Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article examines the role that designers have in the process of designing materials and how, through their direct manipulation and transformation, they can convey emotions and cultural values in the final artifact. It also analyzes the process clay goes through as it becomes an object and the emotions that are elicited in the encounter between human beings, materials, and the context in which they operate. Considering the increase in the use of new materials and the consequent depletion of natural resources, this approach aims to offer new ways to understand and rediscover traditional materials such as ceramic. Moreover, a new vision of the role of materials as a vehicle of emotions is investigated, both during their processing and in their final use when they are embedded in artifacts. The incorporation of craft practices into the design process enables new ways of conceiving traditional materials like ceramic. Designers also need to develop manual skills, as they are a way of thinking and a source for emotional involvement with materials and artifacts.

Pushing authors to make themselves visible in the text ‒ through autoethnography ‒ to account for the decisions that drive their em­pirical research work, explain the performative relationships that link them to their tools, and show the process of cyclical adaptations between them, their tools and the world, guest editors Donato Ricci and Jamie Allen challenged the traditional canons of academic publishing, more focused on displaying results and describing processes than on ques­tioning the means we use to research, test, and validate. These autoethnographic stories ‒ provoc­ative, experimental, and introspective ‒ make us aware of the relationship that we establish with our research tools. Along with this, they urge us to redefine research and publication practices and to question the boundaries between dualistic catego­ries like subject/object, truth/fiction, writer/reader, user/producer, culture/nature and collaboration/ competition, calling for correspondence, inclusion, care, fiction, political soundness, collaboration, post-production, readiness to be affected, pro­to-politics, and the relational dimension of data.

In this article, we describe the process of creating a toolkit intended to trigger a reflection on the ethical aspects of the design process in students, so that they can develop individual ethics. Following Wildevuur, Van Dijk and Schot, we understand the design process as a practice that requires awareness and openness, through exchanges that combine expectations and emotional ties that support identity, independence, and mutual recognition. Consequently, the toolkit proposes to face different academic challenges whose common aim is to include empathy in the different stages of a design project. Building from the iteration of the toolkit, we propose three new principles for the inclusion of ethics in the design process: admiration, commitment, and integrity. These principles expand the three concepts raised by IDEO ‒ respect, responsibility, and honesty, addressing a more emotional dimension of each.

Emotions are present throughout the service design process for each participant, yet the own emotional experience of designers has rarely been addressed in design research. This paper is focused on the role and meaning of the emotions identified by service designers in their own experiences conducting or participating in projects, and as workshop facilitators. It builds empirically on a qualitative questionnaire examining their experiences of ‒ and reflections on ‒ the emotions they identified throughout their practices. The findings indicate a significant variety of emotions and confusion in determining their connection to the overall process. A clear understanding of the emotions associated with this process could strengthen service designers’ specific skills, enhancing confidence in decision-making, and adding value to their work. This, in turn, could help service designers to improve their professional performance in order to create a more inclusive and user-centered design practice in the context of changing scenarios, variable environments, and human interactions.

  In recent years, minimalist home maintenance trends have gained strength with the well-renown Japanese organizing consultant Marie Kondo standing out among its ambassadors. Kondo promotes the construction of ideal homes through the evaluation of each domestic object, keeping those that would ‘spark joy’ while discarding the rest. Based on research carried out in Santiago, this article reflects on the various ways in which objects are kept, valued and arranged in Chilean homes. The relevance and pertinence of these new minimalist trends are discussed, since the results suggest that households are more frequently guided by an ethic of care and conservation, valuing the temporal and dynamic condition of their objects, as well as their participation in an ‘ecology of things’.

Objectives: To determine the empathy presented by dentists coursing their postgraduate training. Compare levels of empathy between genders and odontology specialties. Methods: An observational, exploratory, and cross-sectional study was utilized, analyzing all the postgraduate students at the School of Dentistry of the “Andrés Bello University”, in Chile (N = 195). The Jefferson Medical Empathy Scale was applied (EMMJ).Results: The results showed relevant reliability of the empathy measure (α = 0.819, ω = 0.928), through confirmatory structure analysis, a three-factor structure was evidenced (χ2 / df = 1.445, GFI = 0.952, RMSEA = 0.047) and an adequate factorial invariance among men and women; women exhibited greater empathy in the global scale and perspective-taking dimension, not finding differences by gender in the dimension of caring with compassion and putting oneself in the other person’s place. The median empathy reached 120 points, being found under this range the specialties of Oral Rehabilitation (Med. = 114.5), Surgery (Med. = 117) and Periodontics (Med. = 117.5), Temporo-Mandibular Disorder (Med. = 121), Endodontics (Med. = 121), Orthodontics and dentomaxillofacial orthopedics (Med. =122), Implantology (Med. = 125) and Pediatric Dentistry (Med. = 127.5). Conclusion: Levels of empathy are relatively high in general, but all specialties have low levels in the POOS dimension, which can potentially affect the empathic relationship with their patients.

Pieter Desmet is the founding co-director of the Delft Institute of Positive Design, chair of the TU Delft Department of Human Centered Design, and Director of the Delft Design Labs. After introducing cognitive emotion theory to the field of design research, he established the Design and Emotion Society. Full professor of Design for Experience at TU Delft, Desmet is also co-editor of Design and Emotion Moves (Cambridge Scholars, 2008) and co-author of Positive Design: An Introduction to Design for Subjective Well-Being (IJDesign, 2013). Pieter Desmet, who holds a PhD in the domain of Emotion Psychology, has been recently awarded a five-year personal grant to research about the nuances of human mood in human-product interactions. Besides his academic activities, he also contributes to local community projects, such as a recently developed sensory wellness neighborhood park, and a cultural ‘House of Happiness’ located in Rotterdam. In this interview, Desmet discusses the background to positive design, as well as the practical and ethical challenges that arise from using such an approach. He also refers to his latest research initiative: Design for Mood Regulation. Finally, Desmet explains how he transfers the knowledge he develops to companies.

  Elvin Karana is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology, where she founded and co-directs the Materials Experience Lab. Giving emphasis to the role of materials in design as experiential, and yet deeply rooted in their inherent properties, Elvin Karana explores the productive shifts between materials science and design to materials and product development in synergy. In 2019, she founded the creative bio-design research lab Material Incubator, which aims to the design of materials that incorporate living organisms and to explore their potential to foster an alternative notion of daily life. Material Incubator brings together researchers and practitioners from Avans University of Applied Sciences and Delft University of Technology. In this interview, Karana talks about the emergence of the concept of ‘experiential characterization’, the need to expand our prototyping capabilities with emerging materials and the challenges involved in establishing the particular role design could play in materials development.

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of audiovisual educational material in preschool and school caregivers remotely. The specific objectives are to evaluate the knowledge of the population before and after the delivery of audiovisual material. Materials and methods: Cross-sectional experimental pilot study. An analysis of the literature on oral hygiene and healthy eating habits was executed to prepare seven educational audiovisual capsules on the investigated topics. A total of 30 entry and exit surveys were applied to a cohort of caregivers of preschool and school children between the ages of three and twelve in Chile, who voluntarily and anonymously answered two forms with closed-ended questions, before and after the visualization of audiovisual capsules. A score was applied to each response, and the comparison between the initial and final survey was analyzed using the STATA 15.1 Software.  Results: The analysis of the results showed that there is a statistically significant difference (p <0.005) between both surveys, with an increase in the correct answers in the second survey.  Conclusion: The intervention of the audiovisual educational material presented in this study was effective in its purpose and proved to be a reliable educational strategy for remote work.

Objective: To assess the association between prolonged breastfeeding (PBF) and cariogenic risk in infants. Material and Methods: PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science (WOS) databases were employed selecting the terms "Breastfeeding", "breast milk", "prolonged", "dental caries", "risk", "prevalence". Without language restriction, the selection criteria were: articles referring to breastfeeding and early childhood caries (ECC), full text, and from the last 5 years. Results: The search yielded 133 publications (46 Embase, 34 PubMed, 13 WOS, 40 Scopus). After eliminating duplicates, 12 met the proposed selection criteria, while 121 were excluded. Of all articles analyzed, four referred to breastfeeding as a protective factor against caries when prolonged up to 12 months; On the other hand, four attributed a higher risk of ECC to breastfeeding extended for over one year of life, two for over 18 months, and three for over 24 months. Finally, five articles were inconclusive due to confounding variables.  Conclusion: The analyzed publications describe breastfeeding up to one year of life as a protective factor against caries. Over 24 months, it is considered prolonged; The evidence indicates that it is difficult to establish breastfeeding as a protective factor or cariogenic agent due to the multiplicity of factors involved in caries disease, which is why more research is essential.