Background/objectives Call-bells are often taken-for-granted systems to heighten safety. In joint discussions among residential care home (RCH) residents, their family members, and staff, issues related to call-bell use in everyday life and work were repeatedly raised. In this article, we explore these experience-based perspectives, addressing several key questions important for call-bell use and communication.

Research design/methods We inductively analyzed a series of individual interviews and group discussions with 44 individuals at two units of the same Swedish RCH, conducted as part of a participatory action research project to strengthen supportive end-of-life environments.

Results While the call-bell was a central part of RCH communication, we found: fragmented understanding about how the call bell functioned among all participants; many residents lacked the physical and cognitive competencies demanded for call-bell use; tensions between use of the call-bell for social/existential communication versus purely discrete tasks; and that a call-bell system assuming room-bound residents exacerbated issues related to varied response times, lack of feedback mechanisms, and pressured work situations.

Discussion and implications Investigation of the call-bell system provides an empirical example of how complex relationships among stakeholders are played out in concrete situations. Tensions between different logics of care, and between clock and embodied time become evident.

Konstfack has had financing from KK-stiftelsen (The Knowledge Foundation) for two years to address emerging design challenges in the increasingly complex contexts that design is engaging with. Examples are healthcare, design for sustainable development, social innovation, service design. The objective has been to explore potential expansion and supplementary developments of the currently well-functioning specialisation Individual Study Plan in Design. This has been done in the project Design, beyond service and product – educating for new vistas of design professions. People from academia, consultancy, business and the public sector have been invited to workshops, seminars and symposia in order to learn from them regarding the current situation and anticipated needs. The project has also done study visits to design schools, organisations and businesses. The report presents reflections on design competencies and a few possible ways to proceed at Konstfack.

Konstfack har haft finansiering från KK-stiftelseni två år för att utforska nya designutmaningar i de alltmer komplicerade sammanhangen som design engagerar sig i. Exempel är hälsovård, design för hållbar utveckling, social innovation, service design. Målet har varit att undersöka en möjlig utvidgning och kompletterande utveckling av den nuvarande väl fungerande specialiseringen Individuell studieplan i design. Detta har gjorts i projektet Design, bortom tjänst och produkt – utbildning för nya perspektiv på designyrken. Personer från akademi, konsultverksamhet, näringsliv och offentlig sektor har blivit inbjudna till workshops, seminarier och symposier för att vi ska kunna lära av dem om nuvarande situation och förväntad utveckling. Projektet har också gjort studiebesök på designskolor, organisationer och näringsliv. Rapporten presenterar reflektioner kring designkompetenser och några möjliga sätt att gå vidare på Konstfack.

This paper explores how designers’ core competencies relate to the emerging paradigmatic shift in design practice, and provides suggestions for design education. The shift is due to the increased interest from design in engaging with social and political contexts and issues the last fifteen years. Designers have several core competencies and in this paper prototyping and thereby the capacity to work with wicked problems are explored. More explicitly, we suggest that designers can design relevant propositions with the help of successive prototyping. Tightly integrating designing propositions with problem setting is necessary when dealing with wicked problems. This works well when designers deal with signs and things. However, in order to deal with increasingly complex contexts, we suggest that design students should get more relevant experience of prototyping in complex contexts and improved reflection by making use of theories from STS in order to deal with these complex contexts. 

I dokumentet presenteras det arbete som gjorts med en co-designansats inom forskningsprojektet Decode - Community Design for Conflicting Desires, 2014-2016. 

Genom att arbeta genom en co-designansats undersöks hur medborgardeltagande och andra samarbeten kan stödjas i planprocesser i stadsutvecklingssammanhang med syfte att skapa relevanta och hållbara förslag.

De lärdomar och bidrag som föreslås rör: vikten av förhållningssätt, att arbeta med motstridiga intressen, materiella förhandlingar mellan olika logiker samt hur förslagen lever vidare.

In this paper I explore the use of the concept representation and argue that it can complement the concept constituting in order to support the design and critical analysis of participatory design activities. John Law acknowledges that in a representation some things are made present, while others are deliberately made absent, which is necessary. But it is important to realise that there are also things that are Othered, i.e. things that are unconsciously repressed and absent. The concepts are explored with the help of two cases involving participatory design workshops. I discuss how both concepts can be used in order to make sense of these participatory design activities. The paper also reflects on the importance of what realities the method used supports to be made present.

Projektet Hela resan – verklighetsbaserade videoprototyper har använt ett arbetssätt som är tänkt att utgå från verkliga behov för att ta fram tjänste- och produktprototyper. I projektet har arbetssättet använts för att ta fram koncept och prototyper av digitala produkter och tjänster som underlättar resande med kollektivtrafik. 

Arbetssättet varvar användarnära, gestaltande och samskapande arbete genom videoobservationer, videoprototyper och workshops. Tanken är att utformningen av varor och tjänster ska utgå från användarnas faktiska behov i en samskapande process med tjänstemän och utvecklares erfarenhet och kunskap. Syftet med detta samskapande är att stödja en utveckling som strävar efter att fler kan resa mer självständigt. 

This paper presents our experiences from a research project on how to co-develop new methods for idea generation within a service design practice. As an example the paper describes how service designers used two visual inquiry methods together with customers and employees in different service situations. The results show that that there is great potential in developing methods for co-design work based on design approaches. This project relies on a mindset where materials of different kinds, that can be organized and reorganized in different ways are used. This supports a way of creating knowledge that facilitates production of other results than the purely verbal. We have also realized that it requires a great amount of work to achieve a great result.

This (proposal for a) full day workshop intends to explore design experiments to create a deeper understanding of the underpinning mindsets, epistemological assumptions and their implications as well as possibilities within the context of academic research. The participants will contribute with their experiences of conducting design experiments in a variety of settings and contexts. During the workshop the participants will give and get feedback on the experiments that they presented and explored, get to learn from others’ experiments, and also participate in the discussion and development of proposals for new experiments(new) principles for design experiments in academic research. One aim of the workshop is to develop a conceptual map that categorizes the various design experiments based on their epistemological assumptions and practical implications for design practice as well as academic research.