Designing for playful mobilities

Taking the current presence of South Sudanese refugees in northern Uganda as a case‐study, this paper explores how different forms of mobility enable them to better cope with the harsh conditions caused by their displacement. Based on extensive field research, the results of this article show how for South Sudanese refugees, crossing borders can be empowering, although these complex strategies do not fit within the mutually exclusive ‘durable solutions’ proposed by the international refugee regime. Looking through a transnational lens, it is illustrated how different forms of movement enable the refugees to hold on to certain aspects of ‘normal life’, such as being employed, enacting customs and visiting loved ones, blurring the distinction between voluntary and forced migration. This results in a deepening of transnational networks as the generally large South Sudanese families find their members dispersed across Ugandan and South Sudanese town centres, villages, refugee settlements and third countries in Africa and elsewhere.

In this paper, we identify the nexus between design (architecture, urban design, service design, etc.) and mobilities as a new and emerging research field. In this paper, we apply a “situational mobilities” perspective and take point of departure in the pragmatist question: “What design decisions and interventions affords this particular mobile situation?” The paper presents the contours of an emerging research agenda within mobilities research. The advent of “mobilities design” as an emerging research field points towards a critical interest in the material as well as practical consequences of contemporary sites of mobilities and technology. Furthermore, the paper argues that heightened material sensitivity with an acute focus on situations and the multi-sensorial dimensions of human mobilities is largely under-prioritised within much contemporary city planning and transport planning as well as policy-making. The paper proposes that increased understanding of the material affordances facilitated through design provides important insight to planning and policy-making that at times might be in risk of becoming too detached from the everyday life of the mobile subject within contemporary mobilities landscapes.

Informal caregivers often help manage medications for people with ADRD. Caregiver-assisted medication management has the potential to optimize outcomes for caregivers and people with ADRD, but is often associated with suboptimal outcomes. We used the user-centered design persona method to represent the needs of ADRD caregivers who manage medications for people with ADRD to guide future design decisions for technology interventions. Data were collected through virtual contextual inquiry in which caregivers (Nf24) sent daily multimedia text messages depicting medication management activities for seven days each, followed by an interview that used the messages as prompts to understand medication management needs. We applied the persona development method to the data to identify distinct caregiver personas, i.e., evidence-derived groups of prospective users of a future intervention. We used team-based affinity diagramming to organize information about participants based on intragroup (dis)similarities, to create meaningful clusters representing intervention-relevant attributes. We then used group consensus discussion to create personas based on attribute clusters. The six identified attributes differentiating personas were: 1. medication acquisition, 2. medication organization, 3. medication administration, 4. monitoring symptoms, 5. care network, 6. technology preferences. Three personas were identified based on differences on those attributes: Regimented Ruth (independent, proactive, tech savvy, controls all medications), Intuitive Ian (collaborative, uses own judgment, some technology, provides some medication autonomy), Passive Pamela (reactive, easy going, technology novice, provides full medication autonomy). These personas can be used to guide technology intervention design by evaluating how well intervention designs support each of them.

The purpose of this descriptive case study was to evaluate the extent to which high school special education teachers could implement a technology-based self-monitoring intervention, I-Connect, after completing a brief, asynchronous online training. Participants included three high school special education teachers and four students receiving special education who implemented I-Connect in their classrooms across 3 school weeks with minimal researcher involvement. Data were collected on completion of training materials, intervention design decisions, ongoing data-based individualization, social validity, and teacher perceptions of student behavior. Analysis included evaluating adherence to training materials and research-based recommendations for self-monitoring intervention design, data-based individualization, and changes in social validity from pre- to post-intervention. Limitations, directions for future research, and implications for practice are discussed.

BackgroundThere is a need to develop cost-effective weight loss maintenance interventions to prolong the positive impact of weight loss on health outcomes. Conducting pre-trial health economic modelling is recommended to inform the design and development of behavioural interventions. We aimed to use health economic modelling to estimate the maximum cost per-person (justifiable cost) of a cost-effective behavioural weight loss maintenance intervention, given an estimated intervention effect for individuals with: i) a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 28 kg/m2 or above without diabetes and ii) a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes prescribed a single non-insulin diabetes medication.MethodsThe School for Public Health Research Diabetes prevention model was used to estimate the lifetime Quality-adjusted life year (QALY) gains, healthcare costs, and maximum justifiable cost associated with a weight loss maintenance intervention. Based on a meta-analysis, the estimated effect of a weight loss maintenance intervention following a 9 kg weight loss, was a regain of 1.33 kg and 4.38 kg in years one and two respectively compared to greater regain of 2.84 kg and 5.6 kg in the control group. Sensitivity analysis was conducted around the rate of regain, duration of effect and initial weight loss.ResultsThe justifiable cost for a weight loss maintenance intervention at an ICER of £20,000 per QALY was £104.64 for an individual with a BMI of 28 or over and £88.14 for an individual with type 2 diabetes. Within sensitivity analysis, this varied from £36.42 to £203.77 for the former, and between £29.98 and £173.05 for the latter.ConclusionsResearchers developing a weight loss maintenance intervention should consider these maximum justifiable cost estimates and the potential impact of the duration of effect and initial weight loss when designing intervention content and deciding target populations. Future research should consider using the methods demonstrated in this study to use health economic modelling to inform the design and budgetary decisions in the development of a behavioural interventions.

The medical model for treating severe mental illness has been critiqued for its insensitivity to the subjective and contextual facets of patients’ illness and recovery experiences. For many, mental health service efforts are a function of the social and institutional contexts in which they occur. Understanding this therapeutic context is therefore critical to planning effective care strategies. In this confessional tale, the first author reflects on one-year (>300 h) within a medium secure psychiatric hospital – a process carried out to inform the future design of a physical activity intervention. Drawing upon reflexive journal entries, conversations across the research team, and personal introspection, three broad methodological insights are offered; 1) becoming a reflexive researcher, 2) negotiating ‘the self’ in a mental health context, and 3) cultural means to logistical ends. Researcher reflexivity is a challenging and effortful process that can lead to unforeseen insights into the research setting. Practicing reflexivity supported the first author towards an awareness of her own stigmatised attitudes to mental illness and how they might affect the research process. Immersive fieldwork is time-consuming and presents a raft of methodological difficulties, but it supports deep and nuanced insights unavailable through other methods. When seeking to effectively tailor intervention strategies to the unique needs of a given healthcare setting, this added depth and nuance is valuable. Health intervention work that draws on immersive qualitative methods, rather than tokenistic forms of ‘patient public involvement’, is better equipped to deliver strategies that are not only efficacious but also effective.

The general features of the PDZ domain structure and functions have been extensively studied during the last decade. PDZ domains are generally present in proteins that are involved in multiple interactions to assemble functional protein complexes that control key cellular processes. One of the best characterized functions of PDZ domain-containing proteins is control of epithelial cell polarity and cell-cell contacts. In the present review, we summarize the current knowledge on regulation of expression of certain PDZ polarity proteins localized at the intercellular junctions. In addition, we provide a critical overview of recent findings regarding the role of these proteins during development of human diseases. Complete understanding of these issues is valuable for the design of novel therapeutic intervention for common pathologies, such as cancer.

Video-based feedback (VBF) has become a central component to performance sport, offering coaches, analysts and athletes opportunities to analyse, reflect, and prepare for performance. Despite technological advances and significant investments made to implement VBF, there is little research to explain how it is intentionally designed or evaluated. A systematic literature review and a critical interpretive synthesis approach was conducted to identify the key principles of VBF and develop a model for applied practice. Thirty-nine studies across multiple sports were included and analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Three overarching principles were identified: Aims, Content, and Evaluation. Together they form the ACE Model, which describes the choice points around aims, concurrent design decisions, and evaluation processes for VBF practice. This study positions VBF as an interdisciplinary practice and contributes a model to guide the design of VBF strategies and interventions. The ACE Model provides a practical, theory-informed scaffold for purposeful VBF design and evaluation in elite sport.

Headaches are a major concern for which psychosocial interventions are recommended. However, headache sufferers do not always have ready access to these interventions. Technology has been used to improve access, especially in young people. To examine user preferences to inform the development of an Internet-based psychosocial intervention including smartphone technology, referred to as the Wireless Headache Intervention. The methodology followed a participatory design cycle, including 25 headache sufferers (14 to 28 years of age) who informed the prototype design. All participants were familiar with smartphones and the Internet. Through two iterative cycles of focus groups stratified according to age, qualitative data were collected by asking user preferences for the different planned components of the intervention (ie, smartphone pain diary, Internet-based self-management treatment, social support) and other relevant aspects (ie, smartphone versus computer delivery, and ways of reaching target audience). NVivo 8 with content analysis was used to analyze data and reflect themes as guided by the thematic survey. Participants reported a preference for completing the smartphone pain diary on a daily basis. Participants believed that the program should facilitate easy access to information regarding headaches and management strategies. They also wanted access to other headache sufferers and experts. Participants believed that the program should be customizable and interactive. They reinforced the need and value of an integrated smartphone and Internet-based application. The results provide insight into a participatory design to guide design decisions for the type of intervention for which success relies largely on self-motivation. The results also provide recommendations for design of similar interventions that may benefit from the integration of mobile applications to Internet-based interventions. The present research contributes to the theoretical frameworks that have been formulated for the development of Internet-based applications.

Teacher education programs should have as one of their purposes the promotion of self-regulatory skills for learning among students who aspire to be teachers so that they can take a leading role in their learning and foster these skills in their future students. Considering the importance of knowing what students in teacher education programs do to study and learn, as well as how efficacious they feel to deal with academic demands, this study is part of a larger research and aims to investigate the learning and study strategies and self-efficacy for learning beliefs of 220 students enrolled in teacher education programs in Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics of a Higher Education Institution in the state of Piauí, and examine them in relation to age, gender, licentiate area, and course semester. Brazilian translations of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI — Third Edition) and the Self-efficacy for Learning Form were used for data collection. Scales were administered in the classrooms both through online platforms and in paper and pencil. Nonparametric inferential statistical approaches were used to test hypotheses regarding group differences. Statistically significant differences were found in LASSI in relation to gender, licentiate area, and course semester. Overall, students in Physics dealt better with anxiety; in Mathematics showed more favorable attitudes towards learning; in Chemistry reported managing their time better; in Biological Science showed significantly lower scores on many scales than did other students. Findings from this study could help inform curricular design decisions regarding teacher education programs and inform the design of interventions to strengthen the learning and study strategies and the self-efficacy for learning beliefs of future teachers.

Opinion: a judgment or assessment thought out but open to dispute Belief: a state of mind about a phenomenon based on trust or faith Knowledge: information or understanding of facts gained through study, investigation, observation, or experience Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2005) Those who know me have likely witnessed that I am a person with strong opinions. Through my personal lens of experience and study, I have opinions which I am rarely hesitant to share. It is my concern and my opinion that graduate education in interior design is in jeopardy because it is not sufficiently valued by the profession or university administration. It is also my opinion that we as design educators have not served graduate education well. The lack of coherence, collaboration, productivity, or visibility of North America’s many graduate programs in interior design have too often caused the outside observer to ask, with no small amount incredulity, ‘‘What does one do with a graduate degree in interior design?’’ Or, even worse, ‘‘Really? You can get a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Interior Design?’’ About the undergraduate programs, my all time favorite: ‘‘It takes four years?’’ (Emphasis in the originals). Such exclamations are not confined to any component of the ignorant masses that may never have thought about or employed a licensed designer. It was not long ago that I ran into a former client, who is a highly successful Harvard lawyer, who was stunned and asked those very questions when I told him about my career taking an academic turn, a pathway requiring multiple advanced degrees. This, from a client for whom I designed three progressively larger offices over several years as he and his colleagues moved up the ladder of success. During our many years of association, I had clearly failed to educate him about the value and reality of his designed work environment. I now believe he thought I just had good taste and necessary connections with the furniture industry. Sadly, I believe this perception is not uncommon. Even more disconcerting was my own university’s (president, provost, and dean’s) recent decision to eliminate our fledgling doctoral program in design (without consulting any of the students or faculty). It is my opinion that such a decision and action was made because even they did not understand the value of design and the need for research that informs design decisions. It is not difficult to understand how they arrived at this misinformed opinion: low dollar volume in grants, research, and publication when compared to the typical productivity in the ‘‘hard sciences.’’ Severe budget cuts at the state level have made it increasingly difficult for public universities to adequately support or even maintain programs such as interior design that do not typically secure external funding. It is a simple equation: Low revenue stream +lack of understanding of the discipline =high probability of elimination.

It is often said by Human Factors professionals that Human Factors needs to be involved in design projects from the start. But how often is this feasible, and how often does it really occur in practice? And, perhaps most importantly, do design and operational organizations have the right people, processes and motivation in place to allow this to happen? As part of a European-funded project called SAFEMODE, which looks at the potential for cross-domain Human Factors learning in aviation and maritime domains, twelve organizations participated in a Human Factors Capability Profiling exercise. This paper gives an anonymized overview of the results, showing the range and differences in HF ‘maturity’ in the two domains. A key insight is that for both domains, there is a need for further uptake of validated HF methods that can inform design decisions at early design stages.KeywordsHuman factorsAviationMaritimeDesignBenchmarking

Customers for acoustic products need manufacturers and professionals to provide performance specifications to allow informed design decisions. Acoustic professionals rely upon standard tests and special labs to quantify products. Data published by the ASTM for E90 shows that an STC rating for a single construction can have a variability range of up to 7 points. Being logarithmic, this equates to a sound pressure range of more than 2×, larger than 100%. The log nature of many acoustical performance metrics hides this from most. This large variability causes challenges for the architectural acoustics community. The primary negative impact: customers do not trust the acoustical ratings manufacturers provide. This is not an issue of the manufacturers providing inaccurate information, it is an issue of under-reported and incomplete understanding of the uncertainty in the metrics themselves. For perspective, NRC measured the Young’s Modulus of OSB material to have a mean of 6.8 × 109 and a standard deviation of 1.5 × 108 (Ref: NRC IR-766, Table 22). This yields a measurement error of 3.8%. It is simple to account for this in the design process. If the metric has an uncertainty as large as the acoustic metrics, the standard paradigm for accounting for error not only breaks down, it incentivizes bad actors: cherry picking, lab shopping, etc. More open acknowledgement of the measurement error in architectural acoustic metrics would increase the confidence customers have in them and would allow designers to make more informed decisions.

The design of geosynthetic-reinforced and pile-supported (GRPS) embankments is traditionally optimized by searching for the most cost-effective solution among several workable candidates. The candidates are usually based on experiences of engineers, and the real optimal design could be therefore missed. This paper intends to address the above-mentioned issue by systematically optimizing the design of GRPS embankments considering simultaneously the cost and the safety in the entire design space. It is thus a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem that differs from the studies only focusing on minimizing the construction cost. A practical MOO procedure is proposed in this paper, and it is applied to an illustrative GRPS embankment case. A set of nondominated optimal designs (Pareto front) are obtained at first, allowing an informed design decision. Then, four candidates located on the Pareto front are highlighted. Each of them represents an attractive design: the safest, the least-cost, the best trade-off (knee point) considering the two objectives, and the cheapest one for a target safety requirement. Finally, the optimal design can be selected from these four candidates depending on specific project purposes. For the case study, the knee point design leads to improvements in both the two defined objectives (i.e., decreased cost and increased safety) compared to the initial design, showing great benefits of performing a MOO analysis. By using the procedure, the optimal designs are also efficiently determined for the cases of different embankment heights.

Examining the effectiveness of machine learning techniques in analyzing engineering students’ decision-making processes through topic modeling during simulation-based design tasks is crucial for advancing educational methods and tools. Thus, this study presents a comparative analysis of different supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques for topic modeling, along with human validation. Hence, this manuscript contributes by evaluating the effectiveness of these techniques in identifying nuanced topics within the argumentation framework and improving computational methods for assessing students’ abilities and performance levels based on their informed decisions. This study examined the decision-making processes of engineering students as they participated in a simulation-based design challenge. During this task, students were prompted to use an argumentation framework to articulate their claims, evidence, and reasoning, by recording their informed design decisions in a design journal. This study combined qualitative and computational methods to analyze the students’ design journals and ensured the accuracy of the findings through the researchers’ review and interpretations of the results. Different machine learning models, including random forest, SVM, and K-nearest neighbors (KNNs), were tested for multilabel regression, using preprocessing techniques such as TF-IDF, GloVe, and BERT embeddings. Additionally, hyperparameter optimization and model interpretability were explored, along with models like RNNs with LSTM, XGBoost, and LightGBM. The results demonstrate that both supervised and unsupervised machine learning models effectively identified nuanced topics within the argumentation framework used during the design challenge of designing a zero-energy home for a Midwestern city using a CAD/CAE simulation platform. Notably, XGBoost exhibited superior predictive accuracy in estimating topic proportions, highlighting its potential for broader application in engineering education.