Design Ethics is a challenging yet vital topic to address and teach, especially in an age where designers may think they are not ethically responsible for their creations. This paper describes the design of an ethics course where instructors used Research Through Design as a vehicle to teach design ethics to a class of master’s students. We describe how we introduced tabletop game prototyping using the Design Games Framework, a lecture-workshop-supervision format supported by a design diary, and student-led sessions to create a pedagogical structure for students to unpack and explore ethical issues. We discuss the design diaries and present reflections on developing reflexivity through game making, framing design as exploration rather than solution-making, and moving beyond dramatic elements when game-making. The course design and reflections provide guidance for design educators in integrating game-making activities in design ethics courses.

Experiential learning through games is becoming increasingly relevant as games exert an enormous influence on the imaginarium of newer generations. This paper details the use of a game-based learning process focusing on game-making in relation to ethical issues of digitalization for graduate education in digital service innovation. Within the context of a masters education, students from diverse knowledge backgrounds learned about and reflected upon ethical issues related to social media usage by playing, remixing and designing games using the Design Games Framework. This paper illustrates that game-making can enable non-designer students to work with ethical issues. There are good possibilities to explore ethics through designing tabletop games, and having diverse groups of participants can be advantageous. Using a qualitative approach based on observation and interviews, the paper contributes to the body of literature focusing on experiential learning through game-based approaches and to the consolidation of the Design Games Framework.

This paper sets out to present an ongoing pedagogical project where game design is used to let students both learn and reflect upon different perspectives of ethics relevant to the master program they are enrolled in. The paper explains the underlying logic behind the pedagogical process where students develop their own game and at the same time learn about different perspectives of ethics in relation to courses that they are currently taking. With an open and iterative method, we let the students explore, discuss and design a game that can be used by future students. By letting the students decide and lead the development we democratize the learning-process and engage them in a learning experience. More so, this approach to game design as a pedagogical tool to engage and democratize the learning experience is new and increasingly relevant for both students that play games on an everyday basis, but also students that are new to games. Also, it is a constant and dynamic process for both students and teachers. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

System space is introduced as a conceptual design space and as a distinct space from that traditionally addressed by most design processes. The paper intends to address the increasing complexity deriving from the ongoing blend of physical and digital in a postdigital culture and contribute to the current understanding of the effect of “systemic” ways of thinking in design disciplines. We argue that a systemic perspective cannot simply be “added” to the design process and that addressing postdigital complexity, that is, producing solutions to contemporary design problems, requires instead its own conceptualization, in its own space, to be acknowledged, practiced, and formalized as a different way of thinking. We propose that system space lives in a dialectical relationship with design space within the space of the experience and that it provides a way to escape the cognitive traps in design space. We posit that the relationships between system space and design space can be apprehended by means of an exo-process adapted from systems thinking, and that the exo-process provides a supporting structure for the intentional and necessary movement between the different spaces, scales, and modes of thinking required by contemporary design work. We then illustrate such a dialectical relationship through the analysis of three different cases and draw final considerations. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Theory of Change (ToC) has been criticized for a tendency to oversimplify complex contexts and their respective solutions. This chapter aims at (i) examining whether the use of a systemic mapping technique - in conjunction with ToC - can be a way to counteract this tendency towards oversimplification, and (ii) exploring how the two mapping techniques complement each other. Both techniques are applied to a co-modality case where their compatibility with each other is explored. Our findings show that the personal-local-remote (PLR) syntax and ToC do have a complementary functionality with each other, where PLR maps the experience ecosystem and identifies potential leverage points. These leverage points are then explored with ToC in order to find multiple strategic solutions and define them. The combination of both methods allows for a more dynamic and emerging approach to working with systemic change than what is traditionally found in work connected to ToC.

Interactions between the physical and the digital have become increasingly ubiquitous. They are particularly challenging to visualize and illustrate, as they usually unfold over time and space and involve multiple devices, locations, services, and actors. Traditional approaches to sketching user experiences and storyboarding fall short of clearly illustrating how meaningful relationships between people, things, technology, and places are created when they are consistently transitioning from physical spaces into digital spaces and back again. To address this gap, the pictorial showcases how a design framework based on blending theory informs our illustrative best practices and techniques for Art Directing Blended Experiences. The pictorial further discusses the opportunities and challenges of this narrative sketching technique to help designers further explore and capture the essence of how things, relationships, people, and change weave together new personal social spaces and deeper meanings of physical place. © 2024 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).

Smart Cities have been around as a concept for quite some time. However, most examples of Smart Cities (SCs) originate from megacities (MCs), despite the fact that most people live in Small and Medium-sized Cities (SMCs). This paper addresses the contextual setting for smart cities from the perspective of such small and medium-sized cities. It starts with an overview of the current trends in the research and development of SCs, highlighting the current bias and the challenges it brings. We follow with a few concrete examples of projects which introduced some form of “smartness” in the small and medium cities context, explaining what influence said context had and what specific effects did it lead to. Building on those experiences, we summarise the current understanding of Smart Cities, with a focus on its multi-faceted (e.g., smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living) nature; we describe mainstream publications and highlight the bias towards large and very large cities (sometimes even subconscious); give examples of (often implicit) assumptions deriving from this bias; finally, we define the need of contextualising SCs also for small and medium-sized cities. The aim of this paper is to establish and strengthen the discourse on the need for SMCs perspective in Smart Cities literature. We hope to provide an initial formulation of the problem, mainly focusing on the unique needs and the specific requirements. We expect that the three example cases describing the effects of applying new solutions and studying SC on small and medium-sized cities, together with the lessons learnt from these experiences, will encourage more research to consider SMCs perspective. To this end, the current paper aims to justify the need for this under-studied perspective, as well as to propose interesting challenges faced by SMCs that can serve as initial directions of such research.

Digital transformation is increasingly blurring the line between what is software and what is the world, requiring designers to harmoniously blend digital and physical products, services and spaces if they want to orchestrate meaningful experiences that are specifically aimed at the interweaving relationships between people, places and things. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. The pictorial details the results of a twelve-day workshop focusing on real-world audience and performer problems during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: it illustrates how two distinct tools, the Blended Experiences Tool and the Evaluation Tool, focusing on the creation of a blended experience and respectively meant to provide a structured way to approach the generative and reflective stages of the design process, can be used to address this gap. This pictorial illustrates the theoretical framing supporting the Blended Experiences Tool; describes how the workshop produced Laugh Traders, a speculative experience centering on attending and reviewing comedy shows; provides a page-by-page pictorial storyboard of the Laugh Trader experience; introduces the Evaluation Tool and applies it to Laugh Trader to measure the relevance, complexity, and attractiveness of the resulting blended experience. Preliminary reflections conclude the pictorial. © 2023 ACM.

Digital transformation is increasingly blurring the line between what software is and what the physical world can be. This requires designers to harmoniously blend digital and physical products, services, and spaces to orchestrate meaningful experiences specifically aimed at the interweaving relationships between people, places, and things. As technologies and subsequent experiences rapidly become increasingly ubiquitous, it is essential to design pedagogy for these technologies at a human scale. The Pedagogies of Designing Blended Experiences workshop will discuss, present, ideate, and propose novel methods and techniques to develop pedagogies toward this need. The full-day workshop outcomes mainly revolve around a) Identifying key pedagogical problems and obstacles when designing across digital and physical spaces, b) Early ideation techniques for novel pedagogical approaches, and c) A three-phased speculative road-map to incorporate workshop outcomes in higher education learning. © 2024 ACM.

This chapter frames the ongoing epistemological evolution of information architecture as a shift, under the pressure of social and technological change, from the “classical” information architecture of the 1990s and early 2000s to a “contemporary” information architecture. It then establishes a differentiation between the two, modeled in accordance with the conceptualization of innovation in fields of knowledge offered by Van Gigch and Pipino’s Meta-Modeling Methodology. © 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The chapter analyzes the organization of space and narrative in videogames as an instance of the information architecture of digital environments and of thestructural role it plays in shaping experience. It does so by adopting two different waysto analyze the space/narrative relationship: Lynch’s spatial primitives for cognitivemapping, and McGregor’s taxonomy of spatial patterns. These are then applied toread three different action/adventure video games: Prince of Persia: The Sands ofTime, Shadow of the Colossus, and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. The reason isthreefold: to illuminate the individual information architectures of games that might,on the surface, be regarded as providing very similar experiences; to contribute tothe ongoing conversation on embodiment and spatiality in information architecture;and to provide an example of how contemporary information architecture can beemployed to critique different types of information environments.

The walkshop introduces participants to an embodied, structural approach to understand, conceptualize, and design experiences that blend physical and digital space to create a novel space of action, with its own sense of presence, its own affordances, and its very special challenges. It consists of an outdoors morning walking and exploratory session, and of an afternoon mapping and reflective session at the conference venue. During the morning session, participants directly experience the urban fabric of Copenhagen and engage in activities meant to explore and expose the way digital and physical space commingle and become a layered blended space. During the afternoon session, the participants turn notes and observations into maps with the help of methods and tools provided by the facilitators. Attention is paid to identifying friction between pace layers and to the structure, participating elements, and relationships that support the experience in either digital, physical, or blended space, and to reflect on how the structures of embodiment and spatiality shape experience and act as important, non-interface level grounding elements in the design of human activity in all types of space. The walkshop concludes with a plenary discussion of the deliverables created by participants, what insights were gained in the process, and possible developments to follow. © 2024 Owner/Author.

The paper introduces a conceptualization of experience ecosystems as semantic blended spaces instantiated by the activities carried out by independent actors moving freely and at will between different products, services, devices, people, and locations in pursuit of individual goals. This conceptualization is anchored to three distinct cultural and socio-technical shifts that characterize the current postdigital condition: the displacement of postmodernism as the cultural dominant; the embodiment of digitality and the emergence of a blended space of action; the occurrence of a postdigital society. It contributes to ongoing conversations on ecosystem-level and systemic design from the point of view of information architecture and user experience in five distinct ways: by centering the discourse on the actor-driven individual experience made possible by the postdigital condition; by framing the problem space from an embodied, spatial and architectural perspective; by considering the environment systemically as a blend of digital and physical non-contiguous spaces; by recasting the object of design to be the semantic and spatial relationships that exist or could exist between the elements of the actor-centered ecosystem; by introducing a mapping methodology that can be used to capture and spatially describe the relational complexity of said ecosystems for further intervention. © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2021.

PLR (Personal-Local-Remote) is a spatially-oriented syntax for mapping digital/physical experiences as a system of relationships structuring an actor-centered information architecture that is surveyed, explored, and described by means of a set of simple rules. These rules represent the cognitive load, the relationships, and the relative importance of any element in the experience through spatial primitives such as position, proximity, and size. We here present and discuss a case centering on the mobility system in the city of Augsburg, Germany, where the PLR syntax was applied to gain a strategic understanding of Mobil-Flat, a transport service offered by Stadtwerke Augsburg, to map the local mobility experience ecosystem and identify possible leverage points for change. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

The article explores the Pervasive Information Architecture (PIA) framework as a theory and set of tools that support the identification of both the multiple physical/digital, spatially oriented elements that make up urban life and, importantly, the obstacles and barriers to information flow between them. As an example, the article presents the application of the framework in studying how first-generation immigrants experience the urban natural environment in Turku, Finland. This research contributes to advancing our understanding of how Pervasive Information Architecture can be effectively used to analyse, design, and optimize urban landscapes, thereby promoting a more inclusive urban development. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.