Conference Agenda

Creating respectful and sensitive engagements in design students is essential for conducting research in complex healthcare and social environments. These skills help students understand the diverse experiences of different stakeholders, ensuring respectful and relevant interactions and design solutions. This paper presents the design and development of a new approach to teaching user-centred research methods for an MSC programme in design for health care. The approach focuses on the development of building block projects that equip students with observation and qualitative research skills, ensuring sensitivity and empathy before engaging in real-world projects. Three projects are described. The first two building block projects took place within the university: the first involved observing the First Time User Experience of a product with users within the student’s network, the second involved interviewing paramedic students in role-playing scenarios and the third project, external to the university involved an immersive real-world experience, where students collaborated with various stakeholders—patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. The students showed significant growth post focus group, in qualitative research skills, improving their ability to navigate complex human contexts and translate findings into actionable design insights. These findings emphasise the importance of developing these skills in an educational setting before involving students in real-world healthcare contexts.

The Human-centred Design (HCD) standard has been the foundation for designing interactive systems since the 1980s, inspiring commonly adopted design and development approaches. However, it questioned whether HCD alone can address today’s complex societal challenges. Critics highlight that individual user needs may conflict with collective or long-term goals, prompting a shift toward ethics-focused design approaches such as Value-sensitive Design and Humanity-centred Design.

This “ethics turn” in design education encourages students to follow a human-centered approach and account for a broader set of stakeholders, including non-users, manufacturing chain actors, and more than human entities like ’the environment’ or ‘nature’. Although we share the concerns addressed by these authors, in this paper, we argue that such approaches are insufficient for ethics-focused design education because they do not help students recognize the ethical dimensions of concrete design decisions, such as identifying design choices that may reify social norms.

We focus on a case study on designing digital tools for democratic participation that are more inclusive to underrepresented groups of adolescents in the Netherlands. We use the case to illustrate how ethics-focused methods require a type of reflection that may not be conveyed easily in design education. We feel, however, that it can be scaffolded through a playing field analysis, which encourages students to identify tensions between playing fields of design: technology, humans, organizations, society, and design. This approach may represent a step towards acknowledging these tensions and recognizing the ethical consequences of practical design choices.

The past two decades witnessed extensive design research on addressing complex societal issues, exploring and developing novel design tools, methods, and approaches in this pursuit. This was parallel to the wider adoption of design thinking due to its unique potential to creatively explore, distil, and develop responses to complex challenges, which led to its adoption in many other disciplines. As such, design is becoming an increasingly more interdisciplinary endeavour incorporating the multitude of perspectives. However, the critical link between novel research and practical application in addressing these issues is often missing, leading to a gap where critical perspectives fail to translate into actionable practices for future designers. The research and education on design management fell behind in exploring and addressing the implications of this complexity in organisational contexts, which only hinders the potential of design practices.

Realising this crucial gap, this paper will present the development, implementation and implications of a new design management course structure. The course was delivered at two universities with radically different approaches to design:

a. Department of Industrial Design, Faculty of Architecture, [Technical University 1, Country], as a final year course,

b. School of Design, Institute for the Contemporary Arts, [University 2, Country], as a second-year course.

The course was delivered for two years at each university (four years in total), providing robust data and insights into its delivery and student learning. The course structure is as follows:

1. 'Design Management Basics' part covers the foundational principles of design management, providing students with a solid understanding of the field.

2. 'New Concerns in Design Management' part addresses contemporary issues such as environmental sustainability, collaboration, and the evolving roles of designers, as well as the gendered aspects of designing.

3. 'The Big Picture' part introduces models of innovation and transitions, helping students understand the broader context of design management.

At [University 1], the course focused on depicting students' unique product design processes over two years. This approach allowed students to apply design management principles for devising projects and fostering a deeper yet nuanced and reflexive understanding of the subject. Students developed the capacity to embed sustainability and circular economy principles throughout the product design process, manage collaborations in terms of disciplinarity and user participation, and apply a gender lens in line with policy-level concerns. At [University 2], the course took an inquiry-based approach, encouraging students to investigate and address real-world design management challenges in different design sub-disciplines according to their career aspirations, such as service design and AR/VR design. The course was able to equip future designers with the skills, knowledge and critical lenses necessary to translate critical perspectives into practical action and to create social and environmental values not only for organisations but also for society and the environment. This new course structure not only enhances students' understanding of design management but also prepares them to tackle complex societal issues through innovative and sustainable design practices as design managers or designer-entrepreneurs.

A majority of design students often face challenges in developing empathy and navigating barriers such as language, age, gender, emotional, hierarchical, neurological, cultural, socio-economic, socio-emotional and educational. In an increasingly globalized world, designers are expected to create products and services that address these diverse user needs across broad spectrums of social, cultural, and physical contexts. However, many traditional design education methods primarily emphasize on technical skills and individualistic approaches, overlooking the importance of empathy and socio-emotional competencies. These gaps hinder students' ability to approach design inclusively, impacting both their projects and everyday interactions. This study investigates the impact of collaborative, participatory design education practices by examining how play-based learning can foster empathy and bridge socio-emotional divides. Through experiential, multi-sensory activities, students will engage in inclusive learning methods that equip them with essential skills and tools to design for diverse communities. By exploring how play can overcome social, emotional, and physical barriers, the study assesses how participatory teaching methods can prepare design students for more inclusive design practices. The study recommends the development of educational strategies that integrate play as a core teaching method, emphasizing empathy, inclusivity, and socio-emotional learning within design curricula. Such an initiative will prepare future designers to create solutions that are not only technically proficient but also socially considerate and inclusive.

This article describes how the authors applied Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) methodologies obtained in a teacher training to a 3rd year, Project Based Learning (PBL) course in the Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) degree at Elisava. The Crossover Project course presents students with a sustainability challenge that they address in groups (3-5 students), providing mentoring by two Elisava tutors and one external expert in the field of the challenge addressed. This paper focuses on the experiences of tutoring two of the four class groups from the course. In 2024, there were 3 and 5 student groups in each of the two class groups, obtaining results that show the integration of sustainability competencies even though these competencies were not made explicit to the students.

Reviewing the course results, it is possible to understand that Systems, Future, and Strategic Thinking competencies are intrinsic to the design process, even if they are not always framed explicitly to students. It is also clear that a six-week course duration is not enough to achieve full implementation of project solutions.

In recent years, design workshops have gained attention as a means for driving innovation and solving social issues. Particularly in initiatives aimed at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), workshops that leverage design thinking have proven effective in garnering collaboration from a broad range of stakeholders. Typically, design workshops require participants to create ideas that can be propelled toward social implementation. However, there is a lack of knowledge on how leadership styles affect the workshop process and subsequent social implementation activities. Team leaders play a crucial role in unifying the team and promoting collaboration with communities and stakeholders. Understanding how this leadership influences social implementation and identifying the common characteristics of successful leaders are important, but these factors have not been sufficiently examined as contributors to successful social implementation.

In response, this study seeks to address these challenges by examining the impact of team leaders on social implementation and proposing a more effective workshop management method. Using a Participatory Research approach, this study will use participatory design workshops as case studies, focusing on the relationship between workshop management and social implementation and clarifying how the role of team leaders enhances the likelihood of social implementation. Specifically, the research will: (1) review participatory design workshops conducted from 2012 to 2024 from the perspective of workshop organizers, analyze recorded data to identify shifts in factors related to social implementation through the lens of team leadership over the past 13 years; (2) interview team leaders who achieved social implementation to clarify motivations and specific post-workshop activities, make comparisons with the teams that did not achieve social implementation to extract distinguishing factors and contributors; (3) examine the relationship between team leaders, community resources, challenges, and opportunities to identify success factors for social implementation; and (4) analyze the results to propose a workshop management method that enhances the potential for social implementation.

Close collaboration between team leaders and communities to generate feasible solutions has been identified as a key factor in increasing the likelihood of social implementation. Based on these findings, this study proposes a workshop management method based on collaboration with local communities. This method will enable workshop participants to explore solutions that are adapted to the needs of the community, thus taking concrete steps toward a sustainable society. The methodology proposed in this study is expected to be useful for producing effective outcomes in design workshops, offering practical value for addressing social challenges through design workshops.