The implementation of environmental satisfaction sources in the design of a health centre is a means to achieve stress reduction. The present work analyses the effect that these sources have on the stress reduction of patients’ companions in a paediatric service. A two-phase study was carried out. During the first phase, 120 participants assessed 20 waiting rooms in situ in order to select the environmental sources with the greatest effect. During the second phase, the stress levels of 26 participants were measured in four simulated waiting rooms that combined the selected sources from the first phase. A multisensory simulation was carried out through a virtual reality experiment with visual, auditory and olfactory elements, and stress levels were measured at the psychological and neurophysiological levels. Results suggest that a combination of environmental satisfaction sources creates an important synergistic effect at the psychological and neurophysiological levels and underlines the importance of auditory and olfactory stimuli. Conclusions may be of interest to designers and managers of healthcare facilities.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution requires global, structural, and technological changes in all economic and production fields. The most apparent adaptation requirements fall on Generation Z individuals, who will have more and more responsibilities within organizations. The international reports of the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development indicate that this training will mainly require a strong development of thinking diversity and lifelong learning skills. This study presents an analysis of the education in these future skills that these individuals will need to work successfully throughout their careers, taking into account the evolution of conditions toward the changes expected in the following years. The methodology used in this research belongs to the field of futures studies. Through strategies in the field of foresight, various scenarios are proposed that involve the expected changes in the short, medium, and long term, both in higher education institutions and in industries and companies, to ensure the adaptation of Generation Z individuals to changes in work, workplace, and workforce. The findings show the strong influence that other skills and attitudes, such as self-esteem, self-efficacy, initiative, emotions, and motivation, have on the capacity for self-managed development throughout professional life.

The use of visual attention for evaluating consumer behavior has become a relevant field in recent years, allowing researchers to understand the decision-making processes beyond classical self-reports. In our research, we focused on using eye-tracking as a method to understand consumer preferences in children. Twenty-eight subjects with ages between 7 and 12 years participated in the experiment. Participants were involved in two consecutive phases. The initial phase consisted of the visualization of a set of stimuli for decision-making in an eight-position layout called Alternative Forced-choice. Then the subjects were asked to freely analyze the set of stimuli, they needed to choose the best in terms of preference. The sample was randomly divided into two groups balanced by gender. One group visualized a set of icons and the other a set of toys. The final phase was an independent assessment of each stimulus viewed in the initial phase in terms of liking/disliking using a 7-point Likert scale. Sixty-four stimuli were designed for each of the groups. The visual attention was measured using a non-obstructive eye-tracking device. The results revealed two novel insights. Firstly, the time of fixation during the last four visits to each stimulus before the decision-making instant allows us to recognize the icon or toy chosen from the eight alternatives with a 71.2 and 67.2% of accuracy, respectively. The result supports the use of visual attention measurements as an implicit tool to analyze decision-making and preferences in children. Secondly, eye movement and the choice of liking/disliking choice are influenced by stimuli design dimensions. The icon observation results revealed how gender samples have different fixation and different visit times which depend on stimuli design dimension. The toy observations results revealed how the materials determinate the largest amount fixations, also, the visit times were differentiated by gender. This research presents a relevant empirical data to understand the decision-making phenomenon by analyzing eye movement behavior. The presented method can be applied to recognize the choice likelihood between several alternatives. Finally, children’s opinions represent an extra difficulty judgment to be determined, and the eye-tracking technique seen as an implicit measure to tackle it.

The study of product visual attributes is usually performed through questionnaires which provide information about the conscious subjective opinions of the consumer. This work complements such method by combining Event-Related Potentials (ERP) and Eye-Tracking (ET) techniques and using semantic priming to elicit user perception. Our study focuses on package design and follows the basic structure of classic ERP experiments where participants are presented an ordered sequence of frames (stimuli) in a computer screen for a certain period of time: attention frame, semantic priming frame (descriptive adjective), neutral background, target frame (product image), and a question regarding coherence between priming and target frames. The eye-tracking system works in combination with the ERP experiment. The results of our study reveal the connection between adjectives (semantic priming) and package design attributes (based on the analysis of the N400 ERP component), and the connection between adjectives and the specific visual elements that get more attention (based on the information provided by eye-tracking analysis software).

Idea generation is fundamental in higher education, principally in engineering and creative areas. The challenge presented in our research was to correctly implement a progressive, intuitive categorization method to generate solutions, unifying individual proposals and ideas through a virtual platform or face-to-face sessions and real-time communication. This paper aims to present the implementation impact from students’ first-use perceptions and experiences, segmented by study area, gender, and semesters. Our research began with creating an idea generation method. Experienced design professionals integrated various tools to run on digital platforms. This method was called ICRI, an acronym for Ideation, Categorization, Regrouping, and Ideation. The method had two primary stages. The initial stage employed four-step where the students defined, investigated, established findings, and formed teams to move on to the second stage. This second stage comprised two parts, the first four-step where students generated ideas, reviewed, defined, and grouped them; the second five-step process involved focusing the ideas for regrouping, discussion, fusion, and writing new ideas. This method was applied to start a product design process or design strategy to create a project design. The results revealed high student acceptance of the method due to its practicality, rapidity, and functionality in generating ideas and active, equitable student participation. We found that certain students’ profiles are not optimistic about the use of such tools. Also, we found that there were no significant differences by gender of the student profile, but it was noted that female students liked the method more. The findings derived from the creation and application of the ICRI method were consequences of the need to create innovative practices to integrate higher education students. The ICRI method reinforces the trend of educational methods that address the relevance of collaborative idea generation and processes that facilitate effective interactions, even in a virtual and remote mode.