This paper explores the integration of Pierre Bourdieu’s “thinking tools” – habitus, field, capital, and practice – into design interventions aimed at fostering social and cultural transformation, particularly in the context of youth engagement. By applying a “Bourdieusian” framework, the paper aims to inspire to a more reflexive and inclusive design practice that addresses power dynamics, social inequalities, and sustainability issues. The study involves exploring the design approaches personas and future scenarios to understand how they can be utilized to address factors such as gender, functional abilities, ethnicity, and social class. The findings suggest that using Bourdieu’s framework in design helps to create more inclusive and relevant solutions by recognizing and valuing diversity. This can enable designers to move beyond superficial user engagement, ensuring that design solutions are both innovative and socially equitable. This paper concludes that a reflexive design culture, informed by “Bourdieusian” concepts, can bridge boundaries and support plurality in social and cultural transformations. By involving young people in exploring critical current and future scenarios, the research highlights the potential of design to dismantle existing inequalities and promote an inclusive and sustainable future. 

Design thinking är ett tankesätt och en användarcentrerad metodik för att identifiera alternativ och lösningar på komplexa problem på ett kreativt och hållbart sätt.

Design thinking handlar till viss del om att tänka, men framförallt väldigt mycket om att göra och reflektera. Det handlar om att utveckla sitt kritiska, kreativa och reflexiva tänkande för att utforska och förstå användarens behov, skapa idéer och utveckla attraktiva och hållbara lösningar.

This paper presents an overview of the literature on universal design for equitable healthcare. The central inquiry in the current paper is a critical design-for-all challenge: how might universal design contribute to providing equitable healthcare for women suffering from pelvic floor injuries during birth? This study delves into some of the explicit and implicit needs of this deprioritized minority patient group and what the literature states in terms of how design might contribute to fostering patient engagement in their healthcare journey from pregnancy to after-birth care. The findings from the literature overview offer an understanding of the domain, elucidating some core concepts, and delineating existing and divergent scholarly perspectives. By exploring the intersection of universal design and healthcare, this paper contributes to the advancement of the design of equitable healthcare solutions for women.

The ‘Young 2.0’ project is an exploratory design research endeavour focusing on youth participation in social transformation through co-creation. This study leverages an inclusive design research approach aimed at cultivating inclusivity and co-creating future service offerings and living environments that resonate with youth’s needs and aspirations. The future workshop framework was employed with the idea of encouraging critical assessment of current services and creative generation of future ideas and solutions. Through co-creative activities, the project captured insights into the lived experiences and future ambitions of young participants. The findings identify some of the entrenched norms and activities that spurred empathy and inclusive thinking through making and enactment. The main contribution lies in the initiatives strategies and methods aiming for youth to actively partake in shaping the future of their hometown, to share both explicit and implicit needs and aspirations. The ‘Young 2.0’ project serves as a microcosm of the potential inherent in co-design to serve as a conduit for youth to express and enact their visions for a more inclusive society. This paper provides an exploration of the project’s structure, methodologies, and outcomes, providing some insights into the processes of co-creation within community development and the empowerment of youth.

The co-design of urban places and the role of professional urban designers entails facilitating multidimensional processes to capture people’s dreams of attractive and inclusive future living environments. Nevertheless, many urban designers tend to focus on the material factors rather than the social and cultural ones. Based on findings from a case study and conceptual analysis, a systemic reflexive tool is offered to help scholars and practitioners to comprise the complexities of urban design. The Dreamcatcher tool highlights four perspectives of situated complexity and the synergies between them: place and setting; people and participation; vision and scope; and tools and methods.

Den här rapporten beskriver en forskningsstudie utförd under 2022 med deltagande ungdomar i Piteå som syftar till att utforska deras fritidsaktiviteter och hur dessa påverkar ungdomars upplevelse av inkludering och en attraktiv livsmiljö. Studien utgår från ungdomars deltagande i - och upplevelser av - befintligt tjänsteutbud i Piteå kommun och deras tankar och idéer om framtidens tjänsteutbud. Genom att undersöka olika aspekter av fritidsaktiviteter och inkluderande design syftar studien till att bidra med kunskap om vad inkludering och attraktiv livsmiljö för ungdomar kan vara i Piteå.

Renewable energy infrastructures are becoming increasingly present in our environments, inevitably shaping the urban experiences of the everyday person as they move through the city. The profound impact these infrastructures have on social worlds has yet to be explored, with contemporary renewable energy discourse primarily focussing on the techno-economic. We argue for the everyday aestheticisation of renewable energy infrastructures, and how design thinking might offer a way forward in co-creating future meaningful experiences with renewable energy. We offer a collaborative design thinking workshop on the speculative experimentation of energy futures as a case study. The findings provide multi-scalar insights on exploring urban energy futures with citizen-designers – with aesthetics and lived experiences as central.