HKDI Gallery

Playponics provides kinaesthetic learning opportunities across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects, with environmental education and sustainable practices at their core. Through this, the project aims to instil better understandings in current and future populations of our relationship with the natural world. The team has developed play and exercise equipment enhanced with systems that harness users’ physical activity energy to sustain a variety of hydroponic and conventionally grown crops. The playground gardens are being designed for schools and communities in India to impart and instil in participants, older and younger, privileged and underprivileged, knowledge and understanding about STEM and STEAM infused environmental education and sustainability practices in fun and interactive ways.

The absence of traditional classroom furniture compels young learners to hold a tablet device for prolonged periods while floor sitting in rural Sudan and Chad. The primary objective of this research is to co-design a low-cost digital tablet desk (DTD) for floor-sitting e-learners that improves their visual gaze angle and sagittal head tilt to reduce stress on their cervical spine.

Research findings informed the development of design propositions that were evaluated with young learners and CWTL facilitators in Sudan and Chad. These include single and dual desks, alternative seating configurations and methods for securing tablet devices. The research supports charity War Child’s future scale up plans in Chad and Burkina Faso. The output is a design specification for a frugal, ergonomically sound DTD that is sympathetic to the challenges posed by its local manufacture by a low-skilled workforce.

This research is a response to the World Health Organisation (WHO) call for new innovations to support the management and care of Ebola patients during the West Africa Ebola crisis.

A critical component of infection control is the disinfection of personal protection equipment, surfaces and patients using 1:10 and 1:100 bleach concentrations. With no dedicated  tool commercially available, field workers improvise and use a domestic container to measure the formulations as instructed by the WHO’s recommendations.

The research investigated this urgent and unmet need. Frugal thinking and a subtractive approach to design led to the development of a $1 plywood bleach gauge that incorporated two indentations to visually communicate fill levels for each formulation. The characteristics of the polyethylene buckets procured by NGOs were analysed. Dimensional variances required an agile production strategy to supply quickly a custom product. A calculation tool enabled accurate measurements of gauge indentations to mirror precisely the specification of the buckets.

The Nano Biogas project considers the viability of small- scale biogas fuel production for cooking, heating and energy generation as an alternative to wood, dried dung, and Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG), in rural India. Currently, women regularly cook on open fires and ‘chula’ (stoves) fuelled with wood or dried cow manure which produce dangerous levels of smoke and toxins. LPG fuels are safer to cook with but are prohibitively expensive.

Aligned with the Indian government aims to improve the living standards of its poorer communities, this project explores whether biomass to biogas conversion is technically viable using Jugaad principles. The team worked with families in Khanpur Garbi, a small farming village in Uttar Pradesh. The village’s 400 cattle produce an estimated 3 tons of manure (biomass) per day. Through several design iterations and using local and discarded materials, plus customised components, the research shows that the principles of Jugaad Nano Biogas production are both technically viable and cost effective, with one participating family reporting they have been using the output every day to prepare meals.

The project considers notions of necessity being the mother of invention in relation to Assistive Technology for people with disability. In poorer communities people often invent creative solutions using found and low-cost materials, repurposed and recycled objects and products to address unmet need.

In Hindi, the word Jugaad is used to describe ‘a flexible approach to problem-solving that uses limited resources in an innovative way’. Across the developing world people use Jugaad approaches to solve everyday challenges of mobility, increase, maintain or improve functional capabilities or provide personal protection.

In this project, the team explored how people living with motor neurone disease in the Global South deal with everyday challenges, and brainstormed potential, new, low-cost solutions. The study then considered wider communities experiencing disability and poverty. Four photographers were commissioned to document ‘on the street’ how people solve their individual challenges in Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata.

Staff from Non-Governmental Organizations in India which provide low-cost product-based solutions for children have been interviewed. Insights into motivation, techniques and capability are rich and varied.

The resulting data set will be used to identify common deficiencies in AT provision, to provide a shared problem- solving resource, and to prompt new, lower cost product solutions for communities in need.

The need for user engagement in the design process is particularly acute when the target user group has specific requirements which may not be fully appreciated by designers. The focus of this research, designing to support older disabled living, is one such problem. The bathroom provides particular challenges to user-centred design methodology because of the highly personal, sensitive and intimate nature of the activities that take place in it.

This project aimed to improve the quality and design of bathroom furniture for older people with the goal of producing products which all bathroom users find acceptable as well as meeting the specific needs of older and disabled people.

This enquiry explores the role of design in reimagining the future care home. It focuses on research informed products to promote meaningful engagement between residents in the home, their families and care staff.

Engagement in meaningful activities as we age is crucial to maintaining physical and mental wellbeing. A lack of desirable, age-appropriate products for people living in care homes reduces engagement in meaningful activity, leading to boredom and depression. 

This project aims to improve the quality of activities available in care homes, drawing on a person’s senses for a richer and more meaningful experience. Each drawer is a collection of objects focused on an occupation, which helps navigate memories of peoples’ lives and the roles they had, in order to imbed a sense of purpose. The drawers provide opportunities for meaningful conversations through a sensory based experience, drawing on textures, sounds, smells and familiar objects.

The last decade has witnessed a demographic change on unprecedented scale. People are living longer and with more complex, long-term conditions such as cancer and dementia. Our palliative and end of life care services will be required to meet the needs of our ageing population under increasing pressure.

The Life Café is an output of Design to Care, a large programme of activity funded through Marie Curie, which seeks to rethink palliative and end of life care with a focus on understanding what is important to different individuals in life, in care, and towards end of life. The Life Café Kit is designed to promote and support conversations about what individuals find meaningful in life and in care. The kit is a set of critical artefacts, activities and resources which can be used in community and care settings to scaffold thinking and to prompt conversation.

Journeying through Dementia is an occupation-based intervention that aims to support people at an early stage of their dementia journey to engage in meaningful activities and maintain community connectedness. This intervention enables people to be supported to look after their own health and wellbeing. It was developed in partnership with people with dementia who spoke of the value they attached to continued participation in everyday occupations and in new learning. Throughout all the co-creation activities, people with dementia were clear that they wanted to have the opportunity to access groups that did not just talk about the diagnosis but that offered practical advice and support of how to continue to live well with the condition.

A programme of research and activities with people with dementia has taken place over 10 years, leading to a final iteration of the programme and kit of resources.

The concept of ‘The Exhibition’ is embedded within the culture of Art & Design and has a long history as a form of ‘gathering’ to prompt discourse. This research explores the role of the exhibition as a ‘theatre for conversation’ and its role and format as a research tool as well as a means of dissemination.

The research draws on the value of ‘thinking with things’ as a method. Central to this is the notion of exhibition as a research tool that becomes a meeting space that enables thinking to happen. Exhibition becomes the medium and method for data collection and creates the conduit through which societal assumptions relating to ageing and healthcare care can be made visible, explored and challenged.

In this research, 12 boxes were produced and distributed for use with health specialists in collaboration with older users across Europe. These boxes comprised of everyday objects, photographs and textual material defined through the user workshops undertaken in conjunction with the earlier large- scale ‘EngagingAging’ exhibitions in Taipei, London and Sheffield.

This enquiry explores how an archive of images created by artist Michele Angelo Petrone about the emotional cancer journey might be used to support the emotional needs of people living with a terminal illness.

This research sought to understand how data-driven physical objects might communicate complex data to non-specialist audiences.

An object-based translation of a publicly accessible open data source from the UK NHS healthcare sector was chosen as a praxis exemplar. The work illustrates how it is possible to interpret digital data as a physical object, utilising a combination of design strategies and contemporary fabrication methods. The enquiry led to a set of guiding principles for the creation of data-based objects.

Explaining and quantifying the feeling and experience of living with chronic pain presents a particularly challenging task.This project uses co-creation methods, digital design and fabrication technologies to create data-objects that enable young adults to explore their own pain language, capture this understanding, and use it to communicate with others.

The data-objects were part of a larger project that brings together Lab4Living’s researchers and pain management clinicians at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust in a series of workshops exploring how the use of creative activities might assist young people in describing and communicating chronic pain.

Data driven cultures have become ubiquitous within society and are increasingly becoming the driver in determining research agendas and design decision making. ‘Designing by numbers’ is part of a research inquiry that explores a shift from a ‘data driven’ to a ‘data supported’ approach to design research and practice.

Using well established anthropometric guidelines for key dimensional measurements for standard chairs (Height x Length x Width) and then applying an incremented scale of 5mm to each dimension presents a designer/specifier with 10,000 different physical permutations. Data chairs represent only 100 of these permutations where each chair presents a different but ‘correct’ answer based on ergonomic dimensional data sets. The work challenges and illuminates the pursuit of data, and advocates more creative and considered approaches to utilisation of data.

The traditional structures of our every-day life and the spaces we inhabit are being challenged. Increased life expectancy, a global pandemic and technology pervading every aspect of our lives is blurring the boundaries of domesticity and work life, while spaces within the home become less delineated. This collection of work challenges traditional furniture typologies and morphs archetypal forms to create hybrid ambiguous artefacts that reflect the domestic quotidian.

The work is part of a broader Lab4Living research enquiry funded through Research England’s Expanding Excellence in England Programme that explores the role of Design in the reconceptualisation of the 100-year life.

The emerging biotechnologies, notably tissue engineering and genetic editing, challenge medical practices and push us to reframe bioethics statements. In the pursuit of prolonging lifespan and making humankind better, those biotechnologies overturn the fundamental definition of being human. What are the consequences of designing a human body? How will biotechnologies modify how we live and what we define as humankind? Raw/ à vif is a research-driven and critical project at the crossroad between transhumanism, biology, and art, transporting the audience in possible medical futures.

The project is presented in three imaginary scenarios depicting potential jobs and practices emerging from current biotechnologies. One of them, The Organ Designer, presents a speculative scenario about a team of designers who created a genetically modified kidney able to regenerate in case of kidney failure. They could do so by recoding, reediting and synthetising DNA, modifying the original body of a patient. Where genetics and design meet to create a new profession, this scenario looks at how we could wisely use the resource of our body to reduce heavy or invasive treatment.

The challenges society faces in providing future healthcare suggests significant rethinking of the way health services  are delivered and the way we engage with them. There is recognition that this is likely to demand more self-care and a shift of care from hospital to home. This collection of objects explores implications of this shift in both the culture and practice of health interventions.

The challenges society faces in providing future healthcare suggests significant rethinking of the way health services are delivered and the way we engage with them. There is recognition that this is likely to demand more self-care and a shift of care from hospital to home. This collection of objects explores implications of this shift in both the culture and practice of health interventions.

The challenges society faces in providing future healthcare suggests significant rethinking of the way health services are delivered and the way we engage with them. There is recognition that this is likely to demand more self-care and a shift of care from hospital to home. This collection of objects explores implications of this shift in both the culture and practice of health interventions.

Social distancing has been a core method of disease prevention in the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, hugging a loved one has become rare or prohibited altogether, leaving many of us deprived of the human touch. The speculative garment HUG explores the capacity of technology to respond to human tactile deprivation by creating the sensation of a hug without the presence of another person.

HUG is made of recycled air cushions and infuse bags and can be used independently or with a friend. The two airbags, one on the chest and one between the shoulder plates, can be filled separately or simultaneously. HUG is the first prototype in a project exploring affective health technology. It is inspired by “hugging” garments, used in so-called deep-pressure therapy, imitating the structure of embodied human empathy. The garment evokes questions about breath and its multiple meanings in connection with others and mental wellbeing, at a time when breath is seen as a biohazard, potentially containing pathogenic aerosols. However, breathing into a paper bag may also reduce anxiety. In HUG, breath creates a feedback loop to calm both through deep pressure and carbon dioxide reduction in the bloodstream.

This “generative” whiteboard installation invites visitors to evaluate their response to someone who is crying. It displays one of the questions that scientists use to measure a person’s empathic capacity, and it is part of a series of tallies to be conducted in different cities and countries, in galleries, public space as well as medical schools. The piece represents a form of arts-based data collection, an uncontrolled visual trial to trace variations in empathy levels in different communities.

This research aims to co-design a multi-dimensional, cross- disciplinary and personalised coaching system for older people to support healthy, active ageing. Novel Empowering Solutions and Technologies for Older people to Retain Everyday life activities (NESTORE) is a consortium of 16 partners from 8 European countries. Leveraging ICT social connectivity, NESTORE will support older people to sustain independence. The system will operate through tangible objects as well as software and apps.

Lab4Living employed the ‘exhibition in a box’ methodology from earlier research to understand user perceptions about the use of ICT solutions in supporting health promotion and wellness. Through co-creation workshops with community living older people, researchers built understanding of the hopes and aspirations of participants to gain insights as to what individuals find meaningful. This informs the types of activities that NESTORE may offer to engage and motivate end users of the product.

The artefacts are a series of prototypes leading up to the production device for the trial in the EU, the prototypes were part of the codesign process as well as being used in workshops with our expert user group.

This work focusses on research applied in a commercial context through our colleagues in Design Futures, a commercially focused product and packaging design consultancy within the University. Handsets are the most tangible part of nurse call communication systems. Collaborating with health technology manufacturer Mediplan, Design Futures’ goal was to evolve the design of the successful previous generation handset, which was also designed with Design Futures.

Ergonomic research informed the physical design and the user interaction (UI). The outcome was an inclusive form factor, able to be used comfortably and effectively by a wide range of users. Clever technical design and a robust testing programme delivered a product with a high IP rating and a long service life, something demanded by the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and hospitals globally.

We consume and process everyday sounds, making conscious and subconscious emotional associations with them, as they provide an ever-present soundtrack to our lives. Sounds can produce a powerful memory reaction in the listener. Whether it’s a child’s laughter or music, sound can take your thoughts to a different place.

Collaborating with SheffCare, a regional care home provider, this research sought to understand how we can capture moments of meaningful sound and embed them into an object so that they could be re-played at any time.

Through our design work, we have crafted objects to be used as vessels that can be filled with precious sounds that have been important to the owner during their life.

What sounds would you like to hold onto and revisit in your 100-year life?

Radiotherapy treatment for breast cancer requires precision and accuracy. This research builds understanding and has developed a novel solution for safer breast radiotherapy through the creation of a support bra.

The support bra enables reproducible positioning of tissue during breast irradiation treatment as well as helping maintain modesty and promote dignity.

Funding: National Institute of Health Research.
Partners: Sheffield Hallam University: Faculty of Health & Wellbeing, Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Panache Lingerie Ltd Project 

Motor Neurone Disease (MND) is a rapidly progressive neurodegenerative disease, with individuals developing weak neck muscles, leading to pain and restricted movement.

This research built understanding of optimal requirements  for a supportive neck collar with flexibility to allow functional head movement. Co-design workshops brought together people living with MND, carers, clinicians and designers.

Participatory methods, including qualitative interviews, 2D visualisation and 3D mock-ups, helped build understanding. Head-Up exemplifies collaborative, interdisciplinary research and new product development underpinned by participatory design. UK Health Research funding enabled the team to iteratively develop and detail the product over a 24-month programme.

Through an iterative prototyping process, the HeadUp Collar, a class one medical device, has been patented and is on the market.

This project uses co-design to understand what it means to have a healthy mouth throughout a person’s lifetime and what could be developed to improve oral care.

People’s lives are complex and their experiences can be vastly different depending on their age, culture and the country they live in. This project explores different oral hygiene beliefs and experiences of people across the world in order to develop and support oral health literacy.

Partners: The University of Sheffield, Bangor University, FDI World Dental Federation, University of South Australia, University of Ibadan, College of Dentists of Chile

Design for Health is an international refereed journal covering all aspects of design and creative research and practice in the context of health and wellbeing.

It was established by Lab4Living with leading international publisher Taylor & Francis in 2016 and is affiliated with the Design4Health conferences, convened since 2011.

The Journal publishes work which utilizes design and creative practices as methods and tools within research to engage people to understand problems, and visualize new possibilities and future scenarios.