Conference Agenda

Designing for disability is a very specialised area where designers need to consider parameters that make the intervention socially inclusive, functionally impactful, user-friendly, and widely acceptable. Assistive devices and technologies play a very prominent role in the rehabilitation of people with disabilities. Using these in concurrence with the available treatment procedures helps people with disabilities in achieving independent living. However, designing assistive devices for children with special needs is a challenge, particularly since these users are incapable of providing adequate feedback concerning usability, usefulness, etc. This requires a holistic approach to address the nuances that contemplate the growth of the child, attributes that cater to their daily routine, emotional factors, social interactions, etc.

This paper investigates the adoption of the participatory co-design approach with multi-users involved in the rehabilitation of children with special needs, such as the rehabilitation centre, the therapist, the special educator, and the parent, beyond the child. A customizable assistive device for training children in various motor skills considering the native context, abilities, and needs of children, was designed and tested as a part of this study. This work showcases how the participation of the rehabilitation centre rather, than just one stakeholder, influenced the design intervention. Other than eliciting requirements and affirming the needs of children, feedback on the prototype from multiple users and stakeholders of the rehabilitation centre proved to have high coherence, as they have a common understanding of the target audience.

There have been increasingly significant efforts in exploring various design approaches for user-centric designs. Participatory, user-in-the-loop, co-design, customer-centered design, etc. are undertaken by multiple research groups, and evidence has been gathered from the literature to prove that the resultant design effectively brings out users as the key focus. Along with the inclusion of end users, there have been studies where multiple users and other stakeholders are involved in different facets of the design. While several avenues in robotics, game design, etc. have been ventured using co-design approaches, the design of assistive devices in resource-constraint settings for children with special needs is a relatively less explored territory.

The benefits of extending the co-design approach, from only an individual, i.e., the user to multiple users, i.e., the entire institute, is empirically found in this paper. This approach paved the way for exploring scenarios where the device could be extended to other users or target groups and understanding new requirements from these groups within the same system. This work highlights how building a strong foundation between the institute and the design group can impact the design process and act as a platform to undertake the design of several other interventions in the future, and outlines a different take on the participatory-codesign approach in designing assistive devices for children with special needs in resource-constraint settings, as an exemplar for building collaborations at a systematic or institutional level rather than at the individual level. This ‘multi-user-centric design’ approach as an extension of the ‘user-centric design’ could be leveraged by different communities in designing solutions for special needs.

The state of equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the engineering industry is troubling. The UK has the lowest proportion of female engineers in Europe at just 8%. The Royal Academy of Engineering reports that although 26% of engineering students identify as BAME, only 6% of professional engineers are non-white. This paper will detail the creation of a module in the Mechanical Engineering course at Imperial College, designed to systemically improve EDI in the engineering industry by empowering students taking the module to become champions for EDI.

Galvanised by the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, a group of students from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Imperial College wrote an open letter in their university’s newspaper inviting their department to adopt several specific EDI-improvement measures. The ensuing discourse between staff and students led three students to propose a summer research project, with the goal of designing an elective module focused entirely on EDI in engineering for undergraduate students taking the course.

While UK chartership competencies specifically require engineers to understand diversity and equality issues, many students, including those who designed the module, felt the industry lacked sufficient understanding of EDI and dialogue surrounding these issues. Therefore, this module aimed to fill this gap in engineering education and empower students to affect change as graduates in the engineering sector.

The initial module design was developed through liaising with academics with relevant experience in EDI, outreach charities and relevant teams within Imperial. The aims of the module were to encourage students to think in the context of global society, develop an appreciation for EDI issues, and gain practical experience in initiative coordination to improve EDI in engineering. Students would be introduced to the key issues related to EDI through seminars delivered primarily by expert guest lecturers in the autumn term, and in the spring term, use their knowledge to design an initiative to improve an identified EDI issue within a chosen workplace or institution. Students would also keep a logbook, recording their learning using reflective practice. The module was designed to be completely coursework based.

The student project laid the groundwork and justification for such a module to be added to the curriculum. The implementation of the module into the curriculum required a few modifications to the initial proposal for logistical, financial, and pedagogical reasons, including removing the requirement for students taking the module to action the initiatives they design, ensuring grades were not dependent on external parties.

Although several other departments and institutions have created modules attempting to address EDI issues through societal engagement, this module’s concerted focus on empowering students to become EDI champions in engineering makes it one of the first of its kind offered as part of an engineering degree in the UK. By detailing the process of creating this module at this conference, we hope to inspire and serve as a springboard for the creation of similar modules in other university engineering courses.

This paper discusses how MATLAB software was integrated into the research and design process by capturing and visualising data to inform a 4th-year capstone undergraduate industrial design product development project. Examined within the project framework are perspectives on; data use for design projects from the literature, data collection, understanding project data, designer alternate skill set, using data to justify design direction, associated data capture technologies, data-driven changes of state for UIs (User Interface), and a proposal that designers need to have a data practice paradigm. As technology rapidly embeds into almost every aspect of society, data is produced and captured at a diversity and scale previously unparalleled. Tools and systems to capture and assess such data simultaneously are being democratised, bringing new understandings, and accessibility to systems for testing hypotheses more efficiently, either with sensor-based open-source hardware microprocessors or commercial data-capturing systems. Designers developing smart products, smart system proposals, and IoT devices need to integrate these data capture and assessment tools into traditional product development and research processes. This is especially significant in projects where subtle technical innovation and application of new technologies, “technology epiphanies”[9], or natural user interfaces (NUI) are present. These themes are critical to designers at present; engineers, data scientists, and computing scientists apply data analysis techniques to design problems previously in the product designer’s training skillset. Having an applied understanding of such processes would permit designers to regain control over domains slipping into the grasp of allied product development disciplines.

Although Design thinking originated as a process to solve wicked problems such as environmental issues and inequality (Rittel and Webber, 1973; Buchanan, 1992), the approach tends to focus on a conventional linear growth paradigm rather than a sustainable transition with nature at the core.

Design thinking arose in a time (mid 90s - 00s) when climate and environment did not receive the same attention as in recent years. We believe that Design thinking still has its justification as a process tool, however, the authors are convinced that the tool can be strengthened if we focus more on materials and early use of prototyping, and if the process is supplemented with a consistent focus on natural interdependencies and systems thinking. We will address and discuss this as a perspective to re-balance the Design thinking process in the current context, where natural recovery and green transition should be highest priority. Design thinking emphasizes research as the first step of defining a relevant problem. This can typically be in the form of ‘empathizing’ (Ideo, Stanford), ‘discovering’ (Double Diamond, British Design Council) or ‘finding’ (5F, VIA University College). That is, with a human-centered focus. In this paper, we discuss ways in which systems thinking can serve as an entrance point to a re-balanced Design thinking process model with nature in the center.

In two projects we have employed systems thinking at different phases in the design thinking process. One project has used systems thinking throughout the whole process with an intensified focus on the solution. The other project has used system thinking specifically in the initial phases to find and re-frame the problem through system mapping. The focus in the paper is to evaluate in which ways and to what extent system thinking has contributed to the process.

In this paper we use interviews with participating students from both projects as a foundation for our discussions. The projects are respectively an internal project with local students and an external project with multiple international partner universities and students. We present the two projects, the participating students, and the partners involved together with the insights from the interviews.

The local project Design for Change is a three-week project with 48 students from the 5th semester specialty ‘Entrepreneurship and Innovation’. The GPA Map the System is a 10-week long learning experience offered in collaboration between Humber College, Otago Polytechnic and VIA University College for students to build key competencies for sustainable development (Rieckmann, Mindt and Gardiner, 2017) through activities focused on systems thinking and mapping.

Systems thinking allows us to reorient our thinking from being entity-focused (a product, a local problem, a specific person) to include multiple entities (products and services, multiple problems, multiple stakeholders), their interrelations, the dynamics of the system, and very importantly the different scales of the system (Hunt, 2020)

Based on the insights from the two projects, this paper discuss the didactic approaches to system thinking, the potentials and challenges in connecting it to design thinking processes and summarize with recommendations.

Students of today should learn and see a need for change and recognize the importance of a shift towards a more sustainable business world, design and engineering is an important piece of this equation. The phenomenon of design and engineering is claimed to be in the complex domain. In the complex domain long term plans are not predictable and the methods used to lead this process should be agile and cope with the emergent nature of the phenomenon. Short sprints pulled from a backlog is one of these methods and could therefore be argued to be relevant for teaching design and engineering students. In attempt to learn and practice this method the teaching of UiA’s design and engineering course at master level is using this method directly in the teaching. Combined with the principle of “one piece flow” the students must every week prepare homework for their class, then followed by a relevant classroom teaching and ending the day with a 3-hour graded sprint. The sprints are done either as an individual task or as a group task, depending on the learning objective. The students report about less waste and higher learning effect an impression also shared by the teachers. Let us sprint toward a sustainable future.