Conference Agenda

Engaging communities and stakeholders in developing user-centred urban health solutions, whilst linking the research to their own development, pose major challenges for design researchers working in the Global South. In a number of circular sanitation projects in a community school in Ghana, we co-designed and installed an anaerobic digester delivering electricity and sanitation improvements. To enhance impact we developed and pilot-tested a Living and physical Lab design approach. One project focussed on hand hygiene. We introduced students to ‘making the invisible visible’ by visualising microbes from their hands and assessing handwashing effects. Our findings suggest that visualisation of microbes not normally apparent to school children raised their awareness and prompted communication to peers and family. Building change agent capacity through community engagement like Living Labs can promote sustainable development in the community. Design researchers should further explore schoolchildren’s potential as home and community change agents.

This paper presents a practice-based account of the roles that design can play in the realization of a biodiversity-driven approach to citymaking, specifically as part of urban regeneration. The authors first retrace the evolving relationship between design and citymaking in light of contemporary urban regeneration challenges, to identify the potential roles design can play in these contexts. Urban biodiversity is then explored as a factor relevant to urban well-being, ecosystem services, and proactive citizenship, clustering the types of actions that can support a biodiversity-sensitive urban regeneration. Following these premises, a portfolio of initiatives centered on urban biodiversity within a large-scale urban regeneration project in Milan (Italy) is presented to exemplify how design-led interventions can favor the urban natural environment. From these insights, the authors reflect on how designers can work with urban biodiversity to drive sustainable practices while re-establishing people’s relationship with nature and empowering communities' participation in urban transformation.

Designing for future liveable cities demands a spectrum of perspectives, each responding in some way to global and local challenges, from climate change to safe housing. However, enabling spaces for often juxtaposed, contradictory and cooperative voices, both hopeful and cautionary, can be challenging. This paper is a first step in harnessing pluralistic expression through design fiction as an approach to speculating on design’s role in future liveable cities. In presenting individual speculative positions, authors attempt to reconcile their personal experiences, disciplinary expertise, and vision. This collective voice represents disciplinary diversity including – but not limited to – artificial intelligence, co-design, interaction design, strategic design, life-centred design, and industrial and graphic design. In presenting each position and a subsequent discussion of emerging themes, we seek to invite conversations on future design practice, education, and research, and encourage the design community to consider new approaches to for collaboratively imagining future liveable cities.

This paper revisits the event ‘se essa rua fosse nossa’ (if this street was ours) held in 2014, in Curitiba, Brazil, that aimed to provoke, discuss, and propose new ways of thinking and designing the public spaces in the city so they can be more open, accessible, inclusive, and democratic. With the perspective of a decade, the goal is to analyze its positive outcomes in the city, then, and in the present moment. The event consisted of a series of critical and creative activities. Its closure was a pop-up parklet that occupied half a block using urban furniture resulting from one of the workshops. We discuss the event and its outcomes through the light of design activism and critical design. Beyond the local impact, we believe that sharing our results of reimagining public spaces can contribute to the theoretical discussions around the topic, additionally inspiring people to take action.

With the rapid development of society and the increasing pressure on education, campus psychological issues have become more prominent. Previous studies have demonstrated the positive effects of natural environments on mental health. However, research on campus landscape environments has primarily focused on the impact of campus facilities on student health, neglecting the degree of openness of natural land-scape spaces. This study utilized virtual reality technology to simulate campus green landscape spaces with different degrees of openness and explored the influence of these different spaces on individual psychological recovery. The results indicate that the degree of openness of campus green spaces significantly affects people's prefer-ences and perceptions of psychological recovery. Additionally, people's preferences are influenced by serene, species, and natural elements. Therefore, promoting psycho-logical recovery among students can be facilitated by creating scenic viewing and rest areas in campus environments, introducing beloved natural elements, and creating semi-open landscape spaces.