Zoekresultaten

Probing Problems and Priorities in Oral Health (Care) among Community Dwelling Elderly in the Netherlands - A Mixed Method Study

Studie naar problemen en behoeften op het gebied van mondgezondheid en -verzorging onder een groep van 97 ouderen in een instelling voor ouderenzorg. Vanwege complexe gebitsprothesen en een afname in de mondhygiëne ontstaan diverse problemen.

Scaffolding shared learning about sustainable futures between design engineering students, users, and a smart grid project team

Like the professionals, design students tend to avoid the complexity of the user context, and moral issues are largely overlooked. This inspired us to explore whether we could engage design students in thinking about moral issues by exploring different ethical frameworks in their designing. As a case environment we chose smart-grid product service combinations. In this paper we first discuss the ethical frameworks of four selected philosophers’: Plato, Rousseau, Kant, & Mill. Then we will describe the student design process, the resulting four smart grid service concepts and the user insights that came from a user evaluation. We discuss how this approach allowed the students to get insights in their own ethical stance and how they allowed users to reflect on possible futures. We also discuss how these ‘probing’ concepts were used within the larger smart grid project.

The Hackable City. Cahier #2

Cahier #2 describes a series of design probes that explored cooperative area development in the Amsterdam brownfield redevelopment site of Buiksloterham. These probes were tailored to investigate specific aspects of ‘hackable citymaking’: collaborative practices between different stakeholders, where new media technologies are employed to open up urban institutions and infrastructures to systemic change, in the public interest.

Noise vs. control

Over many years we’ve been looking at the emergence of “organized networks” as an alternative concept that could counter the social media platform a priori of gathering (and then exploiting) “weak links.”[1] Organized networks invent new institutional forms whose dynamics, properties, and practices are internal to the operational logic of communication media and digital technologies. Their emergence is prompted, in part, by a wider social fatigue with and increasing distrust of traditional and modern institutions such as the church, political party, firm, and labour union, which maintain hierarchical modes of organization. While not without hierarchical tendencies (founders, technical architectures, centralized infrastructures, personality cults), organized networks tend to gravitate more strongly toward horizontal modes of communication, practice, and planning.

Centre for Design Informatics: Blockchain City

Mental long Covid and the techno-social unconsciousness

It’s late April 2022 in Bologna and we meet in Franco’s apartment. He shows me his collection of collages he produced in the Covid period, his art therapy to fight off depression. The paintings can be found here and there online, exhibited under the pseudonym Istubalz. We’ve come together to discuss his latest book, The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age (published in English by Verso, translated by Bifo himself into Italian). The message of this short book is simple: we urgently need to engage with the future of psychoanalysis. The discovery of the unconscious in the eighteenth and nineteenth century resulted in the founding of psychoanalysis as both a therapy and tool for cultural analysis. Later, of course, it became an industry. In response to the emphasis of its founding fathers on denial and sublimation, the second mode of the unconscious, associated with Lacan and even more so Deleuze and Guattari, stressed the element of production. For them, the unconscious is not a theater but a factory. Fifty years into this probing of the liberation of desire, Berardi proposes a new angle: a third unconscious that circles around an understanding of the social dimension of the mind, in a world that is no longer focused on growth and (schizo-)productivity but on extinction and degrowth. Berardi calls for the development of new critical concepts that can help us to understand today’s spectrum of emotional attention. We must practice “riding the dynamic of disaster,” which he calls an accurate description of “our mental condition during the current earthquake, which is also a heart-quake and a mind-quake.” The seamless transition from Covid into the war in Ukraine reinstates the collapse of the bio-info-psycho circuit under the weight of the “stack of crises” (my term), the succession of catastrophic events. There’s a deeply unsettling and often profoundly depressing inevitably lurking about this atmosphere of accumulating disaster: the all-too-real sense that life is on the brink of total collapse and imminent disaster.