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The purpose of this paper is to explore and describe the perspectives and reasoning of senior development leaders in healthcare organizations, when reflecting on design as theory and practice in relation to more traditional methods and tools for improving quality and support innovation.

The paper is based on a qualitative interview design with five development and innovation leaders from separate healthcare regions in Sweden. They have, to varying degrees, applied design theory and practice for quality improvement and innovation in their organizations. The interview transcript was analysed using a content analysis together with an interpretive approach.

The major findings are to be found in the balancing act for leadership and organizations in healthcare when it comes to introducing and combining different theories and practices for improving quality and support innovation. The balance is between the change in power dynamics and pushing traditional boundaries in a complex healthcare world.

The narratives from the leaders' experience of applying design theory and practice for improving healthcare quality can help us create readiness and knowledge about how we prevent and/or facilitate planning and implementing design theories, practices, methods and tools in a healthcare context.

The study provides a unique insight when it captures and illustrates five different organizations' experiences when applying design for developing healthcare quality.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute knowledge concerning the dynamics and potential cultural tensions that occur when applying user involvement and design thinking (DT) for improving quality in a health-care setting.

This paper is based on a case study following a quality improvement (QI) project in a medium-sized Swedish county council in the field of somatic care. The project involved eight health-care professionals, one designer, four patients and two relatives. A multiple data collection method over a period of ten months was used. It included individual interviews, e-mail correspondence and observations of workshops that covered the QI project.

The result shows tensions between QI work and the daily clinical work of the participants. These tensions primarily concern the conflict between fast and slow processes, the problem of moving between different fields of knowledge, being a resource for the individual clinic and the system and the participants’ expectations and assumptions about roles and responsibilities in a QI project. Furthermore, these findings could be interpreted as signs of a development culture in the health-care context.

There are several practical implications. Among others, the insights can inspire how to approach and contextualize the current concepts, roles and methods of DT and user involvement so that they can be more easily understood and integrated into the existing culture and way of working in the health-care sector.

This study provides a unique insight into a case, trying to uncover what actually is going on and perhaps, why certain things are not happening at all, when user involvement and design practices are applied for improving health-care quality.

The chapter aims at representing the results of a case study with concern to the economic and environmental crisis triggered by Ilva in Taranto.

The case study design follows an ethnographic approach. The analysis is based on the collection of some qualitative interviews and documentation related to the environmental conflict engendered by the Ilva of Taranto, which has been the largest steel mill in Europe since the 1990s.

The analysis of the empirical data shows some interesting insights about (a) the growing contradictions in time of crisis in the relationship between the ‘the four pillars’ of sustainability (economy, social justice and society, environment, culture); (b) the importance of the social pillar in playing a key role in the management of local conflicts and in stimulating change within social and economic organizations; (c) the difficulty to promote sustainable policies through a multilevel governance approach able to synthesize the complexity of the scenarios emerging at the local, regional, national and European levels, in order to create an alternative way of development.

The ethnographic approach is useful to analyse in depth the core of the environmental conflict and the divergent developmental scenarios expressed by the different categories of actors.

Islands have long been discussed as refuges from global catastrophes; this paper will evaluate them systematically, discussing both the positives and negatives of islands as refuges. There are examples of isolated human communities surviving for thousands of years on places like Easter Island. Islands could provide protection against many low-level risks, notably including bio-risks. However, they are vulnerable to tsunamis, bird-transmitted diseases and other risks. This paper aims to explore how to use the advantages of islands for survival during global catastrophes.

Preliminary horizon scanning based on the application of the research principles established in the previous global catastrophic literature.

The large number of islands on Earth, and their diverse conditions, increase the chance that one of them will provide protection from a catastrophe. Additionally, this protection could be increased if an island was used as a base for a nuclear submarine refuge combined with underground bunkers and/or extremely long-term data storage. The requirements for survival on islands, their vulnerabilities and ways to mitigate and adapt to risks are explored. Several existing islands, suitable for the survival of different types of risk, timing and budgets, are examined. Islands suitable for different types of refuges and other island-like options that could also provide protection are also discussed.

The possible use of islands as refuges from social collapse and existential risks has not been previously examined systematically. This paper contributes to the expanding research on survival scenarios.

New technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), have helped us begin to take our first steps off Earth and into outer space. But conflicts inevitably will arise and, in the absence of settled governance, may be resolved by force, as is typical for new frontiers. But the terrestrial assumptions behind the ethics of war will need to be rethought when the context radically changes, and both the environment of space and the advent of robotic warfighters with superhuman capabilities will constitute such a radical change. This essay examines how new autonomous technologies, especially dual-use technologies, and the challenges to human existence in space will force us to rethink the ethics of war, both from space to Earth, and in space itself.

The supposedly radical development of artificial intelligence (AI) has raised questions regarding the moral responsibility of it. In the sphere of business, they are translated into questions about AI and business ethics (BE) and corporate social responsibility (CSR). The purpos of this study is to conceptually reformulate these questions from the point of view of two possible aspect-changes, namely, starting from corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) and starting not from AIs incapability for responsibility but from its ability to imitate human CSR without performing typical human CSI.

The author draws upon the literature and his previous works on the relationship between AI and human CSI. This comparison aims to remodel the understanding of human CSI and AIs inability to be CSI. The conceptual remodelling is offered by taking a negative view on the relation. If AI can be made not to perform human-like CSI, then AI is at least less CSI than humans. For this task, it is necessary to remodel human and AI CSR, but AI does not have to be CSR. It is sufficient that it can be less CSI than humans to be more CSR.

The previously suggested remodelling of basic concepts in question leads to the conclusion that it is not impossible for AI to act or operate more CSI then humans simply by not making typical human CSIs. Strictly speaking, AI is not CSR because it cannot be responsible as humans can. If it can perform actions with a significantly lesser amount of CSI in comparison to humans, it is certainly less CSI.

This paper is only a conceptual remodelling and a suggestion of a research hypothesis. As such, it implies particular morality, ethics and the concepts of CSI and AI.

How this remodelling could be done in practice is an issue of future research.

The author delivers the paper on comparison between human and AI CSI which is not much discussed in literature.

Any credible agenda that seeks to eradicate global poverty must seek to correct the structural injustices and inequities that cause and perpetuate endemic poverty. Such an agenda must aim not merely to aid the poor with grants, welfare, and subsidies (that indirectly perpetuate poverty) but seek to enhance self-sufficiency and productive skills of the poor by ensuring them comparable access to opportunities of the market economies to participate, on more equitable terms, in the dynamic process of overall economic growth. In this context, we apply critical thinking to identify and recognize the structured injustices of the market system, which not only cause poverty but also compromise human dignity via social inequalities and inequities arguably caused by the free market and corporate capital systems of the world. Global poverty that affects more than a quarter of the human population is a pernicious self-serving system connected to the injustices of the business and political systems of the world. The persistent nature of poverty is in direct proportion to our inability to eradicate it as a whole in the cosmic system. Eradication of global desperate poverty and its unjust structural causes can be achieved, we submit, by tracing the roots of global poverty to corporate and free enterprise capital systems and their unexamined structures of social injustice and social inequalities.