Developments in information and communication systems, organisational structure and the nature of work have contributed to the restructuring of work environments. In these new types of work environments, employees do not have assigned workplaces. This arrangement helps organisations to minimise rent costs and increase employee interaction and knowledge exchange through mobility. This post-occupancy evaluation (POE) study focuses on a flexible office in a Gold Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified building in Istanbul. An integrated qualitative and quantitative POE technique with occupancy tracking via barcode scanning and instant surveying has been introduced. Using this unique approach, we examined the directives/drivers in workplace choice and mobility from different perspectives. The aggregated data was used to discern work-related consequences such as flexibility, workplace choice, work and indoor environment satisfaction, place attachment and identity. The results show that employees who have a conventional working culture develop a new working style: 'fixed-flexible working'. Practitioner Summary: This paper introduces a new POE approach for flexible offices based on occupancy tracking through barcode scanning to explore workplace choice and mobility. More than half (52.1%) of the participants have tended to choose the same desk every day. However, the satisfaction level of the 'mobile' employees was higher than that of the 'fixed flexible' employees.

This article shares findings from a case study conducted in a senior interior design studio in which students were introduced to user-centered integrated design process (user-centered IDP) through a rural community-university collaboration. The goal was to understand the role of the user and user involvement in the interior design process. The research focused on the integration dimension of user-centered IDP and analyzed how students utilized user interaction and knowledge through the stages of the design process. This understanding is important for better interweaving user involvement and design, managing more effective design projects, and supporting student learning in the interior design studio. Research results indicated that students utilized the knowledge of the user in two ways: as an inspiration and as a constraint. The user, as a design factor, oscillated between inspiration and constraint thus suggesting an inspiration-constraint cycle of user in interior design process. This finding demonstrated the constructivist nature of user. Students constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed the concept of the user based on project context and requirements. According to Archer, there are six interrelated and overlapping stages in every design process: programming, data collection, analysis, synthesis, development, and communication. Although design

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Commercial activity trackers are increasingly being designed for children as young as 3 years old. However, we have limited understanding of family use practices around these trackers. To provide an overall view of how families naturally use activity trackers towards collaborative management of family health, we systematically identified 9 trackers designed for children available on 4 consumer electronics retailers. Our data is composed of 2,628 user reviews both from the consumer retailers (for the wearables) and mobile application stores (for the associated apps). Our findings indicate children's and parents' collaborative use of these technologies beyond health and wellness. Parents state that their children enjoy practicing independence and rewards while contributing to family health management and daily life requirements. Parents expect these devices to ease their life and to teach their children to become more responsible for their health, daily tasks, and schedule. However, the current designs give limited agency on child's side and require parents' active participation for wearable-app coordination. For these reasons, they do not fully address parents' expectations in decreasing their workload. On the other hand, they have the potential to facilitate family interaction with challenges structured around the data reported through trackers.

The user is a critical factor in design and innovation. Firms experiment with different approaches to involving the user in design processes, which results in new forms of intra‐ and extra‐organizational collaboration. The establishment of in‐house design research units within design consultancies is one such intra‐organizational user‐centred design practice that targets designer‐researcher collaboration. This paper addresses this issue and reports on the findings from multiple case study research exploring the impact of in‐house design research teams on designers' user knowledge construction. We utilized constructivist learning theory to assess major aspects of these intra‐organizational user‐centred design practices. Ethnographically informed field studies were conducted at six design consultancies representing three design fields (i.e., architecture, industrial design and interaction design) in the Northwestern United States. Three of the consultancies have design research departments and three do not. The findings indicate that in‐house design research units play a role in designers' user knowledge construction via their results, processes and human resources. Among these, the active participation of designers in the research process was observed to have the largest impact because of its contribution to designers' contextual and collaborative learning about users.