Designing for One's Own: Towards Technology Design Education for Home and Family Care
Creators: name: Maranan, Diego Silang
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: (The following summary of the presentation was crafted with the help of an AI chatbot. Access the full chat transcript.)

In this presentation given at the Politics of the Machine 2024 conference, I outline a framework for design education that reimagines how citizens in the Global South might apply problem-solving skills within their own households, communities, and everyday lives. Rather than relying solely on development agencies and civic organizations to address issues, I propose that we take advantage of the reach of open, distance, and e-learning platforms, such as those provided by my institution, the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU), to empower individuals to apply design thinking directly to the challenges faced by their families and loved ones.

Shifting Development Paradigms

Development work in the Global South is traditionally led by experts and organizations who target marginalized communities. While these interventions provide value, I argue for an approach that equips people with design thinking and problem-solving skills, enabling them to address challenges within their immediate circles. With platforms like UPOU reaching thousands of participants at a time, there is a unique opportunity to democratize problem-solving tools, building a society where everyday people become agents of meaningful change. This framework promotes a shift from concentrated expertise in professionals to a distributed model of grassroots empowerment.

Framework Structure: Themes, Mindsets, and Methods

The framework I’m presenting is composed of themes, mindsets, and methods—a toolkit that can be adapted and scaled to empower everyday problem-solvers across diverse contexts. These components work together to achieve specific outcomes, including the improvement of family well-being, resilience, and self-sufficiency.





Themes explore the domains of domestic life and family-centered care where design thinking can have significant impact. For example:



Domestic Design: I encourage individuals to treat their homes as dynamic environments for health, communication, and resilience. This means rethinking routines, caregiving approaches, and the role of the home in supporting each family member.

Healthcare Design for Aging Populations: With limited support systems for elder care in the Philippines, family-centered design can empower people to develop solutions tailored to their loved ones, such as health routines or affordable assistive devices.

Designing for Mortality and Legacy: Through design, families can address end-of-life care, grief, and legacy, using tangible, meaningful practices to honor loved ones and navigate the complexities of loss.





Mindsets shape how individuals approach and sustain their engagement with design in the context of family life. Key mindsets include:



Human-Centered, Culturally Relevant Design: Combining systems thinking with culturally adapted approaches, such as using “hugot”-based problem identification, enables people to develop solutions deeply rooted in personal and social contexts.

Embodied and Experiential Learning: Body-awareness techniques, like the Feldenkrais Method, allow family members to better understand and respond to one another’s needs, enhancing caregiving in an intuitive way.

Multigenerational and Microfuturism Thinking: This encourages individuals to consider the future impact of their solutions, allowing for sustainable approaches that benefit both current and future generations.





Methods provide actionable tools to implement the mindsets and themes. These include:



Design Thinking Principles: A human-centered approach to problem-solving that emphasizes empathy and iterative prototyping, making it a practical skill for addressing immediate family needs.

Tangible and Embodied Interaction Design: Practical exercises in designing tangible, embodied solutions—like assistive devices or interactive family mementos—bring innovation directly into the home.

Speculative and Critical Design: This method helps participants anticipate and prepare for future scenarios, especially in healthcare and eldercare, which can be valuable in long-term family planning.




Exploring the Framework Through a Sample Course

To illustrate how this framework might be developed in an educational setting, I presented a hypothetical 16-week interdisciplinary course titled Design for Loved Ones: Technology & Empathy. While this course serves only as an example of how the framework could be implemented, the AI-supported outline helped organize key modules, covering empathetic design, multigenerational problem-solving, and hands-on prototyping. AI's assistance in structuring this example showcases how AI tools can support curriculum development and idea generation within the broader design thinking toolkit, supplementing and enhancing human creativity.

The Role of AI in Design Thinking

AI has the potential to become a valuable supplement within the design thinking framework, especially as a tool for brainstorming, structuring, and testing ideas. From curriculum design to family-centered projects, AI can inspire new directions and provide insights that complement human intuition. By integrating AI’s capabilities in areas like ideas generation and iterative feedback, this framework empowers individuals to explore diverse, innovative solutions for real-world challenges in their lives.

Outcomes and Vision

Through a structured approach of themes, mindsets, and methods, this framework aims to achieve specific outcomes, particularly in enhancing family well-being, resilience, and intergenerational support. My goal is to cultivate a society of lifelong design thinkers, where individuals routinely apply creativity and problem-solving to address daily challenges. UPOU’s reach offers the unique opportunity to disseminate these skills on a massive scale, building a robust foundation for social resilience and self-reliance in the Philippines.

Ultimately, I envision a future where design thinking and problem-solving skills are embedded at the micro-level, with families empowered to address healthcare, eldercare, and social resilience from within. By decentralizing expertise and making design thinking accessible to all, this framework can transform communities and create lasting social impact.
description: Participatory design is a well-known methodology that involves end-users in the design process to create products and services that better meet their needs [1]. However, this approach is often applied to public or shared spaces rather than (one’s own) personal or family spaces. Even in family-centered design practices, designers’ attention are on the families of others, not their own [2], [3]. In this presentation, I describe the early stages of development of an educational approach as part of art and design research education, where students intentionally collaborate with their own family members, relatives, and friends as research participants and co-designers, and not merely for convenience. The approach draws inspiration from Hiroshi Ishii's "Weather Forecast Bottle," a tangible interface he developed specifically for his mother in the early 2000s [4], and has since fundamentally contributed to the field of tangible and embodied interface research [5]. The presentation will also discuss artistic and design projects I have undertaken with the intent to develop technologies and design propositions that benefit and provide care for my own family [6]. The framework borrows approaches from design fiction [3], [7], somatic practices [8], user experience and human-computer interaction (HCI) research [9], and visual and performance arts, and could be used to apply digital and frontier technologies such as wearable technology, IoT, and artificial intelligence in developing interventions for facilitating care within one’s home and family. I suggest that such an approach contributes to design education even as it addresses the need to care for one's own loved ones through targeted and context-appropriate applications of conventional participatory design and family-centered design. 

 

[1] C. Ten Holter, “Participatory design: lessons and directions for responsible research and innovation,” J. Responsible Innov., vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 275–290, May 2022, doi: 10.1080/23299460.2022.2041801.

[2] K. Cheong and A. Mitchell, “Kwento: Using a Participatory Approach to Design a Family Storytelling Application for Domestic Helpers,” Lect. Notes Comput. Sci., pp. 493–500, 2015.

[3] L. V. Nägele, M. Ryöppy, and D. Wilde, “PDFi: participatory design fiction with vulnerable users,” in Proceedings of the 10th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, in NordiCHI ’18. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, Sep. 2018, pp. 819–831. doi: 10.1145/3240167.3240272.

[4] H. Ishii, “Bottles: A transparent interface as a tribute to Mark Weiser,” IEICE Trans. Inf. Syst., vol. E87D, pp. 1299–1311, Jun. 2004.

[5] B. Ullmer, O. Shaer, A. Mazalek, and C. Hummels, Weaving Fire into Form: Aspirations for Tangible and Embodied Interaction, 1st ed. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2022. doi: 10.1145/3544564.

[6] D. S. Maranan, J. Grant, J. Matthias, M. Phillips, and S. L. Denham, “Haplós: Vibrotactile Somaesthetic Technology for Body Awareness,” in Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, in TEI ’20. Sydney NSW, Australia: Association for Computing Machinery, Feb. 2020, pp. 539–543. doi: 10.1145/3374920.3374984.

[7] D. Oogjes, W. Odom, and P. Fung, “Designing for an other Home: Expanding and Speculating on Different Forms of Domestic Life,” in Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference, in DIS ’18. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery, Jun. 2018, pp. 313–326. doi: 10.1145/3196709.3196810.

[8] R. Berland, E. Marques-Sule, J. L. Marín-Mateo, N. Moreno-Segura, A. López-Ridaura, and T. Sentandreu-Mañó, “Effects of the Feldenkrais Method as a Physiotherapy Tool: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials,” Int. J. Environ. Res. Public. Health, vol. 19, no. 21, p. 13734, Oct. 2022, doi: 10.3390/ijerph192113734.

[9] T. Almeida, R. Comber, and M. Balaam, “HCI and Intimate Care as an Agenda for Change in Women’s Health,” in Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, San Jose California USA: ACM, May 2016, pp. 2599–2611. doi: 10.1145/2858036.2858187.