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Emerging studies of local cooperatives, their sharing practices, and the use of platforms for cooperation call for specific designs and design guidelines to support the endurance and growth of a community-oriented collaborative economy. These efforts also indicate that design has the potential to shape cooperative engagements. However, to-date, only a few design resources are tailored for exploring and further developing design insights from empirical and conceptual research on sharing and cooperativism. To bridge this gap, we report on an international workshop that included a diverse group of scholars, designers, and activists. During the workshop, we aimed to unpack the role of design regarding sharing and cooperativism. Through the synthesis of workshop outcomes, we present new insights pointing towards the development of an ecosystemic approach in design for cooperativism. We call on designers to (1) proactively adopt design goals that focus on ecosystemic design and tools; (2) be inclusive, equitable, and justice-oriented to ensure solidarity and collectivism; and (3) rethink terms such as currency and data while designing for cooperativism in their projects. In this chapter, we conceptualise and discuss the key ideas from the workshop highlighting potential implications for design research and practice.

Literacy and power are closely entwined, and not all literacy practices are equally supported and recognised within dominant discourses and political structures. Technology design offers new possibilities for supporting culturally-diverse literacy practices, including the preservation and maintenance of endangered languages. While literacy is an inherent aspect of design work, theories of literacy as a social practice encompassing a variety of different senses and modes of expression are under-utilised within the design community. We survey the current landscape on literacy and design, and illustrate how six lenses of new literacy theory articulated by Kathy Mills [1] can support us to be more attentive to the literacy practices enacted in design through their application to three design cases with Australian Aboriginal communities. Finally, we reflect on our own Digital Community Noticeboard project to contribute four ways that new literacy theory can inform participatory design.

We propose a collective participatory speculative urban walk exploring “more-than-human” perspectives for smart cities. The walk will be a curated selection of outcomes from a PDC workshop interrogating how “more-than-human” approaches and their resultant ethical, legal, and methodological concerns can shape participatory design practices toward cohabitation. Our aim with the Situated Action is to use the walk as an embodied approach to push forward a cultural change in the agenda of sustainable smart cities, urban informatics and IoT. The walk will draw from the specificity of urban infrastructures in Hasselt associated with “more-than-human” approaches and include a selection of provisional artefacts in the form of low-fi prototypes, manifestos or future scenarios from the workshop to scaffold participation within the urban environment for conference delegates and citizens.

The Participatory Design (PD) community is committed to continuously refine its technological, social, political, and scientific agenda, and as a result, PD has become more widely adopted, robust, and sophisticated. Yet, PD’s advancement cannot end here. The gap between those who can contribute to the shaping of future technologies and those who are reduced to consumers, has – if anything – widened on a grand scale. In response, we argue through three lenses: scale, dialectics, and affect in PD, and suggest some pathways to build bridges, foster alliances, and evolve PD practice to proliferate the democratisation in technology design that has been a strong value driving PD. Scale asks about ways for PD to extend its reach without giving up on its core qualities. Dialectics is about creating and maintaining the spaces and fora for constructive conflict by networking and linking with other stakeholders, organisations, and domains. Finally, affect discusses how PD can put forward democratic visions of technological futures that connect to people’s hearts, acknowledging that decisions are often made irrationally and unconsciously. Our review draws attention to opportunities for PD to travel between different contexts and proliferate through interconnected and intermediary knowledge and an embodied literacy that enables PD to reach further into industry, government, and community.

This paper discusses the early stages of a healthcare participatory design project, where historically recorded ‘hard’ data was used to engage participants in organizational reflection about related (but unrecorded) ‘soft’ data. This uncovered the interconnected history of the organization and allowed participants to collaboratively identify and prioritize design opportunities that could be taken up in subsequent phases of the healthcare design. We share our method for presenting the available recorded data in the form of ‘data timelines’ to start and structure collaborative reflection. We then present the outcomes of our use of this method in the context of the wider healthcare service design project and reflect on the qualities and practicalities of the approach within participatory design.

SIRT6 and COX-2 are oncogenes target that promote the expression of proinflammatory and pro-survival proteins through a signaling pathway, which leads to increased survival and proliferation of tumor cells. However, COX-2 also suppresses skin tumorigenesis and their relationship with SIRT6, making it an interesting target for the discovery of drugs with anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties. Herein, we studied the interaction of thieno[3,2-c]pyran analogs and RONS species with SIRT6 and COX-2 through the use of molecular docking and molecular dynamic simulations. Molecular docking studies revealed the importance of hydrophobic and hydrophilic amino acid residues for the stability. The molecular dynamics study examined conformational changes in the enzymes caused by the binding of the substrates and how those changes affected the stability of the protein-drug complex. The average RMSD values of the backbone atoms in compounds 6 and 10 were calculated from 1000 ps to 10000 ps and were found to be 0.13 nm for both compounds. Similarly, the radius of gyration values for compounds 6 and 10 were found to be 1.87 ± 0.03 nm and 1.86 ± 0.02 nm, respectively. The work presented here, will be of great help in lead identification and optimization for early drug discovery.

Namibian children's appreciation of literature is falling behind. While children develop functional literacy, enough to search the web and read for information finding, their skills plateau due to their limited forms of reading. Thus this paper draws on a participatory approach with different stakeholders aiming to co-create a stimulating and enabling reading environment for Namibian children. Four different participatory workshops were designed to discover ways to deepen the reading culture, in particular by exploring contexts in which children would read and also author books. Acknowledging the different roles of stakeholders in an ongoing national agenda of enhancing the Namibian reading culture, it becomes clear that the various aspirations of children as expressed in their designs need to be accounted for, interpreted and translated into a feasible plan of action. The paper outlines a way of using participatory design workshops at a number of levels to obtain design inspirations for further interventions towards enhancing kids' reading experiences.