Tactical Acts from Lockdown Homes

The COVID 19 lockdown brought work home. As design researchers our interest has been in the socio-material changes which the pandemic lockdown, as a top down strategy has brought to the domestic realm. Using an online response gathering tool we undertook an inquiry with 31 different households from around the world. Analyzing this data, we present 7 inter-connected activity categories performed by people as they merged and separated their professional work and domestic living within their homes. From within these categories we note particular activities let people overcome the pressures of merging professional work and domestic living. We see these activities to be tactically emerging from specific characteristics of the domestic realm. Targeting innovation specialists, product designers, architects and service designers we seek the potential for amplifying such tactical characteristics when designing for working from home futures.

Data visualization in the time of coronavirus

Currently, we observe a proliferation of data visualizations about Covid-19 in the media, which makes it a convenient time to study the topic from the perspective of different disciplines, including information design and mathematics. If, on the one hand, the abundance of such pandemic representations would already be a legitimate reason to address the issue, on the other hand, it is not the central motivation of the present discussion. The uniqueness of the epidemiological phenomenon that we are experiencing highlights new aspects regarding the production and use of data visualizations, one of which is its diversification beyond counting and visual representation of events related to the virus spread. In this sense, the article discusses, through the analysis of examples, three different approaches for this type of schematic representation, namely: visualization of hypothetical data, visualizations based on secondary data, and visualization for social criticism and self-reflection. Ultimately, we can argue that design contributes to the production of data visualizations that can help people to understand the causes and implications involved in the new coronavirus and encourage civic responsibility through self-care and the practice of social distancing.

Design and Covid-19: Monitoring Urban Data

This article discusses the use of population monitoring within urban space by designers. It considers its use to define design strategies aiming at mitigating the Covid-19. Some governments have used identified citizens data as well as stored population data through telephone companies. In search to establish new strategies to mitigate the pandemic consolidation, data collected are used for communication, considering among other aspects statistical surveys of the population. With this, new services are offering digital applications in the pandemic context, having designers as part of the group of people involved in this new process. On population monitoring activity, issues such as data privacy, surveillance capitalism and doubts about the use of these data and activities after the pandemic are points to be considered. In this context, how and what should designers consider in this scenario is a question that arises. This work presents a discussion about the theme based upon a systematic research on the related literature. Literature was analysed resulting in a set of points that shows the importance of design strategy in the use of these projects.

Rethinking post-Covid-19 school design in Brazil: adaptation strategies for public schools PEE-12 FNDE

In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the disease COVID-19, whose causative virus is SARS-CoV-2, a pandemic. An important measure was the closure of schools in several countries to try to reduce the contagion levels, so that students were not exposed to risk, nor their families. The question that arises within this context is: In school architecture, what are the appropriate design methods to deal with challenges during and after a pandemic? In this scope, the article aimed to propose an adaptive design scenario in the post-pandemic moment for a standard school in Brazil. The methodology was built through a literature review and multidisciplinary research, to later present strategies based on the recommendations of competent bodies and studies focused on the school architecture, design patterns for 21st-century schools, technology and security. The focus was on design challenges in the education field in the post-pandemic moment, and on the adaptation of the school built spaces for the return of activities. The results can help the school community and public agencies in making decisions to face this challenge, recreating safer, user-centered schools.

DESIS and Covid-19: It’s Time to Hit the Reset Button

DESIS-Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability is a network of design-led research labs based in universities around the world created to trigger and support social change towards sustainability. The network started in 2009, in the wave of social innovation that characterized that period: innovations emerging mainly from grassroots initiatives aiming to solve, in a collaborative way, problems that people had to face in mature industrial societies. It is not rhetorical to say that the context we were in when we started, seems a century ago. The tragedy of Covid-19 is, in fact, one of those events that force us to push on the reset button. Where, in this case, “resetting” means the need to adjust what we are doing, and how and why we do it, considering what the Covid19 crisis has taught us and could still teach us. The double special issue of SDRJ we are presenting here goes in this direction.

‘Breathful’ design in breathless times

This position paper seeks to address the operational logic that created the conditions for the pandemic to take hold. Grasping the crisis as an opportunity for an anthropological inquiry across disciplines, this exploration firmly anchors design inside the social commitment required by breathing bodies and life-enabling atmospheres. By infusing the self-understanding of design with experiences and conceptions from Eastern and Western ‘breathwork’ practices the adaptation strategy in uncertainty shifts from perpetuating the status quo towards the creative reinterpretation of internal priorities. It also changes the nature of our projects, from making to enacting, from preprogrammed solutions to earthly engagement, from interfacing with inert matter to caring for living matters. Taking our universally shared breath as the resounding call for action, ‘breathful’ design is about the never-finished, perpetually opening task of persisting through bodily vigilance, diligence, and self-critical forsight for ‘knowing what to do when no one knows what to do’.

Maker Networks Fighting Covid-19: Design Guidelines for Redistributed Manufacturing (RDM) Models

Maker Networks indicate how society organizes itself to overcome significant challenges, such as the lack of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) observed during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze initiatives that produced PPE for frontline health staff to propose design guidelines for implementing RDM-Maker Networks: networks of people and organizations in the Maker Movement that collaboratively produce goods or services organized in a redistributed manufacturing (RDM) model. This paper has two main results: five Maker Networks in Brazil analyzed in terms of their RDM features and the subsequent design guidelines. We selected cases through several criteria like their location and the type of one of their nodes. Those criteria also represent limitations that further works can address.

Rationalizing Inquiry Paths for Responsible Design in the Context of a Global Pandemic

The systemic disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic amplified the effects of some social inequalities and revealed positive environmental effects associated with slowing the economy. In order to explore the repercussions of contagion prevention and community engagement initiatives such as deploying face masks and visualizing Covid-19 statistics, we resorted to an ethical model of Design for Responsible Innovation (DRI). This interactive model is useful for identifying, exploring, and describing analytical and generative paths of inquiry departing from, or arriving at, diverse matters of concern such as the impact of commodification and manufacturing in society and nature, the relativism of truth, the segregation of identities, and the reduction of agency. In this paper we argue that the human-centered perspective on design relies on a biased value system that either disfavors some social groups or disregards nonhuman living agencies, and we emphasize the analytical capacity of the model to chart and rationalize alternative inquiry paths. In consequence, future responsible design interventions would benefit from positioning life at center stage and embracing the relational and dependent nature of human beings from a posthuman perspective. To achieve this, research methods capable of handling human-nonhuman units of analysis and allowing the examination of systemic impact in complex systems are needed.

Designing for the pandemic: individual and collective safety devices

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has generated a demand for health-related safety equipment. The development of these emergency products raises several questions, in particular the possible lack of concern for health, satisfaction, and safety of users in addition to the immediate safety against the COVID-19. Considering these issues, the objectives of this work are to categorize, identify trends, and propose strategic approaches to the development and alteration of individual and collective safety solutions for facing the pandemic. For that, we conducted a review and categorization of industrial design products developed during the pandemic using the database Behance. We found 171 developed products. Of these, we classified 99 as individual safety solutions, with the majority being masks and face shields, 59 as being collective safety solutions like disinfection booths, physical transparent separators, and sanitary dispensers. And 13 were solutions geared to hospital use such as hospital furniture, testing solutions, and medical safety procedures. From the analysis of these products, we noted four major themes: protection from the infection, isolation, and physical barriers for enabling safe interaction, disinfection, and testing that can be used as a strategic guideline for the development of new solutions for this context.

Bad Strategy and Dark Matter. Reframing Italian Architectural Debate on the Post-Pandemic

The paper investigates into the inability of Italian architectural debate to produce sensible effects on the society – architects have not been involved in any task forces, nor their proposals have been taken in account for the norms for the post-pandemic. Our hypothesis is that the suggestions emerging from the debate are much vision-oriented, but are so weak from a strategic point of view that they could even be seen as an example of bad strategy – as defined by Richard Rumelt.In the first part, through an extensive survey on various sources (e.g., interviews and video-messages on leading newspapers, social media and TV broadcasts; debates on architectural journals and web forums; official proposals and manifestoes by professional associations), the article analyses and reframes the Italian architectural debate, for highlighting and defining its strategic weakness. The second part explains the main reasons for this weakness, showing that such inefficacy comes from the inability to deal with what Dan Hill called dark matter, i.e. the network of organisations, culture, bureaucracy and norms. The final part hints at a different perspective on architectural design for better dealing with the dark matter, thus giving the possibility of changing the generic proposals into strategic ones.