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The overall trend toward globalization in design, greatly enhanced by digital technologies, has raised issues and challenges on how to preserve the cultural differences and values of different societies. There is a tendency to lose touch with local cultural values when designing artefacts for global use, and social nuances and traditions risk to be flattened or stereotyped in the pursuit of developing new technologies and products for the global society. Attempts to reduce the tension between the global and the local in design can be seen in the development of standards and guidelines for cross-cultural design, that are mostly focused on (online) user interface design. However, when moving from preferences, metaphors, appearance, and navigation toward cultural models of interaction and physical design, new methodologies and tools for cross-cultural design are needed. This paper describes a poetry-inspired design method for cross-cultural sharing within the design process. The approach uses poetry to sensitize the designer to the subtleties and diversity of a (new or known) culture so that the design can be given new aesthetic and cultural significance. The methodology is exemplified by actual design cases developed within the course "Cultural Sensitivity" of the Master's Degree Program in Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology, where poetry was used for uncovering underlying or implicit assumptions, intercultural differences and similarities, as well as for general sensitization of young designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) - based applications and services are no more a remote possibility but an economic and social opportunity. Apart from the legislative changes needed to make urban drone-based applications feasible, it is essential to ensure the efficient and safe operation of UAV fleets within a restrictive and complex operating area. All in all, the compiled articles show the evolution of some hot topics in nowadays research related to drones and drone-enabled systems. [Extracted from the article]

The paper presents the user experience evaluation of Squeeze Me, an interactive cover for tablet and smartphone that enables continuous and expressive interaction with electronic devices. The cover has been used to implement 'Squeeze to zoom', a mobile application to zoom in and out while taking a photograph from a tablet. The experience of use was evaluated in the short and medium term, comparing the Squeeze Me interaction modality with classic modalities for zooming in and out commonly available on tablets and smartphones. The evaluation process was conducted using AttrakDiff [3] a questionnaire that measures hedonic stimulation and identity, as well as pragmatic qualities and attractiveness of software products. Participants were asked to try out different interaction modalities for comparison in the short-term (67 people) and over 4 weeks (8 people). Results obtained in the short-term evaluation reveal that 'Squeeze to zoom' was awarded higher values than the classic 'Slide to zoom' in the hedonic quality-stimulation and attractiveness dimensions, whilst it obtained lower values in the pragmatic quality and hedonic quality-identity. However, the experience of use changed over time. During the longitudinal study, the usability of 'Squeeze to zoom' improved whilst the attractiveness of 'Slide to zoom' decreases significantly. Furthermore results reveal that 'Squeeze to zoom' is significantly more appreciated for its hedonic qualities and the effect is maintained over time. This study highlights the importance of evaluating the experience of use over time, a practice that is almost ignored in the literature on Experience Design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a nuanced perspective on the topic of user-centred design (UCD) in the human–computer interaction (HCI) field. After a brief outline of its emergence, we describe some of the central tenets of the approach, using the process model of Gulliksen et al. ( Behav Inf Technol 22(6):397–409, ) as a well-documented exemplar. We then examine in more detail some of the difficulties one can encounter in performing user-centred design (UCD), illuminating these issues through vignettes from specific projects in which we have been involved. In this paper, we focus on issues that can arise in working with children and with people of differing mental abilities. Our argument is that, while a user-centred perspective is required at all times in the design team, the forms of participation of users in the design process needs to fit the context and can vary significantly from that presented as the prototypical UCD approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a design approach for manipulative technologies that consider “user diversity” as a main lever for design. Different dimensions of “diversity” are considered, e.g., the users' age, abilities, culture, cultural background, and alphabetization. These dimensions drive the development of a user-centered design process for manipulative technologies for learning and play environments. In particular, we explore the possibility of allowing young children to develop and interact with virtual/physical worlds by manipulating physical objects in different contexts, like the classroom, the hospital, or the playground. In our scenarios, we consider children with different abilities (fully able, physically impaired, or with cognitive delays), in different cultures (Denmark, Tanzania, and Italy), and with a different level of alphabetization. The needs and expectations of such heterogeneous user-groups are taken into account through a user-centered design process to define a concept of tangible media for collaborative and distributed edutainment environments. The concept is implemented as a set of building blocks called I-Blocks with individual processing and communication power. Using the I-Blocks system, children can do “programming by building,” and thereby construct interacting artefacts in an intuitive manner without the need to learn and use traditional programming languages. Here, we describe in detail the technology of I-Blocks and discuss lessons learned from “designing for diversity.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]