidence can support successful conceptualisation and uptake of novel interventions into routine clinical practice.

Engineering design methods are typically evaluated via case studies, surveys, and experiments. Meanwhile, domains such as the health sciences as well as software engineering have developed further powerful evaluation approaches. The objective of this paper is to show how evaluation approaches from the health sciences and software engineering might further the evaluation of engineering design methods. We survey these approaches and show which approaches could be transferred to the evaluation of engineering design methods.

Eco-tools and techniques often lack guidance and a robust methodology for improving the environmental performance of products with an active use phase. A case study was undertaken to investigate the role of Design of Experiments (DoE) in providing insights to improve the environmental performance of two product categories with active use phases: showers and tapware. The results show how varying the components can reduce energy use and demonstrated how DoE can be used as an objective method for optimising a products environmental performance when user behaviour can influence the results.

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.

Co-design with marginalised people is crucial for sustained adoption and use of frugal innovations or Product Service Systems (PSS). Interviews were conducted with eighteen designers to identify barriers and enablers that they encounter in co-designing with marginalised people. The findings suggest that the factors supporting or hindering this co-design relate to the context of marginalised societies, co-design processes and methods, organisational issues, and aspects of collaboration. Consideration of these factors can lead to more impactful co-design with marginalised people.

The research outlined in this paper investigated the sun protection behaviour in young men age 18 to 24. Firstly, field observations were conducted on the beach where the sun protection behaviour occurs. The findings highlighted the importance of gender linked with low levels of sun protection behaviour in young men. This informed the next study through participatory design sessions using a simulated beach environment. The results showed design opportunities with taking an account of gender in sun protection behaviour which opens new avenues where design has a key role in health promotion.

We introduce the concept of social sustainability, intertwined with ecological and economic aspects, to the field of service robots and comparable automation technology. It takes a first step towards a comprehensive guideline that operationalizes and applies social sustainability. By applying this guideline to the project MURMEL we offer a concept that collects and rates social key issues to visualize their individual importance. Social sustainability is an important and often overlooked aspect of sustainable technology development which should be considered in the early development phase.

Delivering good quality mental health services remains a top priority in the English National Health Service (NHS). An approach to designing better delivery systems that takes into account the complexities of mental health services is highly desirable. This paper follows previous work that have sought to identify the key components of mental health delivery systems and explored the nature of the relationships between them. The paper presents the results of a qualitative thematic analysis of the requirements for diagrams as tools for describing and representing delivery systems in mental health.

A targeted development of safe medical products can be supported by design methods. This paper analyses which design methods are applied in the development of medical devices and whether they are adapted for considering medical devices’ special features (legal, human and technical issues). In particular, variety management, risk assessment and user-centered design for medical devices are examined. Typically, interdisciplinary risk assessment is methodically supported. Additionally, user-centered design methods for requirements assessment, design verification and design validation are applied.

Companies struggle with identifying relevant sustainability aspects strategically, assessing alternative solutions quantitatively, and making trade-offs. This paper reports results from a prescriptive study with an aerospace company, and presents the Sustainability Criteria And product life-cycle Data Simulation (SCADS) approach. Based on strategic integration of sustainability indicators, this approach aims to enable visualisation and comparison of the sustainability implications of different concepts in early design phases of product development.

Environmental issues such as climate change are leading to sustainability challenges for the aerospace industry. New materials such as composites allow significant weight reduction, which leads to a lower fuel consumption. However, composites involve complex processes and there is a lack of knowledge on their social and environmental consequences. Through two cases based on real aero-engines components, this paper shows that the weight savings provided by composites reduce significantly the CO2 emissions during flight which compensates the environmental drawbacks from production and recycling.

Evolutions in corporate law recently introduced an optional commitment mechanism in the corporate contract: a purpose. Its writing is a pivotal but is yet puzzling from a design perspective. Especially it raises questions about how that could help shaping a responsible governance model for innovation. Our paper builds on an extended-decision framework to propose a formal model of how a stated-purpose shapes the decision situation. Our results highlight several purpose formulation strategies and finally a typology regarding how robustness to changes is embedded in the process is proposed.

Hip joint arthroplasty is considered to be a safe, successful and cost-effective procedure to restore hip joint functionality. However, a successful hip joint arthroplasty affects different stakeholders e.g. patient and surgeon and depends on various influencing factors within the product life cycle as well as the applied technological opportunities. Due to the complex dependencies between influencing factors, technological opportunities and stakeholders, this contribution introduces an IPD-based approach to improve the quality of total hip arthroplasties.