Hannah Korsmeyer’s research while affiliated with Monash University (Australia) and other places

By positioning designers and their practices at the centre of design studies, Designing Knowledge merges theory and practice to highlight how knowledge creation can contribute to an expanded and more inclusive design practice. Bringing together a rich variety of perspectives, methods and approaches, and exploring and critiquing current issues in design studies, this book encourages designers to reflect on their work in a new light.

In a post-pandemic context, everyday life, technology and media have become increasingly focused in the home. This has implications for how people will live with automated and smart technologies in possible futures, for electricity demand, transition to net zero emissions and ultimately planetary health. Here, we explore these unfolding circumstances through the prism of notifications, and their capacity to mediate uncertainties while enabling people to engage in anticipatory modes of home organisation which ensure their physical comfort and produce a sense of ontological security in pandemic and climate crisis situations. In possible futures, the notification may vary from its current characteristics, but would enable people to engage with everyday automated technologies and systems in ways that acknowledge values of place, safety and care.

Problem Framing helps designers define issues they want to focus on and make issues more focused and addressable. In Industrial design, and several other design disciplines, designers use 'pain points' or points of friction in the user experience to support problem framing, and to elucidate areas where they can intervene and improve the experience of the person they are designing for. Many design challenges start with a search for 'pain points' that designers can solve. This is a specific and useful type of problem frame. However this can lead to an excessive focus on (and even fetishization of) the pain and distress of other people. There is also a tension around who defines the problem and why. The focus on pain and deficit approaches can send problematic messaging about a community's lived experience, reinforcing a one-dimensional portrayal of these people as depleted or broken (Leitão 2020; Tuck 2009). The ways in which issues are framed can depend on one's positionality and point of view. In the same way that designers can choose to frame issues around pain points, they can also choose to frame issues with other starting points that are not pain and damage-centered. For this track, we invited authors to share alternative framing that they were using in design education that did not start with a 'painpoint'. The participants in this track were invited to: • consider how world views impact problem framing • examine issues of othering and unequal relationships of power in the framing activities of designers • interrogate how problems and painpoints are defined and described, including who declares these as points of pain. • share alternative methods of framing design problems that move away from damage and pain-centered approaches. • share alternative approaches to framing that are grounded in questions around the future, utopia, happiness and other bold new approaches in design. • share relevant culturally-situated practices such as 'jugaad' that may have alternative starting points This track aimed to challenge current norms in 'problem' framing in design practice and education from Pre-K to PhD and beyond, and in both formal and informal education. The track sought to highlight alternative approaches by considering local epistemologies, critical and speculative approaches, fantasy, 'make believe' and games, as well as the role of happiness as a starting point in design. Three papers and two workshops were selected for this track. In their paper, Christiansen and Gudiksen propose play-based strategies as a means of empathising with and understanding the issues that concern youth. It can be very difficult to connect with and understand young people between the ages of 14-17 years old after one has passed their age. They examine how play can be used to gain a better understanding of young people by unearthing hidden social problems that may affect their lives. The study stems from an emancipatory interest by the researchers in giving young people greater control in the research process, allowing the youth to determine what information they share during the research. They describe the experience of using the cultural probe method with ninth graders to understand