This article presents an approach to user involvement that allows confronting the designer’s rationale with society’s motivations and values. This approach is specifically tailored for design processes aimed at societal transformation. In this approach, user involvement is considered as a constructive process, rather than a destructive process. More precisely, it is defined as a co-reflective session between designers and users that starts by sensitising to construct the user’s desired reality in order to confront it with the designer’s rationale.

Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) was founded by Simona Maschi and Heather Martin in August 2006. With an aim to build an international centre of excellence in interaction design and innovation, CIID incorporates three elements –education, research and consultancy– that together explore new thinking in design and technology.

If we consider the project as part of the design process, which takes its roots from the relationship between culture and material culture through the mediation of a subject and its poetics, then the technical act takes on the value of a complex cultural act, capable of interpreting the social, historic and cultural context in which it is placed. Poetics form an essential element in the act of generating industrial, architectural, engineering or any other kind of design. The elements from which poetics develop are those that we distinguish and specify as being particular to each discipline, on the inside of a cultural and technical system. Reflecting on poetics means researching the object of the project where technical and cultural conditions filter the experience of the project maker, transforming it into an operative programme which serves as a meeting point for science, aesthetics, research, experimentation, intuition, empiricism, materials, technology and art.

v*i*d*a lab (2005-2008) was an experimental workshop for industrial design students at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá (Colombia) which explored the conception of new objects for everyday life, taking as a point of departure trans-disciplinary approaches to the phenomenon of life. The present text sets out the chief reflections of the workshop, its exercises and general methodology, and some of the projects developed by the students.

Healthy Region Cuneo is a healthcare innovation project that was initiated in the summer of 2008 for the Italian regional health system of ASL CN1. The project proposed new design strategies and solutions that addressed the local healthcare needs of the citizens and care providers of the region of Cuneo.

The article Don’t panic is divided in two parts: the first takes us through the most significant projects by the design studio Dunne & Raby, formed by the English duo Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby and based in London. The second part of the article concentrates on the definition of critical design.

The following text is a transcript of a talk by Gillian Crampton-Smith at Innovation Forum Interaction Design, Potsdam, March 2007. The aim of the two-day conference was to focus on all aspects of interface and interaction design: mobile telephone and media interfaces, problem solutions and product visions, web pages and virtual worlds, art and commerce, business and science. Using both concrete projects and visionary concepts, current developments in interaction design were presented and discussed by regional and international experts from the design, research and business worlds.

Into(context) is a design research project developed by the Design for Sustainability group of Delft University of Technology, Kiva.org and funded by Microsoft Research’s Digital Inclusion Initiative. The initiative had as its goal to fund investigations of the role information & communication technology (ICT) can play in creating solutions for overcoming the myriad barriers facing the developing world.

Launching point for digital and electronic art -bioart or a-life art-, engineer and techno-artist Natalie Jeremijenko “plays” with artificial intelligence and biotechnology, carrying out several social practices from activist art into the high-tech world. This art has its roots in social movements connected to new media.