This paper presents a soft passive gripper consisting of six fluidic soft bending actuators arranged in a star-shaped manner. The actuators are oriented such that, upon pressurization, they bend against gravity. Gripping is realized by a commercial tape with mushroom-shaped adhesive structures that is glued to the bottom patches of the gripper. In this way, the object is released by peeling away the actuators from the object’s surface. In contrast to active grippers, which require continuous pressurization during gripping and holding, the presented passive gripper only requires energy for the release process. However, due to its working principle, the gripper is restricted to only flat objects or objects with at least one flat surface.

What for and how will we design children's technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children's lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies can clearly be defined as transhumanist, such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children's' lives by using the power of design fiction.

No abstract

No abstract

This paper reports on the procedure and the results of a design activity carried out to reflect on time and timekeeping practices. The design activity involved a diary study followed by an idea generation workshop in the scope of a graduate level course with the participation of 12 graduate level industrial design students. The paper first explains the procedure of the design activity. Then, it presents the outcomes under two themes: i) timekeeping related insights: the students' reflections on their timekeeping practices and ideas on how to improve these practices to support wellbeing; ii) pedagogical insights: students' thoughts and instructors' reflections on the online diary-keeping and conducting the workshop remotely. The findings are believed to be beneficial for inspiring designers interested in designing interventions to support better time management practices; and for design educators interested in conducting remote diary study and/or workshop in distance education settings.