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This paper examines jewelry as a tangible form of memories. People carry memories of their lost loved ones in their pieces of jewelry, but to do this, they need to attach their intangible memories to the physical forms of jewelry. This paper examines the tangibility of memories in jewelry through American and Finnish women’s stories about their meaningful jewelry. Its theoretical background lies in Durkheim’s and Simmel’s notions about how people use wearable things to communicate parts of themselves to others. It is based on a qualitative analysis of the stories women told me about their meaningful jewelry.

In this pictorial, we illustrate steps towards a novel approach that situates connected technologies for older people as resources. In contrast to mainstream approaches in gerontechnology that consider elderly as frail and passive, we aim to complement older people's vital competences by designing technologies that can be used in less prescriptive, and broader ways. The pictorial describes our design process in which resourceful strategies were identi-fed through thing ethnography and used as inspiration to create a series of new connected objects conceived as resources.

Social design has a history that goes back several decades. Following Victor Margolin’s recent work, social design has been animated by utopic visions that inspire it and gives it its raison d'être. These utopic visions have had their roots variously in technology, architecture, or politics. In this paper, we argue that there are also new forms of social design that are not utopic, but build on other premises. We distinguish two new forms, molecular social design, and sociological social design. The former is happy to change society one step at the time without a larger vision. The latter builds on sociological theory and targets through it those social structures that reproduce social inequalities by maintaining practices that lead to those inequalities. Our example of molecular social design is Katja Soini’s IKE project in Helsinki, Finland; while our example of sociological social design examines the Design Innovation & Citizenship program in Glasgow, Scotland and its engagement with a remote island community.

This paper proposes to reshape the discussion design schools about the relationship of design practice to research. Many universities now have very successful design departments that educate high-level design practitioners. But the rapid growth of these departments, popular as they are with students, has meant that there has been very little time to step back and reflect on the nature and development of academic design in its new environment. Consequently, the formation of an academic design practice that can take its rightful place among other academic fields has been slow. In this paper we will propose a model of academic design and critically asses its qualities, as well as the challenges that lie ahead for this new species of academic design practitioner. The model builds on recent work dealing with forms of abduction in design, and on a few papers that describe the development of research programs at Aalto University.

Businesses and the HCI and Interaction Design communities have embraced design and design research. Design research as a field blends methodologies from several disciplines - sociology, engineering, software, philosophy, industrial design, HCI/interaction design -- so designers can learn from past successes and failure and don't have to reinvent the wheel for each new design (whether it's a digital product, a building, an airplane or furniture). They take into account form, function, and, ultimately, users. Many books exist in the research and academic realm for this field, but none create a usable bridge to design practice. Although business people are embracing design, they are not going to become designers. Design researchers need tools to apply their research in the real world. Design Research through Practice takes advanced design practice as its starting point, but enriches it to build a design process than can respond to both academic and practical problems. The aims of the book are to study three design research traditions that cover methodological directions in current leading research community. Taking you from the Lab, Field and to the Showroom, Ilpo Koskinen and his group of researchers show you successful traditions in design research that have been integrated into processes and products. Bridging the gap from design research to design practice, this is a must have for any designer. . Gathers design research experts from traditional lab science, social science, art, industrial design, UX and HCI to lend tested practices and how they can be used in a variety of design projects . Provides a multidisciplinary story of the whole design process, with proven and teachable techniques that can solve both academic and practical problems . Presents key examples illustrating how research is applied and vignettes summarizing the key how-to details of specific projects.

The project Learning labs for User-Driven Innovation (LUDINNO) has also provided a platform for a Nordic research cooperation in the field of merging design and user-driven innovation (UDI) processes. In the project students supported by academics and trained professionals cooperated with businesses to carry out real and user driven business projects.

Personal consumer technologies such as personal stereos and mobile telephones typically disturb the social situations in which they are used. In this article, we use Goffman's concept of "face" to study how people manage streaming video to mobile phones in public places. We describe three management strategies. First, users avert disturbance by avoiding the irritation of others. Second, users negotiate appropriate behavior by adjusting to signaled disapproval. Third, users may combine the previous strategies in a deliberate, aggressive effort to invite attention and create "thrills". By studying streaming mobile video in public places, we provide elements for understanding the social psychology of future, multimedia rich mobile telephony.