The European Union Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act was adopted in 2024 to protect public interests from AI-related harms. We aimed to determine whether the AI Act captures the most relevant values of stakeholders (understood as any person potentially affected by the AI system, including, but not limited to, the direct users) related to a high-risk AI Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) for cardiovascular disease. This system is intended to be implemented in primary care. A secondary analysis was carried out based on empirical data previously generated using ethics and design methodologies that had identified stakeholder values. These values were translated into the Trustworthy AI requirements of the High-Level Expert Group on AI and then contrasted with the AI Act. These requirements do not capture all identified stakeholder values. We describe three groups of untranslatable values and propose three additional complementary requirements. The AI Act mainly supports the requirements of human agency and oversight; transparency; and diversity, nondiscrimination, and fairness; but only partially, limited by its product safety nature. To address this gap, contractual strategies could provide a more legally robust ground for general practitioners to align the AI-CDSS with stakeholders’ values, comply with their duty of care, and promote trustworthy AI-CDSSs.

This article examines the origins of facility management as a field of practice that was first developed in the 1970s when the open plan office concept first became popular in the United States. The author focuses on the influence of the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller and its subsidiary, the Facility Management Institute (FMI), on the development of this new field and its rapid professionalization and growth through the latter part of the twentieth century. She argues that FMI played an essential role in the founding of facility management as a dedicated field: defining it, establishing its core values, processes, and methods; and increasing its visibility as a professional discipline. While initially promoted by FMI as a human-centered discipline that emphasized using the workplace to support workers, as facility management increased its influence and organizational position “from broomcloset to boardroom,” it evolved to become a more fiscally minded field that sought to cut costs, outsource services, and leverage space for financial benefit.

This article examines how mobile apps and digital platforms embed values about speed, efficiency, and productivity into their design, shaping how teenage users understand what makes time “well spent.” It argues that speed is only part of the story: the same platforms also rely on automation and data-driven algorithms that decide what fills users’ attention, turning that attention into a product. Drawing on design theory and classical rhetoric, the article introduces the concept of deliberative restraint as an alternative to the “move fast” ideology of Silicon Valley and offers concrete practices for putting it to use. Rather than advocating for digital abstinence, the article equips readers with critical questions to recognize when design choices prioritize velocity over reflection, helping them make more intentional decisions about their relationship with technology.

Industrial inspection often requires systems to pass through confined entrances and traverse loosely constrained paths before reaching target locations. Borescopes and long-reach continuum manipulators are susceptible to insertion-induced buckling when deployed without continuous lateral support. This work presents a modular extra-long continuum manipulator designed for such hybrid industrial environments. The system combines a self-recoverable passive body with an independently actuated dual-balloon stabilisation unit, allowing it to traverse regions without continuous lateral confinement and subsequently establish a stabilised lift-up configuration at the target location. Its modular architecture supports transport and field maintenance, while the low-cost disposable design reduces decontamination requirements in harsh or contaminated environments. A solver-free, closed-form framework combines ground, tip, wall-contact, and wrapping resistances to estimate insertion-induced buckling margins for deployment planning. Prototypes (24 mm diameter, 8.2 m length) were validated experimentally and deployed in a nuclear decommissioning hot cell at Nuclear Restoration Services (NRS) Dounreay, UK, carrying a borescope camera and a 70 g radiation sensor to support inspection for subsequent decommissioning decisions.

This work presented a biomechanically informed model and analysis of a 5-degree-of-freedom shoulder exoskeleton, constructed on a spatial parallel mechanism with a universal-prismatic-spherical joint configuration. The primary aim of the shoulder exoskeleton mechanism was to ensure the human shoulder’s natural movements. The mechanism incorporated a proposed anatomical mapping strategy to align the directions of the mechanism linkage movements with the physiological lines of action of the muscles, thereby expected to acquire effective support in aligning the shoulder exoskeleton with the physiological muscle lines of action. To facilitate spatial functionality, forward kinematics were developed based on Newton-Raphson for estimating the shoulder platform based on the actuators’ inputs. The forward kinematics were validated through a closed-form inverse kinematics that provided the actuator parameters, demonstrating geometric consistency with the anticipated configurations. Additionally, the work included the velocity and acceleration analyses, utilizing the Jacobian-based rigid body kinematics to maintain motion continuity. The model was assessed using anthropometric parameters representative of the upper extremity dimensions and was evaluated across three reference poses: neutral, flexion, and abduction. Simulation outcomes revealed a similar spatial motion of the mechanism with that of the shoulder movement range, showing close biomechanical alignment based on the actuator response. Moreover, static force analysis confirmed the efficient distribution of loads among the actuator legs while bearing both limb weight and substantial promise for applications in assistive robotics technology and rehabilitation in the context of shoulder exoskeleton development.

Decolonialism generates a different kind of expertise. Against disembodied, technocratic, and purportedly neutral notions of objectivity as producing expertise, decolonial theory, practice, and politics instead situates expertise as a matter of contextual embeddedness, autonomous agency outside Eurocentric systems of thought, and a futurist imaginary that promises radical global change. Increasingly – moreover – this idea of decolonial expertise is being promoted at the heart of global governance institutions, and particularly humanitarian organizations. In this article, I explore how this has occurred, and its political tensions, in three main ways. First, I tease out how this decolonial challenge to expertise is an aesthetic one – grounded in critiques of how traditional and power-inflected notions of objectivity are themselves aesthetically produced. Second, and drawing on the analysis of the rise of decolonial discourse in humanitarianism, I unpack how decolonialism has mobilized a counter-aesthetic that challenges the appropriateness of that purportedly neutral aesthetic. Finally, I explore the implications of this aesthetic generation of (decolonial) expertise for decolonial politics more broadly, suggesting that – pace critics of ‘metaphorical’ forms of decolonialism – the aesthetic generation of expertise has the potential to radically advance decolonial objectives in concrete, material, and tangible ways.

In safety-critical industries such as aerospace, managing uncertainty is important, both to ensure airworthiness and to control business risk. Although design margins are widely used to support safety, reliability and regulatory compliance, they are often applied conservatively, with rationales that are implicit, inconsistently documented or unevenly interpreted. While the use of margins is necessary from a safety, reliability and regulatory perspective, excessive use of margins can lead to undesirable effects such as overdesign, consequently leading to heavier parts and therefore design inefficiencies. While the role of margins in this context is well appreciated, there is a gap between the theoretical understanding of margins and their use in practice, especially in relation to uncertainty. This paper investigates this gap through a qualitative study involving 11 in-depth interviews with experienced engineers and managers at a leading aerospace component design and manufacturing company. The interviews explore the current industrial practices, cultural barriers and decision-making heuristics surrounding the practice of design margins. The findings reveal a reliance on legacy practices and tacit knowledge, which may limit margin transparency and potentially contribute to margin stacking. We conclude with actionable implications for the proper documentation and use of margins in engineering design.

The Design Society unites researchers and practitioners to advance innovative engineering design. As entrepreneurship grows in importance, integrate design principles into its education seems necessary. This paper reviews Design Society publications to map how entrepreneurship, education, and sustainability intersect, it identifies the Design Society’s contributions in the field to propose strategies and future research to strengthen its influence. It highlights the possible role of the Design Society in leading education advancements in entrepreneurship and sustainability.

We propose a wearable soft robot that assists with individualized scapula adduction and abduction for thoracic stretching in respiratory rehabilitation. Although thoracic stretching is known to be effective for respiratory rehabilitation, the range of motion of older adult patients narrows with age, and long-term external aid by physical therapists is required. The proposed robot consists of a soft and shoulder-wearable brace and cable-pulling mechanism to apply rotational torque on shoulders, resulting in stretching the thorax and scapulae. We designed the pulling mechanism by modeling the humeral head trajectory during stretching by a therapist and reproducing it with two linear actuators pulling the right and left shoulders simultaneously, based on position control aimed at achieving a target tension. The main results of validation experiments with older adults confirmed that the robot-assisted stretching was able to perform scapular stretching similar to that of a physical therapist.

Poor posture is a significant concern due to its detrimental effects on health and productivity. This article presents a collar-clipped device called PostureClip, designed to restrict users from sitting and working at a bent angle, by blacking out the screen and resuming on correcting posture, thereby promoting better posture. The device integrates sensors and feedback mechanisms to provide real-time posture feedback to users. To evaluate the effectiveness of PostureClip, a controlled experiment was conducted with participants (n = 165) who were working on a laptop/PC for over 6 hours per day. The participants were randomly assigned to both the intervention group (IG1, n = 54; IG2, n = 55), which used the collar-clipped device, and the control group (CG, n = 56), which did not use the device. IG1 did not get feedback, while IG2 got feedback from the device by notifying and further darkening the screen. The study was conducted in the office environment of the participants, for 4 weeks, and metrics such as posture angle, duration of bent angle, and user feedback were collected. Analysis revealed significant improvements in posture angle (p < .001) and a significant reduction in bent angle duration (p < .01) for the participants’ group using PostureClip with feedback and compared to the group without feedback and the control group (who were not intervened). The qualitative analysis of user feedback highlighted the device’s ease of use, effectiveness in providing timely feedback, and positive impact on participants’ awareness and habits regarding posture. These results indicate that PostureClip is an effective tool for promoting better posture during sedentary work.