Since 1999, research for creativity triggering education solutions for interactive media design (IMD) undergraduate level education in Yıldız Technical University leaded to a variety of rule breaking exercises. Among many approaches, the method of designing for disabling environment, in which the students design for the users with one or more of their senses disabled, brought the challenge of working on developing interactive solutions for the individuals with autism spectrum conditions (ASC). With the aim of making their life easier, the design students were urged to find innovative yet functional interaction solutions for this focused user group, whose communicational disability activate due to the deficiencies in their senses and/or cognition. Between 2011 and 2012, this project brief supported by participatory design method motivated 26 students highly to develop design works to reflect the perfect fit of interaction design to this challenging framework involving the defective social communication cases of autism.
The pandemic, which started at the end of 2019, has affected societies in their own socio-cultural contexts and altered the interactions of human beings through their use of personal spaces and objects. Changes in the design of a wide range of objects varying from small tools to urban furniture are anticipated, as the “new normal” will be fully established in the coming months and years. We believe that each individual is recognized to be affected by a different aspect of pandemic, which yielded the fact that for such cases the paradigm for design may shift to favor user needs more than maintaining usability. This study examined the personal behavioral transformations after the acceptance of “new normal” and how these would be reflected on the design of everyday objects, tools or spaces. In order to address this problem, we developed design research method that was based on the tales of utopic cities found in the novel Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino. In this method, students, who already started living under the requirements of curfew, were guided to turn inwards and relate with their needs that arouse in the pandemic period with one selected city narrative and try to find design solutions based on the metaphorical narration and language used in the selected story. From the analysis of 17 works based on abductive reasoning, we obtained results in two different categories: (i) 5 generic cases supported by user scenarios, (ii) 3 groups of artifacts interacted by analogue means.
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