Collaborative research projects are great opportunities for the involved design professionals to learn. Many design professionals join in such collaborations to contribute with their existing professional expertise, but also to further develop and extend that expertise. However, learning by individuals is usually not the main aim, and we lack insight in the learning opportunities through collaboration in such projects. We propose that we need to understand this learning process better in order to make this happen more often and more effectively. This paper presents how four design professionals who each participated in different collaborative research projects look back on their learning processes. We interviewed each participant and drew a process map with them. The results show that these projects offer multifaceted learning opportunities and outcomes of important value for the professionals.The paper shows that their learning a) is not always easily recognised by the professionals themselves, b) benefits from their active engagement as learners, and c) requires supportive conditions in project arrangements. The paper provides guidelines for lead researchers, design professionals, as well as funding agencies to recognise and value this learning, to support explicit reflection and articulation, and to facilitate supportive learning conditions.

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As design research matures, more designers pursue a PhD. In its turn, the PhD itself is changing from a solitary preparation for a career in academia toward an increasing emphasis on interdisciplinary and international experience and a greater variety of jobs. These developments call for greater opportunities for PhD candidates to build their network during the PhD. The WunderLibrary, developed in the EU-funded project DoCS4Design, aims to connect PhD candidates through a web-based platform for sharing educational and research materials and making contact. To seed the platform's ontology, the collection of tags which connect the items in it, we studied the keywords and metadata from a set of 342 PhD theses from the 6 PhD programmes in the project over the last decade. The collection of theses came with between three and six freely chosen keywords, typically provided by the authors. In this paper, we describe the process of curating the keywords and clustering the resulting data on three levels. This produced a set of 342 keywords and two levels of clustering. The raw data are openly available. We discuss data analysis and a spin-off application that uses higher-level labels to help PhD candidates describe their work.@en

Design students, professionals, and academics often use design labels, such as social design, co-design, and sustainable design, to position or explain their work. We argue that the labels are insufficient for a clear and nuanced approach to describing design practices, and suggest a way to say a bit more. Seventy design labels were collected and categorized, yielding five clusters. Four clusters derive their name from a necessary element of a design project, namely resources, outcomes, criteria, and methods. The fifth cluster indicates application domains. The discussion explores the clusters and the related elements. We conclude that the labels are often insufficient to clarify a position, that the elements can assist in describing and planning a design practice. But that the labels remain valuable: although these do not describe or explain how these practices are conducted, they do serve to identify specialist communities, and highlight new directions in the field.

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Design skills and methods have been at the conceptual foundation of the design discipline(s) for at least the past half century. Over this period, design has also changed, focusing on new outcomes, serving new goals, and addressing different scales and broader application areas. On the one hand, there is a large set of methods and tools; on the other hand, there is growing visibility with ‘design thinking’ both giving design greater appeal and a shallower message. Currently many design schools struggle with adapting their curricula to meet the new demands for sustainability, diversity, and incorporating new technologies such as AI or Biodesign (designing as, with and for nature). Several academic initiatives have produced visions giving direction to those efforts. This paper reports the outcomes of a series of discussions by experienced educators, attempting to produce a specification of the goals and detailed objectives of design methods education. We share these outcomes not as a definitive prescription for the incorporation of methods within a design curriculum, but as a reference point for further development.@en

Spatial ability is malleable and belongs in the preschool. For preschoolers, many analytical activities with one correct answer such as tangram have been developed. Less is known about employing open-ended design assignments to creatively practice spatial thinking. Little attention has been paid to the mutual qualitative differences between children when engaged in spatial thinking and insight in children’s motivation is lacking. As design and play have much in common, our first study investigated play orientations during free play of 49 Dutch preschoolers during free play in a low and a high SES school. Participative interviews and observations in the construction and home corners of two schools uncovered different play orientations– construction and pretend play - and either a focus on open-ended objects or on defined objects. In a subsequent study, the influence of these play and object orientations on how children design was investigated. This study with 13 children also used generative design research methods grounded in ethnographic research and therapeutic practices. Using an empathic, story-based, open-ended design challenge, results showed that play-orientations of children influence the length and nature of the design activities as well as the design outcomes. Children with a pretend-play orientation are longer engaged and talk more about the character involved. They usually built organic structures with a variety of objects, while construction-oriented children mainly built sturdy and geometrical structures and mainly used open-ended objects. In all play orientations, spatial thinking was practiced and children were spatially challenged. For example, in all orientations difficulties arose around getting the character in out the structure, however, as different structures were build, the nature of these difficulties were also different. Open-ended design activities that contain characters and problems children can empathize with are a valuable addition to the palette of activities to develop spatial thinking in early classrooms. Our study shows that design activities stimulate children to practice spatial thinking in a creative context and have the ability to engage children with a pretend-play orientation who are otherwise less engaged in construction. The play-orientations and object-orientations are informative for research and the development of spatial educational interventions aiming at a diversity of learners.@en

In Research through Design, design actions contribute to the method of research, to the way knowledge is developed. This brings out several tensions and confusions between what research and design are, what they produce, how the two are done together, and how the results can be shared with other researchers, practitioners, and stakeholders. This chapter draws lessons from two seminal PhD on how developing prototypes, and having a conceptual framework helps coherence in broad, phenomenon-led explorations.

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"This paper explores the limitations and functions of design labels, such as social design, codesign, and sustainable design. It argues for a clearer and more nuanced approach to describing design practices. The authors collected over seventy of such labels and categorized them into five clusters. Four of these clusters derive their name from a necessary element of a design project, namely resources, outcomes, criteria, and methods. The labels in the fifth cluster pertain to specific application domains. The discussion explores the relations between these labels and the elements they represent, highlighting that each element can evolve during a design project. The authors conclude that the elements can assist students, professionals, and academics to planning and describing the execution of a design practice. It’s important to notice that although design labels do not define the practices, they do serve to identify specialist communities, and indicate new directions in the field. "@en

Simulations have always been important to engineers who use preliminary models and test rigs to find out whether the designs they have thought up will actually work. With the passage of time, computer systems have been developed which are capable of creating telepresence not just in a single virtual world but in a large number of virtual worlds. Such systems are often termed virtual reality (VR) systems. A VR system is a computer people can no longer see. There are two sorts: systems which completely surround people and offer a complete virtual environment, and systems which only offer a window onto a virtual reality. Computer-aided design is a way of designing in which the computer is integrated into the design process. This confers a number of important benefits. The aim of artificial intelligence is to make a computer achieve results that would be regarded as intelligent if they had been produced by a human.@en

Existing research integrity (RI) guideline development methods are limited in including various perspectives. While co-creation methods could help to address this, there is little information available to researchers and practitioners on how, why and when to use co-creation for developing RI guidelines, nor what the outcomes of co-creation methods are. In this paper, we aim to address this gap. First, we discuss how co-creation methods can be used for RI guideline development, based on our experience of developing RI guidelines. We elaborate on steps including preparation of the aims and design; participant sensitization; organizing and facilitating workshops; and analyzing data and translating them into guidelines. Secondly, we present the resulting RI guidelines, to show what the outcome of co-creation methods are.Thirdly, we reflect on why and when researchers might want to use co-creation methods for developing RI guidelines. We discuss that stakeholder engagement and inclusion of diverse perspectives are key strengths of co-creation methods. We also reflect that co-creation methods have the potential to make guidelines implementable if followed by additional steps such as revision working groups. We conclude that co-creation methods are a valuable approach to creating new RI guidelines when used together with additional methods. @en

This chapter focuses on explorative research using research through design, because in these we have seen the strength of doing design as a part of doing research. It looks at one guided by a research prototype. The chapter outlines how both prototypes and frameworks can help guide explorative research: prototypes through giving a physical instantiation of a phenomenon, frameworks by placing a phenomenon in a conceptual perspective. The series of prototypes anchored the focus of the research, and determined the scope. The research progressed through a number of stages: after exploration, the prototype was developed and during its development it was continuously tested with members of the ID-StudioLab research community as test subjects and critical participants. The role that design skills, and design actions, can have in research has received growing attention. Prototypes force the researcher to confront theory, confront the world, they evoke discussion and reflection, change the world, and can be used to test a theory@en

Knowledge from academic design research projects does not always help design professionals to actually strengthen their work. Based on a multi-case study, this paper describes how researchers view the impact of their design research projects on design practice and what they do to achieve this. Even in projects where impact on design practice is a stated ambition, several challenges can stand in the way, such as a lack of funding opportunities and unclarity on the needs of design practice. The paper provides tips for researchers and funding parties who want to inform design practice by research, including tips to operationalize design practice roles.

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In the DoCS4Design project, six established PhD programmes in design pooled and compared the diversity in their practices in guiding PhDs (e.g., 3- or 4-year programmes, small or large amounts of formal education, small or large numbers of staff and students). Panelists from the six programmes discussed these differences to- gether with 60 conference participants. Starting from a review of practices at the six programmes (the ‘Map & Glossary’), the conversation covered several themes: strate- gic and institutional aspects of the PhD programs, logistical and administrative aspects of these programs, and fundamentally: how (diversely) do we define what is the PhD in Design. The conversation then explored how the programs, DRS and other design organizations could be more effective in supporting PhD students, advisors, and pro- grammes, and deal with new requirements, e.g., toward more interdisciplinary and more international experience, and preparing PhD students to take leadership in re- search teams more than being solitary researchers.@en

As socio-technological environments shape and direct listener behaviour, an ecologicalaccount is needed that encompasses listening in complexity (i.e., multiple listeners, multiple sounds and their sources, and multiple sound-induced actions that ensure the success of a mission). In this study, we explored sound-induced action under the framework of “acoustic biotopes” (a notion
of ecological acoustics by Smolders, Aertsen, and Johanessma, 1979 and 1982) in a specific socio- technological environment, i.e., the context of an orthopaedic operating room. Our approach is based on literature research into the topics of environmental psychology and auditory perception and
action and in situ observations in healthcare with field recordings, participatory observations, and interviews on the spot. The results suggest a human-centered definition of sound-induced action in acoustic biotopes: Acoustic biotope is an active and shared sound environment with entangled interactions and sound-induced actions taking place in a specific space that has a critical function.
Listening in highly functional environments is an individual experience and is influenced by hearing function, physical position and role in an environment, and the task at hand. There is a range of active and passive sound listeners as a function of their attentive state and listeners as sound sources within the acoustic biotope. There are many different sound sources and sound locals in socio-technological environments and sounds have great potential to serve critical information to operators. Overall, our study provides a holistic, multi-layered and yet a listener-centric view on the organisation of complex spaces and the results can immediately be applicable for rethinking the acoustic environment for ORs for better listening and sound-induced action.@en

Academic design research has developed a rich collection of knowledge and tools, but often the results fail to land in design practice. We conducted an interview series with experienced design professionals to study how the knowledge that they derived from research projects was of use to them. They used tools, papers, books, and their own experience in research projects to learn about designing, about the application domain and about project organisation. We found that useful knowledge for design practice can take various formats, including prescribing tools which serve as demonstrator and a reference frame. We discuss how academic researchers can use these insight to make their research more applicable in a way that meets design practice needs.@en

Academic design research has developed a rich collection of knowledge and tools, but often the results fail to land in design practice. We conducted an interview series with experienced design professionals to study how the knowledge that they derived from research projects was of use to them. They used tools, papers, books, and their own experience in research projects to learn about designing, about the application domain and about project organisation. We found that useful knowledge for design practice can take various formats, including prescribing tools which serve as demonstrator and a reference frame. We discuss how academic researchers can use these insight to make their research more applicable in a way that meets design practice needs.

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This map brings together definitions and examples from science, engineering, and design. The aim is to point at key experiences and examples that have played a part, and to convey in a few words (and a pointer to a more in-depth training or hands-on experience) what it means. @en

This paper develops a set of design strategies for promoting young children’s physical activity. These strategies are developed by taking the design perspective of Playscapes as a starting point. Playscapes suggests that three play qualities are key in promoting young children’s physical activity: free, bodily, and dispersed play. We present two field studies in a pediatric oncology center, in which we observed how these play qualities were reflected in children’s interactions with two Playscape designs: Stickz, a collection of branch-shaped objects, were placed in a semi-public waiting area; Fizzy, a self-propelled robotic ball, was introduced to patient rooms. Free play was analyzed according to the diversity of play activities, bodily play according to the diversity and exertion level of bodily movements, and dispersed play according to the floor area covered. Based on the findings, we discuss how Fizzy and Stickz contributed to each play quality, and derive a set of design strategies that can be applied in different contexts to stimulate young children’s physical activity. With these strategies, Playscapes offers a concrete alternative to existing approaches, supporting designers in directing interactions towards physical activity while leaving room for children’s unstructured and spontaneous play.@en

Since its introduction, Research through Design (RtD) has taken on a wide variety of forms. Currently, there is a lack of clarity about what connects and separates different RtD approaches. Several attempts have been made to clarify these matters, often in the form of a top-down categorization. Here we start on a different path, one that is open for different points of view and grounded in the ongoing concerns and needs of RtD practitioners. Over a two-month period, we engaged a local research community in weekly discussions about RtD in their work. Thoughts and questions were posted on a dedicated wall-space, maintained, and clustered over the weeks. As a result, we identified 11 themes that indicate concerns among participants about RtD. We suggest the themes can help in articulating different RtD ‘styles’ and ‘genres’, and believe this should be a collaborative and bottom-up effort that crosses disciplinary and institutional boundaries.@en