Oslo School of Architecture and Design

Chance interaction among diverse strangers is a much-celebrated feature of urbanity. The rise in privately owned and managed public spaces, tending to displace people, activities and exchanges that may threaten business interests, has thus raised broad concerns. However, how such ‘new’, high-profile public spaces of the neoliberal or entrepreneurial city differ from ‘traditional’, everyday ones in terms of spontaneous encounters, is not well covered in the ever-growing public space research. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, Norway, this article explores the occurrence of peaceful chance interactions among strangers in ‘new’ public space. In the two examined urban squares, representing ‘traditional’ and ‘new’ public space, strangers interact on a regularised versus an episodic basis, reflecting major differences in ‘contact-supporting circumstances’. A close reading of the pertinent scholarly literature indicates that these findings have a broader significance. The article’s key contribution is the detailed documentation and conceptualisation of basic circumstances that distinguish a ‘new’ from an ordinary, everyday public space with regards to chance interactions. Herein, the study points to an important shift in urban governance and planning since the 1980s. A market-led notion of attractiveness in the physical and social environment takes centre stage in prestigious urban developments, at the expense of the disordered exchanges of everyday life.

This article traces the interdisciplinary entanglement between biology and architecture at The Delos Symposion, a series of annual week-long architecture and urbanism symposia convened by architect and planner Constantinos Doxiadis (1913–1975), ten of which took place on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea between 1963 and 1972. These Delos symposia stand out as a pioneering interdisciplinary initiative and a unique think-tank for future-oriented developments in both architectural theory and biology, united by a common interest in cybernetics. Biologist Conrad Hal Waddington (1905–1975), who attended all ten Delos gatherings, was a forerunner of such new developments in biology; at Delos he discussed how his ground-breaking theory of epigenetics would change how designers would build, plan, and conceptualize buildings and cities. This article is a critical study of how Waddington’s epigenetic theory mutated into architecture and urban theory. First, I discuss Doxiadis’ holistic urban theory of ekistics in relation to Waddington’s epigenetic theory by focusing on the notion of open-endedness in the two theories. The article then argues that the discussions on planning and design at Delos affected Waddington’s thinking, changing a structural belief in planning into a post-structural disbelief in certitude. The interdisciplinary Delos discussions about planning and architecture triggered the scientist to turn toward aesthetics and ethical epistemology as a response to an uncertain future — a transmutation that impelled ethical and epistemological developments that still resonate in critical discourses in the humanities.

This paper presents the developments across a multi-year collaborative industry-academia R&D project designing and testing novel Augmented Reality (AR) solutions for differing maritime operations and work tasks. We describe the step-wise approach taken in our Human Factors testing program exploring the effects of AR on maritime operators. This paper focuses specifically on our empirical simulator laboratory experiments using differing data collection designs, tools and operational scenarios to investigate operator Situation Awareness, cognitive workload, performance and usability. Moving from comparatively rudimentary measures using static scenarios, desktop data collections and post hoc video analysis to implementing eye-tracking and automated object identification in dynamic scenarios and full-mission simulated environments, we present an overview of how our testing program has evolved and lessons learned. Further, we discuss ongoing research and future plans to better understand the effects of AR on maritime end-users to implement human-centred solutions more effectively in maritime settings.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a wide set of technologies that can be used for many different scopes. AM is now a well-integrated prototyping and development tool in most industrial endeavours, while proper end-product manufacturing has only seen very specific niche successes. Given the complexity of AM’s matrix, which is full of discontinuities and non-trivial intercorrelations that play a relevant role in product design and development, it should not come as a surprise that not many end-product applications have succeeded in making use of it. This paper argues that understanding AM’s complex matrix and correctly identifying suitable production niches for it are key elements of this issue, a topic for which existing literature and tools are scarce. The analysis of AM’s status quo for end-product manufacturing and the review of existing approaches to integrate these technologies with product development are the basis used in this paper to propose a suitability assessment tool to fill this knowledge gap.

In this work, we introduce biodegradation as a process of more-than-human unmaking. We begin by positioning biodegradation amongst related works in design research before presenting a circular process of making and unmaking biomaterials and living organisms through biodegradation. To exemplify this process, we detail two existing works—ReClaym and Biomenstrual—that exemplify how biodegradability can be explored in design through different biomaterials, methods, and contexts. By diffractively reading these projects through one another, we identify six themes and corresponding suggestions for researchers engaging with biodegradation. Lastly, we discuss the broader design implications and limitations, as well as the more-than-human values that emerge from designing for biodegradation via biomaterials. Through this, we aim to provide design researchers with practical tools and insights for engaging with biodegradation to unmake anthropocentric hierarchies between humans, non-humans, and biomaterials, which in turn can promote environmental sustainability and support more-than-human collaboration and care.

This article describes an approach to developing and maintaining interpersonal agency through guided movement and responsive technologies. Making Movement Irresistible (MMI), considered conditions for developing a digital, online and wearable intervention that could make the act of movement irresistible for older residents in care, and encourage improvisational and social interactions. Working within a co-design framework, we combined making material objects and moving together as a method of examining the efficacy of human to human, and human to technology relationships to cultivate agency. Given that movement as performance is frequently not practiced or uncomfortable, we invited a variety of experts as our co-designers to notice the nuances of movement that interested them and to document these using drawing, writing and visuals. This documentation was gathered regularly in journals as the workshops progressed, leading to a coherent capture of data as it emerged. This data allowed us to attribute value to how simple actions could become a conduit for more ambitious, exploratory interactions. Our playful methods afforded the participation of co-designers, enabling us to situate our proposed intervention within a relational and social, rather than medical model, of ageing. Making movement do-able and relational, so that it can be shared and extended with a partner or carer, informed the idea to design a wearable device that could detect movement variability, resulting in a prototype, named emitts ®. The device makes use of the hand as way in to accessing whole body interaction. Our work with responsiveness of visual feedback avoided deterministic targets, as with no two movements being identical, the reported problem of compliance with repetitive tasks could be reduced. The technology foregrounded movement that was capricious and improvisational, offering new modes of artistic practice and engagement through play and performance. The case we describe highlights the importance of understanding the conditions that augment social interaction, rather than specifying design criteria for determining interaction. The longer-term health benefits of our intervention have yet to be measured, however, our collaboration has revealed how interpersonal agency emerges when we socially, aesthetically, and physiologically stimulate movement, making it irresistible where there may otherwise be resistance.

This article explores the intersections and resonances between unmaking and more-than-human design. We begin by aligning unmaking with decentering, a fundamental practice in more-than-human design, through their shared movement and materiality. Using Lindström and Ståhl’s notion of the double movement in un/making, we analyze a series of workshops focused on designing with AI, annotating what was un/made and de/centered during the workshops’ activities. Through this analysis, we introduce two key contributions that highlight some opportunities in the diffractive alignment between unmaking and more-than-human design: firstly, the notion of ‘unmaking-with’ as an emergent concept to describe a posthumanist unmaking practice, and secondly, three decentering tactics–situating, materializing, and enacting–that instantiate this practice through design. Finally, we discuss how unmaking can enrich more-than-human design and, conversely, how more-than-human design can help define the epistemological scope of unmaking.

Increasingly, there is a shift toward bringing services that were originally provided in hospitals into the home. Healthcare designers have been supporting this movement by designing medical devices and home care services. However, there is a risk that such shifts simply medicalize the home and erode the valuable informal practices of care that already occur there. Using a research through design approach, we adopted a hospitality lens to understand the rituals of hosting at home and identify potential areas of hostility as mental health consultations enter the home in Norway. This research demonstrates the value of adopting a hospitality lens when designing healthcare at home and how mapping rituals can contribute to a reflexive practice for both healthcare designers and clinicians.

Design educators often utilize methods to teach students the practices of design. Yet, these popularized methods often wash away mess and inadvertently cultivate aesthetic hygiene among designers. In response, this research explores the following question: How can we instill critical aesthetic reflexivity among designers about the ways that design methods cultivate aesthetic hygiene? In two workshops with design students and practicing designers, we worked with soaps as tangible metaphors to explore the mess that popular methods erase. Exhibited together with prompting questions, these soaps were then used to spark conversations among design educators. Through our analysis of this process, we highlight four material expressions of how design methods repress mess and critical pedagogical questions for cultivating aesthetic reflexivity.

Augmented reality (AR) technology has emerged as a promising solution that can potentially reduce head-down time and increase situational awareness during navigation operations. It is also useful for remote operation centers where video feeds from remote ships can be "augmented" with data and information. In this article, we introduce a user interface design concept that supports ship navigation by showing data about points of interest in AR. This approach enables users to view and interact with relevant data in the maritime environment by bridging the gap between digital information and real-world features. The proposed concept can provide operational data from various maritime systems, such as radar, GPS, AIS, or camera systems, empowering users with a wealth of information about their surroundings. Developed through an iterative user-centered design process, it was built as an extension to the OpenBridge design system, an open-source platform facilitating consistent design in maritime workplaces. Furthermore, we use this concept to propose a design framework that paves the way for establishing new standards for AR user interface design in the maritime domain.

Service design research has recently undergone a systemic turn, transitioning from the aim of improving user experiences toward catalyzing service system transformation. This development has resulted in a neglect of actors’ emotional experiences in the research. To understand the roots and implications of this emotional neglect, this research combines a critical review of the research developments with interviews with expert service designers. We identify three main shifts within the literature: from customer emotions to actor configurations; from service situations to service systems; and from practice-based to theory-driven research. Our analysis highlights how these shifts relate to practitioners’ challenges in addressing the emotional complexity inherent in systemic change processes. To counter what the systemic turn may have left behind, we call for integrating emotions and systems in both service design practice and theory.

Analysing a range of policy documents and drawing on engagements with a wide range of stakeholders, this chapter demonstrates in her chapter that there exist considerable inconsistencies and tensions when it comes to the urban imaginaries being played out over Longyearbyen in particular. However, while on the one hand the chapter she identifies an imaginary strongly tied to the precautionary principle as being strongly present with the Norwegian authorities, it also hints at a range of processes that underlie alternative, bottom-up and co-creative processes of producing urban imaginaries.