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The aim of this paper is to contribute to a new conceptual foundation for design fiction. Much attention is dedicated to theorising how design fictions relate to our so-called actual world. This work can be seen as an attempt at securing the seriousness and legitimacy of design fiction as an approach to design research. The theory of possible worlds has proven promising in this regard. We argue, however, that a detailed understanding of design fiction is still lacking. In design fiction literature, authors often engage in critiquing techno-centric approaches while paying less attention to how design fiction has a potential to foster social change in situated actual affairs. We argue that analysis should start from the messy unfolding of the design event itself rather than from big ontological discussions of the boundaries between fiction and reality. To grasp the messiness of design fiction, we offer an interdisciplinary framework, bridging knowledge domains such as literally theory and design anthropology.

Narrative criminology has successfully demonstrated how the construction and structure of self-narratives are important for prisoners’ process of change and desistance from crime. However, much of this work has tended to focus narrowly on the offender and how he or she uses self-narrative to relate to the offense, the victim, past childhood, the family, or projected hopes for future change. In an effort to extend prior work, this study takes a complementary approach by analyzing how children and their long-term incarcerated fathers in Danish maximum-security prisons talk about family relations and cohesiveness during imprisonment. To address the gap in research and methodology, we introduce the notion of family narratives, and through microanalyses of in-depth interviews with seven prisoners and seven children, we extract three kinds of family narratives. These narratives were prompted by using a board game recently implemented into the visiting program in Danish prisons to help children and prisoners to re-construct disrupted family relations. Our findings illuminate how the design of a game can be a novel method for collecting data on children and incarcerated fathers and how family narratives can serve as lenses for studying fragile family identity, masculinity, and child–parent relations.

This article explores the methodological considerations regarding the organization of a site-specific exhibition in urban space and the design research experiments that may be part of such an exhibition. The aim is to encourage design research as ‘exhibition’ and to propose a format that allows theory to enter the exhibition programme for the purpose of aligning exhibition contributions with theoretical contributions. Through the proposed analytical approach, we offer a method and a model to analyse interventions in public space in relation to agency and the participatory agenda for humans and non-humans. The main contribution is an exploration of the specificalities of curating an exhibition in urban space as a distinct practice-based design research project, where programme, research questions and experiments create knowledge on scaling agency in regard to temporality, citizenship and the value of urban space.

Background Female patients with pelvic organ prolapse and clinicians need to take decisions regarding treatment that are often unpredictable in relation to how they impact the future everyday lives of the patients. This study formed the developmental phase of a larger study to develop and test an online tool to support shared decision-making. Methods Patients, health care professionals and other stakeholders participated in the development and evaluation process of this tool. The collected data was generated from observational studies, exploratory interviews with prompt cards and workshops with end users from four Danish gynecology outpatient clinics. Results Content analysis led to important themes. For the patients three themes emerged: 1) how the impact of symptoms on everyday life affected the need for relief, 2) their bodily perception and sex life and 3) their worries about the future. For clinicians the different symptoms and their severity was a main theme. Conclusions This article provides an overall description and discussion of the development methodology. It demonstrates how user involvement informed the prototyping process and how patients’ preferences were included in the final prototype. Whether the tool actually increases SDM, remains to be tested in a pilot feasibility study.

The aim of this paper is to initiate an interdisciplinary exchange between healthcare and participatory speculative design in order to better understand how patients’ self-management may be integrated into future healthcare services. In the paper we introduce a speculative prototype – the Patient Empowerment Kit – that has been co-designed with cancer patients and informed by a number of self-management strategies that these patients have used to cope with their life-threatening disease. In additional ethnographic field studies, Danish health professionals have been invited to use the Kit as a way to gain knowledge about patients’ self-management and to co-speculate about alternate futures. The contribution of the paper is two-fold: First, we demonstrate how speculative design has a participatory potential to involve health professionals in rehearsing near mundane futures. Secondly, we provide a new frame of analysis that enables design researchers to evaluate empirical material gathered from using speculative prototypes in healthcare.

In design research, critique has recently been voiced against the multiple ways the notion of participation is understood and practiced. Studies of performativity and performance art have been used to account for this methodological multiplicity. However, in this article, we argue that participation still has much to offer design research as a foundational concept, but that a more nuanced understanding is required. Further, we offer such an understanding by presenting three theories and methodologies from participatory art. The value of participatory art for design research will then be exemplified by a practice-based design research project exploring forms of patient democracy.

The aim of this paper is to initiate an interdisciplinary dialogue between social design and narrative theory in understanding how vulnerable families navigate personal and shared identities. To exemplify this, we draw upon results from a design research project that introduces board games in prisons to help children develop bonds with their incarcerated fathers. In our case study we offer a method of analysis that enable design researchers to delve into the complex field of identity navigation. Further, we offer a focused reflection arguing that the vulnerability of these families can be conceived as family identities being broken or challenged. We attempt to show that identity is constructed through family members’ co-authoring of family narratives, which manifest themselves in different formats such as ‘master narratives’ and ‘counter narratives’. Design research has the potential to examine identity formations by applying narrative theory in practice.

IN THIS PAPER WE INTRODUCE SOCIAL GAMES AS A NEW TERRAIN FOR STUDIES IN PARTICIPATORY CULTURE. SOCIAL GAMES DEFY EASY CLASSIFICATION AND CANNOT BE APPROPRIATELY UNDERSTOOD FROM EXISTING RESEARCH PERSPECTIVES. INITIALLY, WE THEREFORE ATTEMPT TO DEFINE SOCIAL GAMES BY COMPARING THE GENRE WITH RELATED GAME GENRES, NOTABLY SERIOUS GAMES AND HEALTH GAMES. TO FURTHER INCREASE KNOWLEDGE OF SOCIAL GAMES, WE INTRODUCE A TYPOLOGY OF PLAYFUL PARTICIPATION IN SOCIAL GAMES. THE TYPOLOGY IS CONSTRUCTED BY USING FORMAL CONCEPTS FROM THEORIES OF PARTICIPATORY ART. ITS RANGE OF APPLICATION IS THEN DEMONSTRATED THROUGH AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF EIGHT SOCIAL GAME PROTOTYPES THAT ARE DESIGNED AS PART OF AN ON-GOING THREE-YEAR RESEARCH PROJECT CALLED “SOCIAL GAMES AGAINST CRIME”. THE PURPOSE OF THIS PROJECT IS TO DEVELOP SOCIAL GAMES THAT CAN HELP CHILDREN BUILD RESILIENCE TOWARDS MANY OF THE PERSONAL AND SOCIAL PROBLEMS THEY EXPERIENCE AS A RESULT OF PARENTAL INCARCERATION.

Over the last couple of years, design activism has attracted increasing attention among designers and design researchers, but the approach seems not to have found it’s way yet to the Design & Emotion research community. In this paper, we introduce design activism as a new approach valuable for probing into the role of mixed emotions in interpersonal interaction. To set the scene, we critically examine recent sources on design activism in order provide a general characterisation of what constitute the approach. Next, we argue for how social game can be seen as an instantiation of design activism used, in a current research project, to inquiry into how teenagers feel about visiting their incarcerated fathers in top secure prisons. Finally, we relate our findings to discourse on ambiguous emotions and use this to visualize the eliciting pattern of ambiguous emotions.

In this paper, we introduce a new approach to designing games for serious contexts. In contrast to Serious Games we argue that learning is a too narrow focus for serious contexts and that simulation of real world problems ought to be supplemented with other design strategies that place greater emphasis on fiction and narratives. The approach is exemplified through three game prototypes designed to be played by an inmate and his child in a prison during visiting hours. By analyzing these game prototypes we demonstrate how a game can be structured around a narrative plot in three different ways. Moreover, we discuss how narrative plots in a game may open up for developing player’s emotional experiences over time and grow social relationships between inmate and child. On the basis of our case analysis we discuss, in more detail, how our approach differs from Serious Games and we single out some key implications for emotion-driven design.

This paper explores how emotion research may inform the design of a playful interactive tool for emotion measurement and communication, called Child Patient Game (CPgame) that has been developed for paediatric patients at a Danish hospital. The CPgame differs from other instruments in that it uses digital narrative and game play as means for self-report. In so doing it integrates play, communication and measurement in one and the same device. First it gives 4-6 year old hospitalized children an opportunity to learn how to cope with their own emotional reactions to medical treatment through game play. Second, healthcare personal and design researchers can use the CPgame to gain knowledge of this patient group as it measures the children’s subjective feelings about their emotions. In the paper we discuss how key theoretical concepts of emotion may help the designer to indentify the basic building blocks of emotions and to distinguish closely related emotions from each other. Further, by comparing various methods and techniques for emotion measurement, we argue that design research offers more sensitive techniques for self-report measurement for children than psychology and the behavioural sciences.

The overall aim of this paper is to increase designers’ understandingof how materiality can be of value in probing. Initially, we positionourselves in relation to existing approaches to probing. Hereafter, weintroduce three different theoretical perspectives on materiality inorder to make some useful conceptual distinctions. The explanatorystrength of each perspective is then exemplified through a case study,where probing was used extensively as a method of co-exploringcancer patients’ individual and social needs. The contribution ofthe paper lies in offering a detailed understanding of how thematerialising of probes can be used as different modes of inquiryin co-exploring activities. Through these, we define a more holisticpicture of the cancer patient in a societal context both as individual, asfamily member, as patient and as citizen, in relation to how individualparticipation in own treatment might be configured.

This article explores how design games might serve as a form of design anthropological fieldwork drawing on examples from the project 'Changing Perspectives'- a social design project aimed at designing games to support family consultants in working with incarcerated fathers' empathic understanding of how their children and family experience the collateral effects of imprisonment. In this design anthropological approach to design games, focus shifts from how games facilitate collaboration to how they can help design researchers understand the ambiguous roles of the design researcher vis-à-vis participants, the gap between research intentions and situated practices, and stakeholder agonism to help us discover and challenge implicit assumptions and roles embedded in the design project.

The aim of this paper is to show how an interdisciplinary merging of social design and narrative theory can increase understanding of how vulnerable families navigate personal and shared identities...

This paper explores Object Theatre as an approach to address power in design. We understand power as a relational activity that emerges and is upheld through particular ways of relating (Elias, 1991; Stacey, 2007). The spontaneity in participant actions through Object Theatre exercises renders processes of relating tangible and negotiable. In this study Object Theatre was applied in exploration of a new walking aid for elderly people. We argue that the shift in perspective that Object Theatre allows designers to achieve can be effectively harnessed to explore issues arising from power relating amongst people – and between people and objects.

In this paper we are exploring the relation between participation and fiction with the aim of investigating how fiction can be a resource for participatory design and can shed more light on the participatory value of fiction. We describe how fiction has been taken up and conceptualized in contemporary design research and argue that different strategies for applying fiction may be seen as a resource for evoking various forms of participation. Furthermore this paper present three case examples of participatory prototyping, that makes use of play or games as a way to engage participants with a particular use of make-believe. We discuss these cases with the purpose of identifying how participatory design can benefit from a more articulate notion of fiction. This paper introduces the concept of ‘resourcing’ to describe the fundamental activity of negotiating the use of what is available for co-design. Even though resourcing is an ever-present undertaking in all co-designing, no theoretical concept has thus far addressed the constitutive practices in collaborative design processes. We define the concept of resourcing on the basis of pragmatist process theories and complexity theory perspectives of social life, which enable us to explicate the gap between managerial thinking that understands resources as objective entities to be planned and controlled, and the actual unfolding of co-design in complex responsive conversation. Through the analysis of three co-design events we illustrate how the different response sensitivities of co-designers can diversify and enrich resourcing. The analyses also reveal that resourcing is a dynamically evolving process that changes in response to what emerges in the complex interplay of intentions between people involved in co-design.

Today's pediatric health care lacks methods to tap into the emotional state of hospitalized pediatric patients (age 4-6 years). The most frequently used approaches were developed for adults and fail to acknowledge the importance of imaginary experiences and the notion of play that may appeal to children. The scope of this article is to introduce a new design-oriented method of gathering information about the emotional state of pediatric patients using an experimental computer game called the Child Patient game (CPgame). The CPgame was developed at a Danish hospital, and the results of the preliminary tests show that games could serve as a system in which children are willing to express their emotions through play. The results are based on two comparative analyses of the CPgame through which it is possible to identify three different types of players among the patients playing the game. Furthermore, the data reveal that pediatric patients display a radically different play pattern than children who are not in hospital. The inquiry takes an interdisciplinary approach; it has obvious health care-related objectives and seeks to meet the urgent need for new methods within health care to optimize communication with young children. At the same time, design research (i.e., the development of new knowledge through the development of a new design) heavily impacts the method.

Design fiction is an emergent field within HCI and interaction design, the understanding of which ultimately relies, so we argue, of an integrative account of poetics and design praxis. In this paper we give such an account. Initially, a precise definition of design fiction is given by drawing on the theory of possible worlds found within poetics. Further, we offer a method of practicing design fiction, which relies on the equal integration of literary practice with design practice. The use of this method is demonstrated by 4 design projects from a workshop set up in collaboration with a Danish author. All of this substantiates our notion of a poetics of practicing design fiction, and through our critical examination of related work we conclude on how our approach contribute to HCI and interaction design.

In this paper, we shall focus on the gap between the idea of patient democracy and the practice of shared decision-making within cancer treatment at Danish hospitals. Through a design research project we are aiming at exploring how probes can be used to evoke moments of dissensus, which allow for a detailed inquiry into patient roles and identities and how shared decision-making works against patient empowerment. The argument we put forward here, is that the probing process have a value in understanding systems of power and the forming of identity belongings.

This paper offers a typology for understanding design fiction as a new approach in design research. The typology allows design researchers to explain design fictions according to 5 criteria: (1) “What if scenarios” as the basic construal principle of design fiction; (2) the manifestation of critique; (3) design aims; (4) materializations and forms; and (5) the aesthetic of design fictions. The typology is premised on the idea that fiction may integrate with reality in many different ways in design experiments. The explanatory power of the typology is exemplified through the analyses of 6 case projects.

The aim of this paper is to address imaginative experiences of emotions by drawing Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe. Moreover, we use a design case as means for investigating how a child’s felt emotions towards a hospital situation relates to his or her imaginative experiences of emotions towards a fictive character in a computer game simulating the real-world situation. In so doing, we contribute with new insights to existing theories of emotions in design, which tend to focus narrowly on felt and measurable emotions.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how practice-based design research is able not only to challenge, but also to push toward further development of some of the basic assumpstions in emotion theories as used within design research. In so doing, we wish to increase knolwedge on a central epistemological question for design research, namely how practice-based design research can be a vehicle for the construction of new theory for design research.

The aim of this paper is to show how the value of social design lies in the approach’s ability as a caring practice to foster change for vulnerable groups in society. Yet, to achieve such change, social designers must have a navigational tool that allows them to identify and steer through some of the value conflicts that are typically involved in public service care provision. To substantiate this claim, we rapport from two recent social design projects in the public sector dealing with care within criminal justice and healthcare. Building on these two projects we propose a provisional model for navigating care throughout a social design research process in accordance with an organizational level, a professional practice level and an interpersonal level.