Publications
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Nilsson, Felicia; Hansen, Lise Amy & Göransdotter, Maria
(2025).
Activating aesthetics - explorations for shifting design practices.
Nordic Design Research.
doi:
10.21606/nordes.2025.24.
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Aesthetics is essential in design practice, yet simultaneously taken for granted and under researched. In light of the expanding design space designers find themselves in due to digital technology’s pervasiveness in everyday things and environments, designers need new ways of grappling with the issue of aesthetics. There is recognition that design ideals and practices honed in different times and contexts, lead to reproducing ideas of how things are made, and how things could or should be presented for use. This paper examines notions and practices of aesthetics in digital design through conversations with practicing designers, design literature, and design experiments. We suggest that an attentiveness to aesthetic qualities in digital design sheds light on deeply embedded ideas in design which need to be addressed in emerging practices. Activating aesthetics is here proposed through shifts from stability to multistability, from visual to transient, and from extraordinariness to mundane and intimate bodily entanglements.
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Nilsson, Anna Felicia & Vink, Josina
(2024).
Critical Design Soaps: Resisting the Aesthetic Hygiene of Popular Design Methods.
In Gray, C.M.; Chehade, E. Ciliotta; Hekkert, P.; Forlano, L.; Ciuccarelli, P. & Lloyd, P. (Ed.),
DRS2024: Boston.
Design Research Society.
ISSN 9781912294626.
doi:
10.21606/drs.2024.207.
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Design educators often utilize methods to teach students the practices of design. Yet, these popularized methods often wash away mess and inadvertently cultivate aesthetic hygiene among designers. In response, this research explores the following question: How can we instill critical aesthetic reflexivity among designers about the ways that design methods cultivate aesthetic hygiene? In two workshops with design students and practicing designers, we worked with soaps as tangible metaphors to explore the mess that popular methods erase. Exhibited together with prompting questions, these soaps were then used to spark conversations among design educators. Through our analysis of this process, we highlight four material expressions of how design methods repress mess and critical pedagogical questions for cultivating aesthetic reflexivity.
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Stranz, Anneli; Tishelman, Carol; Westerlund, Bo; Nilsson, Felicia; Hilton, Rebecca & Goliath, Ida
(2022).
The call-bell in residential care homes: Experiences of residents and staff.
Journal of Aging Studies.
ISSN 0890-4065.
62.
doi:
10.1016/j.jaging.2022.101056.
Full text in Research Archive
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Nilsson, Felicia; Prakash, Shivani & Vink, Josina
(2022).
Service Design within a Multiplicity of Logics in Healthcare.
In Pfannstiel, Mario A; Brehmer, Nataliia & Rasche, Christoph (Ed.),
Service Design Practices for Healthcare Innovation: Paradigms, Principles, Prospects.
Springer Nature.
ISSN 9783030872724.
p. 1–21.
doi:
10.1007/978-3-030-87273-1_1.
Full text in Research Archive
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Vink, Josina; Nilsson, Felicia; Freitas, Thiago & Prakash, Shivani
(2021).
Attempting to Resist Ontological Occupation When Designing for Scale in Healthcare.
Nordic Design Research.
p. 292–301.
doi:
10.21606/nordes.2021.32.
Full text in Research Archive
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Scholars have recently called out how design is
complicit in ontological occupation, where one
reality makes other realities non-existent. The
perpetuation of ontological occupation is a
particular risk when designing for scale in
healthcare, as Western healthcare is a recognized
carrier of modern universalist practices that
threaten local ways of caring. In this research, we
draw from science and technology studies and
anthropology to inform a research through design
study positioned within a collective effort to scaleup decentralized care models in Norway. We
analyse five attempts at resisting ontological
occupation through design and, by doing so,
contribute with lessons for design practice on the
practical implications of ontological politics.
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Prakash, Shivani; Nilsson, Felicia & Vink, Josina
(2021).
Troubling care - A critical look at the systemic shift toward
healthcare digitization.
Full text in Research Archive
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Amid recognition that care is contentious and highly political, conscientious design in healthcare systems cannot simply work blindly toward what is thought to be ‘good care’. Systemic design must grapple with the inherent conflicting values in care. This paper works to ‘unsettle’ care by exploring the tensions amid the evolving landscape of the Norwegian healthcare system. We attempt to embody Haraway’s idea of “staying with the trouble” in a design process positioned within a systemic transition toward digitization in healthcare. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork, we explore the contradictions and plurality of lived experiences in this context through textual and visual collages that intentionally juxtapose divergent values of care. This paper exposes an entanglement of troubles which include: knowing by measuring/experiencing through sensing; the situated view/the isolated view of the patient; and helping the dependent/coaching the independent. This research highlights that one important way of caring in systemic design might be to hold on to the troubles in the thick present, rather than reconciling or re-framing to solve emerging either/or tensions.
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Nilsson, Felicia & Vink, Josina
(2020).
Embodying Design Questions: Playful explorations in critical health and care systems.
Full text in Research Archive
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Published
Aug. 20, 2024 4:27 PM
