Yanki Lee

In Chinese society like in many cultures, persons with dementia suffer some level of stigmatisation. For this reason a dementia research/care centre in Hong Kong (China) initiated the design of the “dementia experience tool”. Its main goal is to create public understanding through inviting the general public to experience dementia. The dementia research/care centre commissioned a social design research lab team (two of the authors are part of this) to create the tool, starting from designing empathic tools. One of the main challenges to design this tool was to find a way to empathise with a complicated condition such as dementia, which is an umbrella term for a series of symptoms, as traditional empathic tools mostly focus on simulation of a specific physical or mental impairment. Additionally, we explored the possibility of using the concept of magic. Magic can be defined as “mysterious tracks: a quality that makes something seem removed from everyday life, especially in a way that...

The Design.Lives project is collaboration between the disciplines of design and sociology. This paper unfolds our latest attempt on the practice of design participation through educating young designers. We discuss a three-week Design.Lives Lab, a workshop for practicing our approach in a design education context. The design lab was inspired and informed by solution-focused approach and employed three tactics namely confrontational, empathy and the imagination of replacement so as to bring forth reflectivity on the role of designers and users. We finally found that these three tactics are significant in opening up the design community and sensitizing novice designers to the power of pre-reflexive being and dispositions. Our attempt has shown the significance and effectiveness of using solutionfocused approach as a design methodology.

www.designingwithpeople.org is a new web tool created to support and inspire designers to design more inclusively. Constructing this web tool revealed a number of insights, and some thoughts for the future of inclusive design are embedded in it. This paper describes these insights as the rationale of the web tool. From influencing policy and business practices to repositioning the subject of design, the concept of Inclusive Design is evolving. What are the next steps? What are the specific questions for inclusive design practice? We explore three more layers of the question, each of which is the title of a subsection: How do we start people-centred design process? What are the methods in user researches for design? What are the ethical procedures when designers design with people? The answers to these questions are our attempt to offer multiple perspectives in understanding people and the prompt adoption of Web 2.0 technologies. We hope that designers' use of multiple perspectiv...

Thoroughly updated and packed with examples of global standards and design solutions, Universal Design Handbook, Second Edition, covers the full scope of universal design, discussing how to develop media, products, buildings, and infrastructure for the widest range of human needs, preferences, and functioning. This pioneering work brings together a rich variety of expertise from around the world to discuss the extraordinary growth and changes in the universal design movement. The book provides an overview of universal design premises and perspectives, and performance-based design criteria and guidelines. Public and private spaces, products, and technologies are covered, and current and emerging research and teaching are explored. This unique resource includes analyses of historical and contemporary universal design issues from seven different countries, as well as a look at future trends.

What can a remarkable community of 6,000 retired academics living on the campus of Tsinghua University, Beijing, tell us about strategies for ‘ageing well’ in societies around the world? The Ingenuity of Ageing tells the story of an experimental piece of design research carried out by Dr Yanki Lee, a research fellow in the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art, who spent a year in China investigating new approaches to design for ageing. Supported by a UK-China Fellowship of Excellence funded by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), Dr Yanki Lee’s post-Doctoral study combines the techniques of reflexive ethnography and action research in order to challenge conventional thinking about the designer as expert and propose an alternative, participatory model of social interaction and innovation through which the ingenuity of older people can be revealed.

Lee, Yan Ki <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Lee,_Yan_Ki.html>, Jachna, Timothy J. <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Jachna,_Timothy.html>, & Frazer, John H. <http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Frazer,_John.html> (2004) Empowerment games : empathic ...

As a team with a sociologist and a designer-researcher, we employed action research methodology by conducting design labs for different learning situations and researching the social role of designers, Design Schools and the design education system as a whole. In this paper, we intend to reflect on our latest project with young design students who were sent out to the local communities around their design institution to see if participatory design and infrastructuring could provide a new direction for design as a profession. We challenged the notion of design things, which conceptualise the design process as 'social-material assembly' but neglect the professional roles of designers. We investigated three areas that enable designers to engage social reality: 1. identifying the public, 2. democratising design process/ design intelligence, 3. solution focused design practice. We argued that designers have their designerly ways of practice that constitutes a specific professiona...

PDC 2012 is an excellent opportunity to enter engaging conversations and debates about the status and future of the field of Participatory Design. This issue of the proceedings provides an excellent starting point for debate as it points to a number of trends, challenges and dilemmas for the field. With firm roots in the original Participatory Design focus on involving people in the introduction of technology into their workplace this year's PDC conference invites us to explore traditional fields of participatory design as well as emerging areas, field, and arenas, like for instance urban life and communities. Skilled workers are still participating in design processes aiming at developing tools for quality of working life, but designing for everyday life poses new challenges for the way participation is practiced and understood. Today we are designing engaging experiences not only through participation but also for participation. A total of 67 papers were submitted in the resea...

This paper is part of the collaboration between a sociologist and a design researcher. Through observing the performance of interdisciplinary groups of graduate design students participating in our design labs, we explored the forms of exchange among them and identified the difficulties as well as barriers against teaching and learning Inclusive Design. The labs are named as the Methods Lab, a new design exercise to promote design for social inclusion started from a postgraduate art & design college in the United Kingdom. By continual conduction and refinement of different forms of these design labs, we set up a double-loop cycle of learning in order to reach for the point of reflection for the aware of disturbances in relation to an existing paradigm. We also stress on the designerly ways of knowing that is basically solution-focused through which different solutions are proposed. This kind of abductive reasoning helps us to reflect the nature of the problems in hand. Through analy...

Inspired by concepts from the Participatory Design discourse such as the idea of design process as Things (Ehn 2008 and Binder et al 2011) and the concept of agonistic democracy (Bjorgvinsson et al, 2010), we have engaged a community of over 7000 retired academics who are actively ageing on their university campus in China through a variety of methods since 2011. We call this a reflexive ethnographic study with these ingenious older people and it focuses on how they designed their lives, the Ingenuity of Ageing. A research team composed of design researchers and a sociologist; we have investigated how designers accomplish infrastructuring and the mobilisation of participation in design. From our intensive interaction with this ingenious group, we found important new roles for designers as triggers/activists. Regarding the ways of deliberating people’s value in design processes, we employed Ricoeur’s ideas of utopia and ideology as the key concept guiding the design of our ongoing ex...

As a dialogue with the advocates of the idea of ‘design process as Things’ of which designers become facilitators and supporters for design process, we attempt to argue that designers should understand their role as a moral subject and their values in design should be revealed and discussed with design participants. Regarding the ways of deliberating values in design process, we employed Ricoeur’s ideas of utopia and ideology as the key concepts guiding the design of our experiment with a group of retired academics in China. We argue that designers could accomplish this task through a critique of ideology and of identifying utopian elements from the participants. In conclusion, we maintain that both designers should align with the critical role of designers as a moral subject so as to ensure better design ‘outcomes’ that could improve lives for our future selves.

Designing with People is a teaching resource website for design students and professionals. It details the process of adopting an 'inclusive design' methodology and includes examples of design work that has used this approach as well as user archetypes to help designers at the first stage of a user centered project. Designing with People was the key output from the Helen Hamlyn Centre's work in the i-design 3 project, funded by the EPSRC and in collaboration with Cambridge and Loughborough Universities. I-design 3 was the final stage of a 10 year project that focused on the development of inclusive design from both a pedagogical and commercial perspective.

The world of design is under a massive change: design becomes everyday activity rather than a professional study. What are the new roles of professional designers under this transformation? This paper investigates the re-writing of designers’ roles as an important component in achieving Design Participation. It starts from the Papanek’s ideology of social design and explained by the theoretical discourse from Lyotard’s concept of narratives concept and then looks at the Populist Movement in design. Following by the introduction of the analysing tool of concrete and abstract space, which aims to understand the changes in the design of world. Real world examples of design participation are shown as the basis for more holistic approach of design. Finally, the discussion is concluded with a realignment of designers’ roles (generator, facilitator and developer) from that of producing objects, environments and systems, to that of facilitating innovative collaboration and creating platform...

This thesis documents a process of rethinking user participation in the design of the urban built environment. It investigates options for the roles of architects and designers as generators and facilitators of design processes that enable designing with people. Its aim is to investigate ...

This paper discusses the importance of user-centred design by outlining its history , embodiment in national and international standards (for example, British Standards Institute, 2005) and its relevance in addressing the needs of an ageing population. It also outlines how a user-centred approach to design and technology has been part National Curriculum in England since 1989. Using data collected from two schools which includes, teacher interviews (n=4); pupil focus group interviews (12 pupils comprising 6 boys and 6 girls from two schools); a pupils survey (n=50) and departmental documents such as schemes of work, we found that many of the tasks teachers plan for students, do not provide them with the opportunities that allow for a user-centred approach. We discuss the implications of this and make some initial conclusions as part of our on-going research.

Following her publications on housing design, French was commissioned to contribute to a project coordinated by Dr Lee at Hong Kong Design Institute, a unique opportunity to gain access to the standard ‘social housing’ units designed by architects and occupied by ordinary families. Inspired by European modernism, the Hong Kong Housing Authority (HA) has pioneered land reclamation and high-rise construction, producing some of the world’s densest, most vertical residential areas built since the mid-1950s. Data were collected and analysed from 120 typical homes to discover how families occupy the compact flats that have continued to be developed, maintained and rented by HA. The research shows for the first time the interiors – the lived reality of modernism's housing project – and has highlighted a particular flat type that housing studies now categorise as ‘indeterminate’: it is offered to tenants as a shell to partition to suit their own desires. Its success offers a model with ...

This collective design workshop aims to provoke and test new design approaches towards ageing. We are looking for design stories/narratives that show how design thinking and collaborative working can enable the world to respond differently to the challenges of ageing. Can designers change our inherent ageism through the engagement of older people in the design and delivery of services and products with them? Can we change our current strategies towards ageing, turning its potential challenges into opportunities to engage, empower and improve the lives of the elderly ?뀀ഀȠ Together, we aims to build a collective design approach with ingenious older people and for our future selves.

DESIGN ACT Socially and politically engaged design today i?½ critical roles and emerging tactics is a new book that presents and discusses contemporary design practices that engage with political and societal issues. Since 2009, Iaspisi?½ and Interactive Institutei?½s collaboration DESIGN ACT has been highlighting and discussing practices, in which designers have been engaging critically as well as practically in such issues. Itself an example of applied critical thinking and experimental tactics, the process behind the DESIGN ACT project is considered as a curatorial, participatory and open-ended activity. DESIGN ACT has developed through a website with an online archive; public seminars; presentations and an international network of practitioners, theoreticians and curators. The book is organized around three sections: i?½WHAT are examples of these movements?i?½ Contemporary and historical writings, including reprints of i?½Suicidal Desiresi?½ (from the book Superstudio: Life With...

This paper also intends to explore the possibility of making this experience a foundation for future models of pedagogy. The learning processes mention would not only happen exclusively within the campus, but would also be open to the community and public. This paper reports the process and results of a survey developed as a collaboration between a design researcher in participation, design educators, a sociologist, local activists, design students and their families and friends. We discussed how this model could be an exploration for forming a community for enquiry. This process advocated the use of open enquiry, common tool creation and co-learning activity to carry out the research. This is an on-going process and we will discuss its latest development: from design education to civic education to create tools and platforms for an archive of Hong Kong lived-in homes. INTRODUCTION Could there be a designerly way of enquiry for social situations? And what is the specificity of desig...

This paper draws on the important implications of Aristotle’s understanding of techne to design making, and on the other, to show how we attempt to apply our practical intellect and imagination to design. These two tasks are to establish the proper role of designers in design process about our everyday lives. Fine Dying is the first “possible design study”, which aims to encourage public to investigate our own dying matters through designing. Three tactics in this project were identified to manifest our imagination of the possibility of having happiness through designing our afterlife: a) the actualization of the ethics of recognition; b) allowing the matter of concerns visible and present in public; and c) the continuation of dialogue between designers/younger citizens, design partners/older people and the audience/on-lookers.

Inclusive Design responds to Design Exclusion and aims to create designs that are mainstream in nature, which can benefit the majority by including those who are design excluded. The many Inclusive Design initiatives since the 1990’s in the UK, have demonstrated that working with people who are excluded by design such as older and disabled people is an ef fective way of developing inclusively designed products, services, environments and communications for other groups in the population. How do these user involvements actually work and what elements of the process have an impact on both design practices and users or user engagement methods? This discussion reflects on the premise that the Inclusive Design process can enable social inclusion and looks especially at the importance of the understanding of cultural context to ensure ef fective user/designer partnerships. It is based on the experience of the 48 Hour Inclusive Design Challenge that took place in Hong Kong in the summer of...

1. Design Participation How can users take part and what are the potential roles of users in participating in design processes? In which parts of the design processes can users take part and what are the roles of designers and of other stakeholders? These questions indicate that there are many actors (both addressees and addressors), processes, and social systems involved. They influence each other mutually and their combinations make for the great variety of Design Participation cases. The discussion of this paper starts with the proposition: Design Participation is about the interaction between designer and user. In order to understand the rationale of Design Participation, the first step is to define the words 'Design' and 'Participation' separately within the 'space' of designers and users. "Both words are ambiguous," Stringer (1972) expressed, "Design can refer either to the design, in the sense of a plan for a product, or to the process o...

IntroductionThe objective of this paper is to present the results of the application of the concept of intersubjectivity to the process of design participation. We believe that design participation is not a political stance but a methodological necessity. User participation must also be highlighted, as the outcomes of design will be utilised by target users and their concerns are of utmost importance. Users' views and knowledge should play a critical role in the design process (Ho, Lee, & Cassim, 2009). Moreover, as suggested by action research advocates like Reason (2004), participation requires the formation of communicative space. This raises the question of what circumstances render open communicative space possible.We focused on how to integrate the knowledge of users into the whole design process. As informed by Cross's (2006) analysis of the nature of design practice, we concede that the design process must be characterised by the components of (a) "design with&q...

Children–Computer Interaction: An Inclusive Design Process for the Design of Our Future Playground Lee Yanki Royal College of Art (RCA) Helen Hamlyn Centre (HHC), London, UK yan-ki. lee@ rca. ac. uk Abstract. After observing children playing games, two design-engineering ...

This thesis documents a process of rethinking user participation in the design of the urban built environment. It investigates options for the roles of architects and designers as generators and facilitators of design processes that enable designing with people. Its aim is to investigate ...

In Chinese society like in many cultures, persons with dementia suffer some level of stigmatisation. For this reason a dementia research/care centre in Hong Kong (China) initiated the design of the “dementia experience tool”. Its main goal is to create public understanding through inviting the general public to experience dementia. The dementia research/care centre commissioned a social design research lab team (two of the authors are part of this) to create the tool, starting from designing empathic tools. One of the main challenges to design this tool was to find a way to empathise with a complicated condition such as dementia, which is an umbrella term for a series of symptoms, as traditional empathic tools mostly focus on simulation of a specific physical or mental impairment.

This doctoral design research thesis documents a process of rethinking user participation in the design of the urban built environment. It investigates options for the roles of architects and designers as generators and facilitators of design processes that enable designing with people. Its aim is to investigate the tactical knowledge of participation in design and explore how architects’ and designers’ knowledge can be transferred to, shared with and developed together with non-experts. First of all, the theoretical discourse centres on Henri Lefebvre’s distinction between the ‘abstract space’ of designers and experts and the ‘concrete space’ of people and day-to-day life, in spatial practice. This dialectic model of space was developed as an analytical tool to define, understand and re-appropriate the term ‘participation’ in the environmental design field. This new Design Participation analytical tool is then further developed to demonstrate two contributions of this design research. 

The first contribution is through a critical assessment of different practices of Design Participation, as first defined in the 1971 Design Participation Conference in Manchester (UK) organised by the Design Research Society (DRS), to provide a new viewpoint to understand design practices with participation. Different Design Participation practices were assessed for their appropriateness and effectiveness within past and current contexts, and in different stages and tasks within the design process. Practices within the realm of collaboration between the abstract space of designers and the concrete space of users were tested through a comparative study of design participation projects in three social contexts: Sweden, the United Kingdom (London) and Hong Kong, in which different social attitudes to design prevail. A rethought definition and typology of design participation was developed based on relations between the two ‘worlds’ of experts/designers and users/people. This new understanding of Design Participation is articulated with a new Design Participation Benchmark and Taxonomy.

The research endeavours to define Design Participation Tactics that avoid mere ‘tokenism’ and aims at articulating tactics for a transformation of the traditionally conceived process of design. Through action research methodology, the second contribution of this research is to further define the term ‘participation’ within the greater social context and its relation to the subject of design by learning through doing. Three levels of Design Participation Tactics were introduced which are working with three newly defined modes of participation: Community, Public and Design Participation. The Design Participation analytical tool was used to compare different practices between different modes of participation. The relevance and validity of the research is supported through real-world cases involving co-designing with grass-roots user groups, children’s groups and older users, as well as collaboration with professional designers of housing, exhibitions and other types of environments, and other disciplines such as social work and public policy.

The re-writing of the roles of designers, architects and other ‘experts’ in the design process is an important component in achieving Design Participation. Positions on the agendas, methodologies and epistemologies involved in the Design Participation process were developed during this study. ‘Agenda’ refers to how the Design Participation process addresses the social context, reflecting social changes and needs. ‘Methodology’ applies to devising holistic Design Participation processes developed through working with users and matching appropriate tactics to each different situation. ‘Epistemology’ evokes the important question of how Design Participation tactics can be transferred to become a foundation and tool for future development. The pursuit of increasing user participation in the design process implies a realignment of designers’ roles (generator, facilitator and developer) from that of producing objects, environments and systems, to that of facilitating innovative collaboration and creating platforms for social inclusion in design practice.