The dominant economic, profit-normative, and business-centered narrative has failed to empower diverse community groups to pluralistically participate fully in local rural life in Canada. This highlights the need for new approaches to community engagement, safety and trust. One such approach that can be used to envision alternative ways of co-creating value through citizen engagement is the use of serious games and collaborative game making workshops as a safe and risk-free innovation thirdspace. In this paper, we present work on how a game-making methodology organically emerged through the reflective facilitation of a series of iterative sessions in different domains aimed at helping rural community intermediary organizations prototype and co-create mission driven value alongside diverse social and culture groups. This paper details the process and initial insights from how rural community nonprofit and public institutional intermediaries can unlock their regional social and political capital, using game making approaches to better address current challenges faced by the marginalized groups they service. Through outputs and insights from this work, the goal is to help develop participatory tools for community-driven innovations that enable flourishing in rural communities in Canada. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025

As mobility systems evolve, their design must enable people to adapt to disruptions in their daily lives and routines, making social resilience a vital yet underexplored focus. This is why this study investigates the question: What are the challenges when designing for social resilience in local mobility services? Semi-structured interviews with seven mobility experts revealed the need for a shift from prioritising organizational resources to enhancing social capacity, emphasising individuals’ strengths and established routines. The main challenges for urban planners and developers to achieve this were identified through a lack of guidelines for incorporating social sustainability into mobility planning, that in turn renders difficulties in employing qualitative methods tailored for enabling citizen and stakeholder engagement, as well as developing deeper understandings of local, social life. These findings are illustrated in this article through five design implications, each highlighting strategies to integrate social resilience into mobility systems, ensuring they are responsive and supportive of the communities they serve. © 2025 The Author(s)

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 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.

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).

As AI becomes ever more embedded into daily life and spaces, the discussion of whether AI empowers or disempowers human agency has garnered significant attention. However, AI agency and human agency may not necessarily represent opposing extremes on a continuum. Previous studies have suggested that humans and AI followed different decision-making strategies which lead to results complementary to each other [3, 8, 10]. The aim of this workshop is to explore the role of design in the co-construction of agency in human-AI interactions. By bringing together an interdisciplinary group of researchers in a half-day workshop, we intend to explore design issues and factors that shape agency in collaborative relationships involving humans and AI technologies. Workshop participants will be asked to submit cases where there is evident tension between human and AI agency, and, using Research Through Design, work in exploring issues of human-AI agency in scenarios fueled by the cases submitted to this workshop. As AI technologies move from emergence to being entangled in the everyday, it is increasingly important to thoughtfully design their place in our lives. © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

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.

The aim of the workshop is two-fold. First, have participants engage in tabletop game-making activities: an original game-making framework will be introduced and used as a structured way to create games that explore wicked problems. Second, have participants specifically create game prototypes that allow them to directly explore, experience first-hand, and reflect on the short- and longer-term consequences and externalities associated with the introduction and regulatory governance of AI in public sector processes © 2024 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

The design of more humane and inclusive automated futures is a wicked design problem. Design disciplines have long addressed wicked problems as socially constructed problems and this chapter explores the critical use of reflective game-playing and generative game-making as a thirdspace approach to produce more socially informed solutions for automated futures. Two cases describing critical tabletop gamemaking for exploring future-oriented ethical issues from two projects are presented: the first case details the design process of a card game created to enable mobility companies to explore how they conceptualise and frame their role as technology innovators in relation to environmental sustainability; the second case details the design process and prototyping of a card game meant to explore privacy issues and the consequences of data sharing behaviours on the internet. Engaging in a co-creative, structured, and reflective process of group prototyping through game-making generates two distinct important learning outcomes that help unravel complex, wicked problems. On one hand, the game-makers directly work to unpack, formalise, and produce an experience that simulates a specific wicked problem, increasing their own awareness and understanding of it. On the other hand, the process produces a concrete artifact in the form of a game that can be later played by unrelated parties ensuring that longer-term knowledge generation can happen. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.

Information architecture is a design discipline concerned with the structural design of shared information environments and with making the complex clear. With roots in pioneer work in the 1960s and 1970s, it achieved worldwide visibility in the early 1990s when the emergence of the Web as the world’s library and the need to make large amounts of data available online required novel, specialized expertise. Since the late 2000s, information architecture has slowly but steadily broadened its purview from that of the single artifact—website or mobile app—to that of the entire structure that supports a product, a service or an experience, and from online-only information spaces to all types of digital and physical environments.