Crossing Design Boundaries

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Author: Paul Rodgers | Libby Brodhurst | Duncan Hepburn

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CROSSING DESIGN BOUNDARIES

BALKEMA-Proceedings and Monographs in Engineering, Water and Earth Sciences PROCEEDINGS OF THE 3RD ENGINEERING & PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, EDINBURGH, UK, 15–16 SEPTEMBER, 2005

Crossing Design Boundaries Paul Rodgers School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK Libby Brodhurst The Institution of Engineering Designers, Westbury, UK Duncan Hepburn School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK

LONDON/LEIDEN/NEW YORK/PHILADELPHIA/SINGAPORE

Cover photo credit (front and back cover): Euan Winton Copyright © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK All rights reserved. No part of this publication or the information contained herein may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written prior permission from the publisher. Although all care is taken to ensure the integrity and quality of this publication and the information herein, no responsibility is assumed by the publishers nor the author for any damage to property or persons as a result of operation or use of this publication and/or the information contained herein. Published by: Taylor & Francis/Balkema P.O. Box 447, 2300 AK Leiden, The Netherlands email: [email protected] http://www.balkema.nl/, http://www.tandf.co.uk/, http://www.crcpress.com/ This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk/.” ISBN 0-203-08853-0 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0 415 39118 0 (Print Edition)

Table of Contents Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

Foreword

xii

Chapter 1 – Interdisciplinary Integrating the Different Design Disciplines During the Development Process of ‘Smart Products’ Guido De Grande and Chris Baelus How much Theory do we Need to Ride A bicycle: or How Useful is Research for Practice Kristina Niedderer Interdisciplinary Lessons in Industrial Design and Marketing Geoff Matthews and Jason Forrester Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders: New Dimensions of Design in the Convergent Fields of Sculpture, Industrial Design and Architecture John Marshall and Jon Pengelly Multimodal Design Imaging – A Vehicle for Crossing Design Boundaries Gordon M. Mair, Kevin Miller and Anne H. Anderson In Bed with Electronics Jon Rogers, Polly Duplock and David Townson Seven Mile Boots: The Design Process of a Wearable Art Piece Martin Pichlmair The Politics of Border Crossing: Negotiating the Boundaries in Multidisciplinary Curriculum Design Erik Bohemia

3

10

17 25

34 41 49 57

Chapter 2 – Culture Investigating the Creative Values and Social Achievements of Two Art Deco Women Designers: Sonia Delaunay and Clarice Cliff Li-Hsun Peng The ‘Culture Medium’ in Design Education Megan Strickfaden, Ann Heylighen, Paul Rodgers and Herman Neuckermans

66

74

Placing Culture at the Centre of Design Siu-Tsen Shen and Stephen D. Prior Design Opportunity in Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta Region K.T. Lau, Ronald M. C. So, L. Justice, T.C. Lee and Louis K. P. Chu The Mapping of Social Relationships in a Product Development Network Fraser Bruce, Seaton Baxter, Tom Inns and David Townson Tradition and Change: Impulses Informing the Designed Environment Lisa Szczerba Inuit Vernacular Design as a Community of Practice for Learning Janne Beate Reitan Exploring the Cultural Differences Amongst a Group of Product Design Students Nick Hobson and Paul Rodgers West Meets East: Negotiating Ambiguities at the Early Stage of Designing Priscilla Chueng-Nainby Designing Across the Cultural Divide Paul Turnock

82 90 98 105 113 121 129 137

Chapter 3 – Education and Pedagogy Boundaries in Our Thinking Colin Ledsome ‘Emerging Technology Design’; A New Master Course Aimed at Bringing Emerging Technologies its Break through Applications A.O. Eger and A. de Boer Towards a Teachable and Learnable Design Process V. Sedenkov Design Curriculum Development for India at Undergraduate Level at IITG Amarendra Kumar Das and K. Ramachandran Philosophies of Design Education in Context of a Developing Nation Amarendra Kumar Das A Study into Students’ Interests in Industrial Design Engineering Using a Gender Pattern Analysis M.D.C. Stilma, E.C.J. van Oost, A.H.M.E. Reinders and A.O. Eger Integrating Interactive Product Design Research and Education: The Personality in Interaction Assignment Philip Ross and SeungHee Lee An Ethnomethodological Approach to the Early Stages of Product Design practice Sian Joel, Michael Smyth and Paul Rodgers Searching for a Balance Between Aesthetics and Technical Bias: New Approaches in Teaching Arts and Crafts in Design Engineering Julio Montoya, Shorn Molokwane and Oscar Tomico Volume Production and the Generic Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Product and Furniture Design

147 154

162 169 177 185

193

202 209

217

Michael Marsden and Peter Ford Futurism & Dada: Theoretical Adventures in Design Context Barry Wylant, Antony Gellion and Craig Badke Assignments Workload and Design Learning Outcome Gudur Raghavendra Reddy

224 232

Chapter 4 – Teamwork Innovation through Collaboration: Exploiting Knowledge Transfer in Engineering Product Development K. L. Edwards and D. C. Parkes Induction into the Community of Practice of Automotive Design Mike Tovey, John Owen and Ray Land Developing and Assessing Group Design Work; A Case Study Patrick Barber Entente Cordiale: Developing Design Alliances D. Hands and M.A. O’Brien How to Achieve the Impossible Paul Wilgeroth, Gareth Barham and Steve Gill Professional Internships and Cooperative Product Design Education James Kaufman Developing Authenticity in Team-Based Design Projects Chris Dowlen and Stephen Prior Who’s Degree is it Anyway? Roger Griffiths and Paul Wilgeroth Experience Design & Artefacts After the Fact Andy Milligan and Jon Rogers Educating the Designer for Team Working: An Experiment on the Effects of Prototyping on Teams Sean Kingsley, Seaton Baxter and Tom Inns Trading Technologies: An Investigation at the Intersection of Artifact and Information Stephanie Munson

242

250 258 266 273 281 289 297 305 315

323

Chapter 5 – Contemporary Design Issues The Inclusive Challenge: Making More of Design Alastair S. Macdonald Modular Degrees Fail to Deliver Bethan Hewett and Paul Wilgeroth Introducing Form and User Sensitivity to Mechanical Engineering Students Through Industrial Design Projects André Liem, Trond Are Øritsland and Carl André Nørstebø

333 341 348

Enabling Students to Communicate in a Practice Setting Lee Hall

356

Chapter 6 – Sustainability Deep Design and the Engineers Conscience: A Global Primer for Design Education S. Baxter Contextualizing Consumption Craig Badke and Stuart Walker Sustainability, Design and Consumerism in the Developing World Ian Lambert

366

374 382

Chapter 7 – Philosophy The Determinants of Creativity: Flexibility in Design H. Casakin and S. Kreitler Exploring Dimensions of Design Thinking Barry Wylant

392 400

Chapter 8 – Model Making Single-Point Design in the Context of Higher Education Darren Southee The Application of Physical Models in Engineering Design Education Graham Green and Ladislav Smrcek T-Lights to Triangulation Craig Whittet Claystation - Design Modelling and Creativity Alex Milton and Ben Hughes Model Making Techniques as a Teaching Tool in Product Design Engineering Alejandra Velásquez-Posada Prototyping with Digital Media Jose Carlos Teixeira

410 418 430 437 445 452

Chapter 9 – Curriculum Inclusivity in the Design Curriculum A. J. Felton and K. B. Garner “Blink” and Technical Innovation Philips M. Gerson

462 471

Reflections on Rensselaer’s Product Design and Innovation Program Langdon Winner and Mark Steiner Distance Design Education: Recent Curriculum Development at the Open University Steve Garner Developing Advocates for Design: An Introductory Experience to Industrial Design Thinking and Methods of Problem Solving Eric Anderson Multidisciplinary Design Curricula from Primary to University Level Liv Merete Nielsen, Dagfinn Aksnes, Janne Beate Reitan and Ingvild Digranes Subverting the Modular Structure: Teaching Design Holistically in a Dislocated and Alien Environment Bjorn Rodnes, Duncan Hepburn, Will Titley and Jim Goodlet Design & Innovation Developing a Curriculum for Future Design Engineers at the Technical University of Denmark Per Boelskifte and Ulrik Jørgensen The Concept of Competence in Engineering Practice Birgitte Munch and Arne Jakobsen

479 486

494

502 510

518

525

Chapter 10 – Industry Links Sme Collaboration as a Driver of Design Research and Education Development Josep Tresserras, Steven MacGregor and Xavier Espinach Transfer of Knowledge Among Different Branches at the Level of Modular Construction Josef Formánek Bringing a Product Design Perspective to an Engineering Driven Organization Carolina Gill, Blaine Lilly and Roger Forsgren Design Process for Ipercompetitive Markets Francesco Zurlo and Cabirio Cautela Red Path, Blue Peach: Discovering the Core Market Values of the Small Business Deborah Cumming Organization of the Actions of a University Work Team in a Collaboration Agreement with a Company to Obtain Conceptual Designs of a Product Joaquim Lloveras and Jairo Chaur The Reality of Working with Local Sme’s, Design Agencies and an RDA in the Light of the Lambert Review Peter Ford and Michael Marsden Knowledge Networks: Collaboration Between Industry and Academia in Design M. Evans and J. Spruce Supporting Student Enterprise and Product Commercialisation – a Case Study G. Hudson and M. Eason

535 542

550 558 568 576

583

592 600

Collaboration Between Product Design Engineering at Glasgow School of Art and the National Health Service Scotland Dagfinn Aksnes, Anthea Dickson and Cathy Dowling Dynamics of Collaboration with Industry in Industrial Design Education: the Case of a Graduation Project Course Fatma Korkut and Naz Evyapan Design Support for SMES M.A.C. Evatt Connecting Technology to the Marketplace Lesley Morris and Jacki Wielkopolska

609

616

624 632

Chapter 11 – Tools and CAD A Hypermedia-based Learning Environment in Support of Learning and Teaching in Electronic Product Design Tom Page Cad/Cam Integration in Combined Craft Courses: a Case Study Richard Hooper Designing Games to Teach Ethics Peter Lloyd and Ibo van de Poel Ithink-Uthink: An Industrial Design Tool to Encourage Integrated and User Centred Design Thinking K. Bull A Visual Inclusive Design Tool for Bridging Eras, Technologies and Generations Christopher S C Lim and Alastair S Macdonald Ethnography’s Gift to Design Meg Armstrong Assessment Feedback Quality in Studio-Based Design Projects: Can Statement Banks Help? M. Sharp Other Geometries_Objects_Spaces Henriette Bier Crafts Praxis as a Design Resource Sarah Kettley Supporting Reflection and Problem-Based Learning Through the use of Laulima Hilary Grierson, Andrew Wodehouse, William Ion and Neal Juster

641

649 658 666

675 683 691

699 706 714

Chapter 12 – Communication Ambiguous Representational Systems in Visualization Assessment Carolina Gill Combinatory Methods for Developing Student Interaction Design Projects Marilyn Lennon, Liam Bannon and Luigina Ciolfi

723 731

Concept to Spatial – Bridging the Gap Judith Hills Evaluating Culture in Product Design by Integrating the Solo Taxonomy and the Circuit of Culture T. Katz, R. Mortezaei and R. Morris

739

Author index

753

745

Foreword Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

The Engineering and Product Design Education Conference 2005 (E&PDE05) is the seventh joint conference organised by the Design Engineering Special Interest Group (DESIG) of the Design Society (formally under the auspices of SEED) and the Institution of Engineering Designers (IED). The joint Engineering and Product Design Education conference series began in 1999, with an event on the “Continuum of Design Education” at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. The event has continued on an annual basis with conferences at Derby University, Bournemouth University, Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands and the University of Sussex to name a few. Themes have always centred on the importance and relevance of education in the fields of Product and Engineering Design, with academics and industrialists travelling from all over the world to take part and share ideas with each other. E&PDE05 has been organised by the School of Design and Media Arts at Napier University, Edinburgh in participation with the Design Education Special Interest Group (DESIG) of the Design Society, and the Institution of Engineering Designers. Initially, over 170 paper abstracts were received for E&PDE05 and a total of 92 papers have been painstakingly reviewed and prepared for this book. As a design researcher, a tutor, a practitioner, or perhaps a bit of all three I am sure you will concur with the view that literally everything now depends on design. Its role as a bridge between technology and art, ideas and ends, culture and commerce is now fundamental. Because design can be a major player in shaping a world where a valueenhanced user-perspective is developing, cross-functional, creative alliances must be formed. Design thinking ought, therefore, to permeate the educational curricula. Recent research in design issues today, with specific regard to design education1, highlights a number of strong characteristics: • Design students should not attempt to develop deep expertise in any one field, but, rather, take in information from many sources. • Designing is no longer a localised activity. • Designers need ever greater flexibility and networking skills. • Designers must be comfortable working with others, and being skilled in managing the dynamics of group activity as it is rare now for design projects to be completed by an individual. • Designing is increasingly about intellectual capital and less about delivering a trade or craft ability. 1 The Bureau of European Design Associations, Design Issues in Europe Today, BEDA, Barcelona, 2004, ISBN: 1-905061-04-8

• Designers must be skilled in creating the right environment to promote creative thinking and design activity that develops vital intellectual capital. • Designers must be able to trawl the vast seas of information and construct connections and thus create new and worthwhile knowledge. The aims of the conference, therefore, are to explore novel approaches in design education within the wider context of product design and development. The theme “Crossing Design Boundaries” reflects the organising team’s wish to incorporate many of the disciplines associated with, and integral to, modern design pursuits. In this book you will find, for example, the conjunction of anthropology and design, the psychology of design products, soft computing and wearable products, new media and design and how they can be best exploited within a product design and development arena. Even though the act of design has been described as “wicked”2, 3 and designers might not be in a position to save the world, the design of products, spaces, experiences, services and systems can make it a more enjoyable, a more beautiful, and even a more interesting place to live. The blurring and crossing of design boundaries was represented well in the recent end of year Design Degree Show at Napier University. In the Design Degree Show catalogue you will find a number of well designed products, systems, spaces, services, and experiences. Products, for example, which range from gardening equipment to inexpensive lighting to hair care packaging to cuddly toys for capturing memorable moments to clothing and accessories for sufferers of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) to interactive wallpaper. A number of systems were designed to alleviate some real world issues such as a beer barrel handling device to eliminate manual handling injuries, and an alcohol gel dispenser to minimise infection such as MRSA within hospitals. In terms of designed spaces, our students have undertaken very ambitious projects ranging from the radical reinterpretation of a Courthouse to the reconfiguration of a Registrars’ Office. Two multi-level housing projects explore issues relating to Retirement Homes and Apartments for First Time Buyers. Other projects included a Shopping Centre with ‘Identity’, the submersion of a northeast icon to create a Diving School, and a City Check-In for Edinburgh tourists. Two schemes considered diverse agendas in education, a Construction School for Teenagers and an Institute for Dyslexia. Social issues were explored in a ‘Timebank’ for Charities, a Clinic for Teenage Mothers, and a Community Media Studio. A Retreat for Textile Designers and a White-goods Workshop completed an impressive array of spatial design solutions. Increasingly, designers are asked to consider the notion of services and experiences and our students are no different in meeting this challenge head on. The dematerialisation of products is gaining momentum in contemporary design and is best reflected in the work of the Barcelona and Berlin-based designer Martí Guixé4. Our final year design

2 Rittel, H. and M. Weber, M., “Dilemmas in a general theory of planning”, Policy Sciences, 4 (1973), pp. 155-169. 3 Buchanan, R., “Wicked problems in design thinking”, in: V. Margolin and R. Buchanan, (Editors), The Idea of Design, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (1995), pp. 3-20. 4 Guixé, M., Martí Guixé: 1:1, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, (2002).

students, like Guixé, explored the potential of dematerialisation in a bespoke design service for reclaimed objects, an urban memorial which permanently stores information on generations of citizens that have passed away, a web-based service which encourages individuals to add some selfless good deeds into their daily lives, a service for bereaved cat owners which helps them to come to terms with their loss, and an immersive experience for authentic dining. As mentioned earlier, in the Bureau of European Design Association report, the designers of today and tomorrow need to be able to take in information from many sources, be flexible and comfortable working with others, be skilled in managing the dynamics of group activity, be skilled in creating the right environment to promote creative thinking and possess the ability to trawl vast seas of information and create new and worthwhile knowledge. In short, they need to be able to “cross design boundaries”. “Crossing Design Boundaries” includes a number of papers which describe discussions about product design education and the cross-over into these established fields, and a number of papers explore other specialist design areas such as interaction design, jewellery design, furniture design, and exhibition design which have been somewhat under represented at EPDE conferences in the past. The book comprises a number of excellent papers which have been classified into the following categories: • Interdisciplinarity • The Culture of Design • Design Education and Pedagogy • Teamwork in Design • Contemporary Design Issues • Sustainability and Design • Philosophy and Design • Model Making in Design • Curriculum Issues in Design Education • Industry Links • Tools and CAD in Design • Communication in Design As editor in chief of this book I would like to thank all the people who played a part in its making. Special mention should go out to all the members of the organising committee who were enormously rigorous and efficient in their reviews. They are, in no special order, Erik Bohemia, Duncan Hepburn, Mike Tovey, Chris Dowlen, Bjorn Rodnes, Bill Ion, Mike Evatt, Joaquim Lloveras, Chris McMahon, Peter Childs, Kevin Edwards, Nigan Bayazit, and Peter Lloyd. The organisation of this conference has been made much easier with the wonderful support of the team at the Institution of Engineering Designers. They are Libby Brodhurst, Alison Parker, Nadine Pearce, and Anna Clarke. Lastly, the Taylor and Francis team of Maartje Kuipers and Lukas Goosen et al have ensured a quick and brilliantly produced book of which I am sure everyone will be proud. My apologies to anyone I have inadvertently failed to mention. Dr. Paul Rodgers Reader in Design Design and Media Arts, Napier University

Chapter One INTERDISCIPLINARY

INTEGRATING THE DIFFERENT DESIGN DISCIPLINES DURING THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS OF ‘SMART PRODUCTS’ Guido De Grande* Hoger Instituut voor Integrale productontwikkeling, Department of Design Sciences, Belgium. Chris Baelus* Hoger Instituut voor Integrale productontwikkeling, Department of Design Sciences, Belgium. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The overall design of ‘smart’ products, based on electronics and on advanced information and communication technologies is a mixture of different design processes, dealing with technological, economical and user aspects. This requires an integrated approach allowing the product designer to manage the underlying design processes: electronic design, software design, interaction design and product design. This paper describes the methodology for this integrated approach as used in a design project for master students. The project focuses on the design of wearable electronic devices and includes the development of a graphic user interface. A specific road map is used to guide the students throughout the project. This road map is a set of techniques and tools to achieve four objectives. The first objective is to define feasible product ideas based on technological opportunities and relevant user needs. Therefore a technology or user driven approach is followed, based on trend mapping, anthropological research and scenario writing. The second objective is to support the inventive process by creating the interface between the different design disciplines. This allows the product designer to specify the necessary design brief for further specialised developments such as PCB design and software development. *Hoger Instituut voor Integrale productontwikkeling Department of Design Sciences - Hogeschool Antwerpen Ambtmanstraat 1 2000 Antwerpen Belgium Phone: +32 3 205 61 73 Email: [email protected] or [email protected]

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Students translate the technical and user requirements into a data flow diagram as a basis for the successive system design. This diagram defines the information transfer within the system and the interaction with the user. It is the basis for the interaction concept and the product architecture describing the working principles and the required functional subsystems. After that the student completes the project by executing the more traditional GUI design (Graphic User Interface) and the product design phases. The third objective is to introduce interdisciplinary verification techniques on a systematic basis. The student is trained in detecting the critical aspects in the design proposals and in selecting the appropriate method to evaluate the feasibility of the proposals. Usability testing, ergonomic verification, virtual PCB prototyping, bread-boarding and 3D printing is used for verification. The fourth objective is to provide the student with adequate expertise and tools to manage this complex multi-layered project. Using project planning software students are able to manage the time critical issues of a complete design project. Keywords: integrated product development, smart products, interaction design 1 INTRODUCTION In the higher Institute of Integrated Product Development in Antwerp a ‘user centered’ approach has been taken to educate product designers in developing innovative products with sufficient added value for both the user and the company. A specific methodology is followed to integrate all relevant disciplines during the early stages of the design process [1]. All technological, economical and human related aspects having an impact on the required added value, the product quality and the feasibility of the final result will have to be addressed during the creative process. Students are trained to analyze the context, generate innovative product ideas and use their design skills to develop these product concepts. Moreover, they have to be able to manage the innovation process and control all critical aspects by systematically performing interdisciplinary verifications. This approach can be used for various types of products but becomes very relevant for the development of the new generation ‘smart’ consumer products, using electronics and advanced information and communication technologies. Because of the various knowledge fields and design disciplines involved, the quality of the output can only be guaranteed by managing all underlying design processes: interaction design, software development, electronic design and product design. A specific roadmap and toolbox is introduced during the I-ware project in order to deal with this complexity.

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2 THE I-WARE PROJECT The I-ware project was introduced into the curriculum in 1999 to keep up with the rapid changes of technology, resulting into new product profiles requiring a shift in design strategies and design methods. The ‘I’ in I-ware is referring to “Intelligent” but also to “Interaction”, two properties categorizing a whole range of “smart products”. These products often have several “self” functions to support there intelligence: the ability to adapt to the environment, the autonomy, the human interaction, the multi-functionality, the reactivity, the ability to react emotionally and to operate in cooperation with other products [2]. The development of these ‘smart’ products requires a merging of different knowledge domains and various design skills. As traditional design skills do no longer match the complexity of this new generation of products a specific approach is needed. If a designer wants to keep control of the process and the final result without becoming an expert in all disciplines involved, very specific design methods are needed. In order to keep control of the overall project designers should be able to specify the output of all underlying design processes: software development, electronic design, PCB design, interaction design and graphic user interface design (GUI). This project is introduced in the 1st Master of the program. Students have to define a relevant and feasible product idea and to develop this idea into a product concept within a 14 weeks period. The design brief describes a technological opportunity such: e.g. Bluetooth, broadband communication,… or it focuses on specific product areas such: e.g. applications for food distribution, ‘intelligent’ luggage, electronic toys or innovative interfaces for people with a handicap. After defining the product functions and the user requirements of this ‘smart’ product, students have to develop the interaction concept and the system design, describing all technical components and the software requirements. After that students define the product concept and the graphic user interface. Specific attention is given on the usability, aesthetics and the produceability of the housing. The result is presented using technical 3D drawings and Z-corps concept models. The project is guided by an interdisciplinary team of designers, engineers and usability experts. 3 A ROADMAP FOR ‘SMART PRODUCT’ DEVELOPMENT The roadmap used during the I-ware project is based on the same principles as most models for integrated product development. It covers the early stages of the innovation process and supports the ideation and the concept development, ensuring the required added value and innovation level. The method also guarantees the interdisciplinary coherence and feasibility by a systematic verification of the results. This article will focus on the methods and tools used during the concept development of the project. This approach has proven to be effective for the development of ‘smart’ consumer products with complex information structures and a user interaction requiring a visual display unit. This selection has been made based on pedagogic arguments, supporting students in their ability to:

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• define a useful and relevant product application based on a given technological opportunity. • define the user requirements and product functions for the specific application. • explore the boundaries of innovative user interaction. • select feasible technologies to provide the required product intelligence and the interaction concept. • select and organize the technical components, with respect to user aspects, maintenance, produceability and environmental constraints. • design the graphic user interface for this application. • detect and verify the critical aspects in the project with respect to feasibility. • describe the specifications for design disciplines that are essential for the final quality of the project requiring specialized expertise. 3.1 A USER CENTERED APPROACH FOR THE IDEATION OF SMART PRODUCTS: During the first phase students have to define relevant and feasible product ideas that can provide new functions to meet the user expectations and requirements. Different entrances for the ideation can be explored: a technology driven approach or a userfocused approach based on target groups (children, baby boomers …).

Figure 1. Roadmap of I-ware project. By performing user observations and ethnographic research techniques relevant and useful user functions can be identified.

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Traditional creativity techniques, quick design methods, participative design sessions and user scenarios are used to refine and complete the product functions and features as well as the constraints. The visualized scenarios provide a well structured description of all user functions without defining the technological solutions or the functional components that are needed. Therefore user scenarios provide a good basis for setting up a data flow diagram. 3.2 A PRODUCT DATA FLOW DIAGRAM AS AN INITIAL STEP IN THE SYSTEM DESIGN OF SMART PRODUCTS A software data flow diagram (DFD) is a graphical way of representing the data streams to and from a system or organization that has to be automated. It is still considered one of the best modeling techniques for eliciting and representing the processing requirements of a system. Used effectively, it is a useful and easy to understand modeling tool. It has broad application and usability across most software development projects. Unlike detail flowcharts, DFD’s do not supply detailed descriptions of modules but graphically describe a system’s data and how the data interact with the system. We have extrapolated the DFD tool to physical smart products. The data flow can be represented in different layers. The physical context layer is the top level of a DFD. This layer represents the product and its data links with the external world (the entities). This can be the user of the product, a computer system, another smart product, the internet … Further details are represented on the lower layers starting from the level 0 layer where the data is manipulated or transformed by “processes”. Drawing a DFD helps the students in organizing their initial ideas. The smart product is considered as the “system” and the external world is shown as individual entities that interact with the system. The next question to solve is: what data is transferred between the entities and the product in either sense. The physical way the data is transferred is not important at this moment. The same rules that govern the software DFD can be used on a product DFD. Information between entities has no effect on the overall design of the product. Data flows between processes in the lower layers of the DFD have to be verified so that no “black holes” or “miracles” can evolve. Data that will be temporarily stored in the product will be saved in “data stores”. These stores can be used to send data to the user and the external entities. 3.3 CHALLENGING THE INTERACTION CONCEPT Because of the complete and well structured representation of all required user functions and data transfer in the data flow diagram, the DFD is also an ideal starting point for the user interaction design phase. Because there are no technical (or hardware) solutions defined in the DFD and no references to existing concepts are mentioned, the design space is enlarged and students are challenged to rethink the interaction concept. They are encouraged to explore new principles for operating the device. Based on the context of use (time, space and activity) and the specific user profiles, alternatives for navigation and control functions are generated by exploring the user requirements and the natural behavior of the users as a reference.

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Figure 2. Data Flow Diagram principle.

Figure 3. The toolbar of the C2TOON, a creative cartoon sketcher appears around the tip of the stylus when in contact with the inductive touch screen (e-toy 2003, L. Adriaenssen). The output of this highly creative stage is a user interaction diagram, indicating when and how users will interact with the product. The principles are defined without taking a final option on the technology used. This is done during the next steps. A functional diagram describes and clusters the technical functions, defines the physical and hardware principles that can be used, defines the system boundaries and can lead to alternative product architectures. Based on the functional diagram, the system design will define the sub-systems and components and their spatial configuration. The interaction diagram is also an ideal template for structuring and quantifying the information flows. It serves as a base for the GUI (graphic user interface) and the software requirements specifications (SRS-document). At this level the different design trajectories that will follow the system design can be controlled. Moreover by defining the requirements and specifications, the product designer can manage the overall project.

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4 INTEGRATING VERIFICATION TECHNIQUES Students are challenged to define innovative product applications for ‘smart’ products and to explore new interaction concepts. Therefore both technological and user related aspects can become critical and a systematic verification is required. Technical solutions and new principles are explored and tested by using breadboards and functional prototypes. For structural and thermal verification as well as for virtual PCB layout “net-software” is available [3]. This software is found on the internet as demo or trial software. The user related aspects are systematically evaluated through the project. Concept testing and participative design techniques are used to evaluate the relevance and usefulness of the proposed product ideas. Usability tests are performed for the evaluation of the interaction concepts and the structure of the information. Simple paper prototyping [4], simulations built in Power Point, Flash or Visual Basic are projected on touch screens to evaluate the GUI, allowing students to observe the learning process, to detect user’s problems and fixation in usage [5] and to optimize the proposed concepts. For the ergonomic evaluation of the wearable products and the visual aspects physical interaction prototypes are made using a Z-core modeler (a three-dimensional plotter). 5 CONCLUDING REMARKS The presented roadmap has proven to be effective for the development of ‘smart’ consumer product. Techniques like a data flow diagram, information structures and an interaction diagram that are commonly used in software development are also applicable in ‘smart product’ design. Because of their simple, user function related and non technical description of the product they are used to determine and to complete the required functions without limiting the possible technical solutions. These tools also support the communication with the other design disciplines and allow the designer to define the specifications for the software development, electronic design and the screen design and control the overall quality of the project. REFERENCES [1] Verhaert P., Praktijk van de productontwikkeling, Acco, 1999. [2] Ait El Houssi A., Rijsdijk S.A. and Veldhuizen H.G., Productontwikkeling en marketing. De on-twikkeling en marketing van intelligente producten, Pearson Education Benelux, 2004. [3] De Grande G. and Baelus C., Using net-software in design education. Proceedings of 2nd International EPDE Conference, Delft, 2004, pp. 443-448. [4] Snyder C., Paper prototyping. Morgan Kaufman, 2003. [5] Standaert A., Cognitive Fixation in Product Usage, Universiteit Delft, 2004.

HOW MUCH THEORY DO WE NEED TO RIDE A BICYCLE: OR HOW USEFUL IS RESEARCH FOR PRACTICE Dr Kristina Niedderer* UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the relationship between practice and research in art and design. It addresses the differences in the perceived value of practice and research in academic context. It questions this apparent dichotomy and its consequences with the aim to generate new insights and solutions and to set research and practice on equal terms concerning their perceived value. To this end, a comparison of the aims and characteristics of research and practice is conducted. The comparison identifies three aspects of research (nature, product, and process), in which the dichotomy between practice and research within the creative disciplines becomes particularly apparent within the context of academic research. The discussion reveals that the perceived differences between research and practice are rooted in the differences between explicit/cognitive and implicit/experiential knowledge. It is argued that an understanding of the relationship of experiential and cognitive knowledge is the key to bridging the perceived dichotomy between research and practice. Keywords: practice-based research, creative practice, experiential knowledge 1 INTRODUCTION Research and practice in the academic environment have been brought into proximity in the UK through the incorporation of polytechnics into universities in 1992, and the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise. Similar institutional forces have conspired to generate equivalent trends in other countries [1]. This has created an environment in which as many academic staff as possible are expected to pursue academic research that contributes to the ‘research culture’. However, in art & design many staff are practitioners who have no training in research and have often little *Kristina Niedderer, UK. Tel: +44 07966 892 879. Email: [email protected].

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understanding of what it is or how it contributes to their practice. The confusions about what it means to do research were revealed by the result of the last RAE where many submissions consisted exclusively of practice rather than research results [2]. This is not surprising, since staff usually are professional practitioners who get a training in teaching upon entry into the academy, but not in research. Thereby this is not to say that practitioners have not been using research before, but it has not always been explicitly identified in a way recognized as academic research by other disciplines or as judged by central university authorities and external funding bodies [3]. This becomes a problem because staff who do not pursue explicit research run the risk of appearing second class, because they do not generate this kind of academic income. To solve this problem, it may be necessary to set research and practice on equal terms concerning training, funding, and appreciation. This is a political issue, which ultimately may have to be resolved politically, but the understanding of the relationship of research and practice seems to be an important part of the problem and a clarification may make a positive contribution to this issue. Therefore, this paper addresses the apparent dichotomy of research and practice in art & design. In the following, the aims and characteristics of research and practice are analysed and compared. The analysis reveals what the perceived differences are and what differences or problems can be established upon scholarly analysis. The three issues arising from the analysis are the nature, product, and process of research, which are subsequently discussed. The paper concludes with a consideration on what one can learn from the dichotomy of research and practice within these issues for the conduct of so-called ‘practice-based’ research, pointing to further issues for investigation. 2 EXAMINING THE RELATIONSHIP OF RESEARCH AND PRACTICE IN ACADEMIC CONTEXT In this section, some common perceptions of the conflict of using practice in the context of academic research are contrasted with the actual differences that can be found upon analysis of the characteristics of research and practice. Through analysing the aims and requests that are being voiced, the differences in understanding that they imply are elicited as well as a number of problems that these differences indicate. The dichotomy of research and practice is a concern that is regularly raised in discussions on doctoral education in art and design. The most extreme perceptions that become apparent in such debates are that the use of practice within research may constitute a diversion from ‘real’ research and the practicing of practice for its own sake. These perceptions stand against perceptions that conventional academic research has nothing to contribute to the realm of professional practice in the creative disciplines. These assertions aim to highlight the extreme positions of both sides. Looking more objectively at the two sides of the problem, one finds on the one hand the request for complying with requirements of academic research. At the very centre of these requirements is the claim to generate original knowledge that is communicable [4]. Thereby there is both an expectation and consent among researchers that originality is demonstrated through contextualising the own work through the literature/context review, and that the knowledge gained is made explicit in order to be able to communicate it. On

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the other hand, there is the request of practitioners who engage in research to use their practice within the process of research, and to pursue research that is of immediate benefit to their practice. Scrivener describes this request as encountered by him in the process of doctoral supervision. He says “Typically, the candidate researchers, whether artists or designers, are experienced practitioners who want to engage in research that will contribute directly to their ongoing practice. Furthermore, they wish to conduct the research through art- or designmaking, or, put another way, they do not wish to suspend their creative work or allow it to become separate from, or sub-ordinate to, the research activity” [5]. Scrivener considers that this request is not a problem as such, i.e. that it is not necessarily in conflict with the requirements of research. The question arises therefore as to why there is a (perceived) problem, and what it is? Scrivener provides another clue when he indicates that problems arise “when the candidates’ primary interest is in producing artefacts and when these are closely associated with their self-identification as creators. For these candidates, the artefacts arising from the research cannot simply be conceived as by-products or exemplification of ‘know-how’. Instead, they are objects of value in their own right. Typically, the candidates involved are artists or studio/craft practitioners, focused on producing work that stands up in the public domain (e.g., be worthy of exhibition). For them, doctoral study is seen mainly as an opportunity to develop as creators and to produce more satisfactory work” [6] From the above statements one can extract three differences concerning the aims and requests made for research and practice: Firstly, there is the aspect of creativity, which is perceived as of great importance in the creative disciplines. Secondly, there is the (internal) need for the production of artefacts and for personal development by practitioner-researchers, which stands in contrast to the requirement of the production of shared knowledge in research. Thirdly, there are pointers towards differences between the processes of research and of practice. In other words, these three points indicate differences in the nature, outcome/product, and process of research and practice. Why these differences lead to problems is investigated in the following in more detail. 2.1 ON THE ASPECT OF CREATIVITY IN PRACTICE AND RESEARCH If the aspect of creativity is an intrinsic characteristic of the creative disciplines, one has to consider how it might affect research in the creative disciplines. One request arising from this is, for example, the inclusion of creative practice into the research process [7]. This is not to say that research in other fields may not include practice, but creative practitioners would certainly claim that this is different to creative practice. To give an example, on the one hand we might e.g. have an archaeological study which investigates a certain kind of drinking vessel from the Minoan period [8]. On the other hand, an artist or designer doing research might e.g. create a body of new work consisting of drinking vessels as part of her research [9]. While the former study may investigate the use in, and social context of, the Minoan period, the artist’s study may investigate new forms of social use, which are demonstrated through the artistic work. In this sense, rather than

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dealing with something existing, the aspect of creativity implies creating something new (e.g. artefact, concept, experience). The former is looking towards what is/has been in the past/present, the latter towards what might be in the future. This has an impact of the nature of research in the creative disciplines, e.g. while research in the scientific disciplines may be of deductive or inductive nature, in the creative disciplines it may need to adopt a model of productive (abductive) reasoning as suggested by March [10], which presents a proposition rather than a proof [11]. This comparison indicates that the aspect of creativity is important in shaping the nature of research in the creative disciplines and that it is not in conflict with research, but that it affects both the process and the outcome of the research which are discussed in the following. 2.2 COMPARING THE OUTCOMES OF PRACTICE AND RESEARCH Concerning the outcomes of both activities, above it has been indicated that the aim or request of research is to generate new/original knowledge, and of creative practice it is to create new products (i.e. artefacts, performances etc.). The aim to make new products is also maintained by many researcher-practitioners for research in the creative disciplines. This has generated some discussion, because often it remains unclear as to which role these products have within the research. On the one hand there is an acknowledgement that artefacts and other products contribute to, or contain, knowledge in some way, and on the other hand there is some consent that these artefacts alone do not produce the knowledge that is required for research [12, 13, 14]. Despite of this general consent, there are still differences as to how and what kind of knowledge artefacts may contribute. Biggs argues that artefacts, as a non-linguistic mode of communication, are not essential to the communication of the findings (knowledge) of research. He explains that the ineffable component of experiential feeling, which is inherent in artefacts, is a representation of experiential content which can also be represented (communicated) linguistically [15]. In contrast, Scrivener argues that artefacts have a value in their own right, also in research, because they cause reflection and ‘apprehension’ in the audience [16]. In an intermediary approach Niedderer shows that artefacts may be seen to be relevant as a knowledge base for theory generation in research. She argues that artefacts are relevant as various kinds of evidence because they combine multiple realities in their material presence, which cannot be satisfactorily represented in their entirety by linguistic means. In turn, linguistic means are more readily suited to draw out aspects of analysis and interpretation, or principles, because of the analytic character of language which makes it possible to extract, and focus on, a single reality of an artefact [17]. What this debate highlights is that there appear to be two kinds of knowledge. The one inherent in artefacts may be described as implicit or experiential or tacit, the other which is required as the outcome of research may be described as explicit or cognitive [18]. 2.3 COMPARING THE PROCESSES OF PRACTICE AND RESEARCH The dichotomy between experiential and cognitive knowledge becomes even clearer when considering the relationship of the processes of practice and research. Using the

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example of riding a bicycle, Biggs demonstrates that knowing-how to ride a bicycle is a practical skill, which is difficult to learn other than through engaging in the activity itself, because the experiential knowledge needed is tacit and ineffable and evades any description through words. While learning how to ride a bicycle is an advance in experiential knowledge which is implicit, e.g. the knowledge of why it is possible to ride a bicycle is theoretical, can be made explicit, and does not even require one’s ability to ride a bicycle. Biggs further argues that the practical-experiential process does not necessarily lead to the explicit knowledge (knowing-that), which is required as the outcome of research. Because there does not seem to be an inevitable link between knowing-how and knowing-that, Biggs concludes that practice cannot be a necessary requirement for the generation and communication of (explicit) knowledge in art and design research [19]. However, from the side of practitioners, there is a repeated insistence that experiential knowledge is important for the development of knowledge. Another example may serve to demonstrate this importance, e.g. the human ability to walk upright. It involves similar characteristics as the example of cycling in terms of balance, but is simpler because we do not have to consider whether it was experiential or cognitive/ theoretical knowledge that led to constructing the first bicycle in the first place. Walking is a basic function, for which humans do not normally need an aid and which is usually developed intuitively. In an artistic context this ability might be developed to its limits e.g. in making somersaults. In this realm, it seems that through creativity of imagination of what might be possible, and through determination to experiment and test these imagined possibilities, new possibilities (technical and/or aesthetically) are established which in due course become part of established knowledge as e.g. the canon of established steps for ballet dancers. The question is here whether this kind of knowledge could be developed through a theoretical process in the same way as e.g. the knowledge “why one cannot easily balance on a bicycle when stationery”? [20] Although it seems theoretically possible, practically it would be very difficult because of the creative aspect and the uncertain variable of human ability. Therefore in some cases of research, it is necessary, or of advantage, to utilise the ineffable aspect of experiential knowledge, i.e. experiential feeling, which is allowed into the research process through the use of practice, even though only its counterpart, i.e. the content of experiential knowledge, can be communicated as part of the research outcome. Consequently, there have been attempts to integrate the process of creative production formally into the process of research e.g. through action research and reflective practice [21, 22] where creative practice is embedded into a cycle of (self-) conscious reflection in order to make explicit the development of, and knowledge gained from, using creative practice. While methods such as action research and reflective practice have provided a practical solution for integrating creative practice into the research process, they have not provided solutions for, or understanding of, the many problems with creative practice (process or product) in doctoral submissions, RAE submissions etc. of which the many current debates in design provide evidence. What needs to be addressed to solve the persisting problems are the underlying reasons, i.e. the need for combining experiential and cognitive ways of inquiry, and how the dichotomy that is inherent in this approach could be resolved. Therefore, if experiential knowledge is of importance for the

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development of explicit knowledge, it is important and necessary to further investigate the role of experiential knowledge in research. 3 CONCLUSION This paper has examined the relationship of research and practice in academic context in art and design. It has identified and investigated differences between research and practice in the three aspects of nature, outcome, and process. This has resulted in the recognition that at the root of these differences is the difference between experiential and cognitive knowledge. In conclusion, this paper considers what the crucial points are which we can learn from this? It has been argued that on the one hand there is theoretical knowledge which is made explicit in form of concepts and theories, and which is recognized as (the outcome of) academic research. On the other hand there is experiential knowledge, which is implicit in action, and which is associated with the tacit knowledge of research that occurs in and through practice. Problems arise concerning the process and outcome of research where research aims to include/utilise practice, because academic research requires its results to be communicable and therefore prioritises explicit knowledge. Nevertheless, experiential knowledge seems to be of importance in certain kinds or aspects of inquiry. While using methods such as action research and reflective practice offers a practical solution, the experiential knowledge that is utilised or gained through this process has to be communicated via the detour of explanation (of those aspects of knowledge that can be made explicit, i.e. explicit knowledge) or of empathy by visually demonstrating a process that requires practical/experiential skill/knowledge. This suggests that it would be desirable to find ways in which to communicate the ineffable component of experiential knowledge more directly and/or unambiguously in order to allow for an equal appreciation of experiential knowledge in academic research. This leads to the conclusion that the understanding of how these two kinds of knowledge relate is the key to bridging the dichotomy between practice and research, and to improving existing approaches to practice-based research and research education. While a simple solution may not be in sight, further clarification through investigation of the following questions might serve to develop an advanced understanding and new approaches that help to overcome the current dichotomy of knowledge. Suggestions for further investigation: • How do experiential and explicit knowledge relate? • (How) Can we communicate experiential knowledge as a whole (i.e. directly or unambiguously), or can we only communicate its explicit component? • (How) Can the ineffable part of experiential knowledge, which is an intrinsic part of practice, be communicated as part of the outcomes of academic research?

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REFERENCES [1] Durling, D. Discourses on Research and the PhD in Design. Quality Assurance in Education, Vol. 10 (2), pp.79-85. [2] HEFCE. RAE 2001. Online. URL: http://www.rae.ac.uk/. 2001. [3] AHRB. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Board, Guidance Notes. Online. URL: http://%20www.ahrb.ca.uk/. 2002. [4] Biggs, M. The rôle of the artefact in art and design research. International Journal of Design Sciences and Technology, Vol.10 (2), 2002, pp.19-24. [5] Scrivener, S. Characterising Creative-production Doctoral Projects in Art and Design. International Journal of Design Sciences and Technology, Vol.10(2), 2002, pp.25-44. [6] Scrivener, S. ibid. [7] Scrivener, S. and Chapman, P. The practical implications of applying a theory of practice based research. Working Papers in Art and Design, Vol.3, 2004. [8] Gillis, C. Minoan Conical Cups. Form, Function and Significance. Studies in Mediterranean Archeology (PhD thesis). Åströms Vörlag, Göteborg, 1990. [9] Niedderer, K. Designing the Performative Object: a study in designing mindful interaction through artefacts (PhD thesis). University of Plymouth, UK, 2004a. [10] March, L. The Logic of Design. In Developments in Design Methodology, ed. N. Cross. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, NY, 1984, pp.265-276. [11] Niedderer, K. 2004a, p.26. [12] Biggs, M. Approaches to the experiential component of practice-based research. Reflektion. Swedish Research Council, Stockholm, 2004, pp.6-21. [13] Niedderer, K. Why is there the need for explanation? – objects and their realities. Working Papers in Art and Design, Vol.3, 2004b. [14] Scrivener, S. and Chapman, P. 2004. [15] Biggs, M. 2004. [16] Scrivener, S. 2002. [17] Niedderer, K. 2004b. [18] , [19] Biggs, M. 2004. [20] Biggs, M. 2004. [21] Schön, D. The Reflective Practitioner. Ashgate, Aldershot, UK. 2002. [22] Robson, C. Real World Research. Blackwell, Oxford, UK. 1993, pp. 438-444.

INTERDISCIPLINARY LESSONS IN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND MARKETING Geoff Matthews* Lincoln School of Architecture, University of Lincoln, UK. Jason Forrester Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The paper describes the inception, progress and successful completion of a knowledge transfer partnership between the University of Lincoln and a local SME specializing in the manufacture of storage solutions. The project aimed to establish an in-house industrial design and marketing function, and was directly translated into a Masters by Learning Contract. The direction taken by the project brings into question some of the orthodox assumptions regarding the relationship between design innovation led and market research led product development. Dealing with the dynamics and contingencies of the real-world context exposed the inadequacies of both methodologies. We argue that it is possible and desirable to foster an interdisciplinary sensibility by integrating marketing and design. The paper concludes with a suggestion for how the university might better organize cross-disciplinary curricula. Keywords: SME, industrial design, marketing, interdisciplinarity, design curriculum 1 INTRODUCTION The paper describes the translation of the project into a Masters by Learning Contract (MALC) and discusses the evolution of the company’s new product development capability. Observations on the relationship between market research led and design innovation led product development lead to a suggestion for how the university might better organize cross-disciplinary curricula. *Lincoln School of Architecture, University of Lincoln, Lincoln LN6 7TS, UK, email:[email protected]

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1.1 CONTEXT OF THE SME MANUFACTURER In the UK many manufacturing SMEs rely on retail, marketing and distribution companies to present their products to consumers. This may be through mail order, retail chain stores, export programs, and over branding. They either buy in the design services they need to generate new products or contract to produce designs commissioned by their clients [1]. This tends to isolate the manufacturer from its end users and it is very often beholden to the intermediary companies’ buyers when it comes to the type, style, range and price of individual products. Such a manufacturer is particularly vulnerable: with limited business diversification capability if it loses a major client it may go out of business before it can respond to the change. This project focuses on an SME manufacturer that was in this situation. It recognized that there were opportunities to transform its position through developing an integrated product design and marketing capability in-house. The company specializes in storage solutions including stackable boxes, hobby cases, multi-drawer units, tool holders, and robust packaging. It also sells machine time to satisfy seasonal demand for products such as video cassette cases. The wider market for injection molded products is quite rigidly subdivided. Manufacturers are very aware of the dangers of treading on competitors’ toes and therefore tend to be cautious and territorial as regards developing and marketing established product types. 1.2 PARTNERSHIP WITH UNIVERSITY OF LINCOLN In 2001 the company entered a Teaching Company Scheme (TCS) project with the University of Lincoln [2]. Through establishing an in-house industrial design and marketing function this had three key objectives: 1. Documenting and implementing product research and development procedures, 2. Improving the flexibility of the company and particularly its responsiveness to market opportunities, and 3. Developing and taking to market three new product lines. Insofar as these objectives were almost fully achieved, the project was a success. 2.0 METHODOLOGY The study is qualitative in nature. It assumes that the learning experience can be adequately described and explained in narrative terms, where that narrative develops reflexively as a critical evaluation of experience. Since Schön articulated the notion of ‘reflective practice’ [3] practitioners in the arts and creative industries have made a small but significant contribution to this type of action research. Its principal purpose is the critical evaluation and improvement of practice. We concur with Bucciarelli in valuing narrative understandings of design activity and expressing the need to criticize design theories too abstract and static to account for real-world experience and, as Shurville highlights, to provide a model for design education [4]. We also believe that through sharing narrative understanding in the organization actors become more flexible and reflexive and more realistic about their own agency in complex situations [5].

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Collaboratively, the reflective practice of Jason Forrester, TCS Associate, and participant observation of Geoff Matthews, academic supervisor, determined the direction and critical evaluation of the project at each stage. Analysis is based on detailed documentation of process and progress produced during the project for reporting and project management purposes. 4.0 INCEPTION The overall aims of the project were used to define four overlapping streams of activity. 1. Investigating and assimilating information from a range of sources. 2. Marketing research and generating product ideas. 3. Establishing a design function through developing three new products, and 4. Putting secure working systems and protocols in place. Project planning assumed that an orthodox marketing-led product development process would provide an adequate model. 4.1 PROJECT STRUCTURE The project was broken down into ten tasks, which TCS proposals document in a linear format (Table 1.) In practice some tasks may overlap and some run in parallel. Tasks 5, 7, 8 & 9, for example, were planned as three overlapping cycles of product development and to run in parallel with task 6.

Table 1. TCS Project outline programme. Task no.

Task description

Effort (weeks)

1

Induction programme

4

2

Develop product knowledge Market research plan Marketing audit and analysis

10

3 4

3 12

5

Selection of potential products

6

Establish industrial design 20 function Product development plan 4 Product development 21

7 8 9

Market testing and approval

13

6

Deliverables Report, NVQ and Degree registration, mini project Presentation Proposal and methodology Customer requirements, exhibition report, market research and analysis, product ideas, report and presentation Development shortlist, Selection methodology, Evaluations, report and presentation Design methodology, design manual, IT analysis & specification, IT training Project plan Specification, concept design, prototypes, Design audit and report Focus group report and presentation, handover to engineering

Crossing design boundaries 10 Hand over and exit strategy Holiday entitlement total

3

20

Systems check and inventory, final report

8 104

Effort is calculated in working weeks and deliverables and milestones specified for each task. Weekly team meetings progress and monitor work. A quarterly Local Management Committee deals with reports and presentations. There is a two-way flow of knowledge and expertise. The company benefits from specialist knowledge of design and marketing and students in the university from live project work, placements and site visits. 4.2 LEARNING CONTRACT The TCS Associate is expected to register for a higher degree to maximize personal benefit from academic input to the project. Planned outputs of the project as far as possible were used to meet learning and assessment requirements. Some Masters degree learning outcomes inevitably fell outside of the scope of the project. For example, the development of the company’s design and marketing capability didn’t need study of research methodologies and an academic paper. Maintaining a reflective log and writing an evaluative report could also be seen as an extra. In translating the TCS project structure into a MALC several compromises therefore had to be made (Table 2.) The University MALC uses multiples of 12 ‘M’ level credits to structure study. Each credit point is worth a notional 10 study hours. Clearly TCS effort does not translate directly into 12, 24, and 36 point blocks of credit. Some working weeks contribute more to study time than others, and some study is outside working time. Also, different study activities are variously time consuming. A student needs a lot of academic advice to compose a realistic learning contract this complex. In practice, for a KTP project, the academic supervisor does most of the work. Nevertheless, the MALC gives mandatory credit to the student for planning and composing the learning contract. 5.0 PROGRESS AND DISCUSSION 5.1 INDUCTION, DEVELOPING PRODUCT KNOWLEDGE AND MINI-PROJECT The associate studied the company, its product lines, sales dynamics, clients and competitors, and was introduced to university facilities and enrolled on the MALC program. The vehicle for the initial study was a mini-project to develop a concept to extend the biggest-selling range of storage crates. It progressed beyond all expectations, was presented to a major buyer and almost accepted for production. This near miss had not involved any market research and highlighted the potential for a design innovation led approach to product development as one option for the company.

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Table 2. Masters Degree outline learning contract. Goal

Summary of work

A B C D

Write Learning Contract Induction programme Develop Product Knowledge Market research plan, audit/analysis E Selection of potential products F Establish industrial design function G Product development – plan and execute H Product development – market test I Hand over and exit strategy total

Credit

Assessment

12 12 24 12

Learning contract PDP, presentation and written report Presentation and written report Research proposal (1000 words)

12

Presentation, Design practice handbook (chapter) Research paper methodology (1000 words), Design practice handbook (5000 words) Project plan, product specification documents, academic paper (3000 words), Design presentations Focus group report and presentation

36 36

24 12

Reflective log, summative report on Masters degree (2000 words)

180

5.2 MARKETING STUDIES The team then returned to the original program (tasks 3 and 4) to explore fully the context and capabilities of the company, its potential markets and end user responses and needs. Constructing user perspectives and obtaining intelligence was intended to feed into product idea generation and selection. The associate designed, supervised and evaluated the market research project. Five final-year European Marketing undergraduates conducted a series of focus groups targeting three market segments: international and UK students, DIY enthusiasts, and retirees and pensioners. For practical reasons samples were limited to the local population. A significantly larger national sample would be required to achieve confidence in the results; however, value was achieved by focusing group evaluation on just three products. The conclusions did not point to any new product ideas. Instead the need for a change in product development rationale was confirmed. In the mini project the ‘cost leader’ rationale had failed to persuade the original buyer. What was needed was a rationale centered on consumer awareness of product fit to the use environment. 5.3 PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT STUDIES Concurrently with the market study commercial pressures on the company forced a start on the next product design process. What began as an attempt to rethink a small parts storage case for DIY use was transformed through client involvement into a concept initially for medical use. This engaged a design innovation approach driven by a 3-year trading agreement and exclusivity clause. Sales of a very successful first aid case, produced for a leading supplier of kits to the industrial market, were in decline and a replacement urgently needed to recapture market share from competitors. Intuitively, the

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associate softened the lines of the product, which allowed for an integral handle design, a more robust structure and a more adaptable range of interior fittings. The resulting product was ‘attractive’, ‘distinctive’ and ‘gendered’. These novel qualities turned out to be central to its acceptance in this initial market. The product also exhibited generally improved ‘design robustness’, although its future adaptation to the DIY market was perhaps compromised by its feminized lines [6]. 5.4 INTEGRATION IN PRACTICE Consumer marketing approaches place a great deal of emphasis on the brand perceptions and behaviors of end users. But opportunities for the company to communicate its brand directly to the consumer are limited. The bulk of the business is, and is likely to remain, in products that are over branded, e.g. Bosch (power tool carrying/storage cases). Understandably there was management skepticism regarding the relevance of orthodox marketing-led models of product development. However, a marketing process has become critical to the company, one that addresses professional buyers’ perceptions and behaviors. Its products used to be utilitarian, brand neutral and competitive only on a cost leader basis. Today the quality, stylish multifunctionality and brand compatibility of its products is paramount. Clients express a new level of trust and confidence in the company and see it not as just another supplier but as a collaborator capable of making a positive contribution to the brand. 5.5 MOTIVATIONS IN MARKETING AND DESIGN It is said that market research can only reveal what people already know and like, which provides an argument for a ‘design futures’ approach to product development [7]. But even close study of ‘trends in consumer behavior and perceptions’ has its limitations. There is no necessary logical relationship between understanding the issues involved and the ability to generate design concepts. Marketing professionals with positivist inclinations would like there to be a causal link and to systematize the process that leads reliably from one to the other. Most design professionals prefer to believe that wit, intuition, play, in general terms the ‘non-rational’, is crucial to successful responses to so-called ‘wicked’ problems. In this view design is defined by its success in situations where there is incomplete information, too little time, and inadequate resources to accomplish purely rational/technical problem solving. As this project has shown, marketing and design motivations have nevertheless begun to converge. 6.0 CONCLUSION Soon after Woudhuysen’s entreaty Goldsmith’s College University of London launched the UK’s first Design Futures program, and several management schools already had interests in design management, e.g. Aston, London, and Open University were exploring the integration of mainstream thinking in a strategic design framework. Over a decade on certain areas of industry still find such thinking irrelevant. In this project, management

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skepticism about front-end market research was grounded in hard-won experience of dealing with clients who see the wielding of buying power as means of expressing control and protecting brand. This excludes the manufacturer from contributing to the client’s brand enhancement efforts, but is counterproductive. Business to business marketing is not as glamorous as consumer oriented approaches and is neglected in design and some marketing curricula. But designers need to know about it. In the UK alone hundreds of SME manufacturers could use a designer to integrate design innovation with business development to the benefit of clients’ brands, consumers’ experience, and the company’s bottom line. This project developed an individual in the workplace but for a more accessible education cross-disciplinary work on campus needs to become the norm. Universities could start by engaging the self-organizing capacity of communities of enquirers [8]. REFERENCES [1] Pavitt, J., In Goods We Trust, p.39 in Pavitt, J. (ed.), Brand New. V&A Publications, London, 2000, pp.18-52. [2] Such projects are now called Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. [3] Schön, D., The Reflective Practitioner. Basic Books, New York, 1983. [4] Shurville, S., Book review: Designing Engineers by Louis Bucciarelli, Design Studies. Vol. 17. 1996, pp. 221-2. [5] Deuten, J. J., and Rip, A., Narrative Infrastructure in Product Creation. Organization, Vol. 7 (1), 2000, pp.69-93. [6] Rothwell, R. and Gardiner, P., Robustness and Product Design Families, in Oakley, M., (ed.) Design Management. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 279-92. [7] Woudhuysen, J., The Relevance of Design Futures, in Oakley, M., (ed.) Design Management. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, pp. 265-72. [8] Awbrey, S. and Awbrey, J., Conceptual Barriers to Creating Integrative Universities. Organization. Vol. 8 (2), 269-84.

PERIMETERS, BOUNDARIES AND BORDERS: NEW DIMENSIONS OF DESIGN IN THE CONVERGENT FIELDS OF SCULPTURE, INDUSTRIAL DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE John Marshall* Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, UK. Jon Pengelly* Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper outlines the initial findings of a transdisciplinary, visual art PhD research project the primary author is undertaking at Gray’s School of Art as part of a research cluster which proposes ‘New Topologies of Practice.’ [1] The research examines the notion that new sets of creative, cultural and economic conditions exist for artists, designers and architects as a result of recent developments in 3D imaging, rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing technologies. The research draws on contextualizing existing exemplary projects from the field of enquiry and the author’s own industrial experience as a product designer and subsequent founding of artist-run, organizations dedicated to the exploration of this art and technology interface (artcore, Fast-UK and rootoftwo). KEYWORDS: transdisciplinary, CAD/CAM, sculpture, product design, architecture. 1. INTRODUCTION The current research grows out of many years of engaged practice in industrial design and manufacture, architectural collaborations and fine art practice. The PhD research project provides the opportunity to critically reflect on this experience and to begin to define analytical terms to make distinctions between projects across disciplinary *Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Garthdee Road, Aberdeen, AB10 7QD, UK. +44(0)7974191933, [email protected], [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>

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boundaries and investigate the major aesthetic, pragmatic and semantic questions currently being asked of these ‘designed objects’ (broadly conceived as the entire range of physical things that we use to facilitate and mediate our lives.) This paper explores the initial state of the research based on the extensive experience of the authors and represents a snapshot of current thinking. 2. CONVERGENCE “Convergence” within the context of this paper, refers to the blurring between disciplines and the increasing predisposition and ability of creative practitioners to work across two or more domains. Since vehicles, buildings, products and art are being produced by similar - if not the same software or manufacturing means, there are implications and opportunities resulting from this convergent condition to create new generic tool sets and applicable transdisciplinary fields of enquiry. Although each of the indicated disciplines of architecture, art and design takes as axiomatic the particular character of their domain, the research project and this paper takes the material culture point of view which treats them as subdisciplinary parts of a larger totality. [2] The use of computer technologies presents opportunities and creative challenges for the exploration and/or colonization by practitioners across the related but until now, distinct subdisciplinary domains of sculpture, industrial design and architecture. 3. GENERATIONS This research seeks to critically map how these technologies are impacting on current disciplinary boundaries and areas of practice within this evolving hybrid, convergent field. From the initial, ‘contextual review’ undertaken (used in this circumstance to reflect the broad range of reference material: journals, exhibitions, artifacts etc. this research draws upon) we characterize two distinct generations of innovation in the application of these technologies to date and the indication of a third speculative generation. These generations are not categorized in terms of time but rather defined in terms of their increased levels of sophistication and application of technologies towards the development of a new object grammar (systems, rules or underlying principles that contribute to our understanding of visual language - in this case, comprised of both morphology and syntax) in the field of ‘designed objects.’ (Figure 1.) We will refer to these generations as: “incremental innovation” (parallel, distinct disciplinary development), “radical innovation” (beginning of technology-enabled disciplinary convergence) and the “next techno-cultural paradigm” (speculative transdisciplinary technological integration). Here, we have borrowed terms of reference from economist Christopher Freeman’s categories of distinction and diffusion of the techno-economic paradigm, transferring from the “economic” to the “cultural” domain. [3]

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3.1 FIRST GENERATION The “incremental innovation” generation refers to the initial exposure of the technologies to practitioners primarily from fine art backgrounds and their mostly superficial use of these. The objects produced in this generation are mainly the results of creative ‘play’ and the definition of the objects has more to do with the suite of new 3D modeling software tools, media and materials available than the development of a new object grammar. The maker’s concerns with ‘what’ the object is - is largely subsumed into the ‘wow’ factor of ‘how’ it came into being. Examples of the “incremental innovation” generation are as follows: • The CALM Project. http://www.uclan.ac.uk/clt/calm/overview.htm • Mind Into Matter. http://www.bostoncyberarts.org/mindmatter/mimtitle.html • Telesculpture. http://telesculpture.prism.asu.edu/ The majority of these projects have produced software-derived, sculptural objects that surpass the formal qualities of the work produced in the 1930’s by canonical artists such as H. Moore and N. Gabo only in terms of their more complicated internal spatial geometry. We argue that an average shampoo bottle has undergone a more sophisticated and exacting process in the application of these technologies than the ubiquitous ‘blob on a plinth’ of Rapid Prototype sculpture. The increment of innovation is the augmentation

Figure1. Three Generations.

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Figure 2. Skull (distortion #2 of 4).

Figure 3. Bus station at Spaarne Hospital. of existing practice by the application of computer technologies and not the grammar of the objects produced. Although the development of these works is significant within the distinct domain of fine art, in the current study we will set these aside to concentrate on the transdisciplinary aspects of the “radical innovation” generation. 3.2 SECOND GENERATION The “radical innovation” approach represents a shift in order of magnitude in the level of engagement with these tools - resulting in increased sophistication, understanding and command of the technology involved. This paper will examine this second generation with respect to a developing vocabulary and evolving syntax of use and application. “Radical innovations are discontinuous events, going beyond variational creativity. In the oft-told explanation, no combination of horse-driven coaches could have produced the railway” [4] The artifacts in this generation have been made to exploit the technologies used and this presents the opportunity to reframe the activities, methods and knowledge of these

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disciplines. It is our intention to begin to define analytical terms to make distinctions between projects across disciplinary boundaries to make observations and track trends in the convergence of disciplines brought about by the use of common technology and practices. 3.2.1 Examples Aspects of projects that indicate this second generation include, but are not restricted to: • Materiality - the generative use of new production processes and the exploitation of unique features of these technologies: both software and hardware driven. As production methods become more sophisticated and accessible, new creative possibilities arise that would not have been impossible previously. Non standard means of manufacturing and new material processes co-evolve to allow the implementation of organic forms regardless of scale or function. Robert Lazzarini’s ‘Skulls’ (Figure 2.) which consists of the presentation of four perspectively distorted skulls brings Hans Holbein’s anamorphic image of a skull from the painting ‘The Ambassadors’, 1533 out of the picture plane into physical space. Lazzarini begins with a familiar object, from which he makes a digital scan and subjects the resulting mesh to dimensional distortions - he then creates a master model through rapid prototyping which forms the basis for casting the final sculptures, in polyester resin and bone meal in this case. NIO Architecten’s ‘Amazing Whale Jaw’ (Figure 3.) bus station at Spaarne Hospital in Hoofddorp, The Netherlands was CNC machined from polystyrene and coated with polyester resin. The various parts were transported to the site and glued together, before receiving a final coat of polyester. It is the world’s largest structure made of synthetic materials. • Heterarchical Implementation - adaptation, customization and personalization of objects involving the end-user as a co-designer - resulting in ‘tailored’ objects. Sophisticated, non-standard production

Figure 4. Gordon Tapper & Olivier Renaud-Clement 1:10.

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Figure 5. Sinterchair®. processes surmount the serial mass production model transforming the nature of the ‘third party’ of the user of the designed object through the application of user input and computer controlled machinery. Karin Sander’s ‘1:10’ (Figure 4.) consists of forty figures produced by 3-D scanning actual people. The data from the scans is used to make the figures at 10% of life size by the process of fused deposition modeling in ABS plastic. The figure is then painted from photographs by a technician. The result is an exhibition of figurative sculpture made through a highly conceptual program of activity that is executed by various technologies and leaves the objects untouched by Sander herself. Oliver Vogt and Hermann Weizenegger’s ‘Sinterchair®’ (Figure 5.) is made by the Selective Laser Sintering process (in which Nylon powder is applied in fine layers and sintered in a series of 2D sections by a CO2 laser to form a 3D object). The product is computer-generated from input from the customer. Vogt + Weizenegger use questionnaires to find out about the customer’s preferences and therefore Sinterchair® is a mass-customized object. • Algorithmic Design – use of software as an autonomous, generative tool increasing the opportunity for serendipitous design. As computer/practitioner interactions become more sophisticated, possibilities have shifted away from productivity tools and moved towards opportunities for design experimentation. One of these is generative design. This can be defined as the approach of developing software processes and applications which can evolve structures and objects at various levels of autonomy, based on predetermined rules, conditions and variables. Michael Rees and Chris Burnett’s Sculptural User Interface® (Figure 6.) is a software tool which through the use of procedures and algorithms working in series creates cybernetic assemblage from text. The reference system explicitly involves language either generated within the program or introduced by the user via the keyboard. Lionel T. Dean’s ‘Future Factories’ concept (Figure 7.) creates designed objects by setting ranges within which random values (assigned by a computer) determine certain defining parameters of the objects. This allows aspects of the

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form of the objects to ‘mutate’ sequentially within certain interrelated parametric ranges. As these technologies continue to become increasingly accessible and prevalent within design studios and computing enters its ‘pervasive’ networked phase, the expectations we all have of the objects we surround ourselves with will transform. Many of the projects (above) are indicative of this transitional juncture and emergent area, and can be viewed as experiments in the field of enquiry outlined in this paper. We would suggest this represents a new dimension of design beyond form, function and semantics. 4. TOWARDS THE “NEXT TECHNO-CULTURAL PARADIGM” The examples cited in this paper track across the traditionally narrow subject area definitions within art & design education that we have sought to apply previously. The

Figure 6. Artificial Sculpture: The Sculptural User Interface®.

Figure 7. Tuber - LED pendant luminaire.

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authors propose that the synergies referred to in this paper, offer tangible opportunities for disciplines to engage in higher level transdisciplinary collaborations linking practices towards the development of new skills sets and design methodologies. Artists, designers and architects have engaged the new territory of machine-mediated design and manufacture. At the same time, the Internet is invading real space as networked computing elements become embedded into physical objects and environments. The potential impact of this on the field of ‘designed objects’ and by extension, how we educate the next generation of practitioners will be enormous. This research engages in this discourse and argues for new transdisciplinary positions and pedagogic models, to better educate practitioners in areas across the great divide of ‘commercial/applied’ and ‘pure’ art. If the qualities of the objects we design and make are increasingly empathic and emotional, then practitioners from the art and design disciplines will need to continue to explore approaches that develop the potential of the space between fine art and design - to provoke and make manifest our relationships with the objects we imagine, design and produce. It is expected that the old models of disciplinary practice will not disappear but will continue to exist alongside new models that are emerging. This signifies a multidirectional morphing of disciplines and the opportunity to create fundamentally new types of ‘designed object’ and practice that eclipse conventional tropes. There are increasing examples of work which explores the technological potential of this area. We would consider the work of the following to be indicative and/or exemplary in the current field of enquiry: • Asymptote - http://www.asymptote.net/ • Diller Scofidio + Renfro - http://www.dillerscofidio.com/ • Dunne & Raby - http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/ • Langlands and Bell - http://www.langlandsandbell.com/ • Thomas Heatherwick - http://www.thomasheatherwick.com/ These practitioners are investigating the application of technologies and have posited new questions about the cultural context of objects. They are exploring the transdisciplinary possibilities for artists/designers/ architects to bring new types of critical/cultural/technological objects into being which both express evolving production syntax and a commitment to innovation in the conceptual design phase. 5. CONCLUSION There is evidence that a hybrid area of practice is emerging around the convergence of sculpture, industrial design and architecture. The authors assert that new sets of creative, cultural and economic conditions have stimulated intriguing levels of inquiry by creative practitioners to work across two or more of these domains and to seek out and use technologies that facilitate a particular blurring between these disciplines. This convergence has been enabled and accelerated by the development and proliferation of computer visualization and manufacturing processes. Insights gained from these technologically driven, experiments from the domains of art, design and architecture are largely transferable across disciplines of art & design practices - discoveries in one area

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are likely to ‘feed’ applications and implications within another. Whilst much of the work in this area exists as research; its impact is potentially significant for current professional and academic models. REFERENCES [1] http://www.newtopologies.org/ [2] Miller, Daniel., Ed. Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter. UCL Press, London, 1998. pp6. [3] Freeman, C., Innovation, Changes of Techno-economic Paradigm and Biological Analogies in Eco-nomics, in The Economics of Hope. Essays on Technical Change, Economic Growth and the Environment. Pinter, London, 1992. [4] Century, Michael., Pathways to Innovation in Digital Culture. McGill University, Montreal, 1999. pp14.

MULTIMODAL DESIGN IMAGING – A VEHICLE FOR CROSSING DESIGN BOUNDARIES Gordon M. Mair* Department of Design, Manufacture, and Engineering Management University of Strathclyde, UK. Kevin Miller Anne H. Anderson Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper proposes that all of our senses need to be employed in order to effectively imagine, communicate, and implement good design. A description is provided of the concepts, rationale, goals, and structure of an inter-disciplinary one year project aimed at exploiting the benefits of this approach. A broad spectrum of researchers from the sciences and arts comprise the project group. Examples of the use of multi-sensory and multi-modal design implementations are considered. The possible future applications of multimodal design imaging are discussed and the practical difficulties experienced in bringing together the wide range of disciplines necessary are presented. Keywords: Multi-modal, human senses, inter-disciplinary design 1 INTRODUCTION How can we best utilise all of our senses to facilitate good design? “Design Imaging” is the title of a Designing for the 21st Century Research Cluster project jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) that addresses this question. This paper is a description of the concepts, rationale, goals, and structure of a one-year project which started on the 10th of January 2005. *Department of Design, Manufacture, and Engineering Management University of Strathclyde Glasgow G1 1XJ, UK Email: [email protected] <mailto:mailto:[email protected]> Tel: (+44) 0141 548 2258

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In order for a designer to communicate his or her ideas to colleagues, customers, and the public, images are used to augment or replace text or the spoken word. Today these images are usually visual and mono-scopic. However it is possible to produce stereoscopic, volumetric, and immersive visual images. It is also possible to use surround, environmental, or binaural sound images, and increasingly sophisticated haptic (tactile and force) images can also be created as can solid “rapid prototypes”. Interestingly we also form images in our mind based on a variety of perceptual experiences, for example listening to a piece of music. In the future all of the senses may be able to be utilised to produce mixed modality images that will create an extremely stimulating and information rich environment. We perceive the world and our relationship to it through an integration of our five Aristotolean senses of vision, audition, olfaction, taction, and gustation, plus our kinaesthetic sense and others. It is therefore important to consider that participants in the design process, end users of a design, and participants in a teaching environment, will perceive a design through all of these senses. By utilising as many of the senses as practicable we can ensure that we exploit every opportunity for communication. The term multi-sensory is here used to refer to either a variety of our senses used individually or in an integrated manner. The term multi-modality is more generic in that, as well as the senses being implicitly included, there is also the concept of the interface and interaction between the human and the world and any mediation involved. 2 CURRENT EXAMPLES As well as the visual appearance of a product, the designer and marketer will consider other aspects. For example in product branding there is already a history of considering a broad spectrum of the senses. Touch is of importance in the design of products that are often handled in use, e.g. mobile phones, MP3 players, and cameras. Also in cameras sound is added in the form of an artificial shutter sound when the button is pressed, this makes the user feel more comfortable that the picture has beeen properly taken. Olfaction has long been known to be closely associated in a powerful way with our emotions and memories, in fact the part of the brain that handles our sense of smell is located physically next to the part that handles memory. We can all cite instances when a brief whiff of a particular aroma has brought back memories of something that may have happened in childhood. Lindstrom [1] notes how on visiting a toy shop the waxy smell of Crayola crayons instantly reminded him of pleasurable hours spent drawing as a child and this stimulated him to immediately purchase them. He states how this was no accident, Crayola creates the smell artificially since modern production methods do not produce the original aroma. He cites the modern Rolls Royce car. Again because modern safety regulations, materials, and processes do not create the same distinctive smell of an older car’s interior, the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to artificially create the smell of a 1965 Silver Cloud. At the concept and detail design stages designers may consider many sensory implications of product design. For example in a car consideration will be given to the noise the doors make on closing (audition), the texture of the upholstery (taction), and the smell of the interior (olfaction) see Figure 1. Subsequently sound may also be used as a

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means of selling the car through “sonic branding”. In advertisements music is used to influence the emotions, e.g. excitement, peace, or urgency, in the anticipation that these moods will be associated with the product. A more unusual example of multimodality recently cited [2] is its use to provide a substitute sensory experience for a student with a sensory impairment. A blind postgraduate student in the USA needed to analyse data on upper atmosphere weather normally represented as colour patterns on a display screen. In order to do this he and some colleagues have devised a method that allows him to use musical notes. By using a pen and tablet device he can draw the pen across the tablet on which the “image” is displayed. In this case the colours of the image have been translated into 88 audible notes, the lowest note corresponds to blue and the highest to red. On reflection this emulates to some extent the experience of those who experience synaesthesia. This occurs when some people have the ability to see numbers, feel sounds and so on. It may be that we all experience some amount of synaesthesia, for example we are happy to talk about a “sharp sound”, a “smooth taste”, or the sound of a “hot saxophone”.

Figure 1. Inherent Multimodal Design. An example of designing for the absence of sound is found in a unique village in South Dakota. Almost 100 families from around the world have reserved space in the new town of Laurent [3] – the first US town to be designed, by architects and town planners, entirely for deaf people. Concerned by the change in US town planning in the last 80 years and the shift away from pedestrian friendly neighbourhoods to auto-oriented suburbs, the town’s mission statement is ‘to create a place where the whole world can look, touch, feel and participate in a visual world’. Public schools are to be integrated within the neighbourhoods to promote a culture of walking and buildings have been designed to afford maximum visibility through emphasis on the use of glass. Emergency services are to rely on lights as opposed to sirens, while shops, restaurants, petrol stations, hotels and schools will be required to use sign language – indeed, all business is to be

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conducted in sign language. The town is an example of how concentration on a certain modality can introduce new constraints and alter the designer’s perceptions, attitudes, goals and motivations when confronted with a design problem. Multimodality is an essential consideration in the design of theme park rides, and virtual reality, simulation, and telepresence systems. Although these areas may seem relatively recent the importance of multimodal design has been acknowledged for some time. Companies and designers have, since the 1960s, concentrated on the production of more user-friendly products. This has been facilitated by the development of the rational, artefact-centred approach typical of functional design into a process that accommodates the sensibilities of the user-centred design – an approach concerned with the stimulation of the mind and senses [4]. For example the downward directionality of Philipe Starck’s lemon squeezer prompts the user to interact with it in a specific way. 3 OTHER RESEARCH Many research centres are now being established to investigate ways of improving human interaction with new products and technologies. Delft University’s ID-Studiolab [5] is a multidisciplinary approach to enhancing not only perceptual, motor and cognitive skills, but also emotional reactions. Their work on the senses is intended to broaden the sensorial scope of user-product interaction. UC Berkeley’s Centre for New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT) [6] has brought together diverse communities through a shared interest in humanising technologies. The focus is the development of creative tools that serve the needs of live music performers and composers, with all tools designed to work in the ‘reactive real time’ essential for live performance. CNMAT have designed an instrument that can produce a extensive array of polyphonic sounds [7]. Known as ‘a gestural controller’ because it creates computer generated music by transmitting and interpreting the gestures of fingertips, it is shaped as an irregular hexagon and is small enough to rest on the lap. The sensory strips which cover the device, on which the finger is moved up and down in a massaging movement, ‘read’ the finger’s movement and pressure and feed the data into software which maps and synthesises the gestures to produce music. There have also been advances made with respect to the simulation of the complex sense of taste. Many frustrated attempts at synthesising the experience have been made. However a new virtual reality food simulator has been designed to mimic the taste and ‘mouthfeel’ of food [8]. Food chewing phenomenon, such as the force needed to bite through food, is measured and recorded using a thin-film force sensor. Biological sensors made of lipid and polymer membranes record the main chemical constituents of the food’s taste. The part of the simulator inserted in the mouth has been designed to resist the user’s bite in a similar way to the real foodstuff. Sensors register the force of the bite and a motor provides the appropriate resistance feedback. The five basic taste sensations of sweet, sour, bitter, salty and unami are stimulated by a mixture of chemicals squirted onto the tongue from a thin tube. Foods such as cheese, crackers, confectionary and Japanese snacks have been simulated successfully. One aspect of aroma research is named Scentimental Space [9], the work aims at ‘bridging the disciplines of fashion, analytical chemistry, nanotechnology, perfumery and

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architecture’, the work embeds body sensors and fragrant fluid colours into multi-sensory clothing and responsive environments. The technology is intended to enhance visual communication and promote well being via perfumery. It is hoped that these examples have demonstrated how, through a greater understanding of, and novel methods of manipulating, the senses, new possibilities emerge and the notion of bringing products and users closer together becomes an attractive possibility. 4 THE GOALS The “Design Imaging” cluster brings together researchers from a wide variety of disciplines. This provides a very useful way of exploring how images are currently used in the design process by different disciplines. An exploration of how new forms of technological support can offer a richer set of media and imaging techniques to communicate design ideas is being made. Expertise in the cluster allows us to explore the possible cognitive and communicative roles that different forms of design representations can take. For example access to rich arrays of design support tools can reduce the cognitive burden on the designer by allowing some parts of the design process to be supported technologically. New forms of technological support such as virtual or immersive environments potentially would allow the designer(s) to more readily explore an array of possible design solutions and to communicate possible design solutions to other professionals or to customers. Such support tools offer considerable potential benefits but if they are not designed and implemented sensitively to the real needs of designers, they could be counterproductive. They might encourage a rapid selection of a design solution perhaps from a store of previous design components without a sufficiently creative exploration of the potential design space. The technological sophistication of the design image could disguise this ‘satisficing’ from the designers or the customer. It should be noted however that we are not exclusively concerned with the technology. This is important since the technology is merely a tool of the designer, educator, or communicator and not an end in itself. The technological mediation can of course be simple, e.g. a paintbrush or spatula, or it can be complex, e.g. a stereoscopic head mounted display with haptic gloves. In the end the objective is the same, the creation and communication of a good design. See Figure 2. 5 THE CHALLENGES An interdisciplinary approach in the field is, therefore, necessary when the emerging technologies require development of new theoretical and applied approaches that existing tools, methods and frameworks of individual disciplines do not afford. The terms ‘multidisciplinary’ and ‘interdisciplinary’ are both normally used to describe individuals from different backgrounds collaborating to reach a common goal – either to gain greater insights to a phenomenon or develop a product [10]. However, the nature of the activities defined by the terms are quite different and introduce separate problem types. Multidisciplinary research aims to pool the skills of researchers from a range of fields in

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a single project that could not be undertaken by any single discipline alone. Interdisciplinary research demands different disciplines cooperate to derive novel concepts – thus allowing novel research questions to be addressed [11]. Cultural differences make interdisciplinarity more difficult to achieve since multidisciplinarity only requires the application of individual expertise to particular problem areas. Mutual understanding and the adoption of ideas can be frustrated by: the incommensurability of concepts; different units of analysis; differences in world views, expectations, and value judgements. Some difficulties encountered during interdisciplinary work were investigated in a study [12] of collaboration between computer scientists and a research team with backgrounds in psychology and cognitive science who were tasked with developing new tools for the fashion design process. They experienced difficulties when trying to: relate observation of work practices to design

Figure 2 Sensory and modal route to design. decisions; manage responsibilities; adopt priorities; and involve users in prototyping. Different notions of what constituted good practice and the correct way of working were responsible. The development of novel design tools (digital or otherwise) inevitably brings together disciplines traditionally thought of as being in opposition, viz. the arts and the sciences. The collaboration of experts from a range of is however essential, if the tacit knowledge and skills of designers is to be successfully supported. It has been suggested that, to overcome these obstacles and enable effective communication, a form of lingua franca [13,14] is required – a means of representing and talking about concepts that can be understood by all participants. It is, therefore, hoped that concentration on multimodal design imaging will facilitate the development of a mutual understanding and will prove to be a successful vehicle for crossing the hazardous terrain at the boundaries of design.

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6 CONCLUSION This is a broad topic and members of the cluster come from backgrounds including engineering design, computer graphics, visual and musical arts, communications, architecture, psychology and telepresence. This unique combination of experience creates a mix to stimulate new ideas that will contribute to the creativity and effectiveness of the design process. It is intended to continue to broaden the spectrum of the disciplines involved to ensure that the arts and the physical, human, and social sciences are all represented and make a significant contribution. REFERENCES [1] Lindstrom M., Sensing an Opportunity. The Marketer, February 2005, pp 6-11. [2] Oberst, T., Blind graduate student “reads” maps using CU software that converts color into sound. Cornell Chronicle, January 27th 2005. Cornell University. [3] Retrieved from http://www.laurentsd.com/ [4] Fiell, C. & Fiell, P. (2001). Designing the 21st Century, Hohenzollernring: Taschen. [5] Retrieved from http://studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/ [6] Retrieved from http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/ [7] Matthew Wright, David Wessel and Adrian Freed “New Musical Control Structures from Standard Gestural Controllers.” Proc. of ICMC, Thessaloniki, Greece, ICMA, 1997. On line at http://%20cnmat.cnmat.berkeley.edu/ICMC97/GesturalControl.html [8] Iwata, H. Yano, H. Uemura, T. Moriya, T. (2004). “Food simulator: a haptic interface for biting”, Virtual Reality, 2004. Proc.. IEEE, issue March 27 -31, pp. 51-57. [9] Tillotson, Jennifer. (1997) Interactive Olfactory Surfaces. Ph.D Thesis, Royal College of Art, London. [10] Brown, G.D.A. (1990) Cognitive Science and its relation to psychology. The Psychologist, 8, 339-343. [11] Rogers, Y, Scaife, M. & Rizzo, A. (2001) Isn’t Multidisciplinarity Enough? In: S. Derry, D. Morton & A. Gernsbacher (eds) Problems And Promises Of Interdisciplinarity: Perspectives From Cognitive Science. Earlbaum Associates. [12] Scaife, M. Curtis, E. and Hill, C. (1994) Interdisciplinary collaboration: a case study of software development for fashion designers. Interacting With Computers, 6, 395-410. [13] Green, D.W. and others. (1996) Cognitive Science: An Introduction. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, UK. [14] Rogers (1998). Beyond the cognitivist crisis: what is the value of recent theoretical developments in HCI for system design? Submitted to HCI journal.

IN BED WITH ELECTRONICS Jon Rogers* Innovative Product Design School of Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee. Polly Duplock* Innovative Product Design School of Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee. David Townson* Innovative Product Design School of Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University of Dundee. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Designing products is different now. Traditional notions of sketch, calculations, measurements, and indeed designing are being challenged by the new computational and electronics skills and tools available to designers. Technology can no longer be viewed as separate from, or distinct to, the design process. This is no shock, no big statement, but rather an indication of how technology and engineering are being integrated into product design education, where the lines between diagram and sketch are blurred; similarly, the lines between mouse and pen are equally blurred. We can not separate design from engineering. Design as a noun/verb provokes contrasting responses from educators and practitioners in engineering, computing and arts schools. Design can be a problem solver (we have consensus on this), but what about design as provoking debate, communicating experiences and enabling interactions between people, technology and products – where technology can enable new forms of practice, process and theory. In this paper we will present questions for design education. We will provide some solutions, create some debate, but mostly talk about experiences of integrating making processes and practices with electronic control of, and within, designed products. Using microcontrollers as the basic technology we will show the results from workshops where microcontrollers, sensors, resistors and capacitors sit alongside paper, cardboard, glue, scissors, and jelly. *Innovative Product Design School of Design Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art University of Dundee Perth Rd, Dundee, DD1 4HT Email: [email protected]

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Embedded

Design,

Product

Design,

INTRODUCTION Design is complicated. Design itself is complicated (agreed), but what about “design” as word, or describer of activity. It means many different things to many different people. In product design, problem solving is seen as central to the design process. Most of product design education is concerned with solving life’s big and small problems through physical artifacts that people use. However, in recent years the role of product design in society has expanded to include notions drawn from interaction design – where the educations concerns problem solving, but also about creating services [1], mediating communication [2], and provoking debate [3]. New materials, new electronic control, new ways of interacting with the world have created a new need for new product design. ELECTRONICS IN DESIGN EDUCATION Product design is changing. The way we design products is changing. The way we educate product designers is changing. Underlying all this change is, as always, the massive advancements in computational technology that we have all been a part of in the last 20 years, coupled with a sea-change in the UK manufacturing industries. In short, the way we work, rest and play has, and is, dramatically different from the ways it was 20 years ago. Technology has enabled new ways to work and live in the world, and it is a world full of electronic products and services all of which need new designs made by new designers; designers that can design through, for and by science and technology. Responding to this demand, the University of Dundee created two new interdisciplinary programs between Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and the faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences – Innovative Product Design and Interactive Media Design. The fundamental philosophy of these new programs is to provide students with an in-depth knowledge of aesthetics and culture coupled with science and technology, and of material with process. Science and technology is taught not as an abstract theoretical component, but integrated into the practiced based studio learning environment that all design students, educators and practitioners are familiar with. The two courses have their own distinct philosophy of design, with IMD being located somewhere between graphics and computing, and IPD situated between artifact and engineering. On the IPD program, which is the focus of this paper, electronics, alongside materials and mechanics, forms a major part of the learning experience throughout the four year program. LESSONS IN EDUCATION The way electronics is traditionally taught through the majority of engineering courses in the UK has not changed since the 1950s, and is not applicable to the world our design students are graduating to, as summised by Hills and Telford’s paper [4] reviewing

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engineering, science and technology teaching. Their view is that “the fate of the engineering laboratory is, therefore, that of the drawing office. It is to be mothballed and, as an educational tool, to be forgotten”. Furthering this view, the Design Council’s Red project [5], compares the class environment for secondary education from the 1950s to the modern day – and little has changed. The same is true for undergraduate engineering education, as illustrated in figure 2; aside from the changes in technology used by students as part of the lab, the actual layout and teaching format remains unchanged. In addition to the learning environment, the way in which engineering technology is taught remains largely the same format – single weekly labs to instruct and practice a single fundamental concept. CODE, COMPONENTS, BROWN-PAPER STRING [BRING YOUR OWN SCISSORS] Through workshops given at the Royal College of Art’s Interaction Design and Design Products masters programs, the School of Architecture at KTH Stockholm, and most recently the IPD program at Dundee,

Figure 2. Now (2005) and then (1950) – the teaching environment in the lab. a new approach to teaching embedded design using microcontrollers has been developed. 1 hour lectures and 3 hour labs are replaced with full day workshops spanning between a single day and a whole week. The emphasis is inspiration over information [6], familiarity over fact and confidence over technical ability. Information, facts and technical ability are much more likely to arise as a result of inspiration, familiarity and confidence, but become implicit rather than explicit learning outcomes. In order to seed familiarity and confidence, the students are provided with a range of basic 2D and 3D prototyping materials – paper, card, masking tape, string, plastic cups, etc. At all times they are encouraged to apply the newly taught electronics skills to the basic materials. LEDs take on new diffused appearance when pushed through card and covered with brown paper; light dependent resisters embedded into raspberry, lime and blueberry jelly can determine the RGB components of a light source; and tilt switches in clothes turn a junk plastic toy man into a dance tutor. The notion of a lab interior, with students facing blank walls with their backs to each other has been replaced with groups working around

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a single table or work bench, with shared resources. We will now go into specific factors that are essential to provide a better student learning experience. Design the environment Students learning as a group using shared resources around a common working place are better able to engage with the class – as illustrated by the interaction between students in figure 3. Students also need to be able to decide the pace of learning. Students advancing faster than others are encouraged to help-out rather than duck-out. Sharing resources enables discussion about the material in use – with those that know helping those that don’t. This shifts the dialogue from teacher-student to student-student, with the teacher role being replaced by facilitator and discussion moderator. It also develops the more intangible, but equally valuable, skills, such as team based interaction that working in a modern organisation requires. Establish a need Microcontrollers and electronics are essential to design. However communicating how and why is often lost in technical detail. Designing products without electronic control can lead to square pegs and round holes. Figure 4 below is an example of a security system within a high tech research facility at the University of Dundee. The picture was taken in 2004 and shows how a lack of technology in design can lead to fantastical creatures of design innovation – beautiful, but do you really want to break the glass to call the fire brigade? Stealth learning In Stealth learning [7], electronic materials are presented alongside familiar materials (e.g. figure 5), essentially by stealth, allowing students to remain in their comfort zone and able to achieve results even with minimal electronics. As the workshop progresses then more complex electronic materials and processes are introduced as a way of enhancing/complementing their known materials. Teaching and learning architecture Architecture of the teaching and learning environment is often ignored. Workshops and labs should be as close to the studio as possible. Most institutions have to make use of existing or central resources that are rarely conveniently located – this leads to problems with students integrating and embedding technology.

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Figure 3. Roundtable lab.

Figure 4. Electronics in Design – Design in Electronics.

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Figure 5. Jelly, electronics, fruit and veg.

Figure 6. Satellite electronics and 3D workshops on the IPD program at Dundee. The rooms are located between the studios, only a few feet apart. When this is the case then make small workshop/lab-lite environments (figure 6) that provide basic making and testing facilities. These zones can be operated by students out of standard teaching hours, furthering the student design experience.

Figure 7. The RCA interaction design workshop. OUTCOMES The sample of outcome shown here is not a hard and fast predictor or outcome, rather an indicator of the kind of outcome you could expect. Students are actively encouraged to

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think of their designs as sketches rather than prototypes of design – and hence the nature of outcome is more of a physical/behavioral sketch rather than traditional prototype. The workshops vary in both student numbers, stage of learning, background and the amount of time given. Figure 7 shows part of the outcome from a week-long workshop given at the Royal College of Art in November 2004 on the MA in Interaction Design program. Although many of the students had not experienced electronics the results were exceptionally high. End ‘products’ resulted in an electronic version of the Rock-PaperScissors game, an electronics Kaleidoscope, a device to teach you to dance, and an emotionally expressive robot. Undergraduates at Dundee have responded in a similar way, with results varying from a disco in a box, to a jelly that danced after the lights were turned off and to emotional coat hangers. SUMMARY, CONCLUSIONS AND THE FUTURE In this paper we have presented a case for change in the way electronics is taught within design centered education. The implications of the argument presented are wider reaching, with a need for education in general to become more interdisciplinary and to mix theory with practice and materials with process. The environment for learning is an essential part of the student experience, and attention must be given to the way students can access and use the facilities we provide. Inspiration over information must be the approach we adopt to enable ease of access to new technology and science. The specifics of the technology is important but complexity must not be a barrier to learning – it is better that a student learns context and application of knowledge than isolated technical detail. The alternative, staying with the established model for engineering and design education is bleak - The Design Council annual survey (Design in Britain 2004-2005) of the sate of the design industry acknowledges there is an ever reducing market for product design graduates. In addition, Business Week [8] recently featured a key note article on the outsourcing of innovation to Asia – no longer simply Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) but now Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs). Already, many of the largest and most familiar names in global electronic consumer products are simply being branded with familiar marques as the final step in the process – all the ‘design’ work has been done by companies most of us have never heard of. Alec Broers [9] points out in his current Reith Lectures for the BBC, that “only by training creative engineers will the UK rejoin the global race for innovation”, and furthers this with: “...they’ve grasped this in India and China. Why can’t we?”. The design council’s Red Project manifesto states that ‘If the world was not changing then design would not be needed’ – and this is true of education. What remains as a challenge for design education in the UK is how to capture the higher value, richer intellectual ground. Through the insights we offer in this paper, we hope it can be seen that opportunities for a new approach to product design education, in all its flavours, are there to be taken. REFERENCES [1] live|work (online), http://www.livework.com/, accessed 10th April 2005

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[2] Buchenau M. and Suri J. F. , “Experience Prototyping”, Proceedings of DIS, 2000. [3] Dunne A. and Raby F., “Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects”, Birkhauser, 2001 [4] Hills G. and Tedford D., “Education of Engineers: the Uneasy Relationship between Engineering, Science and Technology”,Global J. of Engng. Educ., Vol.7, 2003 [5] Design council (online), http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/mt/red/, accessed 10th April 2005 [6] Sanders E., “Information, Inspiration and Co-Creationb”, Proceedings of the 6th European Academy of Design, Bremen, 2005. [7] Rogers J., “Stealth Learning”, Educating the Innovator, CCA Glasgow, April 2005 [8] Engardio P., and Einho B., “Outsourcing Innovation”, Business Week, 21st March 2005. [9] Broers A., “Wake up to the Future”, THES (No. 1686) p. 14., Apr 8th 2005

SEVEN MILE BOOTS: THE DESIGN PROCESS OF A WEARABLE ART PIECE Martin Pichlmair* Vienna University of Technology, Vienna. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper outlines the design process of the project “Seven Mile Boots”, a wearable art piece. Using the Seven Mile Boots, a user can travel seven miles in one step and traverse virtual social spaces of communication. The piece was often perceived as product design because it draws from the experience with everyday objects: boots. By giving an overview on our three main design instruments - Guiding metaphors, prototypes and experiments – we hope to shed light on some aspects of design. Guiding metaphors are important in order to communicate and develop ideas in groups. Prototypes allow for testing a design with an audience in an experiment. The focus of this paper is on the interplay between art, design and technology in the production process. Keywords: Media Art, Wearable Systems, Design Theory, Interdisciplinary Design, Prototypes, Metaphors, Art and Design, Experimental Design 1 INTRODUCTION The project “Seven Mile Boots” started in autumn 2001. It gradually evolved over three years of development. During this time, several aspects of the piece (nearly everything except some parts of the hardware) changed. The project started as a raw idea by Laura Beloff, currently professor for digital art at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She proposed to do a project on mobile technology together. We quickly settled for a networked wearable piece. Laura possessed an unused Compaq iPaq PDA. After some

*Vienna University of Technology Favoritenstrasse 9/187 1040 Vienna ++ 43 1 58801 18733 [email protected]

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more thoughts on the project, we agreed to develop a talking wearable jacket. Soon we found out that we desperately need someone in the team who is capable of designing custom electronics. Erich Berger, an artist living in Oslo, was (and is) the perfect complement for our team. Thus, we started developing a wearable piece of art in form of a jacket called “dresscode”. 1.1 CHRONOLOGY A fundamental discrepancy between design and art is the lack of a defined goal in the latter. Even more than in design, the target of all efforts manifests (or emerges) slowly. This mutating progress forms a core part of the production process. Our way of reaching a certain level of coherence between team members was to establish initial metaphors of what our system might resemble in terms of the audience’s experience. One of these key metaphors was the idea to build an automate that emulates the Tourette syndrome, an illness that “... basically consists of involuntary movements and vocalisations” [12]. Therefore our first step was to connect bodily movement to audio output. At our first workshop in Helsinki in January 2002

Figure 1. The Seven Mile Boots.

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we managed to build a working prototype of a talking jacket in two weeks using the visual programming language Pure Data (Pd) on the iPaq. The prototype was tested by an unbiased user and the (informal) results were disappointing. Thus, we abandoned the idea of a jacket for objects that feature a closer relation to the concept of movement: boots. Since our project was technology-driven from the start, we kept nothing but the technology when we changed direction. Our new guiding metaphor was the concept of the flâneur, a stereotype described 1938 by Charles Baudelaire and later adopted by Walter Benjamin: “The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enameled signs of businesses are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon.” [2] Using the figure of the flâneur we were able to develop an in-depth view of communicative spaces: In order to implement traveling through these, we chose Internet Relay Chat (IRC) as the source for spoken communication. Our digital flanêur walks through virtual crowds. The Seven Mile Boots bring together two formerly distinct (yet overlapping in the time domain) layers of communication: Physical and virtual spaces. Figuring out an aesthetically pleasing device was a prototype oriented design task. The experience of a piece of interactive art can hardly be estimated before there is an at least partly functional prototype. 2 THE SEVEN MILE BOOTS Chatting in the net has become a widespread phenomenon during the last decade. There is endless communication in the online communities. Walking (wearing shoes) is an everyday exercise for humans. The Seven Mile Boots are built upon shoes as an interface to move in the text based non-space of chat rooms. The physical part of the piece consists of a pair of boots, which are available for use. The boots have two different modes: walking through the net and observing the chat activity. The boots depend on no technology but an available wireless network. The piece shifts the viewpoint from the physical to the conceptual aspects of communication. It focuses on the ordinary, on everyday activities. In the exhibition, the audience is welcome to put on the boots. We designed the transport box so that people can sit down on it to change their shoes for the Seven Mile Boots. They get a short introduction to the piece and are afterwards free to walk their way. The boots were done in two sizes, allowing for parallel use. 2.1 THE SEVEN MILE BOOTS AS A WEARABLE ART PIECES During the production process, we never thought that we produce something labeled wearable art. We never tried to settle the piece in the rich context of wearable systems. Our driving force was that we wanted to have a voice follow the participant. We wanted to create a “nasty” art piece that the audience cannot ignore or shake off once involved. We emphasised aspects of wearables such as the inability of the wearer to keep distance, the feeling of touch and physical closeness.

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A great deal of wearable art pieces comments on (the future of) fashion. Even more media art pieces reflect issues of communication. Only rarely an art piece tries to directly address the audience, altering their experience of social interaction in a physical way. People convey information-based and staged experiences different than haptic (or ergodic) experiences. In her famous book Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray treats electronic media as representational [8]. The Seven Mile Boots extend the notion of representational media since the creators of the content do not know of the represtational form of their contribution. In fact, the media independence of data (even information or narrativity) is one of the key points of this piece. Our piece gained - and suffered as well - greatly from reinterpreting an everyday object. On one hand, our audience immediately knew how to use the piece. They also quickly and intuitively understood the link between speech and walking since traversing through crowds of talking people is also an everyday concept. On the other hand, it was common (especially among journalists) to read our piece as a comment on the future of fashion. Bringing technology to mundane objects seems to stimulate people’s creativity. Interestingly, press coverage also revealed several misconceptions about the art piece: From mobile power sources to the functionality of an e-mail reader. Although we were expecting difficulties in communicating our ideas we underestimated the amount of imagination an art piece based on mundane objects fosters. 3 TECHNICAL REALISATION The whole installation Seven Mile Boots consists of several parts: the boots themselves, the transport box with loading station and a wireless network access point. Since all electronics is mounted on the boots, power consumption has been one of the main issues. It was our goal to allow the user of the system to travel through communicative channels by walking through the real world. In order to detect movement we decided against tracking systems because using those would have involved mapping the virtual space onto the real space in an arbitrary way. Instead we solely linked movement itself to virtual movement. By refusing to map spaces we made it impossible for the user to purposefully navigate the social experience. We did not intend to build an ergodic text [1] but a life-like experience. A sensor detects that the boots are put on. The software on the PDA then connects to a randomly chosen IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server. Once a few steps are taken, the first bunch of IRC channels (chat rooms) is entered. A sound indicates that channel boundaries are crossed. If there is a conversation happening in these channels it is synthesised to speech and played through the speakers built into the boots. The wearer might decide to stay and listen to the spoken. If she continues to walk she leaves these channels and enters new ones. Once she puts off the boots, the audio fades out. The transitions between these different states are shown in Figure 2. 3.1 HARDWARE The hardware for the boots was chosen according to constraints that the situation of use imposes on the technology: restricted power, low weight and cheapness. A PDA offers

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about 3 hours of operating time when it is constantly wireless online. We chose Compaq iPaqs because of their relatively low price for used devices and the availability of the Linux operating system (in the incarnation of the Familiar Linux

Figure 2. Different states of the boots. State transitions are triggered by the user. [4] distribution). We run one iPaq 3630 and one iPaq3660. Both iPaqs are driven by a 206 MHz Intel StrongARM processor with RISC architecture. Our iPaqs offer 32 to 64 MB of flash memory and wireless network cards. Audio is put out through the headphone jack connected to the speakers built into the tips of the shoes. The right boot of a pair is passive and receives the right audio channel via a radio link. There are two sensors in the left boot of each pair: The “closing sensor” for detecting if the boot is worn and the “walking sensor” for measuring movement. After initial experiments with photoelectric diodes, we went for a simple switch based on a press-stud for the closing sensor. We also changed the walking sensor from a light diode to an accelerometer. Both sensors are connected to a Basic Stamp microcontroller that translates the sensor data to ASCII data sent to the iPaq over a serial line. 3.2 SOFTWARE For several reasons, we chose Linux as the operating system. First, the installation takes less of the valuable memory space than the pre-installed Windows. Second, Linux is known for its stability. Third, it features a standard set of tools and easy access to lowlevel hardware functions. The Familiar Linux distribution offers a variety of applications in pre-compiled form. Other software (e.g. the sound daemon and the speech synthesis system) had to be crosscompiled and deployed. We were glad to find a small perl package for Familiar that allowed for simple prototyping and fast code adaption. The handcrafted software on the iPaq runs in several parallel processes. There is one server listening to the serial port and constantly polling it for sensor data. Another program is monitoring the internal state of the iPaq (battery life, processes and network state). The third script is a front-end to the audio server and the speech synthesis [3]. Then there has to be a process that connects to the IRC servers. This script is largely based on sirc, a small perl IRC client by Roger Espel Llima [11]. Application logic runs in yet another process, implemented as a state machine that defines the behaviour of the whole system (see Figure 2).

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4 REFLECTIONS ON THE DESIGN PROCESS Seven Mile Boots is an art project rather than a design or engineering project (but it included several design and engineering tasks). We did not have any customers we are committed to but an audience. Our project made heavy use of pre-existing cultural knowledge: shoes are widely used objects. We did not have to fulfill any time plan but were able to choose our own pace. We sought professional service at all domains we are not professional ourselves: e.g., the leather boots were done by a cobbler from Helsinki. The progress through the production process was characterised by intense working sessions and long times spent isolated from each other. We advanced mostly during the times of collaborative work. Only the more technical tasks of the project were carried out inbetween (e.g. doing the shoes with the shoemaker, parts of the programming and soldering). This situation lead to a severe demand for well-suited communication artefacts [9], a fruitful design process is probable to yield [13]. Design artefacts (or “design instruments” [5]) serve multiple purposes: They are tools for thinking, for communicating and for storing information [8,12]. Gedenryd termed working with design instruments “interactive design through inquiry” [5]. Examples of design artefacts are sketches and prototypes. We drew sketches for several areas of design: E.g. visual design, software design, and layout of electronics. We also used sketches to convey information about the piece to organisers and technicians of exhibition spaces. While sketches were created during the whole design process, we had three sessions where we built and tested functional prototypes. These sessions involved an audience. In the first user testing session we invited an artist friend to test out the piece. As pointed out in the introduction, the analysis of the session’s results ruled out the jacket in favour of the boots. The second user prototype was created after a month of full time work on the piece. We invited one of Laura’s university colleagues to have a look at the working prototype. We were able to detect and reject a number of possible wrong future directions of development after this review of the piece. This second session greatly helped in focusing the piece. The third experiment took place in form of an exhibition in Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo. We had real museum audience instead of invited professionals. The echo was mixed. Our observation was that the audience primarily objected technical flaws while adoring the piece’s concept. From this first exhibition on, we saw every public event as an experiment - a prototyping session that helps us to understand the aesthetic, social and technical implications of our art piece. 5 CONCLUSION Art projects differ significantly from design projects. Restrictions like customer requirements and demanded technical capabilities do not apply. Lawson extensively discusses constraints in design projects [6]. Constraints in art projects are often financial or technical and sometimes social phenomena. Progressing by interactive inquiry was a fruitful effort for us [12, 6]. Sketches, prototypes, experiments, and metaphors turned out to be the key to success in our project. We relied heavily on these design instruments. Since the Seven Mile Boots never matured so far that they could be turned into a mass-produced product, the art piece itself remains a prototype. We still develop it

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further between the exhibitions. It will never be finished and thus we see it as an open process – just as communication itself is continuously evolving and mutating. The same holds true for the interpretation of the art piece: new ways of reading the piece emerge with every exhibition. Thus, the design process of this piece will never end. REFERENCES [1] Espen, A., Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997. [2] Benjamin, W., The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, New Left Books, New York, 1973. [3] Black, A. and Lenzo, K., Flite: a small fast run-time synthesis engine, 4th ISCA Worskop on Speech Synthesis, 2001, www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/papers/ISCA01/flite.ps [4] The Familiar Project, familiar.handhelds.org [5] Gedenryd, H., How Designers Work, Ph.D. dissertation, Cognitive Studies Department, Lund University, Sweden, 1998, asip.lucs.lu.se/People/Henrik.Gedenryd/HowDesignersWork/ [6] Lawson, B., How Designers Think, Third and revised Edition, Architectural Press, Oxford, 1997. [7] Lugt, R., How sketching can affect the idea generation process in design group meetings, Design Studies, Volume 26, pp. 101-122, 2005 [8] Murray, J., Hamlet on the Holodeck - The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, The Free Press, New York, 1997. [9] Perry, M., and Sanderson, D., Coordinating Joint Design Work: the Role of Communication and Artefacts, Design Studies, Volume 19, pp. 273-288, 1998. [10] Purgathofer, P., designlehren - zur gestaltung interaktiver systeme, Habilitation, Department of Informatics, Vienna Technical University, to be published, 2004. [11] The Sirc IRC client, http://www.iagora.com/~espel/sirc.html [12] Robertson, M. and Baron-Cohen, S., Tourette Syndrome, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998. [13] Wagner, I. and Lainer, R., Designing a visual 3-D interface: a reflection on methods, interactions 10 (6), November + December 2003, pp. 12–19, 2003.

THE POLITICS OF BORDER CROSSING: NEGOTIATING THE BOUNDARIES IN MULTIDISCIPLINARY CURRICULUM DESIGN Erik Bohemia* School of Engineering and Industrial Design, University of Western Sydney, Australia. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper explores the politics of border crossing using a recent experience in cross-disciplinary course design at the University of Western Sydney (UWS). Literature on curriculum development in Engineering and Industrial Design seldom, if ever, discusses politics [e.g. 1]. This gives the impression that curriculum development is free from workplace politics and emerges in response to a combination of student learning needs, industry requirements and disciplinary knowledge. This paper however, aims to draw attention to the relationship between politics and multidisciplinary curriculum design. This relationship will be illustrated by tracing the rise and demise of a novel degree that aimed to provide its graduates with skills from two vocational areas i.e. Industrial Design and Mechatronic Engineering. This five year undergraduate degree was first introduced in 1999 at UWS as a double degree comprising of a Bachelor of Industrial Design and a Bachelor of Engineering. It was later restructured to become a single degree named ‘Industrial Design Engineering’ (IDE). We describe the power struggles around the development and co ordination/administration of the combined degree. Rather than conceptualising the curriculum content of this degree as coming out of learning theory, industry requirements, or internal program evaluation; the methodologies of curriculum development recommended by instructional designers [e.g. 2], the content of this degree was in a large part shaped by political forces. For example, we describe the way disciplinary knowledge and academic identities have shaped the combined degree over its four years of continually morphing existence. *School of Engineering and Industrial Design, University of Western Sydney, [email protected]

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Keywords: cross-disciplinary degree, industrial design, mechatronics 1 BACKGROUND The history of the Industrial Design degree at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) has been one of ongoing change. The Industrial Design degree at UWS was first introduced in the 1994. In 1996, it was restructured to align it with the Visual Communication degree. In 1998, Industrial Design group formed a new School of Civic Engineering and Environment with Civil and Chemical Engineers academic groups. This has provided the platform to propose in 1999 a new 5 year ‘double degree’ degree the Bachelor of Industrial Design / Bachelor of Engineering (IDE v.1). This new double degree was first offered in 2000. Two years later a new School of Engineering and Industrial Design was formed by joining seven groups: Industrial Design, Design and Technology, Physics, Mechatronic, Computer, Electrical and Civil Engineering. Following this restructure, the five year ‘double degree’ (v.1) was significantly redeveloped and in 2002 it was offered as five year long single degree called ‘Industrial Design Engineering’ (IDE v.2). The reason for changing the double degree into a single degree was to overcome a major issue in trying to squeeze two four year long degrees, into a five year long double degree program. The majority of the engineering subjects included in this revamped degree were drawn from the Mechatronic degree. Both, this and the earlier program were developed predominantly by the Head of Industrial Design with aim of providing a degree that was more aligned with industry requirements. 2 IDE DEGREE VERSIONS Over the time the engineering components of the degree gained a prominence in the overall degree and as a consequence other components were reduced or eliminated altogether. The IDE degree was revised on two separate occasions. A summary and comparison of the number of credit points from each of the subject areas: industrial design, engineering, maths/physics, management, project and electives are given in Table 1. The 1999 the double degree proposal (v.1) included only 15% of engineering subjects as compared to the total study load. On the other hand, industrial design subjects represented more than 40% of the total study load. However, this loading was unacceptable for the Mechatronic staff who claimed that students would have faced enormous difficulties in completing the engineering subjects as they had not had the chance to complete prerequisite subjects.

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Table 1 Comparative study loading of the various IDE degree proposals. Area

1999 v.1 structure 2000 v.2 structure 2003 v.3 structure

Industrial Design 170 CP Engineering 60 CP Maths and Physics 30 CP Project 80 CP Management 50 CP Electives 10 CP Total 400 CP

42.5% 15% 7.5% 20% 12.5% 2.5% 100%

130 CP 90 CP 30 CP 110 CP 20 CP 20 CP 400 CP

32.5% 22.5% 7.5% 27.5% 5% 5% 100%

110 CP 180 CP 30 CP 70 CP 10 CP 0 CP 400CP

27.5% 45% 7.5% 17.5% 2.5% -100%

To overcome some of the limitations of the degree, such as having two separate four year degrees squeezed into one five year degree, and to take on board suggestions from the Mechatronic staff, that now were in the same School as the Industrial Designers, a revised degree was put forward. This revised degree, increased the project component to 27.5%. In addition to the existing industrial design research project, an engineering research project component was included. Importantly, the loading of engineering subjects offering increased to 22% mainly to accommodate all the prerequisite subjects as identified by the Mechatronic staff. Subsequently the industrial design offering was reduced to 32.5%. However, the number of electives was increased, and the physics and mathematics stayed constant at 7.5%. The above restructure was primarily driven by the Head of Industrial Design with limited consultation with the Mechatronic academic staff who were consulted very briefly in one afternoon in regard to the required prerequisite for subjects which they delivered. 3 DIFFERENCES IN MECHATRONIC AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN This section aims to highlight a number of key differences and the varied approaches that prevailed within the mechatronic and industrial design degree structures and deliveries. These differences were in relation to how teaching and learning was approached and viewed and turned out to be a major obstacle in the later negotiations concerning the IDE degree. Although mechatronic and industrial design are each four year long degrees, the program structure varies substantially between these two degrees. For example, the industrial design program was structured to maximise the number of elective subjects and sub-majors available to its students. The industrial design included seven electives in its degree, representing nearly 18% of the total study load. The degree also included a number of core subjects that were delivered by other academic disciplines such as marketing. In contrast, mechatronic staff aimed to maximise the number of core mechatronic subjects and to minimise the number of electives within the program. As a result the mechatronic program included only one ‘elective’ and even this was to be chosen from the pool of engineering subjects. Overall, the mechatronic program included

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only two subjects from outside the domain of engineering. This suggests that the approach to inclusion or exclusion of electives within the degree was in part guided by the meaning the industrial design and engineering academics attributed to elective. Differences were also apparent in the way the goal or purposes of electives were conceived. For example, electives in engineering programs represented a pool of alternate engineering subjects from which students could choose. This was to provide them with an increased specialisation within their already specific degrees, such as mechatronic or electrical engineering. Thus the aim in this instance was to provide a greater specialisation. In contrast, the purpose of inclusion of electives within the industrial design degree was to widen students’ studies by including electives from outside of the industrial design degree domain, such as marketing, management, visual communication, computing and health & safety. This suggests a difference in the way the academic staff understood what constitutes knowledge within their individual disciplines. There were also major differences in approaches to learning which were made visible through the variations in subject focus, depth and breadth. For example, a mechatronic subject dealing with materials and technology focused solely on steel. This approach provided the mechatronic students with in depth coverage of steel properties. On the other hand, an industrial design subject on materials attempted to expose the industrial design students to as many materials as possible. This resulted in a broader but less in depth coverage of various materials. The Industrial Design staff were also keen have students work collaboratively on project with student from other disciplines. The reasons for incorporating this learning technique into the industrial design degree included: exposing future graduates to the complexities that are associated with the new product development process; and introducing students to teamwork, cross-functional communication and design project coordination. The mechatronic engineers failed to see the advantages that collaborative projects might provide to their students. To expose engineering staff to the possible benefits to project-based and cross-disciplinary learning the industrial design staff arranged a video conference with three prominent engineering academics from MIT who incorporated project-based learning in their engineering program [3]. After the video conference the industrial design staff queried mechatronic academics on their thoughts on project-based learning and whether they would be interested in developing crossdisciplinary project-based learning. To start the discussion a project was put forward that would have involved most of the disciplines in the School that is electrical, mechatronic, and computer engineering and industrial design. A learning-based project designing a dental chair was proposed as it would require mechatronic students to utilise their skills in the area of hydraulics, one of the subjects areas in mechatronic engineering degree. The same project would also allow other disciplines in the School of Engineering and Industrial Design to participate. For example, industrial design students could examine issues associated with ergonomics and computer and electrical engineers could develop the control systems to operate the hydraulics developed by the mechatronic students. Mechatronic staff thought that this cross-disciplinary learning project would be detrimental to mechatronic students’ learning needs as they did not want them get distracted with other problems and issues arising from the input from other disciplines.

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3.1 STUDENT NUMBERS Overall the mechatronic degree struggled to attract a sustainable cohort of students. On the other hand the intake of industrial design students was on the increase. This resulted in that the number of full time academic staff in the mechatronic program staying constant at four, while the number of industrial design staff increased from three to ten. The Industrial Design staff viewed the IDE program to be complementary to its core industrial design degree; providing a niche offering to both students and industry, as this was a unique degree within the Australian context. As a result there was good support amongst the Industrial Design staff for the IDE degree. In contrast, the mechatronic staff did not see the IDE as supplementing its core degree with extra students but rather they saw it in direct competition for its prospective full-blown mechatronic students. Consequently, there was very little if any incentive on their behalf to support this degree. 4 ACCREDITATION REVIEW In 2002, School of Engineering and Industrial Design was due for an accreditation review to be undertaken by the Institution of Engineers, Australia (IEAust).1 This review process is undertaken every five years across all Australian university which deliver accredited engineering degrees. The School of Engineering and Industrial Design included the IDE (v.2) degree for consideration for provisional accreditation. The review panel recommended to the IEAust board not to award Provisional Accreditation to the IDE degree (v.2). The review panel deemed the program did not “include a substantive and explicit, high level engineering design skills, developed in an integrated sense within an industrial design environment and targeting the manufacturing sector.” The review panel recommended that “the design and the delivery of this ‘industrial design engineering’ teaching strand should be a team effort involving engineering and industrial design academics staff working in a unified and integrated fashion” [4, pp 28-29]. The above outcome of the accreditation review prompted the School of Engineering and Industrial Design to reassess the IDE degree (v. 2). Therefore, in early 2003 a review committee was established to re-examine the IDE degree (v.2). The committee consisted of two industrial design academics including the Head of the IDE degree and two staff from the mechatronic study area. This was to be a protracted and difficult process and I will argue in the following section that this was associated with fundamental differences between the two degrees in terms of approaches to learning. 5 DEGREE REVIEW PROCESS The above differences posed difficulties in the negotiations between industrial design and mechatronic staff on the revised version of IDE degree. In addition, the mechatronic staff viewed the industrial design subjects as adding very little value to engineering graduate 1

Currently operating as ‘Engineers of Australia’

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competency skills. Therefore, they reasoned that the Mechatronic degree was to become the backbone for the revised IDE degree (v.3) using industrial design subjects to fill the gaps. This resulted in a proposal that included 90% of the mechatronic degree which represented 45% engineering component load in this revised degree (v.3). Subsequently, the industrial design area was reduced to 27.5%, with management to 2.5% (representing only one subject), and electives were completely eliminated from the degree structure (see Table 1). This ‘new’ degree was basically the old mechatronic degree minus the electives and some management units which were removed to allow for the introduction of the industrial design subjects. In addition, mechatronic staff argued against the single degree and wanted to revert back to the double degree. This was despite the indication from the senior university management that they would not endorse it as they could not conceive how two four year long degrees, could possibly fit into five year long double degree. However, the mechatronic staff argued that: The current 5-year single degree lacks sufficient engineering content and that is the basis on which IEAust did not accredit it. Also, having a single 5-year degree that has a sprinkling of engineering units amongst what is effectively an ID course tends to give the impression, at least to me, as being a mish-mash degree and, again in my opinion, would be recognised by IEAust as such. To test this view, the proposed double-degree course should be presented to IEAust to see what their view really is. Rather than discussing what graduate attributes these students should have on completion of this revised degree, the review process resulted in a power struggle between the mechatronic and industrial design staff over issues such as: what number of subjects should be included from each of the disciplines, or who should be the Head of the Program, and what should be the degree title, or whether it should be a double degree. At the end of the negotiation process most of the suggestions proposed by the mechatronic staff were adopted in an effort to move the proposal forward. This included changing the single degree structure back to a double degree structure. In early 2004, when a record number of students had enrolled in the IDE (v.2) degree, a discussion paper produced by the senior University management recommended that this degree should be discontinued from 2005. This was the result of a review by senior management. The rationale for discontinuing IDE (v.2) was never clearly stated by the senior management. Thus revised version 3 of the degree was never implemented. Only a handful of students opted to stay and complete this degree. Students who were enrolled in the degree were given the option of transferring to either mechatronics or industrial design four year degrees. Interestingly, not one of the students has opted to transfer into the mechatronic degree; all have opted for industrial design. 5 CONLUSION By following the rise and demise of the IDE degree this paper has illustrated how the mechatronic and industrial design academic staff physically ‘crossed boundaries’ on a

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number of occasions. For example, they joined the same School and contributed to the same IDE degree. However, the case of the continually morphing IDE degree also exemplifies the failure of mechatronic and industrial design staff to mentally ‘cross boundaries’ that were related to the values and disciplinary principles of each of these groups. It is suggested, that this inability was a consequence of fundamental differences between the two disciplines in what constitutes knowledge. This resulted in a prolonged power struggle over the IDE degree which resulted in a dismal failure. Although this paper describes what might be viewed as an unsuccessful attempt to cross boundaries, in part produced through irreconcilable differences, I do not want to suggest that all boundary crossing ventures are doomed to failure. Rather, I want to draw attention to the complexities around boundary crossing and hopefully through adding this perspective, a better understanding of the issues that might emerge. For instance, my industrial design colleague and I were continually perplexed by the lack of interest by the mechatronic staff in developing this degree. However, when the process is analysed in terms of interests and politics it becomes clearer as to why it was difficult to get this group involved in developing this degree. There was no reason why the mechatronic staff might want to collaborate on this degree. The degree actually posed a threat to this group. If we had realised this at the time perhaps other strategies could have been taken-up to remove this perceived threat. On a more positive note, we are currently in the process of developing another cross-disciplinary degree, this time with an IT group. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to express thanks to Kerry Harman whose contribution to this paper was essential and germinated a vast number of ideas. REFERENCES [1] Lloyd, P., Roozenburg, N., McMahon, C., and Brodhurst, L., Proceedings: The Changing Face of Design Education: 2nd International Engineering and Product Design Educational Conference. TU Delft, Delft, 2004. [2] Briggs, L. J., Gustafson, K. L., and Tillman, M. H., “Instructional Design: Principles and Applications,” 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, U.S.: Educational Technology Publications, 1991. [3] Einstein, H. H., “Engineering change at MIT,” Civil Engineering, Vol. 72, No. 10, 2002, pp. 6269. [4] Bradley, A., “Report of Accreditation Visit,” The Institution of Engineers, Australia, Canberra, ACT, 2002.

Chapter Two CULTURE

INVESTIGATING THE CREATIVE VALUES AND SOCIAL ACHIEVEMENTS OF TWO ART DECO WOMEN DESIGNERS: SONIA DELAUNAY AND CLARICE CLIFF Li-Hsun PENG* Lecturer, Department of Visual Communication Design, Ling Tung University of Technology, Taiwan. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The year 1920 was a turning point in the history of Modern Design. After the massive destruction caused by the WWI in Europe, people started looking for l’Esprit Nouveau (Fausch, 1996:71) to express themselves. This research aims to reveal the fact that the contributions of Sonia Delaunay and Clarice Cliff in the 1920s and 1930s were neglected. Up to today, no comparison research on these two women designers has been conducted. The history of Modern Design has been broadly discussed from the Westerners’ perspective. As a medium between the East and the West, I am creating a Third Space to look into Modern Design History and these women designers from another perception. This study examines the social contexts of two women designers in the Art Deco Era in Europe. It investigate and analyse their works and their accomplishments through not only myself as a cultural medium bridging the East and the West but also such theories as cross-culture visuality, Third Space identity, Hybridity, and gender issues of the time. Keywords: Art Deco, Sonia Delaunay, Clarice Cliff, Women Designers, Hybridity. 1 INTRODUCTION Spurred by my interest in Art Deco that ranges from 1925 to 1939, I was stricken when I came to realize that scarce information relevant to women designers’ contributions and *Department of Visual Communication Design, Ling Tung University of Technology, Taiwan (On Study Leave) PhD Candidate, Faculty of Arts, University of Southern Queensland, Australia Q 123, Post Graduate Research, Faculty of Arts, USQ, West Street, Toowoomba, QLD 4350, Australia Ph: 61-7-4631-1023 [email protected]

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their works could be found despite the existence of many books on Art Deco. This finding made me wonder if women designers were intentionally left out of historical accounts. “When feminists searched the history books they found that women were still largely ‘hidden from history’” (Richardson & Robinson, 1993:304). Disembarking at this point of knowledge, I conducted this research to bring to light the fact that the contributions of these two women designers in the 1920s and 1930s were neglected. As Conway puts it, “Art historians have retrieved many women artists from obscurity and design historians are beginning to do the same for women designers”(1987:63). 2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND THE PROCESSES TO BE USED FOR THIS STUDY ARE 2.1 BRICOLAGE AS METHODOLOGY This research is based on the study of culture. As a Bricoleur, I attempt to adopt diverse tasks – gathering the data, interpreting the personal and historical documents and analysing them. Through a process of Phenomenography, theoretical sampling, and visual research methods, I will be applying a Bricolage process in deconstructing and recuperating the central elements in the works of the women designers by reflecting upon these elements and comparing the different categories to reveal their creating process. “The term bricoleur is used by Lévi-Strauss to define a kind of handyman who invents in the face of specific circumstances, using whatever means and materials are available” (Schneider, 2001:167). I decided to adopt Bricolage for my research because this structure will allow me to collect strings of data, and then assemble and verify them by comparing these women designer’s social achievements and value of their creative works. 2.2 POST-COLONIAL THEORY The concept of the hybridity and the Third Space (Bhabha, 1990:57) can be used to bring up my cultural background and personal viewpoint. Situating myself as a cultural hybrid, this research will focus on the merging of divergent cultures during the Art Deco Era in Europe via my retrospective accounts about the transition of my identity. Hybridity “‘Hybridity’ started life as a biological term, used to describe the outcome of a crossing of two plants or species. It is now a term for a wide range of social and cultural phenomena involving ‘mixing’, and has become a key concept within cultural criticism and post-colonial theory” (Coombes, 2000: i). Being a cultural hybrid, I have the cutting edge while looking into the merging of divergent cultures during the Art Deco Era in Europe, using my retrospective accounts of the transition of my identity. In Taiwan’s cultural heritage and in my family history, the mixture of different races is common. I am interested in the mixture of various cultures in history. I am therefore positioning myself as both culturally and physically hybrid and as an intermediary to interpret the hybridity

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in the cultural fusion of the Art Deco era. It is through the merging of these divergent cultural experiences that I am well situated to recognise and analyse the similar situation in which these two women designers were positioned. These two women designers in Art Deco were positioned between traditional and Modern periods of the design history and the styles in their works appeared mixed. Hybridity is not only a trend but also reflection of the influence of colonial culture. Cross-Culture Visuality Evans and Hall defined visuality as “the visual register in which the image and visual meaning operate.”(1999:4). If we take an image of a design work as an example, the form and the colour of that work we conceived, should be operating with the visual meaning the creator means to bring up, and then combine into a real factor of visuality. The World War I improved the communications and transport condition around Europe; and accordingly, cultural exchange proceeded faster than before, after the WWI, due to the dramatic losses of people and property, a new solution for Western culture’s defect was directed to the Oriental cultures (African, Asian, Inca, and Oceanic…). As Thomas argues: “the East acts as ‘therapy’ for a spiritually depleted the West, a tendency that continues today” (O’Hagan, 2002:204). I will use visuality as a tool to investigate the functional and practical use of these works; besides, Mirzoeff (1999:12) once argued, “Visuality does not replace discourse but makes it more comprehensible, quicker, and more effective” (Ginsburg, 2002:102). I will use the cross cultural visuality in the social context to explore how their forms, styles and colours inspired the fashion trend at that time. The Third Space identity “This in between space is, then, a third space (it is neither the first nor the second of the two interdependent cultures whose hybridization makes up the postcolonial subject)” (Hayward, 2000:271). The notion of being in-between, for me, is a new space, a new territory of thought, in which people can pass through and reference different cultures. Homi K. Bhabha argues “But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge” (Chambers,1994:67). It is essential to include the Third space theory in this study because it advocates an innovative space, an intersection, a creative place which allows other positions to emerge and then sparkle into a new form of culture. As a researcher, I am also standing in the Third Space as an oriental person exploring a new territory vis-à-vis these two Western women designers’ contributions and their works.

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3 COMPARISON RESEARCH AND CROSS ANALYSE ON THESE TWO WOMEN DESIGNERS 3.1 SONIA DELAUNAY (1885-1979) Sonia Delaunay’s works exemplify the integration process and involving several cultures. Her works concentrate on the visualization of many styles, which make it clear that the Art Deco Era is deeply embedded with cultural exchange and hybrid visions. Sonia Delaunay developed her works from theoretical Orphism to practical Art Deco’s product design. This research explores Sonia Delaunay’s Design outcomes in the hope of revealing the value and her contribution to Design history. I am arguing that although Sonia Delaunay had completed many design works and applied these in the lively design field, such as fashion design, textile pattern design, graphic design for books, and mural paintings for commercial places, if compared with the pure painting works of other artists in the Orphism movement, Delaunay’s special contributions to history still remain unrecognized. Most books focus only on the male artists’ domination in this movement, or on her husband – Robert Delaunay’s ideas, without mentioning her contribution (Weisman, 1992:209-212). 3.2 CLARICE CLIFF (1899-1972) Clarice Cliff is a British woman, born in a poor family. Her family background had forced her to face reality in life at a very young age. When she turned thirteen, she had to earn her own living by making potteries. Her hardships brought her later success. Clarice Cliff always viewed her daily ceramic design from a practical aspect: designing her works for sale and for mass production to meet the public need. She had held those as the principles in her design (Clarice Cliff “, the Clarice Cliff Story, claricecliff.com, 2004). Clarice Cliff is the most popular British ceramic designer of the 1930s. She was called the “‘Doyenne’ of British Art Deco” (Cox, 2001:54). Her strategy in ceramics design was simple and direct, based upon the marketing oriented design. This study examine the processes of commercialising her design works, with the acknowledgement that creating works for sales and mass-production result from meeting the public demand. That the numerous products came to existence in many British families in the past signifies how popular the Art Deco style was at that time. She made a paradigm of marketing the design products in the Art Deco Era. 3.3 DATA ANALYSIS OF THE COMPARISON RESEARCH: THE KEY COMPARISONS WERE MADE ON THE BASIS OF THE FOLLOWING ISSUES. Hybridity A combination of different styles is intertwined in each designer’s works.

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Baron comments on Sonia Delaunay’s fabric designs, “These designs, with their bright colours reminiscent of Orphism and ‘simultaneous contrast’…attest to the outcome of a whole movement which had preoccupied art since 1910: Cubism, Futurism, Russian Suprematism, Neo-Plasticism and De Stijl… in her creation Sonia was ‘the incarnation of her times’” (Baron & Damase, 1995:84). Sonia Delaunay’s works are examples to demonstrate the integration process and involving several cultures. Her works concentrate on the visualization of many styles, which evidence that the Art Deco Era is deeply embedded with cultural exchange and hybrid visions. Cox asserts that “Clarice Cliff’s ‘Art Deco’ ceramics…through the conflation of Modernist forms with traditional decoration, but also in their consumption or appropriation… The tension between the ‘high’ and ‘traditional’ is thus one good example of how to understand the creative processes of production and consumption” (2001:24). The fusion in visuality styles of De Stijl and Cubism in Clarice Cliff’s works became her unique style of design. Her ability to satisfy her costumer’s demand and her sensitivity to the fashion trend in mixing forms and exotic styles in her works, “There can be no doubt that Clarice Cliff was the ‘Doyenne of Hand Painting’ between 1927 and 1937”(Griffin, 1999:196). The influence from the East is embedded in both of their works. Oriental cultures were appropriated by the West and became an important part of the ideology in Art Deco. In their works, the mixed of styles is the evidence of hybridity. As the independent entrepreneurs in their design fields, they are both unique and original in the design history. Cross-Culture Visuality Both of their styles were influenced by the East and the West. It was in London in 1909, when “Diaghilev commissioned Robert to do the sets and Sonia the costumes for a production of the ballet Cléopâtre” (Baron & Damase, 1995:69). Sonia Delaunay tactfully combined the oriental culture into her modern fashion design. Later, “Cleopatra costumes that led to Sonia’s next commission – to design the costumes for a production of the opera Aida to be mounted at the Liceo in Barcelona” (Baron & Damase, 1995:72). She applied her perception of Orphism to visualising the Simultaneous dress served for the Opera. This application is an evidence of her crossculture creation. Duncan comments on Clarice Cliff’s works, “Clever marketing schemes…with fanciful names such as Delicia, Biarritz and Fantasque – and moderate prices helped to popularize her wares” (1988:116). Clarice Cliff applied many exotic themes such as Age of Jazz, arabesque, Bizarre Ware, and Oasis in her design patterns to make them become fashionable. Her ideas were derived from such diverse sources as contemporary fashion design, oriental and exotic patterns, and streamlined modernistic shapes. According to Massey, “Art deco signified the orientation toward luxury, glamour and expensive decoration characterized by the 1925 Paris exhibition”(2000:35). The Crossculture influence in these two women designer’s works shows both of the East and West merging tendency.

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The Third Space identity They both took on the Third Space identity. “Already in the 1920s, Paul Klee describes the relationship between a viewer and a work of art using the term ‘the space-in-between’. That is, the space, situation and opportunity, which can open up between two persons, or, for instance, a viewer and an object. It is, most of all, a question of encounter, which possibly creates the third space. An event, which simultaneously belongs to both parties” (“Third space – a merry-goround of opportunity” Kiasma Magazine, 2004). The relationship between the spectator and the work can create a third space and can explain Sonia Delaunay’s Simultaneous contrast works, in which different groups of circular forms and colours (Wosk, 2002:148) create the space-in-between associated with the spectator. As Griffin puts it, “Clarice recalled that the idea for Bizarre… ‘I noticed how very monotonous the designs of pottery…why not design something quite modern as regards colour and form?...which could be produced at a moderate cost to bring it within the reach of the great masses of the people’” (1998:26). In 1927, Colley Shorter inspired Clarice Cliff’s Bizarre series with “an awareness of Egyptian and Eastern design, which was fashionable after the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. These influences were to result in an out-burst of pottery in shapes and designs unlike anything previously made in Stoke-on-Trent” (Griffin, 1998:15). Her ideas on the Bizarre series are a mixture of modern styles, colours, and oriental elements. This blending subsequently created a Third Space identity and became her unique style, which in turn caught the market’s attention. 4 OUTCOMES AND SIGNIFICANCE 4.1 THE OUTCOMES AND SIGNIFICANCE BY SONIA DELAUNAY The value of Delaunay’s creative works was always linked with fashion entrepreneurs (“Sonia Delaunay”, the permanent Collection, nmwa.org, 2004). She applied the pure fine art style into the design field, especially the fashion and product design field. She leaded her design creation to the daily life and improved the quality of people’s living in the 20’s and the 30’s in Paris. She was the person who created the trend of Orphism in Art Décor. Sonia Delaunay was also famous for ushering in a new trend: she was one of the pioneers in the history of art that created the first Abstract work. Her works adopted Art and Design theory. In 1911, influenced by the theories of Michel-Eugene Chevreul, Sonia Delaunay made one of the very first abstract works in the world, a geometric form of sheet made for the bed of her son. This innovation launched the Simultaneous theory. This theory involves different bright and contrast colours. Based on this theory, the relations between colours create a new order of circular forms, which is independent but can be blended into other groups. This theory is attached to Orphism, and Orphism’s theory is based on Cubism. She was the only person in 1920s that used the Orphism and

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successfully applied it to the field of Art Deco. She is surely one of the leading women designers who made the first abstract works in the design field. 4.2 THE OUTCOMES AND SIGNIFICANCE BY CLARICE CLIFF In the United Kingdom, the ceramic design works of Clarice Cliff entered many family homes and became part of the British culture of 1930s. “Clarice Cliff was the first designer associated with any pottery manufacturer in Great Britain to visualize the possibilities of modern design applied to Ceramics”(Griffin, 1999:170). She created design works with modern forms and traditional ornaments, and applied this avant-garde, unconventional design works to the traditional family’s daily lifestyle. Clarice Cliff always viewed her daily ceramic design from a practical aspect: designing her works for sale and for mass production to meet the public need. She had held those as the principles in her design (Clarice Cliff “, the Clarice Cliff Story, claricecliff.com, 2004). She mass-produced ceramic design works. Her works were designed to activate people’s desire to purchase. “The name Clarice Cliff became a fashionable one to display in a culture” (Cox, 2001:56). The massive range of products reflected her unique style; her designs were famous not only for decorative patterns but also for forms. Even during the war, more than eight million pieces of bizarre ware that she produced were sold (Cox, 2001:55). REFERENCES [1] Baron, S. & Damase, J. 1995, Sonia Delaunay the life of an artist, Thames & Hudson, London, UK, pp.69,84,72 [2] Bhabha, H. K. 1990, Nation and Narration, Routledge, London, UK, p.57 [3] Chambers, I. 1994, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Routledge, KY, USA, p.67 [4] Conway, H. 1987, Design History: a students’ handbook, Allen & Unwin, London, UK, p.63 [5] Coombes, A.2000, Hybridity and its discontents, Routledge, KY, USA, pp. i, 9 [6] Cox, M 2001, Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, Routledge,, Florence, KY, USA, pp. 24,54-56 [7] Duncan, A. 1988, Art Deco, Thames and Hudson, London, UK, p.116 [8] Evans, J. & Hall, S. 1999, Visual Culture: The Reader, Thousand oaks and New Delhi, Sage and Open University Press, London, UK, p.4 [9] Fausch, D. 1996, Architecture in Fashion, Princeton Architectural Press, NY, p.71 [10] Ginsburg, F. 2002, Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, University of California Press, Ewing, NJ, USA, p.102 [11] Griffin, L.1998, The Fantastic Flowers of Clarice Cliff, Harry N. Abrams, NY, USA, pp.15, 26 [12] Griffin, L. 1999, Clarice Cliff: The Art of Bizarre, Pavilion Books, London, UK, pp.170, 196 [13] Hayward, S. 2000, Cinema Studies: Key Concepts, Routledge, KY, USA, p.271 [14] Massey, A. 2000, Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture, Berg Publishers, Oxford, UK, p. 35 [15] Mirzoeff, N. 1999, An Introduction to Visual Culture, Routledge, UK, p.12 [16] O’Hagan, J. 2002, Conceptualizing the West in International Relations: From Spengler to Said. Palgrave Macmillan, VA, USA, p.204

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[17] Richardson, D. & Robinson, V.1993, Introducing Women’s Studies, Feminist theory and practice, MacMillan, London, UK, p.304. [18] Schneider, R. 2001, Directing Reconsidered: A Theoretical, Routledge, KY, USA, p.167. [19] Weisman, L.K. 1992, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, USA, pp.209-212 [20] Wosk, J. 2002, Women and the Machine: Representations from the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, USA, p.148

THE ‘CULTURE MEDIUM’ IN DESIGN EDUCATION Megan Strickfaden* 1 School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, UK. Ann Heylighen2, Paul Rodgers1 and Herman Neuckermans2 Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Design solutions do not occur in a vacuum. They are nourished by a breeding ground that embraces various substances, phenomena and traces, all of which function as raw material for concept generation and ultimately for design. Perhaps an appropriate name for this breeding ground is ‘culture medium’, which combines the notion of cultural baggage that individuals and groups hold as part of their make-up, with the idea of a seedbed for growing micro-organisms. This paper examines the composition of this ‘culture medium’ and how it functions in the context of design education through reporting two unrelated, yet contentwise connected studies. The first results from in-depth interviews with experienced design tutors, the second is comprised of an ethnographically oriented study with a group of design students. Combining, comparing and contrasting information gathered in these two studies, reveals some interesting insights about the ‘culture medium’ that is valued by tutors and students. Keywords: Cultural capital, design education, influences on the design process 1 INTRODUCTION Design has been recognized as a highly complex activity, which requires considerable amounts of knowledge beyond what is stated in the design task. As Nigel Cross [1] puts it, “the solution is not simply lying there among the data, like the dog among the dots in the well-known perceptual puzzle; it has to be actively constructed by the designer’s own efforts.” In actively constructing a solution, designers rely heavily on previous design *Napier University, School of Design and Media Arts, 10 Colinton Road EH10, Edinburgh, UK t: +44.0131.455.2678, [email protected] 1 School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh (Scotland) 2 Department of Architecture, Urban Design & Planning, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium)

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experience. That is, design solutions do not occur in a vacuum or pop out of thin air. Numerous authors claim that designers make extensive use of previous projects in the act of designing. Especially during the early, conceptual stage of the design process, previous designs are said to provide grist for a number of decisions to be made [2]. This grist, however, is but one ingredient of the breeding ground that nourishes and is nourished by design. Perhaps an appropriate name for this breeding ground is ‘culture medium’, which combines the notion of the cultural information that individuals and groups hold as part of their make-up, with the idea of a seedbed for growing microorganisms. The culture medium embraces various substances, phenomena and traces— both from within and from outside the design domain—all of which function as raw material for concept generation and ultimately for design. Since accumulating a repository of previous designs requires many years of practical design experience, student and novice designers cannot rely only on previous designs. What raw material, then, do students use for their designs? This paper looks at the composition of this ‘culture medium’ and how it functions in the context of design education. On the one hand, design education has a core component of learning in action and by doing, which means that design students learn through the practice of designing [3]. On the other hand, design students are commonly asked to be creative in their design projects and to learn about what they are designing and whom they are designing for by searching within themselves and their environment. Because designed things make up students’ everyday environment, they are intimately part of their lives. Tutors, to greater or lesser degrees, may encourage students to engage with their individual and collective ‘culture medium’ as sources to move forward their design work. 2 BACKGROUND Within the realms of anthropology and sociology, the notion of a ‘culture medium’ is not new. Social anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu [4], for example, proposed the notion of social reproduction called ‘cultural capital’. His class-based theory considers the nonexplicit activities of everyday life as defining individuals [5]. Bourdieu feels that ‘cultural capital’ is acted out through the individual-personal everyday activities. It is further speculated here that the ‘cultural capital’ embodied in individual design students affects their design process. When discussing the notion of ‘culture medium’, it is important to emphasize the values and assumptions attached to the study and understanding of culture. Two basic assumptions made by anthropologists are particularly relevant in the context of this paper: 1. that many facets of an individual’s behaviour are gained through engaging in various social situations and interactions; and 2. that people learn a great deal that they are never taught explicitly, and that much is learned through simply being involved in situations, society and cultural activities. These assumptions are central to this paper as it presupposes culture to affect individuals involved in the design process. That is, it starts from the view that social and cultural situations can and will affect the design process. Therefore, learning and doing is more than a cognitive activity. Ways of knowing and doing are unique to each group, and can be called its specific culture.

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Design culture, and the notion of culture medium in particular, has hardly been explored by the design community. Although there are few precedents for understanding the social and cultural influences on design, literature reviews reveal a growing interest in exploring the social and cultural nature of design. Ashton’s recent research on social constructivism [6, 7] begins to get at the role of social capital in the design process. Louridas [8] characterizes designers as bricoleurs, who collage divergent ideas together into a complex finished product. There is also a rising interest in ‘design culture’, as emphasized by the work of Rodgers [9] and Julier [10]. Through interviews with wellknown western designers, Rodgers speculates the existence of a ‘cultural DNA’ common to all designers. Julier’s book Design Culture addresses the make-up of western society’s designed world. Research on how ‘cultural contexts’ are viewed help understand how users interact with the world around them. Such studies on user-centred design use information about ‘cultural context’ to create and market better objects [11]. User-centred design connects to the concept of ‘culture medium’ insofar as it recognizes the importance of context in design. The studies presented here embrace the notion that social situations and cultural norms impact individuals and, as such, are passed on and in essence embedded in the artifact. 3 FROM THE TUTOR’S PERSPECTIVE Our first study derives from a series of in-depth interviews with four local designers and design tutors: Mauro, Peggy, Paul and Werner.3 The interviews were originally conducted to investigate the role of cases, i.e. concrete design projects, in architectural practice and education [12][13]. The interviewees represent different approaches and generations in (architectural) design practice and have also ample experience as design tutors. While the interviews started from a formal questionnaire, they often took place in a rather informal atmosphere, at times wandering to other subjects. Because the role of a ‘culture medium’ popped up during several conversations, these interviews are recycled here as the starting point for our investigation. In particular, they provide the (sometimes contradictory) views of tutors on the role of culture in the design process. The notion of culture—or rather of being cultivated—is referred to by Mauro, when explaining what distinguishes ‘good’ from ‘weak’ first year students: “You immediately notice whether or not students have had ‘from home’ the opportunity—unfortunately, but that’s reality—who have richer parents or have had the opportunity to travel more, and who, upon arrival in the second, third year, already have been to Firenze, to Paris, and to London and to New York. And you have others who have stayed in their own village and only have read the Panorama. That is, of course, a huge difference. That shows that those who are more ‘cultivated’, perhaps filter and use what they know in a different way than those who join us on the bus to a museum for the first time […]”

3

For more information on these interviewees and their background, see [12].

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In Mauro’s view, the former students already have from day one of their architecture studies a ‘culture medium’ to draw from during design, while the latter have to start developing this resource from scratch. A similar view is expressed by Peggy, according to whom better students differ from weaker in that they “come up with better examples.” Judging from Paul’s experience, they are also better at interpreting: “For the others, it’s often copying, and in a volatile way.” Many students tend to adopt shapes or materials from other projects, and there is nothing wrong with that, provided they know why they choose a specific example and draw the full consequence of their choice. Yet what is very difficult to students, Paul assumes, is to separate the sheep from the goats: “I don’t blame them for adopting things, but for adopting them without question, without reflecting.” The view of this trio sharply contrasts with the opinion of Werner, who has teaching experience in both architecture and jewellery design. He attaches great interest to teaching students to control and direct their inspiration, instead of passively waiting until they are struck by a bright idea. Therefore, he introduced the use of a memory book, in which students continually collect collages, images and preferences, to serve as base material during concept generation: “What we try with that memory book is to say: ‘Look, what do you like to see? What do you like to listen to? What do you like to eat? What do you like to do?’ […] And not: ‘Yes, I love Bach. And I like Tadao Ando. Etc. Etc. And I only watch movies by Peter Greenaway.’ No, no! ‘I’ve only watched Friends and I’ve also read Willy and Wanda, and I also played with Barbie.’ […] Don’t throw these things away. […] that’s your culture, that’s your basis, and if you look at other people, and you’re projecting yourself onto those other people, then you’re hiding or suppressing part of yourself.” Rather than expecting the less ‘cultivated’ students to start building up a ‘culture medium’ from scratch, Werner stresses that each student already has a valuable and unique resource to draw from, and explicitly encourages students to go ahead and use it. Judging from this series of interviews, then, there is no such thing as ‘the’ perspective of design tutors on the role of a ‘culture medium’ in design education. All interviewees find it evident for students to fall back on some kind of resource during design. Yet when it comes to the content of this resource, they seem to split into two camps. For the majority of our interviewees, this resource should be built up carefully so as to include buildings from ‘Firenze, Paris, and London and New York’ or ‘better examples’, in short Architecture with a capital A. The opposite camp, by contrast, accept that each student’s ‘cultural capital’ is idiosyncratic and may not involve what has typically been defined as culture with a capital C. What both camps have in common, however, is that their opinion seems to be built on presuppositions and intuitions as much as on clear evidence about the role and impact of students’ ‘culture medium’. 4 FROM THE STUDENT’S PERSPECTIVE The second field study takes an ethnographically oriented approach by engaging with a ‘real world’ design learning scenario. A group of industrial design students were observed and interviewed in their educational setting while designing an artifact over a period of six weeks. The participants met once per week for six to eight hours per day in

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a classroom setting. The study aimed to investigate the ‘references’ that are considered to be the inroad to understanding the ‘culture medium’. References are all shared communication in the design environment, including speech and visual representations such as sketches and images from magazines or books. References are topics and experiences coming from inside and outside the design environment, most often relevant to the task at hand. Particularly interesting for this paper are the individual-personal experiences of events (sometimes involving cultural artifacts) that are talked about while designing. They come from outside the design environment and often relate to culture. In order to target these individual-personal and sociocultural indicators, the study started with a questionnaire to discover the participants’ interests, values and background, which could then be connected with the more spontaneously occurring information later in the study. In order to get closer to what was happening socially and culturally in the design studio, information was gathered using a holistic multi-method approach, combining observation, informal interviewing, questionnaires, videotape, still photography and note-taking. The group was selected because of its manageable size and willingness to participate in a lengthy study. Students and tutor were treated equally as participants, in order to maintain research distance and provide a reassuring environment for the students. All participants were male and between the ages of 21 and 22. The majority came from Scotland and England, yet two participants had lived outside the UK for extended periods. The design brief was sponsored by Virgin Atlantic Airlines and Corus Steel Packaging in the context of the British Design and Art Direction Award (D&AD) competition [http://www.dandad.org/]. Current meal trays are relatively standard across airlines and Virgin wanted a trademark meal tray to be manufactured by Corus. All references were sorted into two general categories. Inside references directly relate to design and to the instructions provided by the tutor. Outside references include aspects that are idiosyncratic personal experiences as well as common cultural currency. This paper zooms in on the latter as they are relative to the culture medium. The kinds of references expected in this category are: 1. Local: experiences and memories relating to travel, recreation, gender, workplace, hobbies, home, personal belongings, family, friends, prior education, and personal religious beliefs. 2. Universal: experiences and memories relating to the natural world, religious economic and political systems, government, place, media, and recreation relative to culture. Moreover, references from outside either have a tangible relationship to the artifact being created or are more intangible, more distant from the task at hand. The former include everything that relate directly to the design of an airline meal tray, such as references to dishes, food (e.g., kosher, Japanese, bento boxes, edible packaging, and drawing on restaurants’ tablecloths), cooking, all forms of travel (e.g., train, automobile, plane), space restriction, lap items (e.g., laptops, cushions) and waste management. Indirectly related to the project (but still tangible) are references to Virgin music and music in general. Since they were designing for a multinational corporation offering more than one service, students referenced all types of music, particularly connected with a turning disc (i.e., vinyl records, DJ-ing, DVDs, CDs). This was demonstrated when six participants

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presented preliminary concepts that involved a spinning disc as part of the meal tray. Games and game playing formed the second strongest theme after music. Again, five participants presented preliminary concepts featuring a game to be played while on the plane. Further yet from the task but still tangible are references to TV commercials and a bird feeder. Interestingly, there were very few references to personal flights, presumably because only four participants (including the tutor) had traveled extensively and several had never been on a plane. Intangible references are less frequently discussed while designing an artifact, but nonetheless present. They are abstract, unusual, and ambiguous, and therefore more difficult to categorize. One example worth elaborating on is a reference to a whiskey tin that eventually becomes embedded in the final artifact design. The participant says: “I like the shape … it is like the old whiskey tin boxes that the ‘Glenfidich’ comes in. I’ve got loads of them back home. My dad likes to collect those.” This statement is very telling about the participant’s culture medium. He uses the whiskey tin to describe the overall proportion and form he wants to employ in his design. He also wishes to create a meal tray that is three-dimensional, breaking the mold of a traditional meal tray design. Yet, in referencing a whiskey tin, he is referencing his Scottish culture and individualpersonal experiences. That is, whiskey is produced in Scotland and is known as one of their cultural icons. The references identified in this field study are highly significant to investigating the culture medium, which should allow constructing a broader understanding of the design process milieu. Approximately 50% of all references come from the inside of design, the other half come from outside. Although not all references directly influence the final artifact design, it is clear that the culture medium is a driving force in the design process among design students. The participants in this field study bring values and added meaning to their design work on a personal level by reflecting their cultural capital. 5 DISCUSSION AND FUTURE WORK Cultural capital exists within all people (students and tutors) and is a major contributing factor towards the development of an artifact, shown here from two perspectives. Some tutors define the culture medium as involving specific artifacts that embody ‘good’ design. Another tutor recognizes the inherent value of reflecting on and exploiting ‘what students have’. Either way, students seem to use the culture medium knowingly, unknowingly, creatively and spontaneously throughout the design process. It is speculated that designers and even design experts use the culture medium while designing. That is, the artifact is ‘born’ in an ecosystem that contains other artifacts and the experiences surrounding people’s interface with the designed world of objects, places and spaces. In the case of design, those objects and experiences relate to the everyday lives and cultures of designers. It is, however, too early to draw general conclusions based on the studies reported here. Further research is needed to identify what culture media are used in the design process and why. Awaiting the results of this investigation, design tutors can surely start off by preparing themselves for a profound change in mentality. According to our study, their present emphasis on culture with a capital C wrongfully excludes students’ personal

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and sociocultural background from nourishing design in the studio. To acknowledge this fact is but a step, yet it is not an unimportant one. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Ann Heylighen is a postdoctoral fellow of the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders. The authors would like to thank the interviewees, and the fourth year industrial design students and tutor in the school of Design and Media Arts at Napier University, for their time, support, patience and honesty. REFERENCES [1] Cross, N., Designerly ways of knowing, Design Studies 3(4), 1982, pp. 221-227 [2] Domeshek, E.A. & Kolodner, J.L., A case-based design aid for architecture, Gero, J. (ed.) Artficial Intelligence in Design ’92, Kluwer Academic, 1992, pp. 497-516 [3] Schön, D., The Design Studio, RIBA Publications, 1985 [4] Bourdieu, P. Distinction–A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, London: Routledge, 1984 [5] Julier, G., The Culture of Design, London: Sage Publications, 2000. [6] Ashton, P., The Social Context for Design Learning. Staffordshire University UK, The British Library. PhD Thesis, 2001 [7] Ashton, P. & Durling, D., Doing the Right Thing—Social Processes in Design Learning, The Design Journal, 3(2), 2000, pp. 3-13 [8] Louridas, P., Design as Bricolage: Anthropology Meets Design Thinking, Design Studies, 20(6), 1999, pp. 517-535 [9] Rodgers, P.A., Inspiring Designers: A Sourcebook, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004 [10] Julier, G., The Culture of Design, London: Sage Publications, 2000 [11] Jordan, P. W. Designing Pleasurable Products, London: Taylor and Frances, 2000 [12] Heylighen, A., In case of architectural design. Critique and praise of Case-Based Design in Architecture, Ph.D., Dept. ASRO, K.U.Leuven, 2000 [13] Heylighen, A. & Neuckermans, H., Are architects natural Case-Based Designers?, The Design Journal 5(2), 2002, pp. 8-22.

PLACING CULTURE AT THE CENTRE OF DESIGN Siu-Tsen Shen* Assistant Professor, Department of Multimedia Design, National Formosa University, Taiwan. Stephen D. Prior Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper addresses culturally-rooted factors within user interface design and interaction (HCI). Initially several culturally-related design priorities are identified, explored and analysed, including the application of metaphors and their representation. A ‘Culture-Centred Design’ (CCD) process is developed allowing a specific culture to be the primary point of departure. This ensures that the generic design metaphor is culturally rooted and its representation is unequivocal with respect to its target user group. Through iterative practice-related design research employing a heuristic evaluation methodology, a computer interface is redesigned which incorporates a consistent and culturally rooted metaphor for a Chinese user target group. The “garden” metaphor is developed and applied as an alternative to the current “office” or “desktop” metaphors. The garden metaphor is based on concepts, histories and imagery from traditional Chinese garden design. Keywords: Culture-Centred Design, Iconography, Human Computer Interaction 1 INTRODUCTION Chinese technological developments in the field of information and communication engineering will have a major impact on our everyday lives [1]. It is predicted that the Chinese economy will surpass that of the US by 2050; many economists think that they may do it much sooner. According to the most recent statistical survey report on Internet development in China, by the end of January 2005, there were approximately 41.6 million computer hosts *Department of Multimedia Design, National Formosa University, 64 Wen-Hua Rd, Hui-Wei 63208, Taiwan, ROC. Tel: +886 5 6315874, Fax: +886 5 631 5875, Email: [email protected]

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and 94 million Internet users in China. Note, however, that this only accounts for a penetration rate of 7.3% of the population [2]. Even with this low penetration rate, China is second only to the USA (202 million) in terms of the number of Internet users. If, as predicted, China follows the Hong Kong model (72.5% penetration) the number of Internet users will increase tenfold over the next 10-20 years, and surpassing the US in 2010. The implications of this expansion, on computing and HCI will be dramatic [3]. The supply of universal software has played an important part in the promotion of globalisation, and the standardisation of technology has had the obvious advantage of compatibility. However, evidence has shown that the application of a standardised interface posed usability problems for certain ethnic groups, as the origins of its metaphors and visualisation were largely foreign [4]. Most software is developed directly or indirectly by the USA, and its interfaces have therefore been based primarily on American metaphors, representations, colour associations and navigational logic. This ignores the fact that for example, colour associations and text layouts differ widely from culture to culture. In the quest for compatibility through a level of standardisation, there is a danger of a loss of cultural identity and tradition. Examples are the traditional Japanese and Chinese literature or calligraphy that is written right to left and books that are read back to front. 2 THE NEED FOR A GOOD (CULTURE-CENTRED) HCI METAPHOR According to Johnson (1997), “for the digital revolution to take place, a computer must also represent itself to the user, in a language that the user understands” [5:14]. This statement points to the main question of how to minimise the misunderstanding of visual representations and support metaphorical reasoning in cognition. The role of metaphors in interface design is the key. Metaphors are culturally biased and may serve as a powerful communication tool, but only if implemented properly. Good interface metaphor should be developed or adapted to its cultural requirements with reference to, representatives of the culture for which it is intended. Many gurus such as Donald Norman have claimed that technology has reached a point of saturation. Nelson (1990) in ‘The Right Way to Think about Software Design’ considered the main problem of the metaphor was that “slavish adherence” to the predominant metaphor, which prevents the emergence of things that are genuinely new [6:239]. 2.1 THE REQUIREMENTS FOR A GOOD METAPHOR Based on the CCD manifesto and from an extensive review, the requirements that a metaphor has to meet in order to be successful are: • Richness • Suitability • Fun and Interesting (Alluring) • Originality • Adaptability and Transferability

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3 THE CULTURE-CENTRED DESIGN (CCD) METHODOLOGY The authors hereby introduce a new culturally oriented methodology, namely, CultureCentred Design, whose development was based on an extensive literature review and research by Marcus, Röse and others, who work in the area of cross-cultural interface design [7, 8]. The main research findings are built upon a practice-based project, i.e., the design of a computer operating system and browser for Chinese users. The theory led to a methodology through which it was applied to the design project. The experiences drawn from the development and tests of the design contributed to the refinement of the CCD theory and methodology. The CCD theory needed to address a series of issues including the conveyance of cultural identity, language, visual communication, and research on a target user group related to cognition and usability. A user’s perception and behaviour is greatly influenced by previous experience and background, both social and cultural. There needs to be a greater understanding of differences of cultural perspective in order to make Culture-Centred Design work. 3.1 IMPLEMENTATION OF CULTURE-CENTRED DESIGN Our primary goal was to explore and evaluate the feasibility of the CCD approach to an actual design problem. This experience would serve as a basis for the development of the CCD methodology. The topic that was chosen for this project was the redesign of a software interface. It was believed this topic would offer many opportunities to address and tackle a wide range of culture related usability issues and a great medium to test on a wide audience. The project involved the total representation of an OS (Operating System), including a web- and a file browser. The target group (Chinese) would ideally include computer users ranging in all ages, experience levels and professions. This target group was divided up into several countries that share a common language and cultural background, and includes China and also Taiwan. Besides the primary target group, an adapted design was also tested on a diverse user group consisting of Oriental-non-Chinese and International users to discover whether the metaphor would be transferable to other cultures. 3.1.1 The redesign of a computer interface for a Chinese user group The design of a computer interface held the opportunity to develop, project and explore an overarching metaphor to its full potential. As research has indicated, the success of a good interface design would depend largely on the power of the underlying metaphor. It required a rethink of the ‘desktop’ metaphor that had been developed in the sixties and implemented as a GUI (Graphical User Interface) in the early eighties. The traditional Chinese garden was picked as a subject for the overarching metaphor. An in-depth literature review on the topic of traditional Chinese garden design resulted in a good insight into its origins, concepts, motives, traditions and visualisation. The design process relied on the CCD approach employing action research and heuristic evaluation, involving respondents from the target group.

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4 THE GARDEN OPERATING SYSTEM INTERFACE The choice of metaphor, its visual execution and the consistency of its use would profoundly affect the look and feel of an interface and ultimately its usability. It would influence the efficiency and effectiveness of the application and user satisfaction. A good metaphor could provide for a naturally intuitive interface. The subsequent interface design that would be based on the garden metaphor could have an impact on user behaviour. The realisation that a computer can be structured organically, by which growth, multiplication and maintenance are key concepts, may influence the way a user applies and organises data. The OS interface or ‘desktop’ was based on the traditional Chinese garden layout that was divided into several “territories”. Each sector had a specific theme or function. 4.1 COMPARISON BETWEEN THE GARDEN AND DESKTOP METAPHORS The choice of the weighted matrix method shown in Table 2 is inevitably subjective. However, the criteria and weightings were carefully chosen to reflect a fair and equitable set of important characteristics, by which the two alternatives can be judged. In the final analysis, the Garden metaphor has emerged as the most appropriate choice and we therefore believe that it has the potential to contribute significantly to the next generation of cultural interface designs.

Figure 1. The garden OS Interface screen.

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Table 1. Mapping of the garden layout to the OS interface. Garden Sectors

Usage of the traditional Chinese Garden

Implementation of interface functions

1. Atrium

A focal point at the centre of the garden. Usually a rock or a building. Sometimes used as a pond.

2. Gallery

For exhibition, display and presentation.

3. Courtyard

For storing maintenance equipment.

Relaxation/creativity. For computer games or creative applications such as graphic drawing. Display/show case/presentation. Data and images can be organised into a portfolio, homepage, Weblog/on-line. Maintenance of files and folders. Back-up of data. Anti-virus a pplications. Settings. Control panel, preferences, themes and printer. The system folder. Entertainment. For MP3 music, Real player, Quick Time applications, DVD and movies. Internal and external drives. Recent/on-going projects. For temporary storage, data files that are recent or in progress, shortcuts, etc. Applications/information. Software applications, incl. the web browser.

Usually situated on one side of the garden. The Chinese considered the house to be part of the garden. 5. Teahouse A teahouse for social events and entertainment e.g. games, chess, philosophical debates. 4. Home

6. Library 7. Nursery

8. Study

For reading and private collections. A greenhouse with flowerpots (e.g. for cultivating young plants and bonsai) Self-learning and organisation.

5 TEST METHODS There were two major aims when testing the usability of the Web-based Operating System based on the Chinese garden metaphor. The first was to collect valuable feedback to improve the usability of the interface. The second was to measure the effectiveness of the selected evaluation methods. In the usability test stage Chinese participants who had good computer and Internet skills and experience were evaluated. The chosen evaluation methods for this research were heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Heuristic evaluation concentrated on details within the interface and pinpointed cognitive problems at the design stage. The evaluation also used the think aloud protocol, observation and a questionnaire survey. Data collection techniques included taking notes, screen capture software and video recording.

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6 CCD INTER-CULTURAL USABILITY EVALUATION The initial findings of the two evaluation protocols pointed to a positive attitude from all Chinese participants. The two phases of interaction testing, although small in scale, provided considerable insight into the usability of the CCD approach in a real world situation. The redesigned and improved interface was evaluated and compared with the results of both previous evaluations (heuristic evaluation and usability testing). To test the CCD methodology’s transferability and its feasibility to other cultural contexts, three user groups (experiment, observation and control groups) were involved i.e. Chinese, Oriental (Non-Chinese) and International users. An online usability evaluation was accompanied by a nine-item questionnaire and user background survey. For further direct observation and to record the participants’ actions, three

Table 2. Comparison between the Desktop and Garden Metaphors. Criteria Rich Effective ness ness Meta (0.25) (0.25) phor 6 Desktop 3 4 Garden 7 Total Score (10)

Fun and Interesting (0.1) 4 6

Efficiency (0.2) 7 3

Transfer Total ability Score /Expand (1.00) ability (0.2) 4 6

4.85 5.15

Chinese, two Oriental (Non-Chinese) and three International users from the three groups were invited to the researcher’s office to explore the online interface. In terms of the test results, it is significant that both the Chinese and the International group had remarkably similar average results (3.72 - agreement), as compared with the Oriental (Non-Chinese) group that had a lower average result (2.94 - neutral). The reasons for this difference may result from the fact that there were two Indonesian participants in the Oriental (Non-Chinese) group. Indonesia is well known for its ethnic diversity through a multitude of 300 tribal cultures with differing preferences and viewpoints. For the validation and assessment phase, more than sixty user interface experts were invited to comment on the garden interface via emails. The expert feedback from UI professionals represented a range of viewpoints, both positive and negative. In this respect, the online performance of the Chinese garden metaphor was affected to some extent by technical disparity, such as the expert’s computer equipment and speed. 7 CONCLUSIONS The implications for this research and the success of future interfaces will be dependent on culture-related factors being recognised by all stakeholders. This paper is a first attempt at formulating a theoretical basis for the adoption of cultural factors into the

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design process. It is hoped that designers and educators from a variety of backgrounds may understand the importance of culturability and it’s potential. Currently, China, Japan and South Korea are cooperating on the development of their own operating system in response to Microsoft’s monopoly. Hopefully, we will see the emergence of more and more culturally-rooted metaphors and interfaces to help people of different cultures, abilities and experiences interact with computers. The culturalisation of products and services has still a long way to go, and it is almost impossible to include all perspectives here. However, it is hoped that this represents a good starting point. 8 REFERENCES 1. Parasuram, T.V., China to top global economy by 2050, India to come third. 2003, The Indian Express. 2. CNNIC, Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development of China. 2005, China Internet Network Information Centre. 3. Miniwatts, Internet World Stats. 2004, Miniwatts International Inc. 4. Marcus, A., International and Intercultural User Interfaces, in User interfaces for all: concepts, methods, and tools, C. Stephanidis, Editor. 2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc.: Mahwah, NJ. p. 47-63. 5. Johnson, S., Interface culture: how new technology transforms the way we create and communicate. 1st ed. 1997, [San Francisco]: HarperEdge. 264. 6. Nelson, T.H., The Right Way to Think about Software Design, in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, B. Laurel and S.J. Mountford, Editors. 1990, Addison-Wesley Pub. Co.: Reading, Mass. p. 235-243. 7. Marcus, A., Fast forward: User-interface design and China: a great leap forward. 2003, ACM. 8. Röse, K. and D. Zühlke, Intercultural Human-Machine Systems: Empirical Study of User Requirements in Mainland China, in Usability and Internationalization of Information Technology, N. Aykin, Editor. 2005, Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers: New York. p. 277-311.

DESIGN OPPORTUNITY IN HONG KONG AND THE PEARL RIVER DELTA REGION K.T. Lau* Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. Ronald M. C. So* Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. L. Justice** School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. T.C. Lee** School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. Louis K. P. Chu*** Industrial Centre, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT: This paper aims to outline the potential of product design/engineering development in Hong Kong and what measures that China’s Government has been implementing to enforce the collaboration between Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in China. Besides, the discussion on what the tertiary education sector should do to produce the right graduates to support the product design and development industry, so as to enhance the growth of economy in Southeast Asia is also included in this paper. Examples will be given on the design of curricula where horizontal and vertical integration of knowledge is emphasized and an outcome oriented approach is used for the delivery. It is hoped that through these new curricula, graduates versatile in both product design and engineering could be produced. Keywords: Product Design; Design Education; Design Opportunity. *Department of Mechanical Engineering **School of Design ***Industrial Centre The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong. †Corresponding author: [email protected]; Tel: +852 2766 7730; Fax: +852 2365 4703

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1. INTRODUCTION The Hong Kong economy has been going through very important structural changes during the past decade. Due to the lack of competitiveness, in terms of the salary, manpower and living expenses in Hong Kong, manufacturing industry has continued to move into the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region. The role of Hong Kong, in the product design and development industry has also faced to a dramatic change from its traditional Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) modes to a recently strong demand of Original Brand manufacturer (OBM). Such change has brought a great impact to local graduates as well as experienced employees who have been working in this industry for many years. Since the local product manufacturers have changed their role to OBM to maximize the profit margin, it is in particular important for them to have their own brand name of top quality products, much like the designer label of other well-developed countries, to maintain a strong competition in the international market. In order to achieve that, heavy emphasis should be placed on high value-added products, which implies an increasingly need for inter-disciplinary expertise of high-end product design and development. Currently, more than 60,000 local product manufacturing factories are located in PRD and they have employed more than 10,000,000 employees. Based on statistical data issued by The Federation of Hong Kong Industries (FHKI), 2003, electronic, electrical and home appliances, and toys are the largest (>35%) manufacturing industries in PRD [1]. In order to enhance the global competitiveness, several factors such as (i) economic performance; (ii) government efficiency; (iii) business efficiency and (iv) infrastructures including basic infrastructure, technological infrastructure, scientific infrastructure, health and environment, and education, are crucial for companies to consider in their effort to get into the China market. However, to maintain its competitiveness with other regions around PRD, the need of producing right talents who possess good global outlook and international-wise thinking ability is essential in order to develop high-tech and topquality products to the market. Hong Kong, positioned at the centre of Asia, has a geographical advantage, particularly plays an important role on financial and business activities, among other Asian countries. Precisely repositioning its role in the product design and development industry and educating right graduates in Hong Kong to serve this industry become as an urgent task that the Government and Industry should pay an attention on. In Table 1, it is obvious that Hong Kong has been shifting its role in the product design and development industry, from original manufacturing-based to more research and marketing activities. It represents that the demand of technology and knowledge based graduates will be increased in near future.

Table 1. The changing role of Hong Kong in product design and manufacturing industry. Manufacturing Research & Marketing & Content Design Content Trading & Branding 1961-1970 Full 1971-1980 Full 1981-1990 Some 2001Little

None Little Some Much

Little Some More Much

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2. GOVERNMENT POLICY Recently, China has launched a new policy called “Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA)” that will benefit foreign product design and manufacturing companies who intend to get into the China Market. Under CEPA, exports from Hong Kong meeting the rules of origin requirement in some Mainland product codes will enjoy (i) a zero tariff for products originated from Hong Kong, (see Table 2) and (ii) mutual recognition of professional qualifications (2nd Agreement) including structural engineers and chartered accountants, from 1 January 2004 onwards. The preferential treatment will increase the competitiveness of Hong Kong products in China and also attracts an interest of foreign investors to start establishing design and marketing stations in Hong Kong. In this agreement, goods importing into the Mainland of China must fulfil the CEPA origin rules in order to claim zero import tariff. The majority of products covered in the initial and second phases of tariff preference follow Hong Kong’s existing rules of origin, the remaining products follow either a “Change in Tariff Heading” rule, a “Value-added Content” rule, or a rule having regard to the characteristics of products concerned. “Change in Tariff Heading” means that a product has been manufactured to the extent that its classification in the World Customs Organization Harmonized System falls in a different four-digit tariff heading from the classification of the constituent materials used. “Value-added Content” rule refers to the total value of raw materials, component parts, labour costs and product development costs incurred in Hong Kong being greater than or equal to 30% of the FOB value of the exporting goods [2].

Table 2. CEPA origin rules for goods in 1,108 Mainland 2005 tariff codes: Phase (Implementation Date) CEPA I (from 1 January 2004)

Coverage Goods under 379 Mainland 2005 tariff codes

Include electrical and electronic products; pharmaceutical products; plastic articles; clocks and watches; jewellery; textiles and clothing; cosmetics; chemical products; metal products CEPA II: Goods under current production Goods under Include aquatic products; food and goods proposed to be produced in 540 and beverages; chemical products; pharmaceutical Hong Kong (upon confirmation by the Mainland products; plastic and rubber Mainland and Hong Kong that the 2005 tariff products; leather and fur proposed goods have come into codes products; textiles and clothing; production) (from 1 January 2005) metal products; mechanical, electrical and electronic products

“Product development” refers to the product development carried out in the area of one side for the purposes of producing or processing the exporting goods. Development

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expenses incurred should be related to the exporting goods. These expenses include fees payable for the development of designs, patents, patented technologies, trademarks or copyrights (collectively “these rights”) carried out by the manufacturer himself, fees payable to a natural or legal person in the area of one side for undertaking development of these rights, and fees payable for purchasing these rights owned by a natural or legal person in the area of one side. Under this policy, many local-based product design companies have started moving their design and marketing stations back to Hong Kong. The need of potential graduates is therefore increased to support the industry. As a global consideration, it is impossible to encourage the move back of manufacturing factories from PRD to Hong Kong, since the major cost for labouring and rental is still high in Hong Kong. However, some traditional tasks can now be done through up-to-date computer-aided technology such as the implementation of product life-cycle management (PLM), virtual testing for products; product platform designs and mould design and development. This actually can increase the amount of work done locally, and meet the additional 30% value-added process. Computer-aided design and analysis technology is an emerged technology used to replace physical testings for products. This technology can greatly reduce the cost of investment in terms of manpower and time for manufacturing prototypes, and experiment set up for testings. For an example, the design of roadside structures requires a minimum of US 0.13 million for a road test, which is 5 times higher compared with the same test conducted through the computer modelling, simulation and analysing. However, a problem arisen is how to educate our graduates to have a comprehensive knowledge on design, computer-aided technology and engineering. This has to be solved out through redesigning and /or revamping programmes’ curriculum. 3. ACADEMIC PROGRAMME DESIGN Under CEPA’s agreement, the role of universities to produce product designers and engineers has to be clearly identified in order to provide graduates to serve this fast growing sector of economic activities. In the past, universities are accustomed to educating students based on the concept of specialization, i.e. engineering departments will produce engineers while design school will focus on producing designers. In the 21st Century, especially in Hong Kong, if the tertiary institutions were to serve the rapidly growing sector of product engineering and design, they have to take up the responsibility of educating a new breed

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Figure 1. Horizontal and vertical integration of knowledge. of engineers/designers. A complete product cycle has four stages; a conceptual stage, a design stage, a realization stage and an implementation stage. Therefore, the education of a product designer/engineer has to cover this very wide spectrum of knowledge that could be rather disparate. A viable engineering curriculum should at least attempt to impart knowledge to students that cover the design and realization stages or the realization and implementation stages depending on the emphasis. To educate students both broad-based and in-depth knowledge in some particular fields to support the product design and development industry, the design a curriculum has to include two basic criteria: (i) horizontal and vertical integration of knowledge and (ii) outcome oriented teaching and learning approach. The former one allows the students to receive a broad–based knowledge in design, engineering, marketing and others while the latter one is to ensure that the students can achieve certain specified learning outcomes after taking the subjects. The students learning outcomes should be clearly stated in programmes’ subject syllabi so that they would know what the outcomes they can get from each subject. Figure 1 clearly demonstrates the design chart of the curriculum for product design related programmes. The design of undergraduate programmes that are suitable for product designers and engineers, several components have to be taken into account: (i) Synergize technology with design and business; (ii) Inter-disciplinary collaboration and (iii) Learning-outcomeoriented approach. Since the whole product design process indeed involves knowledge

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and technology from different disciplines, collaboration among different departments is encouraged to contribute their expertises to students. In the Department of Mechanical Engineering, BSc (Hons) in Product Design and Analysis is co-operated by more than 5 departments including the Department of Mechanical Engineering; School of Design; Industrial Centre; Department of Electronic Information Engineering and Department of Business. Each department tailor-made appropriate subjects to the programmes, and place the subjects’ emphasis focusing on product development. Along this mode of curriculum design, the students after taking the programmes would have comprehensive knowledge in handling design, engineering and marketing of products. In order for our graduates to be preferred by the employers, they must be immediately found useful but at the same time, able to develop themselves to play leading roles in the product design and development discipline. In order to develop such all-roundedness for the graduates, a very well balance between education and training to have an extensive and intensive coverage of product design and development is

Figure 2. R&D Investment by other countries in Guangdong and Hong Kong. required. Thus, a broad knowledge-based consisting of product design and engineering, applied computer-aided sciences and advanced technology, together with certain important techniques and skill including communication and presentation, team-playing, management and self-learning is essential for the students. In addition, hands-on experience of the development of top-quality new products will also be acquired by the students. Besides, the support from the Government is important, particularly in product design related research activities, so that the outcomes from that could be used to provide technology and knowledge to underpin teaching activities for all undergraduate/postgraduate programmes. Currently, the amount of investment by the Governments in Hong Kong and PRD is less compared with foreign countries (Figure 2) [3].

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4. CONCLUSION Due to the rapid change of the society in Southeast Asia in recent years, the roles played by Hong Kong and PRD have been changed dramatically. In the current situation, Hong Kong can serve as a hub for product design, analysis and development, while PRD provides a substantial support on manufacturing of products. It is anticipated that China is a most potential market Worldwide; many foreign countries have intended setting up linkage and stations in Hong Kong and enjoying the benefit from CEPA, in order to import their products and goods to China. Therefore, the demand on producing product designers and engineers is increased and the knowledge acquired for them also increases. Due to this need, the educational sector has to well prepare curriculum that is suitable to the industry. In this paper, examples are given on the design of curriculum where horizontal and vertical integration of knowledge is emphasized and an outcome oriented approach is used for the delivery. It is hoped that through this new curriculum, graduates versatile in both product design and engineering could be produced. 5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This project is supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Grant. 6. REFERENCE [1] http://www.fhki.org.hk/ [2] Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA), official webpage: http://www.tid.gov.hk/english/cepa/. [3] Product Innovation and PLM Integration (PI2) Forum, 22 November 2004, Hong Kong.

THE MAPPING OF SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS IN A PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT NETWORK Fraser Bruce* Strategic Design Group, University of Dundee, UK. Seaton Baxter, Tom Inns and David Townson Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper presents the additional findings of an exploratory research project which examines the social relationships found across the extended boundaries of a small to medium-sized medical device organization. By applying the technique of Social Network Analysis (SNA), the relationships between groups of key stakeholders are visually mapped and measured. Equipped with accurate representations of organizational structures and working networks, important insights are derived relevant to the relationships likely to facilitate or restrict idea generation from successfully occurring. The paper concludes with a series of network specific recommendations to help improve the social conditions and ultimately the product development activity across the organization. Keywords: Product, Social, Idea Generation, Networks, Stakeholders, Relationships 1 INTRODUCTION A review of the product design and development literature reveals there are a number of stages that make up the New Product Development (NPD) process. It also implies that successful product development requires a multidisciplinary approach to design. [1] [2]. Idea generation is an activity typically associated with the front-end stages of the product development process. It is at this stage, organizations will attempt to identify triggers that may lead to the development of new products or services [3]. Although, the NPD process is generally driven by changes in/or demands from the market place (i.e. ‘market-pull’ approach), several other variations of the process do exist [4]. Many techniques are used by industry to help uncover new product opportunities, for example, structured creativity techniques (lateral thinking and brainstorming) or consumer-orientated techniques (group *Strategic Design Group, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK, DD1 4HT Telephone: +44 (0) 1382 348101, Email: [email protected]

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discussions and in-depth interviews) [5]. However, the main dilemma for any organization is to ensure the right idea has been selected for development. According to a study by Booz-Allen & Hamilton ‘for every 7 new product ideas, 4 enter development, 1.5 are launched and only one succeeds’ [6]. A more recent report published by the Department of Trade and Industry in 2003, indicates the exploitation of ideas within the United Kingdom is still inadequate [7]. To remain competitive, it is important for organizations to become ‘idea driven’ and ‘stakeholder informed’ [8]. Only by developing creative working environments, that consider stakeholders as an integral part of the product development process, will organizations strengthen relationships, improve their

Figure 1. View of the advice network. decision making process and increase the rate of stakeholder-focused products successfully launched on the market place. 2 METHOD Information was gathered from a cross-section of staff using both quantitative and qualitative methods. A questionnaire (or a participant operated system) consisting of twenty questions was designed in order to reveal levels of ‘collaboration, informationsharing potential, rigidity, well-being and supportiveness.’ [9] To determine the strength of these relationships, questions were answered using a modified version of the Lickert Scale. For example: No; Sometimes; Often; Very Often; Always. The participant operated system was capable of translating raw inputs into numerical values, allowing for direct processing in a Social Network Analysis (SNA) software package [10]. To compliment the gathering of quantitative information, qualitative data from informal conversations was recorded and used to gain a deeper understanding of the attitudes and opinions of each employee.

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3 EXAMINING VISUAL MAPS The findings of the research were displayed in a series of visual network maps and were supported with detailed explanations of network measures where required. Figure 1. below displays the visual map for the advice network (i.e. are you likely to ask this person for advice?). Visual interpretation and analysis of this map highlights a number of interesting and surprising insights. 3.1 IS THE ORGANIZATION STAKEHOLDER INFORMED? In the context of this paper, a series of reflective questions (in bold) can be found relevant to the findings. Each question is based on current understanding of product development and network analysis best practice. As reported in an earlier paper [11] the following comments and conclusions can be drawn from Figure 1. 1. The successful development of a product hinges on the ability of the organization to accurately represent the needs of the people who will use the product [12]. There is no relationship or link between patients (end users) and individuals within the organization. This untapped knowledge source suggests missed opportunities for the organization. 2. The external stakeholders are positioned on the periphery of the network. As a result, (Charles and James) play significant bridging roles connecting individuals from within the organization to the

Table 1. Characteristics of central connectors. Positives

Negatives

playing supportive roles to others holding up decision making (bottleneck) the centralizing of information a single point of failure promoting connectivity excessive links typically innovative - able to monitor, power plays - controlling interaction interact and access information and information flow quicker from others

external stakeholders. These nodes [13] act as boundary spanners and represent a valuable resource for new information [9]. Other individuals within the network also display boundary spanning roles but these tend to be primarily with one stakeholder group. Are these boundary spanners being tapped for information by other employees within the organization? 3. No direct connections exist between the Research and Development Group and the external stakeholders. However, it was still possible for these groups to reach the external stakeholders through a sequence of indirect pathways within the network. For example, the thick black line in Figure 1. represents the pathway between (Susan) and the pharmaceutical company. The total number of links can be counted and indicates the geodesic (or shortest) distance between the pair [14]. Are these front-end business functions connected to boundary spanners (Charles and James)? 4. Two nodes (Craig and Frank), both senior management are positioned between all pairs of nodes within the network. These nodes are described as central connectors

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and as shown in Table 1. can affect the organizations ability to operate in either positive or negative ways [9]. If these central connectors were subsequently removed from the advice network, no direct or indirect pathways would exist between the Research and Development Group and the external stakeholders. 3.2 IS THE ORGANIZATION IDEA DRIVEN? Qualitative data gathered revealed nineteen new product ideas were generated by seven individuals across divisions 1 and 2 over a six month period. Two interesting points emerge. Firstly, by quickly accessing and monitoring information from others within the organization, it seems central connectors (Craig and Frank) were able to understand needs and possibilities and as a result synthesize new product opportunities. Secondly, by bridging the gap between individuals within the organization and the external stakeholders, boundary spanner (Charles) can potentially identify new opportunities in relation to stakeholders needs. However, are these new ideas shared with others? In order to help stimulate the cross-fertilization of ideas, it is important that strong relationships exist among internal and external stakeholders. Table 2. below displays the number of incoming and outgoing connections (degrees) a person has within the ideasharing network (i.e. are you likely to share a new product idea with the following person?). The in-degrees reveals central connectors (Craig and Frank) play pivotal roles within the network (at least in respect to individuals sharing ideas with them). As discussed earlier, (Craig and Frank) can either facilitate or impede network activity. Is a more integrated – less hierarchical ideas process required? Further investigation of Table 1 reveals dissimilarities between the amount of incoming and outgoing connections for certain individuals within the network. For example, (John) has the highest out-degrees within the network. Yet, his incoming connections are much lower. This suggests (John) is relying on the expertise of both internal and external stakeholders to help assess and advance new product ideas. Unfortunately, the relationships are not reciprocal. Is he screening ideas to avoid risk? Are other individuals within the network displaying similar characteristics? Can central connectors and boundary spanners use (John) as an idea broker?

Table 2. In-and-out degrees. In Out Simon 7 Craig 16 Susan 2 Gregor 7 Bill 1 Tom 1 Graeme 5 Tony 4 Peter 10

In Out

0 Fiona 5 7 6 John 4 19 4 David 4 14 3 Gillian 9 8 0 Nathan 9 0 8 Frank 18 6 6 Mike 4 9 1 Charles 6 7 9 Ian 4 13

In Out Luke Simon James Pharma Internal External Clinicians Nurses Patients

9 4 4 3 6 2 3 2 1

14 6 3 0 7 0 0 0 0

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4 RECOMMENDATIONS The recommendations are predominantly based on the work of Cross and Parker [9]. 4.1 DEVELOP CLOSER WORKING RELATIONSHIPS WITH EXTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS • Increase the awareness of stakeholders expertise through: □ Open platforms with guest speakers. □ Monthly workshops with external stakeholders (therefore introducing more formal and thorough methods for extracting information). □ Pre-planned visits to external stakeholders sites. • As shown in Figure 1. maintain established relationships between boundary spanners and external stakeholders. • Introduce new boundary spanners and establish links with patients (i.e. end users). For example, representatives from the front-end business functions. • Re-configure organisational pathways to connect all boundary spanners (i.e. reciprocal relationships). In respect to this new cohesive network, the shortest distance or path between individuals would be no greater than two, indicating the ease in which both divisions could successfully tap into the knowledge base of external stakeholders. • Ensure boundary spanners meet regularly to discuss strategies for managing and monitoring the relationships of key stakeholder groups. This may help to promote a multidisciplinary approach to the product development process. • Connect boundary spanners to central connectors. By centralizing information, staff would know exactly where to acquire information (i.e. a form of knowledge management). 4.2 A MORE INTEGRATED – LESS HIERARCHICAL IDEAS PROCESS • Bring together staff in a criteria framework workshop. A multidisciplinary team based activity to help identify and define criteria for new product ideas (i.e. strategic fit, technical feasibility, potential return on investment…). • Encourage idea generation and sharing amongst the network. • Assign an idea broker to each business division and establish a connection between them. For example, individuals with high out-degrees, such as (Ian) from Division 1 and (John) from Division 2. • Ensure idea brokers roles are made explicit within the product development network. For example: the responsibility of an idea broker is to share, filter and advance the flow of new product ideas across the extended boundaries of the organization, tapping into the knowledge base of both internal and external stakeholders.

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Figure 2. View of the new idea-sharing network. • Connect idea brokers to central connectors and boundary spanners. As shown in Figure 2. this wouldensure the cross fertilization of stakeholder focused ideas.

5 CONCLUSIONS The technique of Social Network Analysis (SNA) has demonstrated a method for gathering accurate representations of the internal networks operating across the organization. In the context of New Product Development, the case-study examined the activity of idea generation and sharing. The study revealed SNA to be a powerful visual mapping and analysis technique that can be used by an organization to derive important insights into the human barriers that affect positive results. With a clear visualization of these intangible relationships, recommendations for improving organizational characteristics can be positively and quickly made. The findings are also pertinent to product design education. The shift away from traditional product design in industry sees a requirement for the next generation of designers to understand the nature of a more interdisciplinary design process and become comfortable working with many stakeholders from different disciplines. Crucial to this is, an understanding of the social relationships within a product development network and an awareness that structured techniques do exist to investigate them. 6 ONGOING STUDY A series of workshops and feedback sessions are planned in order to present the findings of the case-study and to allow for any misinterpreted information to be rectified by the participants. Finally, the network maps are to be re-accessed on a six monthly basis to determine the usefulness of SNA as a technique for breaking down barriers that restrict successful product development.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank the medical device organization for providing the opportunity to carry out this exploratory research project. REFERENCES [1] Cooper, R-G. Winning at New Products: accelerating the process from idea to launch. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Perseus Publishing; 2001. [2] Jones, T. New Product Development: an introduction to a multifunctional process. New York: Butterworth Heinemann; 1997. [3] Hollins, B. and Hollins, G. Over the Horizon. New York: John Wiley and Sons Ltd; 1999. [4] Ulrich, K-T. and Eppinger, S-D. Product Design and Development. New York: McGraw-Hill Education; 1995. [5] Sowry, T. The Generation of Ideas for New Products. London: Kogan Page Limited; 1987. [6] Booz., Allen and Hamilton. New Product Management for the 1980s. New York: Booz, Allen and Hamilton; 1982. [7] Department of Trade and Industry. The Innovation Report - competing in the global economy. Available: http//www.dti.gov/innovationreport 19.4.05 [8] Christopher, M., Payne, A. and Ballantyne, D. Relationships Marketing: creating stakeholder value. New York: Butterworth-Heinemann; 2002 [9] Cross, R. and Parker, A. The Hidden Power of Social Networks. Boston, Massachusets: Harvard Business School Press; 2004. [10] Further information regarding the SNA software package. Available: http//www.netminer.com 1.4.05 [11] Bruce, F-S., Townson, D. and Inns, T. New Approaches for Identifying and Understanding Complexity for Product Innovation Success. Available: http://ead06.hfk-bremen.de/20.4.05 [12] The Design Council. User-centered Design. Available: http://www.design-council.org.uk/ 20.2.05 [13] In SNA, the word node is used as a generic term to mean points in the network. In this paper, those points are people. For clarity, People = Nodes, Nodes = People. [14] Scott, J. Social Network Analysis. London: Sage Publications; 2000.

TRADITION AND CHANGE: IMPULSES INFORMING THE DESIGNED ENVIRONMENT Lisa Szczerba* Department of Design + Management, PhD, Parsons School of Design / New School University USA. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The human impulses of tradition and change make up a significant, clarifying vector for those design educators seeking a perspective that foregrounds lived, everyday experience in their understanding of the designed environment. Tradition and change are discussed as seemingly contradictory, yet simultaneous psychological impulses directed toward managing our sense of the past, present and future. Various perspectives are brought to bear on the practices, processes and products associated with memory as representing that past, and the ways that design educators can consider their work from the vantage point of subtle human experience, through the lens of tradition and change. Keywords: Everyday experience, tradition, change, memory, design education INTRODUCTION One significant vector to consider when discussing our designed environment is the set of seemingly contradictory human impulses toward tradition and change. This vector can be imagined as a continuum with a conserving impulse at one end – the desire to preserve the past, tradition and what is known – and a progressive impulse – the desire for novelty and change – at the opposite end. In this paper, I will explore the notion of tradition as it rubs up against change, with the assumption being that tradition takes its inspiration from the past, and individual / shared memory. Tradition then, as we will understand it, is the means by which the past is understood, articulated and preserved. Understanding the inter-connectedness between design and human experience from this perspective allows for rich questions to emerge, with interesting and direct implications both for those *Parsons School of Design / New School University Department of Design + Management 66 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10011 USA Phone 212.229.5391 ×4216 Fax 212.647.8885 [email protected] 32 Hamilton Place, G-2 Garden City, New York 11530 USA [email protected]

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designing and for those educating others about designing our world. How does tradition make room for new memories? For change, evolution, and new traditions? Must tradition necessarily deny the progressive impulse of individuals and societies? What practices, places and products are designed to facilitate private / shared memory? How can these questions frame the discussion of design education within the context of everyday experience? And lastly, how might future design managers participate in this important cultural activity of world-making? This exploration of tradition and change and its implications for designers, the designed environment, and those who come into contact with it, is theoretically underpinned by discussions within cultural studies. Scholars and designers informed from a variety of disciplines have converged upon topics related to memory, tradition and change. Paul Connerton’s writing on memory [1] serves as a helpful starting point by delineating distinctions between personal, shared and cultural memory: the basis for much of my thinking about tradition and change. Much recent scholarship on autobiographical memory has come from those in the psychoanalytic and literary studies communities [2, 3] who study the continuously evolving nature of memory over time, and the embodiment of this process in various narrative, first-person encounters, such as religious confession, the analytic encounter, and legal testimony. Museum Studies scholar Stephen Greenblatt [4] brings necessary perspectives of museum display to bear on this discussion, fruitful in demonstrating the ways in which institutions embody human impulses. Material Studies scholars provide ways of thinking about tradition and change as reflected in our objects, collecting practices and their technological constraints and affordances. I will walk the reader through this logical progression, address the questions raised at the outset, and consider the ways in which this discussion can be continued and made relevant for design educators today. This paper grew out of a departmental seminar in Design in Everyday Experience I taught for the Design + Management program at Parsons School of Design. Rather than being trained as designers, students in this program are trained to manage the design process. We often think of designers as making things, but only sometimes understand designed output as a verb rather than a noun – of designers enabling processes. Management of the design process acknowledges both seen and unseen evidence of design in everyday experience. Overt design is noticeable in the objects and places that make up our environment. The covert, unseen evidence of design can be felt in the way that design shapes social processes. To enrich the model then, a vector of the seen and unseen – overt and covert – is overlaid with that of tradition and change. For example, Material Studies scholar Alison Clarke [5] has traced the influence of Tupperware, an airtight, plastic container, on the social practice of collecting by enabling perishable goods to last longer, thus shifting shopping habits and requiring more refrigerated storage space and larger home appliances. In addition to creating a culture that embraces the storage of fresh and prepared food, Tupperware also participated in a sphere of political economy, through its unique distribution method that encouraged women to be entrepreneurs: selling their own goods, setting their own work hours and practices, and cultivating their own customer bases under the watchful eye of the parent company. Thus, design can be understood as the velvet rope that directs human traffic patterns: designers shaping social practice.

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UNDERSTANDING TRADITION AND CHANGE First, let me define what I mean when I refer to the designed environment and the boundaries of this discussion: it is those products, places, processes and institutions that make up our world, and help to distinguish it from the natural environment. Place provides us necessary context for our activity: parks are for entertainment and relaxation, workplaces are for labor and service, the marketplace is for shopping, religious buildings are for worship, and homes are for nesting. But we are all familiar with what happens when the combination of affordances and human agency break free from these situational constraints. Free wi-fi access allows parks to be used for work; cell phones, faxes and high-speed modems enable the home to be a workplace; and interactive media and proactive design have enabled the marketplace to be an endless source of entertainment. Place is no longer bound to serve traditional constraints, so its inhabitants are mandated to be savvy and active creators of personal boundaries. Lastly, museums, school systems, religious, civic and other institutions, shape and are shaped by cultural forces. Thus, the designed environment can be experienced through the tension between this one set of seemingly contradictory impulses: to preserve the past (tradition) and to move towards the future (change). Tradition is oftentimes associated with reactionary practices and values. But in reality, the preservation of the past can take on many different faces: it can be unreflective and merely mimic the past as closely as possible, or it can be reflective and thoughtful, with an appreciation for how our present perspective shapes the way we understand the past. Again, if tradition is understood as taking its inspiration from the past, it needn’t just reiterate that past without looking through the critical eye of the present. Change is just as frequently understood to suggest mere novelty and the move toward newness, but it would be more fruitful to understand it as a shift from one state to another. I propose that memory acts as the fulcrum mitigating these two distinct and seemingly contradictory impulses, and that by exploring memory within the context of the designed environment, tradition and change are best understood. MEMORY AS MEDIATING TRADITION AND CHANGE I work from the currently-held assumption that memory is a construct that meets both personal and social needs to provide a coherent narrative of the past. Psychologist Ulric Neisser [6] maintains that present consequences of past events serve to constrain our personal or collective recollections. (7) These constraints, while necessitating a coherent story, may lead to conflicts in recall. “We may have to,” Neisser writes, “construct an ‘agreed or communicatively successful version of what really happened’.” (7) And that is the central topic of this paper: to explore the rich variety of ways in which designers are providing a version of “what happened”; and they do this through products, institutions and processes. According to Paul Connerton, “it is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.” (3) That shared memory is often communicated through the designed environment: through the design of a streetlamp or a public park, through the architectural elements on the façade of a government building, or

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through the design of a civic ceremony. Therefore, it is imperative that both designers and design educators understand that one of the uses of the worlds they create is the maintenance (or lack thereof) of a social order for their inhabitants. Just as Barclay [7] proposes that humans form “protoselves […] as a contemporary remembered self as they are shaped and reshaped in memory and interaction,” (70) a society or community’s notion of its collective protoself is similarly shaped and reshaped in shared memory as a result of interaction with its members and with the designed environment as referents for that collective past. Ritual experiences and commemorative events – designed as they are – anchor their participants in shared experiences of memory: a memory either personal (a birthday celebration), shared (a regional peasant uprising1), or cultural (a national holiday). In such commemorations of the past, cultural continuity is created for those in the present, thereby allowing for a more complex way of understanding tradition and change. Yet, such rituals acknowledging the past can also serve as portals to new ways of experiencing the present and possibly even the future, serving as touchstones for this larger examination of tradition and change. The most engaging of these traditions observes and witnesses past processes, cultural activities, and the actions of those that came before, while still allowing the necessary agency to explore future possibilities without blind adherence to this past. And designers and design educators can and should benefit from framing their work in this way. Ritual experiences designed for flexibility and the influence of its participants are what will move “design” away from an overt, artifactbased practice into one that shapes human destiny. There is an array of products in the marketplace that facilitates the preservation of personal, shared, and cultural memory: jump drives, printer accessories, digital cameras, indeed – ecording devices of all kinds. These are obvious examples. Less obvious are those products that serve memory by reminding us of a past either real or enhanced through the filter of nostalgia: the retro automobiles – Volkswagen’s New Beetle and Chrysler’s PT Cruiser. These two cars, launched in 1998 and 2000 respectively, refer to a recent cultural past: for the New Beetle, it is the late 1960’s, and for Chrysler’s PT Cruiser, it is the 1940’s / 1950’s. [8] Through the modified design of the New Beetle and its advertising, Volkswagen references the shared cultural past of flower power, love-ins and 1967 by linking its new product to the cultural context of its own previous one, thereby drawing on its own internally-created memory. Chrysler, on the other hand, invents an ersatz past by linking its new product to “the hot rods of the forties and fifties”, yet not to any car in particular. And through the launching of these two body designs, both the cultural past is reactivated and a new shared experience is created for the consumer: a collective experience of the present characterized by a nostalgic sensibility toward the past. Interpreting a culture’s relationship to its collective past through the analysis of specific, designed objects, benefits from employing the techniques of psychoanalytic dream interpretation, namely amplification and association, to these collective memories. Memory functions in similar way to the dream; it (the 1

The Festival d’Ivrea’s “Battle of the Oranges” is an event that commemorates the 12th century peasant uprising against the nobility of this Piedmont (Italian) town. Representing the peasants, the townspeople hurl oranges at a small group of people who act as the nobility, riding through town on a horse-pulled cart. This ritual performance has occurred largely unchanged since the 16th century.

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dream) is a narrative that is largely associational and highly-motivated to suit the needs of the dreamer. Likewise, memory (personal or shared) is largely associational, frequently inaccurate, and motivated by the need for logical, historical and / or aesthetic coherence. The collective past filtered through the eyes and experiences of a collective present results in a nostalgic gaze: one that must be stylized enough to successfully attract, capture the attention of, and activate a collective complex that longs for that real or imagined past. Building on a current fascination with self-reflection across a variety of artistic modes (from autobiographical short films to the resurgence of literary memoirs), technology companies are building product lines designed to facilitate this creative expression of personal memory. Hewlett Packard’s line of printer accessories provides templates for scrapbooking and quilting, simplifying the integration of photographs and scanned images of nostalgic objects into one’s everyday, artistic creations. “Tradition meets technology and memories are made,” encourages the website text. [9] In addition to launching actual products that facilitate the sharing of memory, the company’s website assists consumers in adopting these social practices by offering support, templates and virtual communities. The civic zoning process presents an exceptionally coherent example of the mediation of tradition and change in institutional policy. Zoning practice in residential communities is designed to preserve certain qualities of the past, among them urban planning / architectural integrity and style, and the “felt” quality of the community, while mitigating the challenges brought on by increases in population density and the effects of sprawl. Certain communities with historic, landmark status (such as Georgetown, Washington, D.C.) are especially incented to preserve the historic character of their building and sites, while other communities (Disney’s Celebration2, Florida, for example) rely on zoning practice to invent this traditional or historic character, where none existed before. In this way, civic process is central to shaping the quality of everyday experience. Through the signifiers of architectural style and the prescribed uses of public space, local governments can imprint an aesthetic and functional sensibility in the lives of its inhabitants. Museums are among those institutions that are challenged to support the dialectic of tradition and change. At their most rigid, museums can be designed as a culture’s attic: a repository of catalogued objects, available for one-way viewing by those with enough curiosity and stamina. At their most progressive, museums are designed as engaging sites that ask as many questions as they answer, encouraging the viewer to seek out what literary scholars call “interpretive gaps”: sources of ambiguity left to the beholder to fill in, thus encouraging the active processing of information rather than the passive viewing of a previously completed work. New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, opened in 1997 as a self-proclaimed “institution of memory”, was designed as a living memorial to preserve the stories of those who perished during the Holocaust, and to situate Jewish traditions and culture within the context of the twentieth century. It achieves this aim so successfully by focusing on the uniqueness of each story and artifact, rather than by 2

The town of Celebration, Florida, conceived as a small southeastern town with pre-1940s architecture, was designed, developed and managed by The Celebration Company, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, from its first move-in in 1996 until its sale in 2004 to a private real estate investment company.

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reinforcing the over-determined quality of collective experience. Such a notion of representation would aim to tell a single, coherent story, a kind of ur-experience, that is precisely what the museum strived to overcome. But these unique stories are still carefully chosen to represent the museum’s mission; no individual stories conflict with the overarching story or perspective that the museum is compelled to tell: of survival, of the importance of memory, and the passing on of traditions to future generations. Thus, this collection of unique, individual memories was designed to function as a surrogate memory for those who can no longer tell their stories. CONCLUSION Future design managers are challenged to consider subtle human experience in their cultural activity of world-making, and indeed – to foreground it as a priority when considering the undercurrents of the designed environment. The experiences this author seeks to highlight are those that are most responsive to the impulses of tradition and change, and specifically – understanding these as psychological impulses. Such an approach can be successfully applied to design, broadly defined as a contrivance. Therefore, we needn’t simply look to the design of products, but also to the institutions and everyday practices shaped by them. One needs to ask, whether designing or experiencing design, “Is there a consistent template here (tradition and the conserving impulse) to which this design unconsciously adheres? And to what extent has this work broken or pushed against that template (change and the progressive impulse)? To what extent was the template deliberately designed with interpretive gaps in order to allow for human agency?” Part of the responsibility of the design educator then, is to encourage students to consider these and other similar vectors, as the impulses that charge people’s experiences of their designed environment. REFERENCES [1] Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press, NY, 1989. [2] Middleton, D., and Edwards D., eds. Collective Remembering. Sage, London, 1990. [3] Schaefer, Roy. “Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue” in Mitchell, WJT, ed. On Narrative. Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981. [4] Greenblatt, Stephen, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Karp, Ivan and Steven Lavine, eds. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1991. [5] Clarke, Alison. “Tupperware: Product as Social Relation” in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field. Winterthur Museum, Delaware 1997. [6] Neisser, Ulric. “Self-narratives: True and False,” in Neisser, Ulric and Robyn Fuvish eds. The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994. [7] Barclay, C.R. “Composing Protoselves through Improvisation” in Neisser, Ulric and Robyn Fuvish, eds. The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-Narrative. Cambridge University Press, New York, 1994. [8] Daimler Chrysler, Promotional Literature for the 2005 PT Cruiser. http://www.daimlerchrysler.ca/EN/CHRYSLER/1

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[9] Hewlett Packard, Activity Center. http://h10050.www1.hp.com/activitycenter/us/en/dir_quilting.html

INUIT VERNACULAR DESIGN AS A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE FOR LEARNING Janne Beate Reitan* Oslo University College, Norway. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The concept vernacular design allows for the understanding and the appreciation of the fact that even those without a degree in the design profession can practise design. A study of how Inuit (Eskimo) women from North Alaska learn design is the empirical basis for an interpretation inspired by the social learning theory of Wenger in his ‘Communities of practice’. This theory promises to be of particular relevance for future research into the learning of design. Keywords: Vernacular design, design learning, learning theory 1 VERNACULAR DESIGN Do ordinary people design, or is the concept design reserved for academically educated professional designers? Vernacular design – a concept I will introduce below – implies the recognition that practitioners who have never entered a school of design can also practice design. In my doctoral thesis Improvisation in Tradition [1], on which this paper is based, I focus on the design of contemporary traditional clothing made by the women of Kaktovik village in Northern Alaska. For a wider understanding of the design concept we can refer to Schön, who points to the architect Christopher Alexander’s interest in Slovakian peasant shawls, which Schön sees as ‘… an informal, collective, generational process of design’ [2]. It is important to see the differences of design practices, but, as Schön continues, it is also interesting to examine the similarities in developing: ‘…a generic design process which underlies these differences…’ [2]. Christopher Alexander discusses the design process, or methods for creating things or buildings, in what he calls ‘unselfconscious cultures’ [3], which in the past were often termed primitive. *Oslo University College PO BOX 4 St. Olavs plass, 0130 Oslo, Norway Phone: +47 22 45 34 13 Email: [email protected]

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Alexander noticed the high quality of design from these cultures, and mentioned the Slovakian shawls by way of example. Alexander wished to identify a design process for selfconscious cultures built on these qualities. Alexander’s definition of the design process in unselfconscious cultures is that this process is learned informally through imitation and correction, while in selfconscious cultures, design is taught academically and in relation to explicit rules. Since the methods of learning are important, I have therefore chosen to focus on the learning aspect of design. To avoid the ambiguous and problematic terms unselfconscious and selfconscious I use the more neutral term vernacular design, inspired of vernacular architecture [4] to refer to unselfconscious cultures, and the corresponding term academic design for design from what Alexander calls selfconscious cultures. In a study about design in organizations, Gorb and Dumas make the distinction between silent design, for design by people who are not professional designers, and formal design, for professional design [5]. They do so without any references to Alexander’s work. As far as I know, Alexander never carried out empirical research into how the design process actually is practiced and learned in what he calls unselfconscious cultures. I see it as essential to examine more closely how people without a professional design education – vernacular designers – practice and learn design, with the intention of identifying qualities that might be introduced to the field of academic design. 2 DESIGN IN KAKTOVIK, ALASKA In order to pursue an empirical investigation of vernacular design, I sought out a society where people practiced design without an education from design schools. Many different vernacular designs exist around the world, such as Inuit kayaks, Afghan or Sámi clothing, or Norwegian knitting [6]. I chose to travel to the Inuit village of Kaktovik on the northeast coast of Alaska in the winter of 1997 and the summer of 1998. Approximately 200 Inuit live in Kaktovik; the few non-Inuit in the community live there mainly for short periods. Kaktovik has no road link to the outside world, and is around 300 km from its nearest settlement, an oil drilling rig, and 700 km from the nearest town or city. The only transport is by air, apart from local travel by snow-scooter or small boat. All the same, the village has most of the same services and facilities as the rest of the USA. The economy of the region is largely based on income from oil production in the area. Hunting and whaling continue to be important expressions of Inuit identity, as well as a way of procuring meat, which is very expensive in the village stores. In Kaktovik I was accepted as a ‘daughter’ of the Inuit family of my sister-in-law Evelyn Anguyak Reitan. This meant that I made contact quickly with the seamstresses in Kaktovik, who are all, more or less, in the same extended family. This made it easier to make contact and to pursue the research. I observed some of the seamstresses while they designed and made their contemporary traditional Inuit clothes; I interviewed some of them and myself tried to design and sew in conformity with their tradition. I filmed everything on digital video as a means of carrying out further interpretation.

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3 LEARNING THROUGH A COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE The interpretation of the empirical enquiries from Alaska in my doctoral thesis, is inspired by reflexive methodology [7], implying two dissimilar theoretical starting points: Schön’s theory reflection-in-action, and Wenger’s theory community of practice. Here, I focus on the latter context of interpretation: the community of practice, which I think is particularly relevant to an enquiry into design practices, because this social learning theory fits the social practice of designing. According to Wenger, communities of practice are not a new method of organizing learning; rather, this method of learning, and of developing knowledge, came into being when people first began to obtain food collectively and socially, and band into groups thousands of years ago. ‘Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis’ [8]. All people belong to different communities of practice, which we create naturally without outer formal frameworks. A community of practice can be the gang on the corner, the family bringing up children, a research network on the internet, the seamstresses from Kaktovik, or designers who wish to share knowledge and learn from each other in a large organization. To be able to learn within a community of practice it is necessary to get permission to take part in what Lave and Wenger call legitimate peripheral participation [9]. Wenger states that learning occurs through first peripheral participation, then gradually taking a full part in the actual community of practice. Wenger’s theory stresses that learning occurs everywhere in daily life, not only in institutions created especially for this purpose. Learning is thus integrated into everyday practices in the community. Not all practice is learning, however. A learning practice is that which alters or develops the identity of the practitioner, who we are, and how we interpret who we are. The interpretation of how women from Kaktovik in northern Alaska learn to design Inuit contemporary traditional clothes is a very suitable case for the wider discussion of design learning inspired by Wenger. In Kaktovik, this design process is highly analogous with Wenger’s perspective on learning, which stands in opposition to the conventional view of learning. My observations at Kaktovik were inspired by the alternative or contrary standpoint, contrary to the conventional view of learning practiced by most educational institutions, which Wenger characterises thus: Our institutions, to the extent that they address issues of learning explicitly, are largely based on the assumption that learning is an individual process, that it has a beginning and an end, that it is best separated from the rest of our activities, and that it is the result of teaching…To assess learning we use tests with which students struggle in one-on-one combat, where knowledge must be demonstrated out of context, and where collaborating is considered cheating. [10]

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3.1 THE VERNACULAR LEARNING PROCESS WAS NOT AN INDIVIDUAL PROCESS When one sees a Kaktovik Inuit group of women, men, and children in atigis (parkas) or atikluks (indoor clothing), one will quickly notice that the garments have a ‘family resemblance’, a unique style, distinct from other clothing. Deliberately building on others’ work is the rule, and not the exception. This is definitely not seen as cheating! The seamstresses thus build on a common knowledge, a collective repertoire, even though every garment is unique. In fact the common knowledge implies that every garment must be unique. One of their informal rules is never to copy, either one’s own work or that of others. In terms of the community of practice involved in sewing Inuit clothes, not all the Inuit women from Kaktovik belonged, and none of the resident whites did. I was able to learn to make and use Inuit clothes by virtue of my role as a member of the extended family, even though I was non-Inuit. However, not all the Inuit women made clothes themselves. Some received Inuit clothes from family or friends; others never wore Inuit clothes at all. All the women had the option of legitimate peripheral participation, but not all chose to take part. The process of learning to design and make Inuit clothes is a collective matter in Kaktovik. All the participants learn from each other all the time. Novices usually learn more than the experienced seam-stresses, but the experts also learn from newcomers as well as each other. Everyone learns by taking up and adapting new materials and adding new techniques to the common repertoire. Examples of this are ready-made ornaments for applying to the fabric, or machine embroidery. 3.2 THE VERNACULAR LEARNING PROCESS HAD NO BEGINNING OR END The first phase of the learning process, before newcomers make their debut as seamstresses of Inuit clothes, is a long one; it stretches from infancy to young adulthood. The debut usually did not occur until they themselves established families and it was expected that they made clothes for themselves and their husbands and children. This means that, as they grow up, they can focus gradually but consistently on the different aspects of the processes, observing the problem areas that the experienced seamstresses stumble over, watching them and by listening to their outbursts towards their work when something goes wrong. Each seamstress from Kaktovik made a certain number of Inuit garments in the course of a year, perhaps anywhere between two and ten. This means that each child observed parts of the design and production process of between twenty and a hundred different garments, made by various seamstresses such as grandmother, great aunt, mother or aunt until their own debut. This long familiarity makes it possible to learn complicated rules in the community of practice for what frameworks the tradition implies for the common repertoire at any given time. It implies also to learn the rules for individual creativity within these frameworks – improvisation in tradition.

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In the second phase, after the debut, adult seamstresses are constantly able to develop their knowledge of making Inuit clothes, by taking part in the community of practice. This means that the learning process has no beginning or end, because there is a constant supply of new participants from the new, growing generations. 3.3 THE VERNACULAR LEARNING PROCESS WAS NOT A SEPARATED ACTIVITY Neither practice – the designing and making of Inuit clothing from textiles – nor the learning of this practice, happens in institutions in Kaktovik, such as schools or courses. The school in the village follows the normal curriculum of American schools; the only difference being the fact that the pupils had one hour’s lesson in the Inuit language every day. Nevertheless, there are no lessons in making Inuit clothes, whether garments are made from skins or textiles. The practice and the learning takes place in their homes, integrated into daily life. The seamstresses made clothing in the living room, the kitchen or in one of the bedrooms, during intervals between domestic caring tasks such as childcare or food preparation, or pastimes such as watching television. When I made prior arrangements with the various informants about when I could visit and watch them sew, things never transpired as planned. The women were constantly interrupted by caring tasks which took priority over sewing. There was no regulated work period for when they could concentrate upon designing and sewing. I regard this as an important reason for the development of a tradition that they continue to build on, at the same time as there is room for their own creativity and improvisation in tradition. It means that the design of a new garment does not take a very long time, yet the women find an outlet for their need to be creative. The results are aesthetically and functionally pleasing, because they build on a collective repertoire tried and tested over a long period. 3.4 THE VERNACULAR LEARNING PROCESS WAS NOT A RESULT OF TEACHING When I made my observations in Alaska, I saw clearly that learning had taken place, since the women could certainly design and sew Inuit clothes. However, I did not see any explicit instruction taking place. When the girls, or the young women, made their debut with the sewing of a first atigi, it was expected that without any form of instruction or help they would be able to design and make the whole garment – included the trim – alone, with a satisfactory result. It was not usual that young girls practiced on parts of atigis before they made their debut as young adults. Millie, Mildred Patuknak Aishanna, was my ‘mother’ while I lived in Kaktovik, and one of my main sources of information. Millie’s daughters and grandchildren looked on while she designed and sewed several Inuit garments whilst I was there. This I have chosen to call learning by watching, a form of learning which in my opinion is much undervalued in learning theories, including Wenger’s theory, in contrast to Dewey’s much used learning by doing. Also in professional design education learning by doing is regarded most customary [11]. Dewey himself criticized parts of the movement of radical education for their narrow understanding of the learning by doing as reduced to merely activity [12].

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Inuit clothing is on display in many situations in Kaktovik’s social life such as when Eskimo dancing takes place, when one meets another woman dressed in Inuit clothes, often worn for everyday use – on the road or in the store. Moreover, when one comes through the front door when visiting people, one immediately notices many different atigis, in countless variations, but in typical Inuit style. These atigis hang on rows of pegs by the entry to the house. The learning arenas and situations are therefore endless, even for the people from a little village such as Kaktovik. 3.5 LOCAL ASSESSMENT OF VERNACULAR LEARNING DID NOT USE TESTS The evaluation of the first garment a newcomer made was strict. The beginner had to make an entire decorated garment without any form of tuition from the older seamstresses. If the experienced seamstresses – the grandmother, the mother or an aunt – did not accept the newcomer’s handiwork, the newcomer was told ‘Do it over!’ The community of practice expected that a beginner should design and make a complete and worthy garment from the first attempt. Another important arena for the evaluation of Inuit clothes was Inuit ceremonies, such as Eskimo dancing, that occurred over the course of the year. If the seamstresses liked what they saw on these occasions they expressed it – if not, they usually looked, but said nothing. Sometimes boys and men, who would never themselves become full participants in the community of practice of Inuit seamstresses, gained a certain amount of knowledge about what the important features were in good products. This meant that even boys and men were sometimes present during garment production, appraised Inuit clothes, and occasionally gave advice to the seamstresses, preferably to novices such as myself. Through these evaluations the community of practice, both novices and experts, developed the collective repertoire of how the garments should be designed and sewn. 3.6 VERNACULAR KNOWLEDGE WAS NOT DEMONSTRATED OUT OF CONTEXT Designing and making Inuit clothing is to a large extent tacit knowledge [13], which is not expressed in words, but through practice. This was particularly the case in the design process. This visual planning of the garment was seldom made explicit or articulated verbally. Nevertheless, the garments they produced were clear evidence that they had a good understanding of design. When learning happens non-verbally, then, they had no great need to verbalise this knowledge. It is probably possible to verbalise much of what they know, but this will not happen as long as both learning and practice function inside the community of practice where verbalisation of the processes involved is not necessary. 4 NEW PERSPECTIVES ON DESIGN EDUCATION As far as the vernacular design and production of Inuit clothes is concerned, my interpretation shows the following. • The learning process was a collective process

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• The learning process had no beginning or end • The learning process was integrated into daily life • The learning process was not a result of tuition • Appraisal of the learning process was integrated into practice • Knowledge was demonstrated through practice As mentioned above, this is a perspective on learning that differs from the conventional one in educational institutions. Looking at design practice and learning in a context different from the conventional educational institutions can open new perspectives. To look at academic design education through the same six points in the future might perhaps show more similarities than differences between the learning process of vernacular and academic design. Such research would help build a more thorough scientific foundation in order to develop a more functionally effective design education. REFERENCES [1] Reitan, Janne Beate. In progress. Improvisation in Tradition. The Vernacular Design of Inupiaq Clothing. PhD, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo. [2] Schön, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books. p. 77 [3] Alexander, Christopher. 1967 [1964]. Notes on the Synthesis of Form. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. pp. 33-36 [4] Rudofsky, Bernard. 1964. Architecture without Architects. New York: The Museum of Modern Art. [5] Gorb, Peter, and Angela Dumas. 1987. Silent Design. Design Studies 8 (3):150-156. [6] Reitan, Janne. 1992. Selbustrikking - kompetanse for morgendagen? [Traditional Norwegian Knitting – Knowledge for Tomorrow?] Master, Art and Design Programme, Oslo University College, Oslo. [7] Alvesson, Mats, and Kaj Sköldberg. 2000. Reflexive methodology. London: SAGE. [8] Wenger, Etienne, Richard McDermott, and William M. Snyder. 2002. Cultivating Communities of Practice. Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press. p. 4 [9] Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [10] Wenger, Etienne. 2003 [1998]. Communities of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 3 [11] Dorst, Kees, and Isabella Reymen. 2004. Levels of Expertise in Design Education. Paper read at IE&PDE, September 2-3, 2004, at Delft, pp.159-166 [12] Dewey, John. 1979 [1915]. Schools of Tomorrow. In John Dewey. The Middle Works, 18991924, edited by J. A. Boydston. Carbondale: South Illinois University Press. p. 255 [13] Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Anchor Books.

EXPLORING THE CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AMONGST A GROUP OF PRODUCT DESIGN STUDENTS Nick Hobson* Alloy Total Product Design, Unit 1, Hurlands Business Centre, Surrey. Paul Rodgers** School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the extent to which evidence of a design student’s cultural origins, as a result of living in a truly globalized society, can be seen in their product design project work. Pierre Bourdieu’s three forms of “cultural capital” [1, 2] are used as a starting point from which to categorize the results of a sketching study carried out within two undergraduate design programmes in Scotland. The study involved product design students born in the UK and product design students born overseas who were all studying in Scotland at the time. Bourdieu’s three forms of cultural capital facilitated exploration of the differences and similarities between the two sets of design students’ sketching techniques. Keywords: Globalization, cultural capital, product design, sketching 1 INTRODUCTION Globalization is the process of economic, social and cultural transformation that took place, predominantly, in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Globalization has transformed the world in which we live [3, 4]. Advances in all forms of communications and transport have brought global travel, commerce and communication to a large percentage of the world’s population [5]. It would be foolish to attempt to address all the aspects of globalization and its impacts on the world’s cultures in one study. It is *Alloy Total Product Design, Unit 1, Hurlands Business Centre, Hurlands Close, Farnham, Surrey GU9 9JE e: [email protected], t: +44 (0) 1252 712000, f: +44 (0) 1252 712111 **Napier University, School of Design and Media Arts, Merchiston, 10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh EH10 5DT e: [email protected], t: 0131 455 2313, f: 0131 455 2292

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apparent, however, that through the course of this study by focusing on the impact of globalization on product design students and their cultural roots that there are many variables influencing their final design outcomes. The aim of this paper then is to investigate the extent to which design students draw upon their cultural roots. By questioning both UK students and overseas students on exchange programs in the UK, the goal is to discover what aspects of the students’ culture were retained and evident in their work. 2 STUDY The product design students participating in this study were all based in Scotland and studying Product Design at Honours level. The students, who were all taking part on a voluntary basis, comprised of seventeen students, nine of whom originated from the UK and eight from overseas. Product design students were selected for the study in order to gather the rich visual data required for the study. 2.1 BACKGROUND The students in this study were all asked to first complete a small booklet of tasks. The first task was a questionnaire to gather information on each student’s background including their age, their country of birth, their nationality and the nationality of their parents. The students were also asked what and how many countries they had lived in, what languages they spoke, their education history including locations of institutions and length of study. 2.2 PERSONAL INVENTORY In order to identify what the students consider important to them they were next asked to draw up two lists. These were used to catalogue evidence of their lifestyles. Firstly the students listed all the countries that they had visited, regardless of the time spent there or the nature of the trip. Secondly the students were asked to list all personal items that they had brought or would take on a cultural exchange. This exercise yielded a significant number of common items across all nationalities represented. 2.3 INFLUENCES Lastly, students were asked to name three well-known designers that they felt had an influence on their design education. The results of this were extremely varied and somewhat unexpected. The final question asked the students which three countries they thought had the greatest influence on design.

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3 DRAWING STUDY The final three pages of the booklet contained space in which the students were asked to draw three mundane household objects from memory. Using one page for each drawing the students were asked to draw a table lamp, a telephone and kettle. These objects were chosen as it was felt that the students would have sufficient knowledge of each item to draw it to a good standard. The aim of this exercise was to ask the students to draw three everyday objects in order to see if there were any common trends in objects drawn or drawing styles between nationalities. The students were not told what the purpose of the study was in order to prevent a bias in the results produced, as research has shown that knowledge of the objectives may introduce a bias, known as the Hawthorne Effect [6]. Drawing is a basic skill for all designers, by asking the students to draw three objects it was hoped to be able to detect differences in the objects drawn between the students. Tseng et al [7] suggest that functional knowledge of an object may play a critical role in the reasoning underlying sketch production. Functional knowledge is said to contribute to the accuracy of the object recalled but can interfere with the organization of a drawing which is generally driven by geometrical or structural knowledge. 3.1 TABLE LAMP SKETCHES When considering the table lamp sketches it is interesting to observe the type of objects drawn (Figure 1). Four of the UK students all drew a lamp with a round base, a thin flexible neck (often ribbed) with the bulb and shade at the top angled downwards (UK student lamps 1 to 4). Two sketches which are almost identical in composition are UK student lamps 2 and 3. However, the only common thread between these two students is that they are both from Scotland and both listed Japan as an influential country despite neither of them having been there. The majority of the International students (Figure 1) have drawn table lamps with ceramic bowl type bases and a shade on top covering the bulb (lamps 1 to 4). It is interesting to note that three of these students were from Scandinavian countries. Other details common in these four lamp sketches are the concertina effect on the shade and the electrical cord. Two UK students also drew this style of lamp with shades. Of these six students that drew this style of lamp, five listed Italy as an influential country. The final common lamp between the two sets of students was that of International student 7 and UK student 7 who each drew a hinged work lamp. The only differences being that International student 7 had a desk clamp fitting and

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Figure 1. Table lamp student sketches. the UK student 7 had drawn a freestanding lamp with a base. The number of arms and hinge points were the same and both appeared to have the on/off switch mounted on the back of the shade. One student had drawn a lamp very similar in appearance to a well known Swedish furniture store (UK lamp 8), and when pressed as to why he had drawn this lamp the student explained that he had owned one for a number of years and it was the first lamp to spring to mind. One student from each set (i.e. International and UK) drew a lamp entirely different to that of any other lamp represented in the study. UK student 9 drew something resembling a lantern with an electric cord whist International student 8 drew a lamp that would appear to have a clamp fixing, a bulb and type of shade but no common ties were found between these two students. 3.2 TELEPHONE SKETCHES The study of telephone sketching perhaps provided the most interesting results of the drawing exercises. Eight of the seventeen students drew an old rotary dial style phone with the handle resting on top of the base unit (Figure 2). The ratio of these drawings was an equal split between the UK and International students, but the gender breakdown was five women to three men. One explanation why eight of the seventeen students sketched this old style of telephone is that these students grew up with this type of phone in the early 1980s and it is the phone that they have the greatest functional knowledge of. The old rotary dial style phone is still used as a graphic symbol for a telephone in may different cultures, the call/ hang-up buttons on a mobile phone often have this graphic to denote the function of the buttons, the Yellow Pages and BT telephone boxes also use this symbol as an illustration. For a style of phone that is rarely

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Figure 2. Telephone student sketches. used any longer its iconic shape has remained in circulation in other forms much longer than its physical manifestation was ever intended to. Another popular type of telephone drawn by the two sets of students was that of the more angular twelve buttoned telephone of the late 1980’s (UK phone 5 and 6, and International phone 5 and 6). There was a considerable age range between these students from nineteen to twenty-eight years and few common links between them. The final type of phone common to both groups was the portable phone with a docking station. Three UK students and one International student drew this phone type (UK phone 7, 8, and 9 and International phone 7). The International student was the only one of the four to have drawn their phone in perspective. All the UK students drew phones with aerials and the international student, from Japan, wrote ‘BT’ on her phone. All four students listed Japan as an influential country, which could have been a technological influence resulting in the drawing of portable phones. Finally only one student drew a mobile phone (International phone 8) who did not list, when asked in the questionnaire, her mobile phone as an important personal item. However her drawing would indicate through its detail that it is a product with which she is familiar and is influential enough to have caused her to draw it from memory. 3.2 KETTLE SKETCHES The final object that the students were asked to draw from memory was a kettle (Figure 3). With the kettles there was a greater degree of variation than the previous drawing exercises, occurring mainly in the features such as the handle, water level indicator and base (power base or electrical cord). For the most part the kettles had straight vertical edges, were elliptical in cross section and had triangular spouts. The handles were frequently the weakest parts of the compositions and varied considerably in size and shape, perhaps illustrating that there may be an absence of structural knowledge in this area. This is best illustrated in the kettle sketches of the International students 6 and 7. The two kettles appear to be very similar except for a slight difference in perspective. International kettle 6 seems to have a more two dimensional, slender handle that doesn’t look like it would support the weight of the kettle when full and may be awkward to use. International kettle 7’s handle is more substantial and has been kept closer to the body of the kettle and appears more functional than that of International kettle 6.

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The kettle drawings also indicate who may be more familiar with the object as many students (both UK and International) drew a 2D line drawing representation with little detail (UK kettles 2 to 5, and International kettles 5 and 8). Other students drew their kettle in perspective, shaded the object to give it volume and included detail in well proportioned drawings. International kettle 8 (USA student) drew an object that is probably closer to a teapot than a kettle. From the first author’s own experience, Americans tend to drink more coffee than tea and do so by making it in coffee machines as opposed to boiling the water in the kettle. Kettles that are owned by Americans are rarely electric but are heated on the hob of an oven thus suggesting that the drawing represented is that of a kettle intended for heating on a stove. Similar kettles are shown in UK student kettle sketches 8 and 9, who drew more traditional style kettles where the

Figure 3. Kettle student sketches. handle comes over the top of the lid. One of these two kettles was illustrated as an electrical appliance whilst the other was animated with steam coming from the spout. As mentioned above, some kettles were drawn with power base fittings so that they can be lifted off the base which provides electricity to the heating element. This type of kettle was drawn by five UK students (UK kettles 1 to 5), and one international student (International kettle 5) which perhaps indicates that this style of kettle is more commonly found in the UK market than continental Europe or the rest of the world. 3.2 SKETCHING SUMMARY It is interesting to note that in all categories, particularly the telephone sketches that there was a progression in either the style of the objects or the technologies involved, or sometimes a combination of the two. It was initially thought that this could have been due to the range in ages of the students but as discussed in the case of the telephones this did not appear to be the case. In order to gain a more accurate picture of the improvement in a students drawing skills the same study would have to incorporate the student’s drawing ability from when they first started studying for their degree and again near to the end of their studies in order to gain a measurement of progress and improvement (if at all) in the student’s abilities.

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3 CONCLUSIONS This project attempted to test the hypothesis that globalization and the exposure to different cultures would have an impact on a design student’s sketching. Through the course of this research it became apparent that these influences are particularly hard to measure. Whilst at university the students are in the formative stages of becoming designers, during which time they are influenced by many factors. Such factors include the philosophies, outlooks and beliefs of the university in which they are studying, as well as those of their lecturers. The original aim of asking the students to draw three everyday objects was to discover if there were any common trends in the objects or drawing styles between nationalities. From the results shown (Figures 1, 2, 3) and discussed, it can be seen that there were trends in the objects drawn but not in the style in which they were drawn. There is insufficient evidence to suggest there are certain national styles in the objects drawn. However the study did demonstrate that some objects are common to a variety of nationalities such as the old rotary dial style telephone that dominated the telephone drawings. It is also interesting to note that the functional knowledge of an object influenced the type of object drawn by students in the study. REFERENCES [1] Bourdieu, P., Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Routledge, London, 2000. [2] Fowler, B., Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations, Sage Publications, London, 1997. [3] Featherstone, M., Global Culture, Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, Sage Publications, London, 1990. [4] Featherstone, M., Undoing Culture, Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity, Sage Publications, London, 1995. [5] Aldersey-Williams, H., World Design, Nationalism and Globalism in Design, Rizzoli, New York, 1992. [6] Crothers, S., Montgomery, I. and Clarke, R., An Investigation into the Role of Prototypicality in the Design of Consumer Products. The Design Journal, Vol. 6, Issue 1, 2003. [7] Tseng, W., Scrivener, S. and Ball, L., Sketching Behaviour in Object Recall and Object Copying, Proceedings of the 4th conference on Creativity and Cognition, Loughborough, UK, 2002, pp. 57-64.

WEST MEETS EAST: NEGOTIATING AMBIGUITIES AT THE EARLY STAGE OF DESIGNING Priscilla Chueng-Nainby* School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, United Kingdom. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The socio-cultural differences between Western and Chinese designers highlights the issue of negotiating ideas at the early stage of designing when communication is kept ambiguous in order to be exploratory. This research takes the viewpoint of Chinese designers with Western experience. In two studies, we explore: 1) cultural issues concerning Chinese designers working in the West, 2) Chinese viewpoint in negotiating ideas with Western designers at the early stage of designing. The issues revealed subsequently inform a proposed dialectic framework useful for Western/Chinese designers to negotiate ideas with ambiguity at the early stage of designing. Keywords: cross-cultural, conceptual design, design thinking, design communication, east-west, ambiguity, design practice, dialectics. 1 INTRODUCTION The research informing this paper was prompted by the growing trend of Western designers to practice in China, a trend that following the earlier ‘offshoring’ of production to the Far East. The socio-cultural differences between Western and Chinese designers highlight the issue of negotiating ideas that is otherwise masked in monocultural collaborations. This is particularly prominent at the early stage of design when designers tend to leave ideas and communication ambiguous in order to be exploratory [1], [2], [3], [4]. To work together successfully however, Western and Chinese designers must contend with differences in thinking, communication and often concepts of designing.

*School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, 10 Colinton Road, Merchiston, Edinburgh, Midlothian EH10 5DT, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected]

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2 WESTERN/CHINESE DESIGNING Western designing is generally considered as more advanced than the Chinese [5] with the established design research in methods and theories. In contrast, the predominantly craft based Chinese designing may result in the current trend in China of adopting the Western design process [6]. It may seem incongruous as the fundamental differences in Western and Chinese thinking and communication [7], [8], [9], [10], can be heavily influential in designing. Our view is that Western design methods may not be easily transferable to Chinese designing. Instead we may have to reconsider Chinese cultural roots to positively engage China in designing [5]. In fact, socio-cultural research identifies cultural dimensions of Western individualism as opposed to Chinese collectivism [10]. While personal goal is more valuable in the West, the Chinese, with holistic worldview, prefer to work as a group. On another level, the West’s long established formal logic derived from Aristotelian hypothetical deductive and analytical way of thinking may explain predominantly sequential problem solving activities pre 1960s design process, causing Chinese Daoism dialectic thinking seemingly intuitive-seeking, metaphoric and non-critical [11]. However, these opposing cultural differences took a turn at Postmodernism. Design after 1960s is well aware of the richness of contextual information as well as alternative way of thinking. The dialectic framework (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) although hard as it is to be understood in the West, has been acquired as a possible way to tackle complex design problems [4], [12], [13], [14]. In viewing that designers tend to leave ideas and communication ambiguous at the conceptual stage in order to be exploratory [1], [2], [3], [4], and little research has been done on cultural issues influencing negotiation of ideas yet preserving ambiguity in a Western/Chinese design practice. This research first identifies cultural issues concerning Chinese designers working in the West, follow by exploring their viewpoint in negotiating ideas with Western designers at the early stage of designing. 3 WESTERN/CHINESE CULTURAL ISSUES IN DESIGNING The first study set out to identify the issues that most concern Chinese designers while collaborating with Western designers. The empirical work focuses on their viewpoints on differences in designing by exploring their design education and design experience in Western/Chinese settings. We interview seven Chinese designers with Chinese as their first language from Shanghai (2), Beijing (1), ShenYang (1), Dalian (1), Hong Kong (1) and Malaysia (1). They are working in the design disciplines of graphic design, fashion design and interior design, who finished their first design degree at a Chinese oriented design institution in their homeland, and later further studied at a design institution in Britain. Questions were open-ended to allow flexibility to further pursue issues expressed by interviewees. Questions are divided into two parts: 1) design education: before the West, after the West and comparing both, and 2) design experience: comparing socio-cultural issues and

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design issues. Interviewees speak Mandarin, Cantonese and English. The Chinese transcriptions are later translated to English. Grounded theory with coding table is the chosen method for qualitative analysis. See Table 1 for part of transcriptions and coding that shows significant issues. One of the key issues grounded from this study is the Chinese designer’s astonishing view over the outspoken Westerners during collaboration. Six out of seven interviewees expressed being less outspoken than their Western counterparts. Another related issue referring to lack of debate for Chinese in collaborative work. Despite language barrier, the explanation could be due to the traditional Chinese value of discouraging speech, as quoted by Lao Tzu: ‘He who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know.’ [15]. Besides, preparing thoughts internally before verbalization for communication seems essential for Chinese people, that the Chinese language is a non-linear pictorial-based language that may not be as efficient for verbalising thoughts [16]. On the other hand, Chinese high power distance [10] may explain the predetermined hierarchical work structure that is more authoritarian. Therefore discussions set for group decision-making may not be the common practice; instead decisions tend to be individually made by a higher authority and given to the subordinates. Most interviewees express this as a master-apprentice relationship with Chinese tutors in contrast to the equal relationship with Western tutors. In summary, the study shows implications of cultural differences for Chinese designers working in the West, in particular the lack of verbalization and authoritarian hierarchy. In comparison to Western designing, little work has been done on how Chinese designers negotiate ideas. Therefore, a second study was conducted on Chinese viewpoint on negotiation of ideas with Western designer at the early stage of designing.

Table 1. Part transcription and coding for study 1. Transcription

Code

“I got a shock when everybody (the Western students) in class started to debate. They talked constantly. But I noticed that Asian like Korean, Japanese and Chinese just stayed quiet.” “I was a junior (designer) during my first year working, I was willing to learn things from my boss and that is to follow direction from my boss……” “It is very hard to express my idea in small group discussion. I would have to wait until it is time for me to speak…they (westerners) would just jump in and talk non-stop.” CODING

LD

AH

NOS

LD: Lack enthusiastic on debate as the method for decision making. NOS: Not as outspoken as the Western Counterparts. AH: The authoritarian characteristic of work place, resulting high power distance.

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4 CHINESE MIDDLE WAY OF NEGOTIATION Three Chinese interaction designers from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia, who have been intensively involved in a cross-cultural design environment during the past year, were interviewed. The interaction design process, with a thorough and prolonged conceptual stage of design, provides a useful platform for this study. Open-ended questions at the early stage of designing focus upon three sections: 1) interpreting design problem, 2) conception of ideas, 3) negotiation of ideas. This study adopted interview and analysis method similar to the first study. See Table 2 for part of transcriptions and coding that shows significant issues. All interviewees expressed frustrations toward group discussions in the form of debate and argument. Furthermore, they felt responsible for taking up the role as a middle person to resolve conflicts to keep the team together. Chinese emphasis on harmony may have contributed to a lack of debate during discussion. According to naïve dialectism, both opposing propositions hold some truth and therefore no side should win in a debate. In addition, concepts and words are dependent on actions, therefore argumentation is not meaningful to gain truth [11]. Instead the emphasis is on finding “the middle way” in which truth can be found in each of two competing propositions [17], [18]. This approach differs from the Western Aristotelian way of understanding by relating one proposition to the other decontextually, and deciding on one that is seemingly correct [19]. In addition, the Middle way [17] approach of overcoming conflicts is common for Chinese people. Therefore critical debates can be undesirable for group discussion for fear of losing harmony. On the other hand, interviewees see the value of cross-cultural collaborations that bring diversity in ideas and the importance of leaving ideas ambiguous at the conceptual stage. The early stage of design often involves negotiation of ideas that could be conflicting at first, but develop into a design decision through inevitable arguments and debates. Western designers seem to be at ease at verbal negotiation through prolonged debate sessions and can be frustrating for Chinese designers who see verbal arguments as a negative value [20]. Consequently, Chinese designers tend to individually develop the idea into a convincible form before presenting it to the group members. The study confirmed that although Chinese designers are aware of the potential of higher abstraction of ideas through group discussions, they are reluctance about debate as a way of negotiation and prefer the Middle Way to overcome what seem to be conflicts. The different viewpoint on verbal negotiation between Western and Chinese designers seem deeply rooted in their cultural values, which are particularly difficult to overcome. Furthermore, negotiating ideas at the conceptual stage is usually exploratory. Therefore, the research attempts to identify possible ways to mediate the different viewpoint yet preserve ambiguity of ideas. One solution is to identify similarity in thinking between Chinese and Western designers through the notion of ambiguity that may be useful as a framework in overcoming differences in negotiation of idea.

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Table 2. Example of transcription and coding for study 2. Transcription

Code

“Under these circumstances when they can’t overcome the differences, I felt that I have responsibility to hold them on together, otherwise the team will be divided.” “If it (the design) is not going to be as strong if this part (my idea) is missing, then I will just go ahead and do it. Because I don’t want to spend another week trying to tell them what the part is….” “…However, we seem to move to higher level to look at the problem through debating, it is like separate the problem into different parts of what (the design) we were doing ….” “But it gets better after that, we figure out a lot of interesting things, in especially how people see things differently.” “It takes some time to understand your working partner on his preference and vice versa. There is a period of adjustment for it to work.” CODING

ME, LD

AC, LD

AD, DS

PCD

ME

LD: Lack enthusiastic on debate as the method for negotiation. ME: Act as the mediator or middle way of resolving conflicts. AC: Prefer action over verbal argumentation as way to truth. DS: Dialectic synthesis. AD: Aware that debate is useful for discussion PCD: Positive viewpoint on cultural differences.

5 DIALECTIC FRAMEWORK FOR NEGOTIATING AMBIGUITIES Ambiguity as a framework has been analytically redefined in the arts domain [1], [21], [22], [23]. It is claimed to provoke multiple interpretations of the 1) likeness; 2) opposites; 3) alternatives; 4) unconnected; 5) complementing; or 6) combination of these [21]. Confronted by the similar, connected or alternative meanings, we either generalise them or make a choice from the alternatives. The most useful ones are the opposites and the unconnected, which we tend to resolve by reinventing understandings through dialectic synthesis between the extremes [21]. It is a mind-expanding activity that seems useful for idea exploration at the early stage of designing.

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According to Goel, it is the ambiguities that allow lateral transformation of conceptual design to happen [24]. Usually, it involves negotiating the ambiguities in which new ideas take over old conceptions rapidly through the dialectic (See Figure I) at both the individual and collaborative level until a decision is made [4], [12], [13], [14]. At the individual level, designers develop an antithesis through design artifacts such as sketching in answer to the thesis of a design brief. A higher level of conception is then achieved through

Figure I Dialectic of the early stage of collaborative designing. the synthesis of thesis and antithesis. Later, when presenting the idea to the group, negotiation happens, again through thesis-antithesis-synthesis: that is the individual idea, group response and group conception. In fact, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis method seems to be one of the similarities between Postmodernist Western design and Daoism Chinese thinking and appears to complement the notion of ambiguity in designing through the dialectics. For this reason, the dialectic nature of ambiguity may be the answer to effectively generate and negotiate ideas in Western/Chinese designing. An ambiguous brief rather than a clear one is more likely to provoke thinking through the differences, hence eradicating cultural differences in understanding. On the other hand, negotiating ideas with ambiguity may overcome social misunderstandings [25]. The diversified interpretations from team members may push for a higher level of conception through the dialectic logic. Therefore the challenge for collaborative conceptual design lies in keeping ideas and communication ambiguous yet exploratory through the dialectics. 6 CONCLUSIONS The first study suggests Chinese lack verbalization and an authoritarian work pattern. The second study confirmed that debates during collaborative idea generation could be frustrating for Chinese designers due to the cultural value of achieving harmony. However, debate is inevitable for negotiation and ambiguity is desirable for idea exploration. In view of this, the research suggests a dialectic framework for idea generation and negotiation at the early stage of designing. Future work will continue

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investigating the dialectic framework of ambiguity for negotiation of ideas through ethnographical study of Western and Chinese design practices. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The author would like to thank Matthew Turner and Paul Rodgers for their generous support and also the research funding from the School of Design and Media Arts at Napier University has made this research project possible. REFERENCES [1] Gaver W, Beaver J and Benford S, Ambiguity as a resource for design, Proceedings of CHI’ 03, ACM Press, New York, 2003. [2] Kelley T. and Littman J., The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm, Doubleday, 2001. [3] Minneman S., The social construction of a technical reality. Ph.D. Dissertation, Stanford University, 1991 [4] Schon D. A. and Wiggins G., Kinds of Seeing and Their Functions in Designing. Design Studies 13 (2), Chicago, IL, 1992, pp.135-156. [5] Buchanan R., Human-centered Design: Changing Perspectives on Design Education in the East and West. Design Issues, vol. 20, no. 1, MIT Press, 1 January 2004, pp.30-39(10). [6] Siu K. C., Redeveloping Design Education in Hong Kong? Design Issues: Volume 19, Number 3, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Summer 2003. [7] Becker C. B., Reasons for the lack of argumentation and debate in the Far East. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 10, 1986, pp.75-92. [8] Moser D. J., Abstract thinking and thought in ancient Chinese and early Greek: Ph.D. Dissertation. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1996. [9] Needham J., Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1954. [10] Hofstede G. H., Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, McGraw-Hill, London, New York, 1991 [11] Peng K. and Nisbett R. E. Culture, dialecticism, and reasoning about contradiction. American Psychologist, 54, 1999, pp. 741-754. [12] Akin O. and Lin C. T., Design Protocol data and novel design decisions. In Cross, N.Christiaans, H. & Dorst, K, (Eds.) Analyzing Design Activity. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996. [13] Goldschmidt G, The dialectics of sketching. Creativity Research Journal, 4, 1991, pp. 123143. [14] Suwa M., Gero J. S. and Purcell T. A., Unexpected discoveries: How designers discover hidden features in sketches, Visual and Spatial Reasoning in Design, J.S. Gero and B. Tversky (eds), Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, Sydney, 1999, pp. 145-162. [15] Lin P., A translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching and Wang Pi’s Commentary, Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, The University of Michigan, 1977. [16] Kim H, We talk, therefore we think? A cultural analysis of the effect if talking on thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(4):828-42, 2002. [17] Liu X. G., The philosophy of Zhung Zi and its evolution. The Social Science Press of China, Beijing, 1988. (In Chinese)

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[18] Nakamura H., Ways of thinking of Eastern peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan. Honolulu. East-West Center Press, 1964/1985. [19] Logan R. F., The Alphabet Effect. Morrow, New York, 1986. [20] Needham J., Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1954. [21] Empson W., Seven Types of Ambiguity, republished 2004, Pimlico, London, 1937. [22] Hunter S and Jacobus J, Modern Art, 3rd edition. Harry N. Abrams Inc, New York, 1992. [23] Pinkal M., Logic and Lexicon. Oxford, London, 1995. [24] Goel V, Sketches of thought, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. xv, 279. [25] Risberg A., Ambiguity and communication in cross-cultural acquisitions: towards a conceptual framework Leadership and Organization Development Journal, vol. 18, no. 5, October 1997, pp. 257-266(10).

DESIGNING ACROSS THE CULTURAL DIVIDE IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF LIFE IN FAVELAS, RIO DE JANEIRO Paul Turnock School of Engineering and Design, Brunel University, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Industrial projects are built in to the second year undergraduate Design programmes within the School of Engineering and Design, Brunel University. These projects have run with manufacturing and service providers and help students work to commercial briefs and also build closer working relationships with industrial clients. It was decided to approach the 2004 project with a more responsible agenda – to look to design for Papanek’s ‘real world’ [1], to design within less commercial constraints and to design for real needs. The opportunity arose through Jody Chapman, a trustee of The Audi Design Foundation. There was a six month project planning phase to build a team to work with Design students on a special project based in Rio de Janeiro. The Audi Design Foundation sponsored the project. The project team comprised Brunel University, Audi Design Foundation, International Family Health, Seymour Powell, The Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Motivation and ICON Magazine. Some of the UK’s most prestigious designers joined forces with the Audi Design Foundation to support Brunel on a project specifically aimed to improve the quality of life for people in a developing country through product design. British designers Wayne Hemmingway, Richard Seymour and David Constantine helped Paul Turnock (Brunel Design) form the team bringing ‘Designs of Substance’ to life. This major design project ran at Brunel University, culminating in one design student traveling to Rio and presenting designs to community workers inside Favelas and meeting people who would develop the idea over the next few years. The unique element to this educational project was that it involved two Rio residents, working with the UK team – Tiana and Marcelo became the eyes and lifestyle of the project and they provided the ‘life’ and context to the 140 design students who had no idea how to start to design for a completely alien culture. The project formed a landmark case study in bringing design students and communities together to find relevant

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problems and to provide appropriate, sustainable and empathetic solutions to improve the quality of life.

1 INTRODUCTION This paper describes the experience of injecting real context to the design curriculum in second year Design programmes. The study combined professional briefing, intensely close working relationships and end user involvement to enhance the experience of design for the real world. The emphasis was to bring many stakeholders involved within the real system into the academic environment in order to create realistic scenarios, inside which the creative process was optimised. Stage 1 took one week., Stage 2 took 14 weeks and the whole project 50 weeks from idea to the visit to Rio in August 2004. The Brunel Design team have run Industrial Client projects annually for the last ten years. Previous projects had been successfully managed with British Airways, Dyson Appliances, Fiat (Turin), Mercedes-Benz Gmbh (Stuttgart), LEGO (Denmark), Fisher-Price (East Aurora, NY State), Bentley Motor Cars (Crewe, UK), Toly Products (Malta). The objectives of incorporating a project-based problem with a ‘real client’ within the Design Process 2 module of the programmes were to provide students with memorable learning experiences of generating design ideas, to introduce students to a new way of understanding user expectations, to begin to appreciate the lifestyle conditions within a very different socio-economic group, to develop rapid idea generation techniques within a very intense short period, to work alongside a high profile professional team and to develop stronger communication skills The curriculum within Brunel Design courses generally precludes the surprise introduction of client-based projects. Time and resources were created through the academic team making room for the project by suspending all teaching and project work for a period of eight working days in the spring semester. This allowed the whole project to be introduced and the specialist team brought in to work with the students without any other interruptions through the first stage of the Rio Project. All students had been taught Design Brief formulation, brainstorming, Algorithm Mapping, concept generation, research techniques and presentation prior to the start of the project. It had been proved that students at this educational level responded well and applied great creative skill to finding potential new design solutions to problems introduced by a new client. This would be the first occasion where most had met a ‘real’ client. The students knew that, at some stage through the two-semester module, they would have to take on a specially prepared brief relevant to a client. It was proven that these projects worked better when the start date of the project was a surprise, that no one, other than the project coordinator, knew of the start date, the client or the nature of the project and that the idea generation stage would be very short. Brunel Design and the Audi Design Foundation had a strong working relationship and ADF had sponsored many individual design projects over a number of years. We were approached to consider running a pilot project whereby the task would be to generate design ideas based on the needs and lifestyle of a culturally complex system, far removed from the design culture within European students of Design in the UK.

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2 THE BACKGROUND Over a six-month period Jody Chapman, Design Engineer, Jaguar Motor Cars created the project, with the generous support of M Farmer, Manager, Audi Design Foundation. The ADF panel were presented with the concept of running a design project competition to help create appropriate solutions for a group of under-resourced users in an internationally recognised special area of need. Jody Chapman selected Rio after an extensive search. ADF were given a detailed presentation of how such a competition could work and that it would be a pilot study which, if successful, would lead to the ADF running more design competitions based on special human needs, empathetic design and sustainable environmental issues. Jody Chapman and Paul Turnock prepared all the project timescale details, the logistical running of such a project and the key players who would need to be in place prior to the students within Brunel University being introduced to the project. ADF approved the project and a prestigious team of specialists was brought together to support the students and be judges of their work. 2 THE PROJECT The project was named ‘Designs of Substance’. The design team comprised Jody Chapman, Trustee of the Audi Design Foundation, Paul Turnock, Director, Industrial Design, Michelle Douglas, Design Lecturer, Brunel, Glen Thompson, Design Lecturer Brunel and Professor E H Billett, Brunel Design. The judging panel for the project would be brought together from across the world to take part in the ‘Designs of Substance’ project. Robert Worthington, one of the project specialists, worked in Rio for Janice Perlman as part of an NGO and started a website called www.favelafaces.org based on the people he met, one of which was Tiana de Souza. She worked on a large demographic study of the Favelas interviewing residents over a period of three years and gathering information about their lives. This was a very dangerous project and both women risked their lives many times to venture in and out of favelas to talk to local residents. Many faveladors are killed if they are caught taking photographs in public places. Robert Worthington recommended Tiana de Souza as our main ‘voice of favelas’ and she agreed to work

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Figure 1. Designs of Substance Project Judging Team. with Brunel in the UK. Tiana chose their mutual friend, Marcelo Arantes, who used to live in the favelas and was now an English teacher in Rio. One spoke no English so the other would be the translator for the whole UK experience. This would be the first time that Tiana had ever left her family or Rio. The project involved a number of key organisations. The judging team included personnel from the Audi Design Foundation, Hemingway Design, ICON Magazine, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, International Family Health, Motivation and SeymourPowell. The Briefing meeting was the first time that all the members of the team met as a group and the students were subjected to two days of concentrated information transfer. ‘Designs of Substance’ was introduced as a live, sustainable-design, industrial project. The brief was open to interpretation and required inspirational and innovative thinking utilizing appropriate technology. Sustainable design parameters were introduced as a real constraint; the key was to have empathy for the target users. The project was based in a challenging community, devoid of basic social amenities where daily routine could be made easier and with a higher value through good design. The students were introduced to their client, the Audi Design Foundation. The target market would be Brazilian urban poor people leading very complex lives. The project objective was to create concept ideas for products that would improve the quality of life for the people of the favelas, Rio de Janeiro. Milestones and deadlines were issued and a first stage concept generation and presentation deadline was set 175 hours from the briefing time. The two day information transfer sessions enabled students to become familiar with the culture within which they would need to provide new design ideas. Students were shown “Cidade de Deus” (City of God), “Tiana’s Day”, a documentary of favela life and a talk by Marcelo Arantes “A day in the life of a Favelador”, an overview of Brazil, its history, culture, and the environment, the history of Rio, culture and the communities and lifestyles within the many favelas. The project was to conceive a new product or system to improve the quality of lives for people living in the favelas. The brief focused on five key aspects; identifying a need, understanding user empathy, economic, social & environmental

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sustainability, pride of ownership and presentation quality. Their incentive was that the winner of the design competition would fly to Rio de Janeiro, meet residents, develop their concepts, and work within the community. The shock of the briefing affected everyone. Many students saw the films, read about life and crime in favelas and found the whole context too complex to comprehend. Many were unable to find problem areas or product themes to explore as the major issues of poverty, crime, territorial gangland, drugs and over-crowding could not be solved through designing a new product. Communication with our Brazilian guests became the cornerstone of the whole project. An information room was created, displaying ideas generated in discussions between student groups, showing other projects being done by global and local organisations, articles from publications and the Web. Students would return to this room to regenerate their motivation, to look for ideas, to share thoughts. The team was always available to discuss the context of living within favelas, to look at preliminary concepts and to feed back their relevance and how they could be improved. The first two days of the project were a series of specialised talks. Students gathered information on sustainability, LCA, working with stakeholder networks in developing countries, the war culture within the child population, life expectancy, living conditions, material possessions, buildings, sanitation, climate, entertainment, shopping and Mardi Gras culture. We observed the ways that students assimilated this information, built hierarchies, externalised their thinking, learnt from each other and then shared their knowledge to the whole group and to our Brazilian guests. The socio-economic aspects of the project proved to be of great importance. Initially the students felt pity for the faveladors, imagining that their lives were squalid, deprived, violent and depressing. The students began to appreciate that the faveladors had a special quality of life, rich in emotive depth, more shared and interdependent than life in Europe and that people had more individual ingenuity, craftsmanship and imagination than first envisaged. The people of Rio believe that their greatest potential lies in what they can do more than how much they possess; the boys all want to be footballers, the girls to be supermodels and everyone has a passion for dancing and for music. The students’ preconceptions of life within favelas began to change. The concepts moved from being globally complex and technologically involved to locally relevant, sustainable and crafted. Smaller concepts were explored so that faveladors could either benefit directly from using these new products in their homes or to set up manufacturing groups and to sell or barter the products to make money. 140 Design students immersed themselves in the project and 8 were selected through seven rounds of reduction by the judges to develop their concepts towards realised design proposals. 3 OUTCOMES ‘Just how were a group of students in Surrey, none of whom had ever been to Brazil, supposed to improve quality of life in the favelas? Especially as they were, in a sense, competing with people who have to be creative to survive, people who have built their own cities out of whatever they could lay their hands on’ [2] Justin McGuirk, Assistant Editor, ICON Magazine

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The team worked closely through both stages and met often to clarify the objectives and to focus creativity. The students found the first week to be one of the most profound experiences of their lives. Many were unable to create ideas that excited them because their view of the whole project was too negative and they were not able to see how positively the inhabitants of favelas could be within such a complex and dangerous context. All the students valued the exercise as being one of the first times they had compared their lifestyle with another and to design for people very different to them. The key for many was to know that a simple product could improve the quality of life for one person. The project could never address instant design solutions for the whole community. The craft skills within user groups were vital to the sustainable aspects of any successful design concept proposal. The students really began to think about the appropriateness of their proposals and to look at the project objectively rather than subjectively. The project drove design students to begin to compile a user lifestyle profile before they could generate ideas. The film made for this project was seen many times by all the students and they began to view it as a puzzle containing all the clues they would need to create a design proposal. The information room and design spaces became more ‘Brazilian’ as music played and images were displayed in order to feel more like the environment. Brunel became Rio for a week. The team worked hard to help remove mental blocks, to allow creative ideas to flow, to develop, sketch, discuss and evolve ideas with our Brazilian guests and to be able to do this within a very short timescale. The removal of all other curriculum activities and other academic lectures proved to be a valuable element. Students were able to live and breathe the project and this created a strong passion in all the group members. Students formed peer discussion groups and idea generation groups. Each day the creative thinking expanded so that all participants could learn from each other. The project generated high quality ideas and appropriate solutions due to strong team work. The Brazilian guests and specialist advisors supplied considerable contact time. Stage 2 involved design seminars with Wayne Hemingway, Jody Chapman and Robert Worthington. The judges provided valuable feedback at the first selection stage and at the final presentation at Audi, London. The team never doubted that the students would find new ideas, innovative concepts and sustainable proposals that would become the foundation of a project development in Rio. The students were motivated because of the high profile of the project and that they were ambassadors of Brunel University and their country. When there were

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Figure 2. Solutions for carrying heavy loads. great language problems, the design students used their drawing, modelmaking and language skills to put across their hiking and to further understand the needs, aspirations and abilities of their designated users within favelas. Stage 1 concepts comprised visual panels – no students could present their ideas. This test proved most useful and focused the visual communication and clarity of language to maximise impact for the judges. A few students produced proposals in English and Portuguese. The judging panel were fully briefed, had a Designs of Substance information pack and judging criteria. The concepts were grouped by project type, e.g. interior, urban education, medical, environmental, safety, etc. Every concept was judged separately, giving each student three opportunities to be selected for the final group. The judges looked for clarity of communication, appropriateness of the idea and empathy to faveladors. All the concepts were compiled into a design ideas book and presented to Tiana and Marcelo so that they could return home to start working within their favelas. Stage 2 was a three month period where the 8 students worked as a team and on their individual projects. All refined their initial ideas and developed the concepts in detail. The projects included handmade bags to carry shopping and children, interior room dividers, walkways up the steep slopes utilising old car tyres, recycled cigarette packets with favela art on new canvas covers, ‘Favela TV’ a forum for anonymous discussion, lights powered by kinetic charging, new versatile furniture and ideas for growing plants on the outside walls of houses. All the students compiled a business plan for their concept, containing a life cycle analysis, a summary of its sustainable elements, pride of ownership, user empathy and why the product was an answer to the brief. The students designed and built an exhibition of their work and each gave a 30 minute presentation to the judging panel. The winning concept was supported by a booklet written in Portuguese with iconographic images explaining how products could be self generated, sustained and developed by faveladors. The winner went to Rio, to Quitungo and Rocinha, favelas in the north-eastern edge of the city, and presented the project.

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4 CONCLUDING REMARKS The ADF ‘Designs of Substance’ project provided a unique insight into the lifestyles, aspirations and skills of the people living in favelas within Rio de Janeiro and proved to be an incredible learning opportunity for students of Design working within a UK institution. The real ‘down-to-earth’ nature of this brief caused many of the students to question their ethical philosophy of design. All the team members learnt so much about the true value of design solutions as being empathetic to their targeted users. ‘The Audi Design Foundation is about passion for functional design. This is a great opportunity to take that passion to benefit an impoverished community. Good design isn’t just about whether a product looks sexy or trendy - design can actually make a major difference to people’s lives’. [3] Michael Farmer, Manager, ADF. Nathan Murphy, the winning student, is developing the Designs of Substance Project. With continuing ADF support, he is developing new media to communicate his design concepts. Booklets are now being designed to help young children in the favelas to make the products and to learn about them through understanding the design, materials, construction and benefits to them and their families. Many people have already developed the project in sustainable new directions. The Audi Design Foundation is now expanding the programme to other Universities in the UK in Autumn 2005. The pilot scheme with Brunel has proved to be a total success and, though exceedingly difficult to set up and manage, the work produced by the students has justified such projects as a future direction for many organisations keen to build links between academic institutions, companies and communities. REFERENCES [1] Papanek V., Design for the real world. Human Ecology and Social Change, Thames & Hudson, London, 1985 [2] McGuirk., Brazil’s Slum Culture. ICON, Issue 017, November 2004, pp.94-100. [3] Farmer M., Designs of Substance Project Summary. Brunel University, 27.2.2004

Chapter Three EDUCATION AND PEDAGOGY

BOUNDARIES IN OUR THINKING Eur Ing Colin Ledsome* MEng, CEng, FIMechE, MIED, MCIM, FBIS London Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Boundaries in expertise may be natural borders between clearly different activities, but expertise changes over time and boundaries can get out of date. Boundaries can become barriers between people, if they are jealously guarded. Alternatively, boundaries can be a point at which we acknowledge that something has changed and must adapt to new circumstances. This paper looks at how boundaries have been created in design and engineering in the last two centuries, the ways in which they have affected our understanding of our work and possible ways to improve matters. Keywords: Design policy, Bologna Agreement. 1 INTRODUCTION “The excellence of every art must consist in the complete accomplishment of its purpose.” - Written over the door of the Victoria and Albert Museum In the first half of the nineteenth century, as engineering became a more overt part of everyday life, the Victorians extended the idea of “art” to include all marketed goods, not just those produced by traditional craftsmen. Manufacture was the link, with the new production methods seen as a logical extension of the crafts, which were already a partner to the arts. Mass produced pottery, cotton and woollen cloth and furnishings extended the lifestyle, previously only affordable by the rich, to the new middle classes with money to spend. The need to move raw materials and finished goods drove the expansion of the canal system and then the railways, which were then also included in with the arts. Even so, there was no real attempt to unify the whole field with a common philosophy. The crafts included all the ways by which things were made and the arts were the processes of deciding what to make. The boundaries between the different arts and crafts were defined by matters of differences in practice; even so many people were practitioners in several of each. *

MEng, CEng, FIMechE, MIED, MCIM, FBIS. 50, St Dunstans Road, Hanwell, London W7 2HB Phone: 020 8840 3916; E-mail: [email protected]

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Engineering had been recognised as a mainly military activity until canals began to be built across the land. An Institution of Civil Engineers was established, in the 1820s, to ensure that this civilian activity was carried out in a professional manner. Then along came the railways, a competitor to the canals, and naturally the institution looked down on these newcomers regarding them as “mere mechanicals”, people who only worked under instruction. So the Institution of Mechanical Engineers was born, initially to cover the railways, but with a common interest in steam power, soon diversified into manufacturing, mining and other areas of the growing industrial age. Other bodies grew up to cover new technologies, such as electrical power, and so further boundaries appeared dividing engineering into arbitrary segments. Each seemed sensible at the time at a parochial level, but the result was the overlapping patchwork quilt of a profession we have now. Victorian Britain was supremely confident in itself, as only the leader of the largest and richest empire the world had ever known could be. By including manufacturing as part of the arts, it could be regarded as an extension of something safe and familiar. Famous engineers could be included in society alongside painters and poets, and even scientists, accepted as an eccentric and fashionable fringe rather than the mainstream of gentlemanly pursuits. Engineering had been made acceptable. In the late Victorian period, metal turning was, for a while, a fashionable activity for ladies, who had grown tired of water colouring or embroidery, and many large houses had a small lathe. Design was “a way for gentlemen to become involved in manufacture without getting their hands dirty.” But confidence can breed complacency. Even as early as 1831, David Brewster, Editor of the Edinburgh Journal of Science, could write, “Bribed by foreign gold, or flattered by foreign courtesy, her artisans have quitted her service - her machinery has been exported to distant markets - the inventions of her philosophers, slighted at home, have been eagerly introduced abroad - her scientific institutions have been discouraged and even abolished - the articles which she supplied to other states have been gradually manufactured by themselves; and, one after another, many of the best arts of England have been transferred to other nations.” 2 ENGINEERING SEPARATES FROM THE ARTS By the time of The Great Exhibition of 1851, it was clear to a few that other countries were taking up manufacturing for very practical and commercial reasons where art was not a particular consideration, but producing products which satisfied the customer definitely was. Victorian Britain carried blithely on; with the empire as a supplier of raw materials and a captive market for its goods, they did not notice that they were gradually being overtaken. This left a complacent Britannia vulnerable to other industrial nations in the marketplace, and soon on the battlefield, when the twentieth century began. Engineering had developed a momentum of its own, which gradually separated it from the rest of the arts. As projects got bigger and more complex, the traditional evolution by trial and error became too dangerous and it became clear that research and analysis was needed. In the 1880s, engineering departments began to appear in universities with a

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strong mandate for research as well as teaching. To gain academic respectability, they adopted a scientific pattern of advancing knowledge and publishing papers. Engineering departments divided their fields into topics for analysis and developed the necessary theories. As a result engineering is still linked with science in the thinking of both the government and the general public, while craft skills are regarded as an extension of the arts. This forms an artificial boundary in the public understanding of design to this day. The First World War and financial upheavals which followed boosted the importance of engineering, led to rapid technological advances, and gave it major markets away from the general consumer. Divorced from technology, product design, as we now know it, went through a number of revivals with art deco, and the influences of Bauhaus, for example, but these were only for those who could afford them. The all embracing Victorian concept of art faded and became a collection of its parts. Ironically, it was the needs of the Second World War which, at least for the UK, began to bring everything back together again. With the experience of the earlier conflict, Britain was much more organised the second time around, when peace was in sight. 3 THE LAST SIXTY YEARS The wartime rationing system not only ensured that, for the first time ever, the entire population had a reasonably balanced diet, but also made relatively inexpensive, carefully designed “utility” products, from clothing to furniture, available to the mass market. Two far sighted reports (the Maynell-Hoskins and Wier reports of 1944) made the government aware that the general population would expect things to be even better in peacetime, particularly in the field of consumer goods. We would also have to compete for raw materials and overseas markets as the Empire faded away. They recommended that an organisation be set up to ensure that the products of British industry were well designed, in the sense of appeal to the customer. The Council of Industrial Design was set up at the end of 1944, “to improve the design of the products of British industry by all means possible” but excluded engineering from its remit. The CoID helped organise the Festival of Britain in 1951 and, two years later, ensured that all Coronation souvenirs were well designed. The Crafts Council was formed and sat somewhere between the CoID and the Arts Council. The major differences were that the CoID did not have any funds for distribution and had a proactive remit, where the other two were mainly supportive. Even so, these three bodies provided some unity between the more aesthetic fields of design and the arts, but inevitably had a clear boundary with engineering. Engineering in its turn was not too concerned. This was the period when all of the technical advances made during the war were turned to peaceful uses and new product development moved along technical lines, with a bit of “styling” added to soften the edges. At the same time, new furniture, fashion, tableware, lighting, interior design and more were reviving industrial design as the economy expanded and the population had “never had it so good.” (Harold MacMillan, Prime Minister 1957-63) It was the Feilden Report of 1963 [1], which pointed to the need for a greater appreciation of the design process, and of broader aspects of design in engineering. This started a debate over the role of design in engineering practice and in education and training. In 1969, the Conway Report [2] proposed a Council of Engineering Design to

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work in parallel with the CoID under a co-ordinating Design Council. The government eventually formed a single body, The Design Council, in 1972, which effectively just extended the remit of the existing council into engineering. The new body moved aggressively into providing advice to industry and linking product designers with engineering companies. This led to a split in the product designers, between those who willingly worked with engineering companies, and those who did not recognise the realization of their designs as an industrial process. The new council also began to expand its education and training activities. It was becoming more apparent that the old divisions of the engineering profession no longer matched those of a much changed engineering industry, with academia trying to meet the requirements of both and stay academically respectable. Several proposals were made for changes but then the government set up an inquiry into the profession chaired by Sir Monty Finniston. For the period of the inquiry, until it reported late in 1980 [3], and for the time to see the effects of its recommendations, all other options were put on hold. The immediate result was the establishment of the Engineering Council, taking on the role of the earlier Council of Engineering Institutions, but with more authority to act and set policy. The underlying message of thinking more in terms of practical application and less of theoretical analysis, with strong implications for more emphasis on design, became the basis of new requirements for the education and training of engineers. This produced the first of a series of SARTOR (Standards and Routes to Registration) policy documents [4], which have brought the accreditation work of the professional bodies closer together. One initial effect of the increased emphasis on the accreditation of engineering courses was to emphasise the boundary between engineering and product design courses. Those near the boundary moved, either to meet the new requirements or to distance themselves from them, and a gap opened up, except for three courses. The design engineering course at South Bank resolved to stay on the boundary between engineering and product design, the automotive design course at Coventry kept its close links with engineering, and a new post-graduate Product Design Engineering course appeared, jointly run by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College, Department of Mechanical Engineering. Since then a number of courses have deliberately moved into this field and arguably the product design field has become more defined. This has been helped by the Institution of Engineering Designers expanding to include product designers. In 1991, a joint working party of the Design Council and the Engineering Council produced a report, Attaining Competence in Engineering Design (ACED) [5], with the aim of clarifying the SARTOR requirements on design in education and training for chartered engineers. This was well received and adopted by a number of engineering departments, notably Cambridge. It was also adopted as a policy document by both councils, but then they both went into a period of re-organization and the ACED recommendations were not adopted on a national scale. In 1987 the Design Council had 350 staff, by 1994 it had 30 and a new remit to “promote better design”.

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4 THE BIG PICTURE The early Victorian concept of Art included theatre, literature and music, of course, as well as the products of craft skills and manufacturing. There was no attempt to force a common philosophy, the boundaries between the different branches of the arts remained in place within the broader picture. The big split was with Science, which was seen as analytical and logical compared to the creative and unfettered arts. Unfortunately this was revived as C.P. Snow’s two cultures in the 1950s, but with engineering moved into the science camp. This split has biased government thinking ever since, particularly in education, condemning engineering to work within policies devised for science and “design” to be thought part of the arts. For more than a century, the various types of designers and engineers got on with their work within their own areas of interest with little interaction across the boundaries. New technologies were invented, grew to maturity within their own industries, and were eventually superseded by newer technologies. Product design, as it is now known, followed a series of influential phases bordering on fashion, from decorative to severely functional. Styles formed in architecture or furniture design were applied in adjacent areas, crossing boundaries and producing a common concept of the human interface with manufactured articles. In early Victorian times each industry and craft was separate and distinct, the boundaries were clear. The politics of the engineering profession created boundaries, for good reasons at the time, but which now are an illogical, out of date, shambles. By the early years of the second Elizabeth, common aesthetics and technologies were crossing all of the old boundaries making them obsolete. Over the past half century, the concept of “design”, as a single creative process covering everything from clothing to spacecraft, has been growing. For the design community, that has been a long slow change, but the public perception is of cycles of design influence. The 1950s saw an explosion of new products onto a receptive market with growing incomes. Not all products were well designed but value for money was important to those brought up in times of austerity. In the 60s, a new generation, without the conservative history of their parents, began to spend their money on short term fashionable design. The 1970’s economic problems made good design less affordable, but Design and Technology became a GCSE subject and the Consumer’s Association’s Which magazine maintained the idea of value for money. In the 1980s, design became politically important as it was seen to be the link between advances in research and new competitive products. “Designer” labels appeared further distorting the public concept of design. Early in the 90s, design sank briefly below the public horizon before reviving as part of the newly fashionable “entrepreneurship”. In the last ten years, for the general public and most politicians, design and engineering have gone from being “old hat” to “a good thing”, with, for example” more promotion of A levels in Design and Technology and lots of related programming on BBC2 and Channel 5. Within the design professions there seems to be a growing appreciation of the things we have in common, which has arisen partly from the multi-disciplinary nature of most design projects.

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5 FUTURE PROSPECTS Industry has had to be flexible to survive and the boundaries between the “traditional” design and engineering disciplines have become less relevant in practice. The material and component suppliers are in a complex interconnected web and are not concerned how you classify the market for the end product or which discipline the designer studied. The fact that most design projects are regarded as multi-disciplinary indicates that the old disciplines no longer match design in practice, particularly in engineering. Amalgamations among the existing professional bodies do not remove boundaries; they just change the administration; that’s politics. We need a new view of what is happening, without being constrained by boundaries set in a very different time, for arbitrary reasons. Then we can find more appropriate flexible boundaries, which will help us see a better way forward. An opportunity has arrived to do exactly that. The Bologna Agreement will be coming into force within the next ten years and will require a re-think of all academic disciplines. It will have some effects on product design, but a total upheaval in engineering. This is the chance to decide just what is the core of engineering, to be taught to a Batchelor level, for those students aiming for Chartered status. Beyond that, a new set of boundaries could give a sensible set of Masters level courses to match the real divisions of the profession as it is practiced. The boundary between engineering and product design needs to stop being a barrier, by ensuring that those on both sides understand more of the work of their colleagues on the other side. There also seems to be a boundary between product design and the less manufacturing orientated areas of design, which could similarly be better understood, with an emphasis on the differences between art and design. This is not an area where I feel competent to comment further. The boundary between science and engineering needs more emphasis and clarification for both the public perception and more sensible political policy making. This is something we can do something about. Both academics and industrialists have opportunities to talk to schools, politicians, business and finance colleagues, and the general public. We can get the message over, that policies laid down for science are not necessarily right for engineering. That simple message could change our future direction. REFERENCES [1] Engineering Design (Feilden Report), Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, London, 1963. [2] A National Design Council (Conway Report), Council of Engineering Institutions, 1969. [3] Engineering Our Future (Finniston Report), Department of Industry, London, HMSO, 1980. [4] Standards and Routes to Registration (SARTOR), Engineering Council, London, 1984, 1990, 1997. [5] Attaining Competence in Engineering Design (ACED), Design Council, London, 1991.

‘EMERGING TECHNOLOGY DESIGN’; A NEW MASTER COURSE AIMED AT BRINGING EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES ITS BREAK THROUGH APPLICATIONS A.O. Eger* Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente, Netherlands. A. de Boer** Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente, Netherlands. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT In 2001 the University of Twente started a course on Industrial Design Engineering. In 2004 the first group of students obtained their bachelor degree and started with one of the two then available subsequent master courses: • Design & Styling • Management of Product Development This paper describes the insights that have been employed in developing the curriculum of a third course that will start in 2005, and that is called ‘Emerging Technology Design’. Many new products are the result of what is often called ‘technology push‘, the result of new techniques, new materials or new methods. Within the University of Twente a lot of research, both fundamental and applied, is carried out. Too often it happens that the results of this research remain in a theoretical phase and don’t find their way to the industry because they lack a “break through application”. The master course Emerging Technology Design teaches students of Industrial Design Engineering to introduce in the market of consumer products a new technology that was *

Laboratory of Design, Production and Management, Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente, Drienerlolaan 5, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands, E: [email protected] ** Laboratory of Applied Mechanics, Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente, Drienerlolaan 5, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands

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developed in one of the faculties of the University of Twente in a two years course. In the first year they study – next to a program of industrial design subjects – methods of innovation research and market research, and the new technology they have chosen. In the second year, after they have succeeded in tracing a possible break through, they finish the course with the design and engineering of a new product. The intention is that they finish the course within a company that is interested in the new product. The paper describes in more detail the curriculum and the education environment. Keywords: design curriculum development, new materials and new technologies in design, interdisciplinarity, industrial collaboration and working with industry. 1 INTRODUCTION The Twente curriculum Industrial Design Engineering consists of a mix of project work, lectures and exercises. The traditional scheme of lectures in the morning and practical work in the afternoon has been abandoned. Typical for Industrial Design Engineering is the mix of short lectures and project work. The students can just turn their chairs to the screen and some 20 or 30 minutes later they are working on their project again, while the teachers are giving detailed explanations to groups or individuals. Project results are assessed both on a group result as well on an individual basis. For the theoretical subjects, students take traditional examinations [1]. 2 THE BACHELORS PROGRAM In the first year of the bachelors program the students start with a short project of five weeks to get acquainted with the profession of industrial designer. A product presentation, including the motivations for the design decisions and a functional test at the end of the project are part of the assessment. It is remarkable that already in this first project several of the available software packages are used by the students without them being given any formal instructions. The software packages are installed on the laptop each student has to buy (for a reduced price) at the start of the curriculum. Thanks to the wireless network the students can use the laptop and communicate with colleagues at any location on the campus of the University Twente. The next project is aimed at construction and the use of materials. This 20-week project covers the design and manufacturing of a prototype in much detail. The third project is addressing smart products. The second year of the bachelor’s curriculum starts with a period dealing with design methods and principles, physical principles and with the relation between art and industrial design. Then two fourteen weeks periods follow in which two projects are carried out. One in the field of a typical mass produced consumer project with injection molded parts and the other dealing with the design of a product for a specific target

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group. The second year ends with a free individual assignment. In this assignment the students formulate, plan and execute their own project. In the third year the program is more individual. The University of Twente uses a major-minor concept, which allows the students to follow a second line of interest during the first half year. In parallel to the minor the students follow courses on topics like philosophy of technology, psychology, business economics, systems engineering and dynamics. In the last trimester the students have to do a bachelors assignment and an accompanying course on research methodology. They may choose to do the bachelor assignment in a company. 3 THE MASTERS PROGRAM After the bachelor program students can decide to continue their study in one of the three master tracks at the University of Twente: • Design & Styling • Management of Product Development • Emerging Technology Design Design & Styling and Management of Product Development are well known specializations in Industrial Design Engineering. In this paper we will further explore the different approach we use in the track Emerging Technology Design. In the next two paragraphs we will first explain why this specialization was chosen. 3.1 COMPETENCES OF DESIGNERS In 1995 a study was carried out with regards to the question how industrial design engineers fared after graduation [2]. One of the questions that was researched and answered in this thesis was: by whom and how have the competences of industrial design engineers been put into use. From the interviewed designers that considered themselves to be working in product development, 32% claimed to work as industrial design engineer, 30% said to work as manager of product development and 38% either as consultant or in R&D. 3.2 CORE FEATURES Nigel Cross [3] describes eight core features of design ability. Designers: • Produce novel, unexpected solutions • Tolerate uncertainty, working with incomplete information • Apply imagination and constructive forethought in practical problems • Use drawings and other modeling media as means of problem solving • Resolve ill-defined problems • Adopt solution-focusing strategies • Employ abductive/productive/appositional thinking • Use non-verbal, graphic/spatial modeling media

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Most of these abilities appear to be closer to inventing than to industrial design engineering or styling. The activities of some industrial design engineers in the research from De Wilde [2] seem to be closer to inventing as well. It is therefore that, besides the two more traditional master tracks “Design & Styling” and “Management of Product Development” a third master track was developed at the University of Twente: “Emerging Technology Design”. 3.3 EMERGING TECHNOLOGY DESIGN The students that choose the master track Emerging Technology Design like to: • Understand applicability and constraints of new technologies • Explore applicability of (new) technologies on markets of existing products • Explore applicability of (new) technologies on markets for new products • Design for new technologies; modify technology for new design • Define product and/or technology requirements • Communicate with researchers, manufacturers and customers

Table 1. Outline of the master track Emerging Technology Design. 1.1 • Past Futures

1.2 1.3 1.4 • Product • Product • Scenario Based life cycle 1 life cycle 2 Product Design • Design management • ETD 1 • ETD 2 • ETD 3 • Innovation methodology • Optional subject • Optional subject • Optional subject 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 • Create the future/ MSc. Assignment MSc. Assignment MSc. Assignment Future studies • ETD 4

The students share about 30% (35EC) of their courses with the other two master tracks. One course -Innovation methodology - was especially developed for this track. In this course the students learn how to search for new markets or how to use a SWOT analysis for new opportunities. They have to learn that in looking for opportunities, weaknesses of a product or material can create new opportunities. To give an example: when looking for

Figure 1. Hydroformed automotive space frame.

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Figure 2. Hydroformed T-piece. new possibilities for a heat resistant ceramic material the porosity of the material was considered to be a weakness. During a brainstorm session a member of the innovation group suggested to consider it as strength. This lead to research in sewage plants where the material could be used for bacterial growth (to clean the water). Four courses, Emerging Technology Design 1, 2, 3 and 4, offer the student the opportunity to further investigate the materials and techniques that he (or she) will develop in his master assignment in the second year of his master studies. Table 1 gives an outline of the program of the master track Emerging Technology Design. 3.4 EXAMPLES OF MASTER ASSIGNMENTS 3.4.1 Hydroforming in consumer products In the automotive industry, hydroforming of tube metal has been introduced over the last decade. With this technique it is possible to achieve tubular shapes that can not be made with ordinary bending techniques. Lightweight, yet stiff and strong, space frames as presented in Figure 1 were developed. The freedom in shape is well demonstrated in Figure 2. By axial compression and internal pressure a bulge can be formed, of which the shape depends on an external die. The flexibility of the manufacturing method is also used for creating table legs of modern office furniture. The assignment consists of an investigation into the applicability of hydroforming in other products. New applications can be found by substituting existing parts by hydroformed parts, reducing costs, or by creating new parts that can not be made economically at all without this process. 3.4.2 Design for Friction Stir Welding Recently, a new welding process has been discovered, that facilitates welding of aluminum and other materials in the solid state instead of in the liquid state: Friction Stir Welding. The FSW process has several advantages over traditional arc welding processes. With a minimum of preparation a sound weld with less distortion and residual stresses is made that shows prolonged fatigue life. Moreover, strong alloys traditionally considered unweldable can be welded easily. A rotating tool moves between the surfaces to be welded and creates sufficient heat to deform and mix the materials to a homogeneous weld. A sketch of the process is shown in figure 3. The Friction Stir Welding process has mainly been applied in various areas of transportation. One of the earliest industrial examples is the catamaran built by Kvaerner in the mid nineties. Other

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examples are floor parts in the fast Japanese Shinkansen train and Space Shuttle rocket fuel tanks. A recent application is in the Eclipse airplane where up to 60 % of the rivets are eliminated through FSW welded panels. The advantageous of the FSW-technique should allow its use in a wider range of applications than transportation and aluminum alloys. The objective of the assignment is to investigate possibilities to apply this technique in consumer products. 3.4.3 Integration of fuel and solar cells in products A growing number of portable consumer products consume electricity. Batteries continue to be the main source of power, not only in audiovisual, communication and information products, in which the electronics provide the main functionality, but also in an increasing number of products that deliver mechanical

Figure 3. Principle of Friction Stir Welding.

Figure 4. Prototype of a laptop with Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFC) of Casio.

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work as their output. With the current battery systems it will become more and more difficult to fulfill the requirements of energy density and life time. Promising alternatives are fuel cells such as Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (DMFC) (see figure 4) and Photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. The defined assignments concern investigations on the application of PV solar and fuel cells in consumer products. Several kinds of investigations can be considered such as an inventory of possible products in which fuel and solar cells can be used on the one hand or the implication of the integration of the cells in the design. For instance the nonflatness of the product causes an intrinsically non-uniform radiation on the solar cells. To be able to apply the solar cells on curved geometries this problem should be solved. 3.4.3 Noise reduction A lot of electronic equipment contains fans e.g. in computers for cooling and in hair dryers for forcing a heat flow. Tonal noise at the rotational frequency of the fan is important in fan noise. A well known solution to reduce sound at a specific frequency is the application of so called resonators. These are tube like air cavities which can reduce the noise at a certain frequency having the proper dimensions. At the University Twente fundamental research is carried out to understand this mechanism of sound reduction and analysis tools for determining the right tube dimensions have been developed. With these tools a pilot study has been carried out to reduce the noise of a hair dryer. The basic design as depicted in figure 4 (left) is not suitable and ‘user friendly’ from a consumer point of view. Therefore the Industrial Designer asked the researchers whether the theory is also valid for tubes that are 900 bend. This lead to a new concept namely an axial cylindrical resonator as depicted in figure 4 (right). 4 CONCLUDING REMARKS The master track Emerging Technology Design educates students how to introduce new technology on the market instead of searching a technology for a certain product. In this way technology that is expensive

Figure 4. Fan duct with tube like resonators (left) and cylindrical resonator (right).

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because of its limited field of applicability can become cheap because it is adapted for mass production. On the other hand consumer products can be modified and or new products can be brought to market because new technologies make it possible to produce new shapes (hydroforming) or cheaper (less parts due to friction stir welding) or more advanced (fuel cells, reduced sound). Another goal of this track is to decrease the distance from the research environment to the industry and market. It happens too often that new advanced findings are only used to solve one particular problem and disappear in the garbage bin after that. REFERENCES [1] Eger A.O., Lutters D. and van Houten F.J.A.M., ‘Create the Future’: an environment for excellence in teaching future-oriented industrial design engineering. E&PDE Conference, Delft, September 2-3, 2004, pp.43-50. [2] de Wilde J., Passie voor Productontwikkeling, 1997, Delft University of Technology, Delft. [3] Dorst K., and Reymen I., Levels of expertise in design education. E&PDE Conference, Delft, September 2-3, 2004, pp.159-166.

TOWARDS A TEACHABLE AND LEARNABLE DESIGN PROCESS V. Sedenkov* Software engineering department, Belarusian State University, Belarus. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Design process disintegration has given rise to multiplicity of the process realizations marking out levels, phases, aspects, stages, goals and types of designing. This makes present-day design process visually ungraspable and progressively less teachable and learnable. The paper pres-ents an attempt to build up a holistic design process. The only response for the challenge could be an integral design paradigm. We have called it CUD or Computer-Urged Design. The natural cooperation of CUD (top-down design problem realization) and CAD (based on bottom-up design problem “solution”) would make design computerization logically completed. Keywords: Synergetic context, design process, design problem solution, design machine 1 INTRODUCTION The development of products, processes and services has received such wide acceptance and importance to date that it is not a long way, in our view, to the day when “designing” will receive the status of compulsory discipline in general education. On the other hand, it has become difficult to teach designing even for those who have to specialize in this subject. Design disintegration into levels, phases, aspects, stages, goals and types stipulated chaotic evolution of supporting aids, fragmentariness and the lack of order in engineering design research [1], entailed stimulated disintegration of not only training courses, computer aided design facilities and expert corps, but Design Science itself, as well. As a result, we have today a variety of piece-wise automated design processes (DPR) with their semiintuitive human-oriented description that does not permit to develop a unified design system [2], out of which, in turn, the efficient solution of the system design problems (concurrent development, design management, knowledge structuring and employment, etc.) is impossible. *

Belarusian State University, Software engineering department, 4, Scarina Ave., Minsk, 220050, Belarus, Ph.: +375 17 272 33 44; Fax: +375 17 226 55 48; E-mail: [email protected]

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Thus, the current situation in design automation (“towards sustainable design through unsustainable designing”) and the trending (DPR disintegration has entered the phase of self-development) inspired us to make a search for a way to draw a more teachable and learnable design process, i. e. holistic domain-independent DPR with regular structure and semantics. 2 4D DESIGN PROCESS INDEPENDENCY The variety of design processes is motivated above all by the diversity of objects being designed. On the other hand, every complex object may initiate a number of DPR variants motivated by different types of designing (adaptation, innovative, creative) and different goals (DfX); besides, a specimen of complex DPR can be divided into segments reproduced as separate and autonomous processes (conceptual, embodiment, detailed design). Therefore, there are the following main factors of DPR diversity: (1) domains variety, (2) different types of designing, (3) variety of design goals/aspects, (4) DPR complexity of a detached product. In compliance with the above claimed intention, we will attempt to build up a DPR, which should be unified for different domains, goals and types of designing and possessed at that a low sensitivity to the complexity growth of the product under design. In other words, such DPR should possess the independence with four dimensions: • Independence from the type of designing. • Domain-independence. • Goal-independence. • Independence from the complexity of a product under design, treated as a weak sensitivity to the product complexity growth. Evaluate the prospect to realize each dimension of the independence. 2.1 INDEPENDENCE FROM THE TYPE OF DESIGNING This sort of independence may be provided by DPR semantics unification. DPR semantics is based on the concept of design progress (DPC) and on the concept of the next design state obtaining (NSC). The name of the first one does not give rise to doubts: “the product development process is a regular technical evolution” [3]. But while of the subject of evolutionary design concept, we shall differ the evolution of population (for instance, collection of versions of the intermediate decision) and evolution of individual (for instance, design as a whole). The former has established the line of investigation represented particularly by AGT [4]. Design evolution is treated as adaptation of the current design state to a new state of adaptation environment (AE), i. e. the environment, which will accept the required product during the time and after its physical realization. The achievement of the first DPR independence dimension needs to work out (in the framework of evolutionary DPC) the design NSC named “feedback structure synthesis”.

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This implies the necessity to deal with the structure synthesis problem, which is generally unsolvable. 2.2 DOMAIN-INDEPENDENCE On the one hand, DPR structure cannot fail to map the product structure (otherwise it will be some other process); on the other hand, DPR structure has not to depend on the specific product structure. Therefore, the requirement to the structure of DPR to be independent of the structure of a specific product should be transformed into the requirement of a product structure unified representation. CAD exploits the hierarchical presentation of objects structures. This presentation is borrowed from systemic analysis of existent objects; we shall refer to it as synchronous (sh). The mapping of sh-structure into DPR-structure makes the latter dependent on a product. At the same time the successively obtained, during CAD-synthesis, levels of abstract design description may be considered as the terms of diachronic (dh) or “historical” representation of a product structure. Though “diachronism” in this example works weakly, its phenomenon seems to be important due to the following reasons: (1) diachronic (by the sequence of states) representation of design structure does not depend on a specific product, (2) dh-presentation is in good compliance with evolutionary DPC. Hence, it is to be of interest to systematize synchronous product structure presentation and then use its mirror image to offer the diachronic structure presentation. 2.3 INDEPENDENCE FROM A GOAL/ASPECT OF DESIGNING This case presumes DPR structure unification with respect to a goal/aspect of designing. It may be achieved only when the DPR structure should reflect the structure of the universe, i. e. AE. Since DPR structure has to reflect the product dh-structure as well, finally DPR structure has to appear as an outcome of the product structure and AE structure integration. 2.4 INDEPENDENCE FROM PRODUCT COMPLEXITY More precisely, we intend here to make the DPR complexity less sensitive to the product complexity growth. To this end, we shall start with introduction of regular and processorindependent understanding of product’s structure and semantics complexity (processor P=H C, H – human being, C – computer): it is reduced for both to their signatures iterations. Then the intent analysis of the DPR complexity nature should follow. We shall speak about process objective complexity, reflecting the product complexity, and secondary complexity induced by other factors. Differentiating the main factors of induced complexity according to their specific influence, distinguish among those the source, catalyst, stabilizer and fundamental principle. The primary source of the secondary DPR complexity is the entrenched bottom-up way of design problem solution, i. e. the ascent by programming throughout the hierarchy of sub-problems, presenting design problem (DP) decomposition (ascending computerization). Such one-way and halved scheme of computer expansion in DPR does

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not produce the design problem solution as a whole (or in the top-down manner) and gives rise to naive (task-by-task, product-by-product, etc.) design automation. The part of catalyst is assigned to the structure synthesis problem (SSP) since it has not yet a formal solution when stated in the most general form: structure synthesis concurrently with its operation algorithm. The current state of DPR action system (AS) serves for efficient stabilizer of the induced complexity, providing its changes towards the growth only. Indeed, the part of agent in hierarchy of informal and formal processors is performed only by H. In the part of a server, C is plunged into alien to it H-centered notional environment and is not able neither extend its role in DPR implementation nor interact with H in synergy mode. DPR has “genetic” orientation to synthesis. Systemic approach (with its analysis orientation, mechanistic H-centered decompositions of available products and hierarchical structures of problems, processes and models) still dominates in design computerization. We consider this approach as fundamental principle of induced DPR complexity. Both above mentioned constituents of DPR complexity form the synergetic unity where (under conditions of regular DPR structure) exactly the secondary complexity imparts the process with sensitivity to the product complexity growth. After the induced complexity neutralization, we should get the situation when the objective complexity does not reach the threshold initiating DPR disintegration. 3 REALIZATION OF INDEPENDENCIES: THE ENVIRONMENT AND CONTEXT Summing up the analysis dealing with the prospect of independencies realization, we should mark its positive nature: each of the independence dimensions may be supplied with a solution. But before the search for the solutions starts, contour (1) the environment of the realization, and (2) the environmental context presented by one of the two sciencewide methodologies – systemic or synergetic approaches. Due to the fact that adaptation to synthesis goals the analytic mechanisms of systemic approach has proved its inefficiency, it was the synergetic approach [5] we have chosen for the part of the context. Basic toolkit of the environment is represented by the structural process theory (SPT), mechanism of models integration [6], and diachronic product structuring [7]. Now we shall make a brief presentation of these tools. 3.1 EXCERPTS FROM THE STRUCTURAL PROCESS THEORY The subject matter of SPT [8] is the scheme technique of processes. The goal of the discipline is to prove the runability of some process through the building a runable structure of processes for it. Therefore, the SPT technique is characterized by the following: • Each process (PR) can be presented by its scheme: PR=(D, P), where P stands for a processor thatperforms transformation of energy, raw materials, information or products entering its input (IP), and D stands for a procedure that describes the

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function of P over its IP. D and P are referred to as a process object and subject respectively. • A set of process schemes is added with a number of binary relations. • Process schemes connected by distinguished relations make up a structure. • The rules for structure formation and conditions for structure runability are stated. There are two relations used to form the structures: providing relation, or p-relation, and relation of determination, or d-relation. PR1 and PR2 are linked with p-relation (PR2 PR1) if the output of PR2 becomes an input of PR1. If the output of PR2 becomes a scheme component of PR1, these two processes are d-related: (PR2 PR1). A set of processes (or their schemes) continuously linked by d- or p- relation forms a structure of processes (or processes schemes). This structure is represented by a graph, the nodes of which serve for processes and each arc is a cross-linking relation. The motive for structure formation may be as follows, named process determination. Associate with each process scheme a level of its uncertainty (UL) as UL of the scheme’s components. • A process, which has UL=0, is called physical: its D and P are real. • UL=1 corresponds to a logical process: its D and P have descriptions sufficient for their physicalimplementation. • A virtual process has UL=2: its D and P exist only as mental images. • UL=3 is assigned to a conditional process (PRC): its result has been declared, but D and P are presented by their symbols only. Constructive proof of logical runability for PRC consists in stepwise reduction of its UL. A step (stroke) of reduction is referred to as determination of conditional, virtual or logical process. While the two-stroke PR determination, the first one, or the stroke of virtual determination, fulfils a reduction UL3→UL2; the second one, or the stroke of logical determination, performs UL2→UL1. The outcome of this two-stroke determination cycle for PRC is, so called, S-tree [7] – an arc-bichromatic tree, each Snode of which is an ordinary tree. 3.2 MODELS INTEGRATION In 2.3 we pointed out the necessity of integration for the three models: AE, product, and process. Since the integration takes place in the course of models construction, they cannot exist in a completed form yet. Therefore, only some distinguished levels of models completeness, call them pre-models, may participate in integration process. From this point of view, we determine the essence of integration as borrowing and subsequent adaptation of pre-models, which belong to some object (donor), by the model under construction, which belongs to a recipient object: for instance, borrowing and adaptation of lower pre-models of a product while constructing the process model. To define the collection of pre-models, turn to diachronic structure presentation, i. e. to presentation by a sequence of states, which is possible for both real and virtual products.

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3.3 DIACHRONIC STRUCTURING OF PRODUCTS Sh-presentation of a product registers its componentization at the point of time ∆tm, m=1,2,…. This sort of visualization is originally based on cognitive motives, is efficient for existent product, and is typically materialized by the list of components presented by a number of its abstract levels ordered into hierarchy. Creation of sh-presentation passes through three main stages. Their outcomes are taken for the following pre-models: 1.1 sh-structure scheme – a hierarchy of names assigned to the product decomposition levels (for instance, subsystems, aggregates, assemblies, parts). 1.2 sh-decomposition scheme – the sets of product constituents; each set refines an element from the previous level of hierarchy. 1.3 sh-structure – product componentization obtained by application of 1.2 to 1.1. Dh-presentation is actual above all for non-existent product. The latter is represented at that by a sequence of named but yet unknown sh-presentations ordered along continuous interval of time base and interpreted as product’s maturity levels (ML). Having distinguished some (various in power) associations of ML, we get the following premodels of diachronic presentation for a product: 2.1 dh-structure scheme – q-hierarchy (hierarchy of recurrent tuples) of higher MLs. 2.2 dh-decomposition scheme – a family of lower MLs ordered into nD space of intervals with given vectors magnitudes; n is a number of sets in the family. 2.3 dh-structure – a full range of intervals (for instance, ML-intervals) obtained by substitution 2.2 into 2.1. Semantic assignments to constituents of this pre-model will provide completed product model (design).

4 REALIZATION OF THE DPR INDEPENDENCIES DPR independence from the type of designing leans in its realization upon unification of the process semantics, associated with the structure synthesis problem realization. By the second genus unsolvability of SSP, the answer to it may be delivered only by realization of conjugate problem. The latter had been found: it is the process determination problem when the process part is played by the functioning process of a product [7]. Domain-independence of DPR structure is achieved through the unification of product structures representation and integration of product and process models. At the same time, models integration of AE and a product, anticipating product-process models integration, supports DPR independence from a goal/ aspect of designing. Finally, DPR independence from the product complexity is attainable through neutralization of the secondary DPR complexity factors listed in 2.4: □ The complexity, caused by the ascending design computerization should be neutralized through application of the alternate, i. e. descending (top-down) computerization, identified with the formal solution of design problem (DP) “as a whole”. □ Neutralization of the stabilizer consists in substitution of hierarchic relations between processors in AS for the relation of cooperation. This immediately initiates the refinement of design language towards the independence from the type of processor P

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(H or C), which, in turn, clears the way to P-independent modelling of DPR. The descending solution of DP also embraces the search for SSP solution (neutralization of the catalyst). □ Descending solution for DP is looked for in the framework of synergetic approach whose guiding principles are cooperation and interaction. This approach is called upon to neutralize the fundamental principle of induced DPR complexity.

5 CONCLUSION Realization of all DPR independencies is not a compilation of a number of particular expedients, but presents a uniform technology for top-down realization of design problem called “computer-urged design” (CUD). For holistic DPR model (practically DPR design) implementation, a special purpose operating system has been developed. Now its pilot version, named Design Machine [9], passes operation testing in training process. DS should support the natural cooperation between CUD and CAD paradigms making design computerization logically completed. REFERENCES [1] Horvath I., A treatise on order in engineering design research. Research in Engineering Design, Vol. 15, 2004, pp. 155-181. [2] Endig M. and Jesko D., Engineering processes – on an approach to realize a dynamic process control. Transactions of the SDPS, Vol. 5, 2001, pp. 65-81. [3] Linde H. and Hill B., Erfolgreicherfinden – Widerspruchsorientierte Innovationsstrategie für Entwickler und Konstrukteure. Hoppenstedt Technik und Tabellen Verlag, Darmstadt, 1993. [4] Clement S., Vajna S., Mack P., Autogenetic design theory – a contribution to an extended design theory. Proceedings of the TMCE 2002, Wuhan, China, 2002, pp. 373-380. [5] Haken, H., Advanced Synergetics. Berlin, Springer, 1983. [6] Sedenkov V., Models integration and synthesis of objects with regular structure. Materials of the 4th Conference “University Science, Industry and International Cooperation”, Minsk, Belarusian State University, 2002, pp. 79-84 (in Russian). [7] Sedenkov V., Product structuring and synthesis in evolutionary design. Proceedings of the TMCE 2000, Delft, The Netherlands, 2000, pp. 183-196. [8] Sedenkov V., Evolutionary Design of Complex Objects. Minsk, Belarusian State Polytechnic Academy, 1997 (in Russian). [9] Sedenkov V. and Poloyko D., Structural Synthesis of Systems. Minsk, Belarusian State University, 2001 (in Russian).

DESIGN CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT FOR INDIA AT UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL AT IITG Amarendra Kumar Das* Associate Professor, Department of Design & Head, Centre for Mass Media Communication, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati, India. K. Ramachandran** Professor & Head, Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT India has the second largest population and the largest technical and scientific manpower in the world. It’s education system is recognized globally as one of the best. It has a well established engineering industry as well as consumer durable industry. Formal industrial design education activity started quite late in India. Indian industry wants designer with strong engineering background being able to design and detail out a product fully ready to take up for production. It is only in early sixties that design education programme started with establishment of National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad and later in the same decade with the establishment of Industrial Design Centre (IDC) in Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in Mumbai. NID offered diploma level programmes initially and then post graduate programmes. IDC being part of IIT system of technical education catered to the post graduate levels and that too in industrial design and visual communication only. Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) as well as Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) are the other institutes offering M. Des in Industrial Design. *

Department of Design & Head, Centre for Mass Media Communication, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati 781 039, Assam, India. Phone: +91 (0) 361 258 2454 (O), +91 (0) 361 258 4454 (R), Fax: +91 (0) 361 269 0762 (O), Email: [email protected], url: http://WWW.iitg.ernet.in/design. ** Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati 781 039, Assam, India. Phone: +91 (0) 361 258 2451 (O), +91 (0) 361 258 4451 (R), Fax: +91 (0) 361 269 0762 (O), Email: [email protected], url: http://WWW.iitg.ernet.in/design.

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Department of Design in IIT Guwahati is the first to offer undergraduate level programme leading to B.Des in Product design and communication design in India. Being in IITG system, it is challenging to design a curriculum for this course. The course structure requires to fulfill various diverse needs from the common academic structure to be followed. A strong scientific background, an engineering foundation, understanding of various social issues are to be built up as an integral part of the design education. Students admitted to the courses were through common Joint Entrance Examination conducted by IITs for engineering disciplines. Many a times, they lacked the artistic attitude, skill and inclinations to be a designer. The aspirations of the IIT students to go to foreign countries for higher educations in multi disciplinary and emerging fields are another area where course structure requires consideration. To complicate the matter farther, there is acute shortage of faculty in design, since IITs consider the entry qualification for faculty in design at par with engineering faculty. This paper discusses the challenges, achievement of the efforts of designing a course structure and course contents with all the constraints listed above and yet how it could achieve the desirables. Keywords: Design Education, Design course structure 1 INTRODUCTION Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati is the sixth of the seven-member IIT fraternity. In India out of different categories of technological institutes, IITs are considered the top most category. Established as an institute of national importance under the Institutes of Technology (Amendment) Act, 1994, the IIT Guwahati came into being on September 01, 1994 and its academic programme began in August 1995. The Institute was established conforming to the general pattern and objectives of the IIT system, but has incorporated many special approaches and features taking into account the changing needs of the new era and the special interest of the North Eastern India. Although a decade old, IIT Guwahati has already promoted itself as a premier academic institute to serve as a pivot for change in a developing society - an emergence of a new academic culture in the North Eastern India. Located in the midst of vast natural resources, IIT Guwahati is instrumental in developing technological skills of the highest order to utilize and usefully harness this wealth. IIT Guwahati is located on a picturesque lush green area of 285 hectares on the northern bank of the mighty river Brahmaputra across Guwahati city. 2 INDUSTRIAL DESIGN IN INDIA India also has a well established engineering industry as well as consumer durable industry. However during it’s effort for building it’s industrial structure rapidly since it’s

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independence in 1947 till recently, import of technical know how is imperative to catch up with the latest advancements in Science and Technology. The technological transfer has led to design transfer as well, resulting in low development in design abilities. This ‘design dependency’ has made Indian products less competitive in the world market. Only recently in the last decade major areas like automobile design has seen successful Indian design intervention. Even than in case of Tata Motors’ Indica car basic industrial design was done by design house from outside India but engineering design was done in house. In case of Mahindra Scorpio MUV, the case is much better in the sense that both industrial design and engineering design was done in house. Indian two wheeler industry has developed the expertise of designing two wheeler from scratch. Indian industry wants designer with strong engineering background being able to design and detail out a product fully ready to take up for production. 3 DESIGN EDUCATION IN INDIA Compared to industrial development, formal industrial design education activity started quite late in India. It is only in early sixties that design education programme started with establishment of National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad and later in the same decade with the establishment of Industrial Design Centre (IDC) in IIT Bombay in Mumbai. NID offered diploma level programmes initially and then started offering post graduate programmes. IDC being part of IIT system of technical education catered to the post graduate levels and that too in industrial design and visual communication only. Centre for Electronics Design and Technology (CEDT) in Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD) as well as Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (IITK) followed suit at different times. 4 DESIGN EDUCATION IN UNDERGRADUATE LEVEL IN IITG In late nineties, Department of Design in IIT Guwahati was established to offer first undergraduate level programme in design leading to Bachelor Design (B.Des) degree in Product design and Communication design specialization. Being in IIT system, it is challenging to design a curriculum for this course. The course structure requires to fulfill various diverse needs from the common academic structure of IIT to be followed. A strong scientific background, an engineering foundation, understanding of various social issues are to be built up as an integral part of the design education. The programme is of 8 semester duration, spread over 4 years. 4.1 ADMISSION CRITERIA AND LIMITATIONS IMPOSED BY THIS CRITERIA Students admitted to the course require to qualify through the most rigorous Joint Entrance Examination conducted by IITs. Although students are of high academic caliber; many a times, they lack the artistic attitude, skill and inclinations to be a designer or sensitivity towards design activities. As measure to filter out students without basic

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inclinations to design, JEE qualifiers who want to enroll themselves in B Des have to qualify another aptitude test for designer. Design as a profession has not established itself in India till recently. The students and their parent are not aware of the potential of this profession and hence the top rankers in JEE are not attracted. 4.2 IIT STUDENTS’ ASPIRATIONS The aspirations of the IIT students to go to foreign countries for higher educations in multi disciplinary and emerging fields are another area where course structure requires consideration. 4.3 SHORTAGE OF FACULTY FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGN IIT system considers the entry qualification for faculty in design also at par with engineering faculty. This complicates the matter farther since recently there was no institute in India offering Ph D in Design. There is acute shortage of faculty in design. 5 STRUCTURE OF B DES COURSE IN IITG B. Des course structure was designed with all the above constraints. The structure was found to be quite stable and students from this course excelled. The course structure was revised further to accommodate various other requirements. In spite of these all, B. Des course is unique, it is not a product design engineering course, but a design course in true sense. Based on the strength of different inputs provided, a student after graduation is at ease at any design situation, whether it is a product or a communication design. The inputs in the course is proportionately from 1. Design 2. Basic Science (Physics, Chemistry & Mathematics) and Technology 3. Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) 4. Management In the design area, emphasis was on elements of design, 3 dimensional design (form generation, form transition, geometry of form etc), semantics, typography and product graphics, photography and motion graphics, multi media, animation, videography, filmmaking, identity design, History of Design and practical projects. Design content and teaching was further divided into skill upgradation through practice, such as drawing, sketching and rendering; knowledge based; theoretical inputs in core areas, design methodology in problem solving, analytical thinking, sensitivity enhancement and studio based practice and last but not least, knowledge generation.

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5.1 INSTITUTIONAL SPECIFICATIONS FOR UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM STRUCTURE FORMULATION. IITs are autonomous academic institutions. Each IIT formulates it’s own academic programmes. The structure of the academic body for formulation of academic programmes has 3 tiers in the following pattern: Initial Course Structure Communication Design Year 4 3 2 1 •

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Study Area Fundamentals Design-Visual principles Surface, texture and colour Typography/ Calligraphy Writing for Designer History of Design Presentation Techniques Drawing, Illustration-Photography Models, CAD- CAM, DTP, CAG Projects Craft Design Communication Design Industrial Design Electives Video/Film Computer Animation Exhibition Design Seminars Technology-Materials-Mechanics Materials: Natural and Man-made Manufacture/Production Humanities Semantics and Communication Theories Perception Psychology Social Psychology Ergonomics Man and Product interaction Environmental Design Open and Closed environment Management Product planning Media planning

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Business studies/ Marketing • Law- National and International • Basic Design + skill emphasized in 3rd and 4thsemesters Application Design + knowledge emphasized in 5th and 6thsemesters 7th and 8thsemesters Hardcore Design + Practice emphasized in

Each academic department constitutes it’s Departmental Undergraduate Programme Committee (DUPC) with members from it’s faculty, students’ representative from the department and one or two invited members from other department for the formulation of it’s academic programmes for undergraduate level. Head of the department is the chairperson of DUPC and the Head of the department nominates one faculty member as convener of DUPC for conducting meeting etc. In the institute level, Institute Undergraduate Programme Committee (IUPC) is constituted with members nominated from each academic department and centers by respective heads. Dean of Academic Affairs of the institute is the chairperson of IUPC. Academic matters are first discussed in respective DUPC and if approved by the same are taken up for discussion by IUPC. After approval by IUPC, these are recommended for consideration/approval by the institute’s highest academic body- Senate. Senate is constituted with Director of the Institute as chairperson and Professors in the institute as members and a few renowned academician from outside the institute as invited members. Registrar of the institute act as the secretary of senate. IIT system has it’s own requirement in terms credits, contact hours etc. In IIT Guwahati, the criteria that must be fulfilled for award of degree in undergraduate programme are: - Credits: Minimum 340 to Maximum 360 credits for 8 semesters in 4 years with a rider that credits in any semester is within 42-52 range - Lecture-Tutorial-Practical/Studio practice loading not to exceed 32 in any semester. - Each hour of Lecture, Tutorial and Studio practice carry a weightage of 2 credits and practical carry a weightage of 1 credit. - At least 2 institutional electives, 2 open electives, 3 HSS courses should be included. - Division into Institutional Core 33% Institutional elective 3.3% Departmental Core 50% Dept elective. 15%

- 60%from Department and 40%from Institutional core and elective is ideal. 5.2 HIGHLIGHTS OF REVISED B.DES STRUCTURE &SYLLABUS BEING PROPOSED. Initial B.Des structure provided for specialization in Product and Communication Design streams.However it did not provide any scope for offering electives in new and emerging areas.Shortage of faculty for communication design was critical.Although Department of Design started Ph.D programme in Design, it did not initiate Masters programme in Design (M Des)and pressure was felt for starting the same.The above factors led to the realization that specialization provided in the B Des course be replaced with more

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flexible structure for specialization through electives. It can facilitate the starting of M Des course providing scope for higher specialization. In the revised course structure it is proposed that department will offer departmental core courses in basic design and other area compulsory for all students and departmental electives in various areas of product design and communication design. This will facilitate specialization and reduce course load per faculty. In case of Institute core courses and electives, it will be followed to maximum possible extent. Highlights of the structure with distribution is as under: Science 5 courses with total credits of 42 (12 %) Engineering 13 courses with total credits of 80 (22.8%) HSS 3 courses with total credits of 18 ( 5.1 %) Design 25 courses with total credits of 211 ( 60.1 %) Total 46 courses with total credits of 351 ( 100 %)

Grand distribution of credits in the proposed B.Des program is as follows: Science and Basic engineering = 32.2% Institutional electives = 2.6 %. Design + HSS = 65.2% Total=100% Lecture-Tutorial-Practical/practice Distribution. Institutional Core + HSS 66 + 9 - (32.5%) Instituteelectives - 9 (3.9 %) Departmental Core - 123 - (53.2 %) Departmental Elective - 24 (10.4%)

6 ACHIEVEMENT OF THE NEW COURSE STRUCTURE FOR DESIGN In the revised course structure, actual design courses start in 3rd semester and the design teaching is limited to the rest 6 semesters. The course structure formulated meets all the challenges posed before the faculty of Departments of Design in IIT Guwahati. Total credits: 351. In case of the institute’s norms for Lecture-TutorialPractical/practice loading-only one semester (4th) has touched 32 contact hours. Rest all are bellow 32. 3 core HSS electives and 2 open electives (Institutional electives) has been included. More Science and Engineering electives from other departments can be opted by students as audit courses since total credit in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th semesters are kept well below the maximum permissible limit of 52. 4 projects are integrated in the course structure. Compulsory summer training to provide exposure of design profession and seminar presentation to train students for professional presentation built in. 4 departmental electives of different levels are included in the 5th, 6th & 7th Semesters. This provides flexibility for student to specialize in a combination of PD,CD or PDE. Specialization through electives reduces the dependence on PD/CD faculty to run the programme and takes care of shortages of faculty. The Department can start M Des immediately since electives offered in different level can be taken by both B Des and M Des students. This will ensure optimum utilization of manpower and infrastructure. The structure will provide for integrity with higher education within and outside the country. This will attract brighter students to this discipline.

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The demand of Indian industry can be met by designer with proper understanding of engineering and detailing of product designed to see it through manufacture. The graduates exposed to the latest trend in design can be successful in the global context and can contribute to the global process of outsourcing in design from India. Department of Design can draw maximum advantages with the proposed course structure without compromising the uniqueness of the Design discipline within IIT G REFERENCES [1] Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati’s ordinances for academic affairs related to undergraduate programmes.

PHILOSOPHIES OF DESIGN EDUCATION IN CONTEXT OF A DEVELOPING NATION Amarendra Kumar Das* Department of Design and Head, Centre for Mass Media Communication, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. Even then it is considered as a developing country. India has completed 58 years of Independence. Till now India does not have a policy either for design education or design industry. Because of its emphasis on Science and Technology, it stands self reliant in these areas. Benefits of these have not been translated in terms of improved standards of life, due to better products and services. Till 1994 India had only two institutes offering design education; National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and Industrial Design Centre in Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Situation has changed in the last decade with few other Institutes offering design courses in masters level for product design. Disparity in income level in the country, large rural population, poor infrastructure, fast degrading environment and depleting natural resources, philosophy of designing for the masses must form an integral part of this new design education. It is also responsibility of these designers to preserve India’s diverse culture, crafts and environment etc. Philosophy of Design should consider to build an identity for Indian design itself. These aspects can be ideal not only for India but for any other developing countries. This paper discusses in detail how these philosophies are being built into Indian Design Education being offered and efforts to form a design policy. *

Associate Professor, Department of Design and Head, Centre for Mass Media Communication, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, Guwahati 781 039, Assam, India, Phone: +91 (0) 361 258 2454 (O), +91 (0) 361 258 4454 (R), Fax: +91 (0) 361 269 0762 (O), Email: [email protected], url: http://WWW.iitg.ernet.in/design.

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Keywords: Philosophy of Design Education, Designing for the Masses, Designing for Development 1 INTRODUCTION Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and per capita income are often flaunted as the measuring sticks for development and prosperity of a country. Similarly energy consumption per capita is cited as a measuring stick for progress of a society. However these should not be applied uniformly all across the world. Because in case of a country like India, the GDP and per capita income does not take into account the non monetary wealth generation by the women folk constituting 50 percent of the population. In developed countries power consumption in Kilowatt of electricity per person is considered as a yardstick of progress of a society. In Indian context, many part of it is not even electrified. Energy needs are met through petroleum product to run tractors to prime movers. Being a semi tropical country, most part of the country except trans Himalayan region do not need heating in the winter and thus energy requirement is low. Only in the summer one need air conditioner to escape the heat. Majority uses electric fans in the semi- urban and urban areas. In the rural areas traditional housing using building materials such as mud block keeps the heat off. Air coolers using cooling power due to evaporation of water in low humidity condition has been used from time immemorial and at present efficiency has been enhanced through the use of electric fans and pumps to circulate air and water. India has the distinction of having the largest technical and scientific manpower in the world. Indian engineering and technical education system is recognized globally as one of the best. India also has a well established engineering industry and consumer durable industry and industrial growth is commendable. However industrial growth and achievements failed to improve the living standards of people within the country. This is related directly to it’s effort for building it’s industrial structure rapidly after it’s independence until recently. Import of technical know how is imperative to catch up with the latest advancements in Science and Technology. The technology transfer has led to design transfer as well and resulted in low development of design abilities. This ‘design dependency’ made Indian products less competitive in the world market and has adversely influenced the export performance. India’s failure to develop indigenous design & development capabilities led to the Indian market flooded with foreign products that in many case meet consumer aspirations but not their needs. To ensure industrial growth along with improved living standards of our citizens, it is important that we choose the priorities. Design can play a significant role in this growth and economic development, employment generation and exports in future. 2 DESIGN EDUCATION IN INDIA Compared to industrial development, formal industrial design education activity started quite late in India. It is only in early sixties that design education programme started with establishment of National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and later in the same decade

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with the establishment of Industrial Design Centre in IIT Bombay in Mumbai. NID offered diploma level programmes initially and then started offering post graduate programmes. IDC being part of IIT system of technical education catered to the post graduate levels industrial design and visual communication. Centre for Electronics Design and Technology in Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur followed suit at different times. In late nineties, Department of Design in Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati was established to offer first undergraduate level programme leading to bachelor degree (B.Des) in Product design and Communication design in India. Indian industry wants designer with strong engineering background. A designer must be able to design as well as detail out the product fully to take it up for production. 3 PHILOSOPHY OF DESIGN EDUCATION At a philosophical level, design commits to improve quality of life. However in a developed industrial country driven by market economy, the efforts of design profession is to design and redesign most of the well functioning consumer product with a view to create obsolescence to earlier products and create new demand essential for the survival of their materialistic economy through industrial growth. Similarly restricting the design inputs to products from engineering industry would not be adequate in a developing country like India. Ideas of ‘product’ and ‘industry’ have changed to include new areas that were mainly left to Art earlier. In the context of developing nation, the philosophy of Design Education should be the achieve the following: 3.1 PRESERVATION OF DIVERSE CULTURE WITHIN INDIA India has a rich tradition and culture. Continuous transfer of ‘western’ design has brought into the country western habits and value systems, creating a crisis in our cultural identity. These cultural identity needs to be preserved. Industrial Design sensitive to the local cultural heritage can create a cultural identity overcoming the imitative, secondhand culture. It is possible through design intervention in documenting and dissemination of traditional and existing knowledge. E.g. Designing computer interface for different languages is not only a challenge but an opportunity. 3.2 CRAFT BASED INDUSTRY In India, it is a well recognized fact that craft is an industry employing several thousands of workers. The products that they make is a source of endless variety. Most of these used to be functional. However at present, except for handloom products, craft objects have lost the role they play in daily life. With new materials and processes, most of these craft produced items has been replaced with cheaper product that are mass produced. Crafts remains a neglected area in development efforts. These traditional craft items must be used in alternative way to keep the crafts alive since these provide for livelihood of craftsmen and preserves the traditional aesthetics and forms so encoded in this country.

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When craft products are not related to everyday needs, the industry may turn to manufacturing of curio articles for home market and exports. For crafts to return to their old role in daily life, the craftsmen may have to update their knowledge and skills. Acceptance of modern materials, tools and methods can make them successful in maintaining their positions in the home market. There is an obvious need to generate new design capabilities in craftsmen, so that the products can be updated. The product range can also be extended to suit new needs. It is also important to offer simultaneous inputs to improve the technology used. Craft designs display styles that are highly specific to regions. Craftsmen are also proud designer themselves. Design educations for them must take these into accounts. Otherwise a centralized and universal educational or design assistance approach may only lead to crafts losing their regional flavour. Designer working in the craft sector must face a totally different situation. To develop craft based products, the designer must go through a new learning process and understand relationship between craftsmen, products and culture. He must get an acceptance in the craft guilds and win their confidence before they accept his ideas. Philosophy of Design Education should be such that a designer imbibes these values through his education.. 4 EXPLODING POPULATION AND EMPLOYMENT GENERATION India has the second largest population in the world. Most of the developed countries are witnessing negative population growth. However almost all developing countries including India still has a growing population rate above 10 % per annum. 4.1 EDUCATION OF THE MASSES AND REMOVAL OF DISPARITY IN INCOME DISTRIBUTION Education for the large population in a country like India have to be done through mass media. “Information design’ can play a significant role in social, cultural and scientific education of the masses. Design can help in evolving new strategies to reach the vast masses. E.g. ‘design’ knowledge in making one’s own things using local materials can be communicated to people through mass media and adult education programmes. Proper ‘Information design’ can make adult education meaningful and productive. Income distribution is one of the serious and explosive problems of any developing country. The fruits of design in organized structures seldom reach the poor majority. Once this vast masses can be reached through design, this disparity can be tackled. 4.2 EMPLOYMENT GENERATION Exploding population growth in a developing country results in unemployment and related problems. In a developed country, the trend is for designing equipments and systems for reducing human workforce due to high labour cost, in a developing country like India, this philosophy is not always tenable. The philosophy of Design education must emphasize the designer’s role not to unnecessarily reduce human work force, but

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encourage design where human being is productively utilized. Questions raised is what is the employment generated for every million invested in an industry. There is thus parallel activity being encouraged. Khadi (Fabric woven using hand spun yarn through handloom) and Village Industries Commission (KVIC) propagates decentralized rural based industries and designers engaged works for improving design & utility of their products adding more value and changing images. Thus Industrial Design could play a vital role in innovating products with high market potentials which can be made with local skills. One good example can be revitalization of vegetable dyes, terracotta, local toy and doll industry with proper design and marketing inputs can generate large employment potentials in the rural and semi-urban areas. ‘Craft’ based industries can make use of local trades which are often abandoned for ‘employment’ in cities. Agriculture based rural economy provides for seasonal employment to the rural worker can thus get regular employment through these activities. 5 VAST RURAL POPULATION BASED ON AGRARIAN ECONOMY In India, around 70 % of the population lives in rural area and are primarily dependant on agriculture. India is self reliant on food and has surplus food production. However value addition to the agricultural produce is very low in the rural sector. It is the organized urban sector that is adding to value addition selectively and this does not benefit the rural sector. Although India produces significant amount of fruits and vegetables, the actual processing of these for preservation and value addition is miniscule within 1-3 % of total produce. All these provide tremendous scope for designing products and services for India’s rural sector. Design intervention is required in agricultural equipments and implements (Harvester, combines, thresher etc.), food processing and preservation (cold storage & warehousing) using non-conventional energy. Generation of non-conventional energy in smaller scale appropriate to the sector itself is another challenge. Bio digester, gasifier, bio gas, bio manure, bio pesticides, bio diesel, rural transportation, vegetable dyes etc. are just a few. Rural sector also generates huge by-products such as straw that are to be productively used. Plantain stalk after harvesting can be extensively used for banana fibre extraction. Local products needs of the Indian society are very different from those of the western countries. Design if sensitive to local needs can help in bringing out products to satisfy cultural and social needs of our rural population particularly well. 6 PRESERVATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT Mad rush to development resulted in ecological imbalance due to increased pollution and environmental degradation. Fast degrading environment & depleting natural resources have dislodged population from their natural habitat and threatened the peace and very existence of a country. Design can play a vital role in searching for alternatives and innovating usable products, making use of new energy sources. Design of solar cookers, gobar gas (Biogas

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produced from cow dung) stoves and lenturns, etc. can make these attractive as gas and electric appliances and help in preserving the environment. Fast spreading disposable culture even in the developing countries is another factor threatening the environment. Designing for reuse and recyclability of the products to reclaim the materials must form an integral part of design education and philosophy. India ranks quite higher in this context. Due to economic compulsion for earning a livelihood, poor population recycle everything from papers to rags even from garbage dumps. However if inbuilt into the product itself, these can be more efficient. Similarly collection of disposable items must be made easy and dignified to gain popularity. 7 COPING UP WITH POOR INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE COUNTRY India till recently has not been able to set up infrastructure in terms of road for transportation to it’s interior. In the last decade with the starting of East –West, NorthSouth and Golden quadrilateral highway project and national highway development project has improved connectivity in this organized sector but road infrastructure in rural and semi-urban areas are in a very bad condition. In these areas, most of the inputs to agriculture and village industries and raw material produced along with the products are transported using animal drawn carts etc. Mode of travel to school, market as well as medical facilities are non-existant. There is a need and scopes for designing appropriate technology based means of transportation utilizing the skills of fabrication of the local technicians. These gadgets must use or outsource commonly available local aggregates from existing industry and should meet the local needs of the population and climatic conditions. One example is Dipbahan, an improved and redesigned tricycle rickshaw utilizing all the modern methods of manufacturing but locally manufactured and maintained. Numbers of variations in terms of use has made this design extremely popular. Similar efforts are required for mobile health services, disaster management etc. During perennial floods when areas gets inundated, low cost amphibian vehicles can serve the waterlogged population extensively. Till now nothing exists. Directing our design education in meeting these needs should be the inherent philosophy. 8 ABSORBING TECHNOLOGY TO CREATE NEW PRODUCTS Design can stimulate developing countries from ‘technology-stagnation’. In the initial stages of development, technologies are imported along with end products. Over a period of time, these industries importing technologies should be able to utilize this technologies for designing new innovative products. Unless this is done new collaboration becomes imperative, endangering the local industries. In such situations ‘design’ can play a vital role in overcoming the ‘technology stagnation’. Till recently the trend was that a product was manufactured in India through foreign collaboration as a part of technology transfer, where design was an integral part and after the expiry of the collaboration, it was freely manufactured with very little alterations

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9 UTILIZATION OF EXISTING STRENGTH OF S & T BASE Strength of India lies in it’s extensive and very strong Science and Technology base. Input into fundamental and frontier area of research has put India in a unique position amongst the developing countries. The present research infrastructure is a result of careful planning and correct investments in developing indigenous research capabilities. In spite of other pressing priorities, the investment in R & D efforts has steadily grown in the past decades. Private sector industries also have stepped up their investment in R & D efforts in last decade. However these expertise has not been always translated into product and services. Existing strength and technological potentials of research institutions like Indian Space Research Organization, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bhaba Atomic Research Centre, IISc, IITs, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Indian Council for Agricultural Research, and R & D labs in public sector industries like Bharat Heavy Electrical Limited, Bharat Electronics Limited and Defence labs be tapped and utilized to design and develop new product and services. It is important to strengthen the interaction between research labs and industries. To tap the export market, it is essential that the interaction directed towards product innovation. In the export of engineering goods, ‘design’ plays a major role in blending the local technologies with the imported parts. In modern competitive markets, selective import of components and export of finished products can be achieved through design inputs. 10 GLOBALIZATION AND COMPETITIVENESS OF INDIAN DESIGN Multinationals looking for product markets in culturally diverse countries have realized that they can expand their markets in developing countries by responding to local needs through new product innovation rather than by forcing international products in these markets. It is necessary to develop products by understanding current and potential needs of society using local materials and processes. ‘Design’ talents within the country are essential to absorb the continuous flow of new technologies from developed countries and adapt them to local conditions of manufacture. 11 BUILDING AN INDIAN IDENTITY IN PRODUCTS The most challenging task of the designer is to build up an Indian identity in the products designed and manufactured for use by Indian population suiting their cultural needs and use. The tendency is to design universal products applicable for all. But if these products has to have an appeal to user, these products must be designed with a long term use in view. Products with a different identity can also attract foreign users. This is specially true in crafts products.

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REFERENCES [1] Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, Design as a Strategy for a Developing Economy, Working Paper prepared for Department of Education, MHRD, GoI. [2] Bonsiepe G., Development Through Design, a working paper prepared for UNIDO, 1973 [3] Munshi K., Technology Upgradation in Small Scale Sector, working paper, Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, 1985 [4] Nadkarni S., Design Crossroads in India: The Challenge Amidst Confusion, Conference proceeding of ‘Next Wave’ at Nagoya, Japan, 1995

A STUDY INTO STUDENTS’ INTERESTS IN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEERING USING A GENDER PATTERN ANALYSIS M.D.C. Stilma*† Industrial Design Engineering, University of Twente, The Netherlands. E.C.J. van Oost** Centre for Studies of Science, Technology and Society, University of Twente, Nl. A.H.M.E. Reinders* Industrial Design Engineering, University of Twente, The Netherlands. A.O. Eger* Industrial Design Engineering, University of Twente, The Netherlands. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper describes first year students’ interest and motivation towards the field of Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) at the University of Twente during three years (2002-2004). Data was gathered systematically based on students’ interest to aspects of IDE: technology, styling, ergonomics and marketing. Students’ arguments were analysed with help of a theoretical framework, based on: 1. a basic phase model of product development (I/design-product-use/market) and 2. value patterns (virtuosity, economic, and user/need values). Results show varied and gender patterned interest in the mentioned four aspects of IDE. Significant gender differences were also found in type of arguments students used to motivate their rate of interest. Results of this paper can be used for a didactical educational review. They too may be relevant to enhance insight into the differentiating values of people in design practices. Keywords: student interest, gender, industrial design engineering

*

Industrial Design Engineering; University of Twente, The Netherlands Centre for Studies of Science, Technology and Society; University of Twente, Nl † Corresponding author: Margot Stilma; [email protected]; tel.: +31(0) 53 489 3072 **

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1 INTRODUCTION The programme for Industrial Design Engineering (IDE) at the University of Twente (The Netherlands) is a young educational programme that started in 2001. They were eager to gain insight in their student population and started a study in 2002 on the attitude of first year students towards their study and future profession. A first year course was developed to stimulate the students’ awareness of and reflection on IDE. Students’ opinions, interests and motivations were elicited by written questionnaires and small group discussion meetings. The course and the study evolved over three years, based on the results of the previous years. This paper focuses on the written questionnaire and in specific the students’ grading and motivation of their interest in four constitutive aspects of IDE (technology, styling, ergonomics and marketing), in order to adapt in future the curriculum. The empirical outcomes show significant differences between male and female students. Therefore, gender was chosen as a central focus for analysis in this paper. 2 RESEARCH CONTEXT AND METHOD In total, 184 IDE first year students, of which 48 female (26%), participated in this research. This accounts for 53 students (12 female) in 2002/2003, for 67 (18 female) in 2003/2004 and for 64 students (18 female) in 2004/2005. To determine students’ interest in IDE, distinct aspects of IDE were used to gain more detailed results. Data was gathered systematically, based upon four aspects of the socalled “four leaf clover model” by Van Eyk [1]. The aspects concerned here are: technology, styling, ergonomics, and marketing. Students of all three years could grade their interest in the four aspects from 5 (very interested) to 1 (no interest at all). In the first year (2002/03), students were only given the opportunity to grade their interest. From the second year on, the students were also asked in an open question to motivate their grading. This study is based on the numerical grading over all the three years, whereas for the analysis of the students’ motivation, only data of the generation 2003/2004 was available. 3 STUDENTS’ INTEREST IN THE FOUR ASPECTS OF IDE Figure 1 and table 1, show that the aspects styling and technology are most popular among the IDE students (with grading of resp. 4.3 and 4.1). Ergonomics and marketing score substantially lower (both 3.4). However, when taking gender into account, different patterns of interest of male and female students are revealed. Female students grade ergonomics significantly higher (p<0.001) than male students, making it their second favourite aspect of IDE. Among male students, ergonomics ends in the bottom-position. The grading of interest in the aspect technology shows a significant gender-difference (p<0.001) as well. Here, differences in opinions per gender are less, as female students still prefer technology above marketing. Grading of styling and marketing are similar for both genders.

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3.1 GENDER PATTERNS IN STUDENTS’ GRADING OF INTEREST From figure 1 and table 1, it was concluded that the interest-profiles of male and female IDE students significantly differ. These differences are in line with wider cultural gender patterns that males show more interest in technology whereas females prefer human and social dimensions [3]. This result is not obvious as these respondents are a self-selected group of students – male and female – who have chosen a technology-related IDE study. Societal gender processes already hamper many girls to choose this type of study, causing a relatively low participation of female students. Apparently, similar gender patterns in interest were manifested within this selective group of students. Therefore, a gender analysis of the students’ underlying motivations to their grading of interest seems relevant.

Table 1. Statistical tests: IDE students’ interest in IDE aspects: mean and significant difference per gender (grading 1–5, with 5 highest interests) (generations 2002/2004).

Mean:

“I am interested in …” (scale 1-5) Technology Styling Ergonomics Marketing

All: N = 184 4,10(2) 4,35(1) 3,38(3) 3,36(4) (3) (1) (2) Females: N = 48 3,69 4,31 3,92 3,45(4) (2) (1) (4) Males N = 136 4,25 4,36 3,19 3,33(3) Test Statistics (a): Mann-Whitney and Wilcoxon: significant difference per gender, α <0,05 Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed) 0,000 0,302 0,000 0,499 (n=1,..,4) order of students’ interest; (a) Grouping variable: females - males

Figure 1. The interest in IDE of male and female IDE-students (generations 2002–2004). Horizontal: positive increasing gradation of interest from 1 to 5. Vertical: percentage of opinion per grade from 0% to 100%. N total =184, N male= 136, N female = 48.

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Figure 2. basic model of product development for locating student’s arguments. 4 STUDENTS’ ARGUMENTS FOR GRADING THEIR INTEREST 4.1 FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSIS To analyse and compare the students’ arguments, a conceptual framework was needed that allowed to categorise the type of student motivations in the four aspects of IDE. A very basic model of product development and use was applied. This was based on the distinction between the design context in which a product is created, the product itself, and the context in which users appropriate a product into daily activities (schematically presented below). This model is used in Technology Studies to study the socio-cultural relation between design and use of concrete products [4, 5]. The students’ arguments were categorised, based on the locus of the argument in this scheme. The hypothesis is that female students would more often – related to all four IDE aspects - mention the relevance for users, considering their relatively high interest in human and social aspects. Next to this model, a three set of values involved in the practice of technology, was used as developed by Arnold Pacey (virtuosity values, economic values and user/need values).[2]. In our western culture, virtuosity values (prestige, mastering, performance) have a high masculine connotation, whereas the user/need values (care, stability, risk-avoidance) are more related to femininity.[6] The hypothesis is that the arguments of male students will more often be rooted in virtuosity values, whereas the female students would prefer arguments based upon user/need values. 4.1.1 Methodology The argument analysis is based on one generation of students (2003/2004) consisting of 49 male and 18 female students. As some students did not fill in their argument the number of respondents will be somewhat lower (On average, four male and two female students were missing, with a slightly variation over the four aspects). The space in the questionnaires to fill in arguments was limited, therefore in the majority of cases the argument had a singular character or has one clear focus (e.g. “it is nice to create and experiment”). These cases were relatively easy to categorise. However, more complex were also given. Some had the structure of “…, but…” or “….., if ….”. In most cases this was a positive argument (which was used for categorisation) followed by a negative (often personal) motivation. (e.g. “it is important for good products, but I don’t like it”). A few students gave multiple arguments that did not easily fit to one of the categories. In those cases, the students’ main argument was interpreted. As these cases were limited, the methodology was accepted as valid by the authors.

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4.2 ANALYSIS OF THE STUDENT’S ARGUMENTS FOR EACH OF THE FOUR IDE ASPECTS Below, for each of the four IDE aspects, the type of categorisation and the distribution of arguments over the different types of categories are shown in tables 2 to 5. Differences in percentages are indicative rather than distinctive. 4.2.1 Technology

Table 2. Students’ motivation concerning Technology; Female N=16; Male N=46. Type

Female/ Male

Examples of arguments

I/ designer F: 8 (50%) “I am a man”(m) “I have always been interested”(m) M: 26 (56%) “I do find it interesting, but sometimes it is boring”(f) “I find it very interesting to find solutions for certain problems”(f) “It is interesting how things are put together”(m/f) Product F: 5 (31%) “Technology is an important part of a product”(m) M: 11 (24%) “The way products work is interesting”(f) User/market F: 3 (19%) “Technology should make a product work properly and satisfy the expectations of the consumer”(f) M: 9 (20%) “Technology has great influence on society”(m) “Technology that serves people is fun”(m)

Quantitative results differed significantly between both genders. Even though the division of arguments across the used framework was almost similar for both genders, relatively more female students used negative arguments (19% females compared to 2% males). And within “I/ designer/ production”, male students gave more personally focussed opinions. No ‘typical’ virtuosity arguments were given. 4.2.2 Styling

Table 3. Students’ motivation concerning Styling; Female N=16; Male N=45. Type

Female/ Male

Examples of arguments

I/ designer F: 3 (18%) “I like styling, I am interested in drawing, sketching and design”(m) “I love nice things and these begin with good styling”(m) M: 28 (62%) “I find it great to put my emotion and experience in a product”(m)

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“Products gain value by good styling”(m) “Styling is the business card of a product”(f)

“I like to take care that the a product is attractive for its styling, not its functionality only”(f) User/market F: 2 (13%) “A nicely styled product can contribute to a positive living environment and in this way to a positive good feeling”(m) M: 5 (11%) “With styling one can make an agreeable living environment”(f)

This IDE-aspect scored highest in interest. However, the type of arguments students used differed substantially between male and female students. The majority of male students (62%) mostly formulated arguments from their personal perspective and motivation. Most female students (69%) argued from the quality of the product in relation to its market/user environment. Only a few students, male and female, argued their interest in styling with relevance for user needs. 4.2.3 Ergonomics

Table 4. Students’ motivation concerning Ergonomics; Female N=14; Male N=46. Type

Female/ Male

Examples of arguments

I/ designer F: 1 ( 7%) M: 20 (46%)

“It is important, but I find it boring”(m) “It is dull and it hampers your design”(m) “Ergonomics is a necessary evil for a designer, it confines your freedom”(m) Product F: 1 ( 7%) “It is important for the usability of a product”(m) M:12 (27%) “Ergonomics is a factor that makes or breaks a product”(m) User/market F: 12 (86%) “It is important to design products for people, so you have to M:12 (27%) know what people want, are able to, etc.”(f) “It is interesting to see how people use products”(m) “People must be able to use their products in a healthy way”(f)

Not only quantitative rating differed significantly between both genders, also the used type of argument. Almost all female students motivated their interest in ergonomics positively with its relevance for users. Almost half of the male students argued from their own interest or from the designer’s perspective, mostly in a (very) negative way (dull and boring). Five male students even explicitly argued ergonomics as a hindering factor in the design process. None of the female students used negative arguments here.

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4.2.4 Marketing

Table 5: Students’ motivation concerning Marketing; Female N=12, Male N=44 Type

Female/ Male

Examples of arguments

I/ designer F: 2 (17%) “I am not interested; it feels like selling air”(m), “I am fascinated”(m) M: 20 “I like to palm off things”(m) (45%) “It is of course the nicest if you can see your own product in use; marketing is a means that can help here”(f) Product F: 10 (83%) “Marketing can help put your products on the M: 13 market”(m) (30%) “Selling of products must be done, but I prefer to be concerned with the market”(f) “I prefer to take into account the market and to design products, it is better others see to it that it can be sold”(f) User/market F: - ( 0%) “Interesting how people look at products”(m) M: 11 “I am curious in what is appealing to people and (25%) why”(m)

In the case of marketing, about half of the students (45%) argued (half of them negatively) from the “I-/ designer” point of view, whereas most female students (82%) argued from the product to market point of view. Some male students used explicitly a virtuosity type of argument, focussed on influencing the market for their own benefits. Female students seem to have a limited view on marketing (“only selling”), as they like to consider the market but do not see it as a part of marketing. This may also contribute to the fact that no female students argued from the user/market perspective. 4.3 GENDER PATTERNS IN STUDENT’S ARGUMENTS Each of the IDE-aspects show specific gender patterns in types of arguments. With respect to marketing and ergonomics, the type of arguments that students used is in a way surprising. In both domains, one would expect a majority of arguments located in the user/market cluster, as these aspects clearly address issues in this domain. With ergonomics, a strong majority of female students indeed valued the user orientation however, only a minority of male students did. With respect to marketing, the outcome is even more eye-catching. Here, none of the females and only a quarter of the male students argued from the user or market perspective. In general, male students (about half of them) more often argued from a personal or a designer’s perspective compared to the female students (~20%). Females tended, more often than males, to argue from the point of view of the quality of a product and from the user perspective.

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5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION Considering the IDE-student interest in IDE, grading appears towards 1. styling, 2. technology, 3. ergonomics and 4. marketing. Among these results significant gender patterns emerge. Quantitative results show more interest in ergonomics by females and more interest in technology by males. Qualitative results reveal the different perspectives among all four aspects of IDE. Male students more often argue from a ‘I/ designer’ perspective. Females tend more often to argue from a ‘quality of a product’ and from a ‘user’ perspective. With marketing, students seem to have a limited view on this field. From a didactical point of view, it is important that the perspectives of both genders are taken into account, as education should be optimal for all. If IDE education finds it important to stimulate equal student interest in all four aspects, a gender specific approach seems to be relevant as well, given the results of this study. The same conclusion holds for the relevance to educate students with a broad perspective on design processes, covering the whole range of design context, product and use context. Here, the didactical challenge is to stimulate especially male students to develop such a broad perspective. Information of this study may also be taken into account to enhance insight in the differentiating values of people as applied in design practices. REFERENCES [1] Van Eyk in Arthur O. Eger, Van het eerste uur – grondleggers van de Faculteit Industrieel Ontwerpen, Faculteit Industrieel Ontwerpen (TU Delft), 2004 [2] Pacey, Arnold, The culture of Technology, Basil Blackwell Publ., Oxford, 1983 [3] Stienstra, Marcelle, Is every kid having fun? A gender approach to interactive toy design, Twente University Press, Enschede, 2003 [4] Oudshoorn, Nelly and Trevor Pinch, How users matter. MIT Press, 2003. [5] Smit Wim A. and Ellen van Oost, De wederzijdse beïnvloeding van technologie en samenleving, Coutinho, Bussem, 1999 [6] Connell, R.W. Gender and Power. Society, the Person and Sexual Politics. Oxford University Press, 1987

INTEGRATING INTERACTIVE PRODUCT DESIGN RESEARCH AND EDUCATION: THE PERSONALITY IN INTERACTION ASSIGNMENT Philip Ross* Department of Industrial Design, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Netherlands. SeungHee Lee** Graduate School of Comprehensive, Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The generation of industrial designers we educate today should be trained to deal with new design issues related to interactive aspects of consumer products: How can we design for beauty in human product interaction? How can we make human-product interaction engaging and intuitive? This paper presents the Personality in Interaction assignment, conducted at the department of Industrial Design at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, to illustrate our approach to dealing with abovementioned issues. Central to this approach is an integration of design education and research. In the Personality in Interaction assignment, students created experiential prototypes of lights, to express personality of a fellow student in its interaction design. Students learned a new approach to designing for expressive interaction and concurrently produced experiential prototypes that triggered new insights relevant to the authors’ research. Keywords: expressive interaction, personality, learning-by-doing, research-throughdesign *

Department of Industrial Design, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Den Dolech 2, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, the Netherlands, E-mail: [email protected] ** Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan 1-1-1 Tennodai Tsukuba 305-8577, E-mail: [email protected]

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1 INTRODUCTION Application of digital technology in the field of industrial design raises new design opportunities and problems that are relevant to design education, design research and design industry. The research world, focusing on human-computer interaction, has spent most effort on making digital interfaces understandable and efficient, through applying and developing cognitive engineering theory. The industrial design world, dealing with everyday consumer products, has a more elaborate task: to make digital products beautiful, engaging and expressive, next to efficient and productive when needed [1,2]. The question today is how to design beautiful and expressive human product interaction? Somewhat surprisingly, the industrial design world seems conservative on the interaction level. Interaction design of digital products seems to come down to the same menu-button-icon scheme over and over again (apart from a few exceptions), while miniaturisation of functional components gives ever more freedom to design richer and more innovative interactive products [3]. The question how to do this is not easily answered. The generation designers we are educating now needs to be better equipped to deal with it, since the share of interactive technology will increase in

Figure 1. The design studio inspired work environment of the Industrial Design students. everyday products [4]. This paper proposes an integration of research and education as an approach to both develop new insights in how to create beauty in interaction and entice students to participate in this process. An assignment, called Personality in Interaction, in which students were instructed to design lights that expressed personality of a fellow student in interaction, illustrates this approach. 2 EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT The curriculum at the department of Industrial Design at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, where this assignment is conducted, is built on a ‘learning by doing’

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philosophy [5]. Students learn design by practicing it in projects. A model based on design competencies constitutes the framework in which student development is directed and monitored. Furthermore, the students reflect on their own development as a designer in periodical self-evaluations. The students are treated as ‘junior employees’ in a setting that simulates a professional design environment, to offer them the taste of their future profession from day one. 3 RESEARCH CONTEXT The authors’ research approach is action based, like the educational model described above. The approach can be summarized as ‘Research-through-design’. Theory is developed in iterative cycles of design, experimental testing, reflection and theorizing. So although the goals differ in research and education, both approaches are akin. The authors are interested in using personality as a way to understand and design expression in interaction. Earlier research points out that people are able to perceive personality in products as varied as software interfaces [6] and vacuum cleaners [7]. Examples from daily practice are not hard to come by: people talk of stubborn printers, tough cars, and old cranky doors. The second author researches personality in relation to designers and their designs [8], and has integrated her findings in a new design approach, called Kansei [9]. The Kansei design approach aims to support a designer’s ability to use and express subjective criteria in the design process. The approach entails creation of 2D images and 3D objects expressing the emotional aspects of products, which are subsequently analysed and abstracted into single iconic expressions [9]. These 2D and 3D ‘abstract icons’ are considered to give richer input into the design process about affective aspects than words or diagrams. Up until the research described in this paper, the Kansei approach has been applied only to design of static 2D or 3D shapes. The authors have developed a possible way to include also dynamic abstract icons in the Kansei design process to capture and express dynamic aspects of product interaction. 4 THE PERSONALITY IN INTERACTION ASSIGNMENT The Personality in Interaction assignment was developed in context of the research interests mentioned above. As stated earlier, our approach to research and education was to create a platform for joint learning by doing for both researchers and students. But educational goals differed from research goals. The following educational goals underlay the assignment: • To make students aware of existing design research on personality and personality theory in psychology [10]. • To increase the students’ skills for designing expressive interactive products by offering them the Kansei design approach that includes dynamic abstract icons. • To make students sensitive to personality of others and themselves as designers.

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Besides fulfilling these educational goals, the assignment served the following research purposes: • To produce real, experiential designs that would allow us to examine if and how personality in interaction is an effective approach to designing expressive interactive products. • To test the newly developed Kansei approach that includes dynamic abstract icons. The design brief of the assignment was to create a lamp, lighting system or light switch that would express the personality of a fellow student in interaction. 15 Students participated in the assignment. The assignment was structured after the Kansei design process that included dynamic abstract icons: 1. Students (voluntarily) completed the Maudsley Personality Index-test [11], which is based on Eysenck personality theory. Purpose was to make the students aware of their own personality (γνωθι σεαυτoν also holds true for designers) and for us to be able to make pairs of students with contrasting personalities. 2. The Eysenk two dimensional model of personality and Kansei theory and methods were introduced. 3. The students were instructed to create a ‘personality collage’ of themselves and their assigned fellow student. A personality collage was a video of approximately one minute, in which the students had to capture the essence of the personality of their fellow student. For example, one student would ask the other to write her name in order to capture her personal fine motor style. Students were free to create the contexts for capturing the personality. 4. The next step was analysis of personality collages and creation of dynamic abstract icons. 5. At this point, the students were ready to design and prototype a living room light switch, lamp or light application to match the personality of the fellow student, inspired by the personality collages. PIC-boards with pre-programmed routines, halogen lights, LED’s, colour filters, dimming circuits were available for the prototyping stage.

5 RESULTS A total of 9 students finished the assignment. Most students managed to create (partly) functional prototypes. The short time span of the assignment (40 hours) did not allow the students to refine their designs on material expression and form expression. The prototypes nevertheless sufficed to experience the expression of personality in interaction. Three interesting designs are briefly presented in this section. PROTOTYPE 1: A STAIRCASE LIGHTING SYSTEM FOR BAS FROM LISSA KOOIJMAN Lissa described Bas as an extravert person and as a creative person who liked to create beauty in his surroundings. Her personality collage included facial expressions of Bas,

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impressions of his living spaces and artwork of his making. Lissa designed a lighting system to fit in Bas’ living surroundings and at the same time enable him to be creative with it and compose lighting schemes. See Figures 2 and 3 for a description of her design. PROTOTYPE 2: THE HIGH FIVE LIGHT SWITCH FOR JURGEN FROM JAN GILLESSEN Jan described Jurgen as an extravert and stable person. His personality collage included excerpts of a race through the department’s main building. Jan chose the ‘High Five’ gesture as the basis of his design to express Jurgen’s extravert personality in interaction. His product was a room light switch, shaped like a hand that switches the lights on or off when somebody hit it with an enthusiastic ‘High Five’. See Figures 4, 5 and 6 for a description of the design.

Figure 2 and 3. Lissa Kooijman designed a staircase light for Bas. The light balls, distributed over the staircase, light up when they are moved. Magnets make the balls stick to each other when they touch. The lights behave dynamically as well. When the first ball is touched by a person, the lights follow her walking the stairs. New dynamic lighting compositions can be created every day by pushing the balls when climbing the stairs, making climbing the stairs also a creative effort, instead of just a physical one.

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Figure 4, 5 and 6. Jan Gillessen created the High Five light switch to express Jurgen’s extravert personality in interaction. The High Five switches only when it is firmly touched. This way it elicits big energetic gestures, which gives the interaction an expressive character. PROTOTYPE 3: A PRECISION COLOUR SPOT FOR BENJAMIN FROM BART SMIT In Bart’s personality collage, Bart asked Benjamin to enter an unknown space and write his name. From the way Benjamin completed these tasks, Bart could conclude that perfectionism and introversion are two salient characteristics of Benjamin. Bart created an RGB colour spot light to express these characteristics in interaction (Figure 7 and 8).

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Figure 7 and 8. Bart Smit’s high precision tabletop RGB light spot for Benjamin. The brightness of the Red, Green and Blue lights are individually adjustable. Each light can be individually adjusted by moving its arm. The precise and nuanced way the colored lights can be mixed gives interaction a perfectionist character, while the small focus area of the three lights gives it an introvert character. 6 EVALUATING EDUCATIONAL AND RESEARCH GOALS All students referred to the offered theory in their presentations, demonstrating that they understood the theory’s general outlines. They mentioned links between theory and aspects of their designs, which indicated that they also applied the theory in their designs. Noticeable fact was that the students incorporated personality aspects akin to human values (e.g. creativity and curiosity), next to the offered Eysenck scales. The students used the proposed Kansei approach slightly differently then we anticipated: they did not abstract their personality collages into icons, but rather selected two or three key scenes. They analysed these scenes closely and incorporated elements in the designs. In most cases the resulting designs were innovative and incorporated expressiveness in interaction, which strengthened our confidence in the assignment’s Kansei design approach. The designs offered input for a possible next research step, in which the designs would be rated on personality scales to see what aspects of the interaction design contribute to expression of personality.

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7 DISCUSSION The Personality in Interaction assignment has fulfilled the educational and research goals we set for it, which points towards the merits of integrating design research and education. The lessons we learned are applicable to both our future research and education. In this first assignment, students have expressed personality aspects beyond the two Eysenck dimensions, more akin to human values. The next assignment will therefore include the aspect of human values in analysis and expression of personality. Furthermore, in the next assignment, the Kansei approach will be modified and presented differently to make sure students get to the dynamic abstract icons stage. After the second assignment, we will be able to compare products designed from an Eysenck point of view and a human value point of view. We argue that the approach of integrating interactive product design research and education can be effective in other research fields than expressive interaction as well. In this approach, a precondition for success is to have similar learning-by-doing philosophies in both research and education. Any research-through-design project needs explorative designs. Students trained in a learning-by-doing education context are particularly fit to participate in such a research process, being able to quickly absorb new theory and to incorporate it in design explorations. When research and education are integrated, students create input for research and research becomes direct input for students. This way, a gradual build-up of design knowledge and a continuing state-of-theart learning experience for the students is achieved concurrently. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank Ton van de Graft and David Schellekens for their technical assistance, Kees Overbeeke and Stephan Wensveen for good advice and support, and the students that did this assignment with a stimulating enthusiasm. REFERENCES [1] Norman, D.A. Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books, USA, 2004. [2] Overbeeke, C.J., Djajadiningrat, J.P., Hummels, C.C.M., Wensveen, S.A.G. Beauty in Usability: Forget about ease of use! In: Green, W.S., Jordan, P.W. (Ed.) Pleasure with products: Beyond usability, Taylor & Francis, 2002, pp.9-18. [3] Wensveen, S.A.G., Overbeeke, C.J., Djajadiningrat, J.P., Kyffin, S.H.M. Freedom of fun, freedom of interaction. Interactions Magazine, Sept. + Oct., 2004, pp.59-61. [4] Aarts, E., Marzano, S. The New Everyday, Views On Ambient Intelligence, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2003. [5] Feijs, L. and Kyffin, S. The new Industrial Design Program and Faculty in Eindhoven Competence based learning and designed intelligence. In: Proceedings of the Designing

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Designers 2003, International Convention of University Courses in Design, 4th edition, Salone Internationale del Mobile, 2003. [6] Reeves, B., Nass, C. The Media Equation: How people treat computers, television and new media like real people and places. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1996. [7] Jordan, P.W. Products as Personalities. In: M.A. Hanson (ed.) Contemporary Ergonomics 1997, London: Taylor & Francis, 1997, pp. 73-78, [8] Lee S.H., Harada A. A Mutual Supported Design Approach by Objective and Subjective Evaluation of Kansei Information. In: Proceedings of 3rd Asian Design Conference, Taipei, 1998, pp. 359-365. [9] Lee, S.H., Harada, A., Stappers, P.J. Pleasure with products: design based on Kansei. In: Green, W.S., Jordan, P.J. Pleasure with Products: beyond usability. Taylor and Francis, 1999. [10] Eysenck, H.J. Eysenck Personality Inventory. University of London Press, 1964. [11] MPI Research Lab New Personality Test, Seishin Shobo, 1996, pp. 7-15.

AN ETHNOMETHODOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE EARLY STAGES OF PRODUCT DESIGN PRACTICE Sian Joel* School of Computing, Napier University, UK. Michael Smyth* School of Computing, Napier University, UK. Paul Rodgers** School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the use of ethnographically orientated methodologies to understand the identification of customer needs within product design. Within the ethnographic mechanism there are various theories and affiliations that can be employed to research the practice of designing. This paper looks at three theories, activity theory (AT), grounded theory (GT) and ethnomethodology (EM). It will be proposed that an EM approach is an appropriate mechanism for understanding and analysing the earliest stages of product design. Keywords: ethnography, ethnomethodology, product design process 1 INTRODUCTION Since the early 1990s, computer science and design research has heralded the “return to the social” [1]. It has been proposed that within the field of HCI, for example, there has been a series of stages progressing from a fourth stage (the user), to a fifth stage (the social/organizational). Luff et al argue that failure of technologies often derives from not *

School of Computing, Napier University, Merchiston, 10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh EH10 5DT, Email:{s.joel; m.smyth; [email protected]} ** School of Design and Media Arts Napier University, Merchiston, 10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh EH10 5DT, Email:{s.joel; m.smyth; [email protected]}

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understanding people in organizational environments, and requirements gathering needs to look more at the “social” [2]. This social consideration has led to methods and techniques from the social sciences being applied to the design process. Ethnography is one such technique and has been used in its own right but has also been applied to theoretical frameworks such as EM, GT and AT. This paper evaluates these theories in regard to how well they could be applied to product design. EM, with its focus on social interaction, is an appropriate method for investigating the identification of customer needs in product design. 2 DESIGN PROCESS The term ‘design’ is applied to an activity that can be carried out on a spectrum from the very creative to very technical. Any classification must encompass such diverse disciplines as the fashion designer on the one hand, and the engineering designer on the other. The result of which means an actual definition will

Figure 1. Concept development activities [5] be vague and abstract, such as the definition provided by Jones: “to initiate change in man-made things” [3]. Although this definition can be applied to the differing types of design activity, Lawson noted that it is probably too general to be useful in helping to understand design generally [4]. In this paper we refer to design as a process, or a sequence of steps that an enterprise employs to conceive, design and commercialise a product [5]. As a process, there have been many attempts to draw up models and maps. Cross [6] outlined a four-stage model of: exploration, generation, evaluation and communication. This can be applied to a generic design process. Another, prescriptive generic model is described below [7]: Analysis- Design needs are listed and reduced to a set of performance specifications. Synthesis- Solutions for individual performance specifications and designs from these. Evaluation- Evaluating alternative designs on how they fulfil requirements. Ulrich and Eppinger describe the following five-stage process [5]: 1. Concept development 2. System level design 3. Detail design 4. Testing and refinement

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5. Production ramp up The model outlined above has a more practical orientation and is geared specifically toward product design. Each of the stages summarised in the model could be analysed against the theoretical frameworks. However because of the limitations of this paper, only the concept development stage of this product development model is focused upon. Figure 1, describes the elements of the concept development stage: Only the identification of customer needs from the concept development activities are taken into consideration when evaluating the theoretical frameworks below. The identification of customer needs can be broken down still further [5]: defining the scope of the effort, gathering raw data from customers, interpreting raw data, organizing the hierarchy of needs, the relative importance of needs and reflecting on the results and the process. These six stages are used as a frame of reference for discussing the methodology below. 3 METHODOLOGY 3.1 ETHNOGRAPHY Ethnographic based research is a technique used in a number of design contexts [2,8,9]. It can be described as a set of methods rather than a theory in itself [10] and encompasses participant observation, interviews, literature analysis and information gathering. It can be summarised as, “the study of people in naturally occurring settings”, “involving the researcher participating directly in the setting”, “in order to collect data”, “without meaning being imposed externally” [11]. Many have deemed ethnography as being a minority pursuit within sociology or have accused research under the name of “ethnography” of not being that at all [12]. It is true that the understanding of the term has shifted from its Malinowski foundations [13]. It is now understood, however, to refer to fieldwork where the study is carried out in situ and where the researcher takes a first hand view of the phenomenon under investigation. An ethnographic approach, although seemingly similar to other types of qualitative study, can be distinguished by its use within a context that is particularly apt for studying people in their natural environments. By studying what people do in the workplace rather than what they say they do, the technique gives a richer, more realistic overview of the whole scene. Creative and complex scenarios, like that found in design studios, require a suitable mechanism for accommodating creative knowledge and practice. Applied ethnographic methods can be seen as able to achieve this, as they provide a rich supply of data gained from various relationships and practices [2]. There are many issues surrounding ethnographic type studies. For example, the technique has typically involved researchers generally “sitting in” however what they get from this data is very much based on the researcher’s conceptions. The objectives of ethnographic studies can also be very broad and can often result in a huge amount of data. If ethnography can be considered “a source of information that designers can use” [4], its successful use relies on the quality of the conveyed results. Many of the conclusions made are based on the researcher’s interpretation and are centred on explicit reference to evidence within the data.

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There are many benefits to using ethnographic based techniques for understanding product design in practice. Firstly, a holistic view of the design workplace is given which ultimately is informative and revealing for external bodies (researcher or client), the company as whole and the design practitioner or student. Secondly, such applied techniques can highlight successes and failures in the processes that are in use. It can also be argued that an applied ethnographic approach is particularly apt at understanding the varying types of complex social interactions that are at work. The identification of customer needs can be seen as a phase that is particularly collaborative and as such requires a technique that is able to cope with this social dimension. 3.2 ACTIVITY THEORY AT conceptualises human activity and bases activity itself as the fundamental unit of study. AT was originally developed from the works of Vygotsky in the 1920s as a consequence of Russian psychologists moving toward Marxist philosophy. It was Rubinstein and Leontiev who fully formulated the actual theory and Leontiev particularly who is credited as developing the conceptual framework [14]. The basic principles of the theory are [15]: • Hierarchical structure of activity – Hierarchy can be broken down into three levels: activity, actionand operation. • Object orientatedness – An object can be physical, social or cultural. • Internalisation/externalisation – Activities can be internal and external. The internal activity can bethe cognitive process of understanding. The external could be the transformation of the imagined action into realized action. • Mediation – The mediation of artefacts during activity. • Development – Research method (ethnographic) that encourages active participation in the field of study. An example of an AT orientated ethnographic research, is the work of McCaulay and Crerar who carried out a year long study into information gathering at a UK daily newspaper [16]. The research concluded that AT lent itself to the study of auditory devices as the mode of mediation where activity was studied. However depending on the project other theories maybe more suitable. AT can be seen as particularly apt when studying persons interacting in an obvious way with an identifiable object. However if activities and goals are difficult to articulate or identify, the process is not as easy. 3.3 GROUNDED THEORY GT grew from the work of Glaser and Strauss, who were concerned with the domination of quantitative verification of pre-determined theory [17]. They proposed that qualitative data could provide a thorough understanding of the subject matter. They believed that GT was an inductive theory based on the study data. In practice this meant that structure, theory and questions are not generated before the research starts. The resulting theory produced is, therefore, formed from the dataset and, it can be argued, perfectly fits that data. The two summarised premises to GT are [17]:

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• Constant comparative method – An iterative process of collecting and analysing data in order to formulate theory. • Theoretical sampling – The theories that are developed are re-tested. The use of GT has been shown to reveal generalized theory from first hand experience in Grinter’s work on workflow systems [10]. GT can be seen as a theoretical framework that allows for new or unexpected theory. However the idea of no pre-conceived ideas can be difficult when initially starting the study. The theory also requires a great deal of time to formulate rigorous results as any assumptions made require a further testing procedure. 3.4 ETHNOMETHODOLOGY EM is an analytical framework initially described in the work of Garfinkel. Heritage, commenting on Garfinkel’s work, suggested that EM could be described as “the pursuit of a single question - how do social actors come to know, and know in common, what they are doing and the circumstances in which they are doing it“ [18]. EM focuses on how people understand their everyday activities and their created ‘reality’. EM uses ethnography to look at a given scenario and proposes that social situations can be studied and manipulated to reveal insight. The following are some of the major themes within EM: • Disruptive experiments – A planned social disruption to observe the effects. • Conversational analysis – Analysis of how we describe the world to one another, the words, sentences and context in which they’re spoken and the un-spoken cultural background to what is said. • Practical reasoning – Analysis of how people arrive at conclusions. • Documentary method – Social order is illusionary, individuals make sense of their world through selecting certain facts. • Indexicality – The framework that is used as a socio-cultural “index”. EM has often been used to study the workplace particularly when considering Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) [2]. EM can be seen as having strength in its ability to look at the social interactions at work and as such is especially useful when looking for social collaborations. Studies of aircraft control are a typical example of EM requirements capturing for the creation of CSCW tools [9]. It showed the effective application of EM, and was used not to suggest changes to the design process generically, but rather looks at a particular project or a part of the design process. In this paper, the theoretical frameworks already discussed are now applied to a particular aspect of the product design process, namely identification of customer needs. 4 IDENTIFYING CUSTOMER NEEDS 4.1 DEFINE THE SCOPE OF THE EFFORT Formally understood as the creation of the brief, an AT approach would view this as activity itself and would focus on the actions involved in the completion of the task. GT

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on the other hand would theorise after the event, although testing post event theories may prove difficult in this instance, as a brief tends to be a one-off event. EM analysis would involve studying the social dimensions of the planning committee. Disruptive experiments would also be difficult to achieve unless the creation of the brief was purely an academic exercise. 4.2 GATHER AND INTERPRET RAW DATA FROM THE CUSTOMERS AT can be particularly affective when studying how customers interact with an identifiable object or product. However if that product is not yet conceptualized, carrying out activity analysis could prove problematic. AT analysis of the interpretation of raw data would primarily focus upon understanding how a customer uses a product. This does not necessarily say what that product needs to do. GT analysis of the data gathering process can provide non-presumptive theories, which can be re-tested for validity. Although this can be a very endearing approach, it can be quite resource intensive. GT also does not provide any pre-study categories to aid in the interpretation of raw data. EM can look at specific lead users who can be subject to intense research where latent interaction between researcher and customer could be understood. EM analysis would be based around a deduced documentary method and practical reasoning from the user and researcher interactions. 4.3 ORGANISE THE NEEDS INTO HIERARCHY AND IMPORTANCE AT can aid the understanding of the hierarchy of needs as the theory has a structured activity, actions and operations rhetoric. This can also aid the process of establishing the relative importance of needs. GT’s framework is not so easily applicable as it does not have the same rhetoric, however in the process of creating a hierarchy of need, new theories can be discovered. Theories established during the organization of need hierarchy can be tested and theoretical sampling applied. Again, EM, with no formal hierarchy structure of its own, its use is primarily based on analysing the assumptions that the researchers make. The conclusions made can also be tested using disruptive experiments, under the EM framework. 4.4 REFLECT ON THE RESULTS AND THE PROCESS Each of the theories discussed can be used to reflect on the process and success to which identification of customer needs have been gathered and analysed. It is probably in this aspect that the application of a theoretical framework is most advantageous especially to those studying the design process.

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5 CONCLUSION It has been argued that ethnographic techniques can analyse the early stages of product design, because of the rich picture of information gleamed from on-site research. From the ethnographic affiliated theories that are discussed in this paper, EM is shown to be particularly useful when studying social collaborations and interactions. AT on the other hand, would be more suitable for research projects that are based on studying the completion of tasks when interacting with a tool or mode of mediation. GT led ethnography can be a suitable approach when studying a process without prescriptive goals. Regarding the identification of customer needs, this initial stage within product design is seen as particularly social and it is because of this that it is particularly appropriate to use an EM approach. REFERENCES [1] Grudin, J., The Computer Reaches Out: The Historical Continuity of Interface, Proceedings of SIGCHI, Seattle, U.S.A, 1990, pp 261-268 [2] Luff, P., Hindmarsh, J. and Heath, C. Workplace Studies: Recovering Work Practice and Informing System Design, University Press, Cambridge, 2000. [3] Jones, J.C., Design Methods: Seeds of Human Futures, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1970. [4] Lawson, B., How Designers Think, The Design Process Demystified. 2nd Edition ed. Butterworth Architecture, Oxford, 1990. [5] Ulrich, K. T, Eppinger, S.D, Product Design and Development. McGraw-Hill, Irwin, 1995. [6] Cross, N. Engineering Design Methods. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 1997. [7] Jones, J.C., A method of systematic design In N.Cross (Ed,) Developments in Design Methodology, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 1984. [8] Button, G., The ethnographic tradition and design. Design Studies, Vol. 21, 2000, pp.319-332. [9] Bentley, R., J. A. Hughes, D. Randall, T. Rodden, P. Sawyer, D. Shapiro, and I. Sommerville. Ethnographically-informed systems design for air traffic control. Proceedings of CSCW ‘92. New York, 1992. pp.123-129. [10] Hammersley, M. and Atkinson, P. Ethnography: Principles in Practice, Routledge, London, 1995. [11] Brewer, J., Ethnography, Open University Press, Buckingham, 2000. [12] Sharrock, W. and Hughes, J. A. Ethnography in the workplace: Remarks on its theoretical bases, team ethno online issue 1 ISSN 1475-0872, 2002. [13] Malinowski, B., Argonauts of the Western Pacific. E.P. Dutton & Co. New York, 1922. [14] Leontiev, A.N., Activity, Consciousness, and Personality, Prentice-Hall, Hillsdale, 1978. [15] Kaptelinin, V. & Nardi, B., Activity Theory, Basic concepts and applications, http://www.acm.org/%20sigchi/chi97/proceedings/tutorial/bn.htm 1997. [16] McCaulay, C. and Crerar, A. Observing the Workplace Soundscape: Ethnography and Auditory Interface Design in Proceedings of ICAD 1998. [17] Strauss, A.L., & Corbin, J. Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques, Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1990. [18] Heritage, J., Garfinkel and ethnomethodology, Polity, Cambridge, MA, 1984.

SEARCHING FOR A BALANCE BETWEEN AESTHETICS AND TECHNICAL BIAS: NEW APPROACHES IN TEACHING ARTS AND CRAFTS IN DESIGN ENGINEERING Julio Montoya Shorn Molokwane* Dept. de proyectos. ETSEIB, Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Av. Diagonal, Barcelona. Oscar Tomico Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Creativity has been affected by an educational system based on a passive knowledge acquisition. Recent studies in pedagogy has permitted an establishment of new teaching methods oriented to stimulate and develop individual’s creative capacities, which necessary aspects in these times when the society needs and values innovations which responds to new demands generated by technology and human development. One of this project’s objectives is to introduce more elements of teaching of applied arts in the design teaching. In the present design teaching in general, we mainly encounter drawing courses geared towards technical drawing, which we consider as not stimulating imagination capacities, and in responding to standards and conventions, it is restrictive. Keywords: art based design education, design creativity 1 INTRODUCTION Owing to the technological and marketing competition there has been a demand in the recent years for the modern day designer to cope with the challenges. The industrial * Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, Dept. de proyectos. ETSEIB, Av. Diagonal 647, Planta 10, 08028 Barcelona, e-mail: [email protected], tel:+34 934 010 706, fax: + 34 933340255

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demand dictates that the design and production has to be fast and cheap. This requires a redefinition of the concept of designer as a project manager, simultaneously being a multifaceted person comprising of an artist, an ergonomist, and production engineer, amongst a few specialist areas. In response there has been a growth of engineering design degrees and related teaching. Most of them are characterised by teaching styles consisting mainly of two different parts of knowledge. On one hand, the technical where the students are taught a series of skills such as materials, production techniques, technical drawing, management and technological subjects like electronics, mechanics and mathematics, amongst others. The other part is the artistic biased, in which the students are taught other subjects like art history and crafts studies essential for good product realisation. 2 PROBLEM STATEMENT The problem is that there isn’t a coherent approach that unites the two parts above. The courses are divergent in focus; the technical part is practical in its approach, whilst the other is theoretical and sometimes abstract. This creates an attitude of giving more importance to the technical part, breaking the necessary equilibrium between the two, and as such the graduating student is found lacking in practical aesthetic skills (which are to be harnessed from the artistic biased courses). Giving so much importance to theory in the artistic part has made the subject quite distanced from the original practical approach. The modern teaching approaches effectively develop theoretical skills well without an accompanying practical tactful knowledge based on sensorial sensitivities. The theoretical artistic skills refer to those similar to ones imparted in subjects like history and literature, whereas design is more a hands-on discipline and as such needs practical approach teaching. 3 TEACHING APPROACHES With this in mind, some teaching approaches were adopted, specifically to address the problem of knowledge disparity and the affected levels of creativity amongst engineering students. The aim is to develop and educate design engineers who are more sensitised to the rigour of human demand on the product and its place in our modern life. A cognitive point of view of the arts and crafts can help to simplify the huge amount of information that comes when one teaches aesthetic theory, art and/or anthropology. Reduced to the key aspects, the lectures can be more practical and the information easy to assimilate. In the Product Appreciation & Aesthetics course at Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (UPC) artistic ideals, product perception and emotive responses were introduced to students of engineering design, and it was presented in a way such as to open them to different resources, and how to incorporate them in product development processes, such that the product outcome is more aesthetic or achieved improved appreciation. The product appreciation and aesthetics class was about introducing design concepts which have more to with the more ”humane” aspects of the products, i.e. addressing typical issues of how and in what context the user is likely to interact with the object. The idea

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was to increase the designer’s sensibilities to everyday demands on the product, and these include the functional requirements, as well as the psychophysical aspects. This course was specifically developed for engineering students, to complement their knowledge to be consummate with the actual state and context of the consumers of possible products they would develop. 3.1 KEY ASPECTS The class was divided into several themes, which included art history awareness, aesthetics, semantics and semiotics, as well as the context of design object of the future, vis-à-vis contemporary living. The focus of the course was also to enhance the young designer’s skills through using inspirational awareness techniques (using all aspects of their environment, natural and man-made, as sources of information and inspiration for developing improved future products). A series of lectures were conducted, basically generating interactive discussions around existing designs or design concepts, in which specific design elements of some products were studied, in the way that they give the given products its character, and consequential appreciation of the same, by an observer, the kind of interaction that ensues between the object and observer, and ways in which the latter’s appreciation of the former may be enhanced. Typical issues that arose here were; the product’s appreciation of its design elements, the circumstances of observation, or the background knowledge, culture and context of the user (or observer); or is it a combination of some or all of the factors. If so, in what way would these factors influence the product appreciation, and in what proportions? Is it really that well quantifiable or do we run a risk of falling off the essential platform of debate by too much analysis. In other words, is such an approach likely to give us answers on how to better design the products or how to get the best out of the design products? These were easy questions to table, but not all that easy to resolve. Given the broad nature of the issues raised, the present study could only select a few, to address product appreciation in a given arena.

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Figure 1. Retrospective craft-based design approach. 3.2 HANDS-ON EXPERIENCES FROM EARLIER COURSES The course development arose from the authors’ personal experiences first as students and later professional experience in developing and teaching craft-biased design courses at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana de Mexico (1999/00) and the University of Botswana (1998/00). Elements of lessons learnt in the earlier experimental courses were

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built into the Product Appreciation & Aesthetics course at Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña, which is continually evolving as new knowledge and experiences come to bear. A practical, hands-on learn-by-doing approach was adopted, in which students worked with modelling and visualisation, material handling and prototyping, as well as analysis and peer critique. This served to accentuate their perceptive world beyond an intuitive thinking about aesthetics, broadening their creative skills.

Figure 2. Formal approach with experimentation. In the course innovation based design concepts in everyday objects or utensils are developed, using monographics, learning presentation techniques and personalised

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tutorials. The course development contemplates to capacitate the student to develop design concepts, which are innovation based, whether they are formal techniques or product technologies. The teaching methods aims to be open and personalised in which the students participates actively in his learning and in which he is capacitated in learning to learn. The representation of design concepts play a key function in the development of the creative habits as it has to do with drawing and three-dimensional modelling, this with regard to visual arts represent the applied experimentation stage where the student develop sketches, concepts are written, and a project is developed which is finally represented by the artist’s work. We refer to the artistic work because this is distanced from the technical work which end up limiting creative process and instead permit creativity development, whose enrichment is sought in all artistic expressions and which appear like an intrinsic significance in all artistic education. This also tries to instil in the student a conscience that the entire object is a cultural product. If we apply artistic criteria, we discover some determinants of what may not be totally freely defined but which represent advantages in the search for alternatives. The course is designed for 12 weeks in which the main themes are explored in the first four, imparting seminars in which various product design related topics are examined making a division in the criteria that the design objects are elements of human language and for that they are part of the culture and in this way we need to educate the future designer in disciplines which permit us understand and develop criteria for

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Figure 3. The arachnid chair in a backdrop of its inspirational ambience. creation of innovation concepts in products focussed to enrich the industrial culture in which the society is submerged. The academic task is divided in three topics, which are aesthetic theory, contemporary design and Art history and design theory. From the fifth week a capacitance building of the students is commenced, in which there are various project works incorporating workshop practice, which permit development of creative capacities as well as the technical in modelling making and prototyping, parallel with personalised tutoring where the conceptual part of the project is developed. The workshop achieves a creativity development in processes this dot not necessarily focus on innovation only but in the student’s development who interacts with elements and experiments through materials and processes which allow innovation capacity development en their Project which they can translate as hands on experience. It is considered that from the ninth week the student is able to develop his own project and for this focus is on project work development, and the tutorials become even more

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important in the evolution of the student, who are completely immersed in hands on workshop practice. In the 12th week the finished work, with accompanying portfolios describing and explaining the concepts, are handed in for evaluation, based on criteria such as: the level of innovation of the product, formal contribution, contribution of technological design, Project coherent, the quality of the Project presentation. The methods illustrated in figures 1 and 2 above depict methods which were adopted to develop two different student projects, at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana de Mexico (1999/00). The coffee table project in figure 1 was a retrospective craft-based work, which reflected an integration of the concepts explained earlier in the paper. The “arácnida” chair in figures 2 and 3 above responds to an eclectic taste, and results from an experimentation process with form and materials, as well as a study of the environmental setting. 4 CONCLUSIONS This paper represents a research work on the relation between art and design. As could be observed, applied arts teaching is a good auxiliary in education as it stimulates creativity and spatial imagination which are necessary in all design related activity, not only in the formative levels of any individual, but also, given in higher level courses, they can achieve a growth in the creative capacity. The paradigm shift of employing and integrating into design engineering ideals from other areas identified as having a higher sense of the aesthetic and enhancing creative capacities, such as the arts and crafts, is recommendable. These ideals have been shown to work well as employed by groups such as arts and crafts movement, and the Bauhaus school, but unfortunately it has not found such a wider currency in the general product design area, probably because it does not easily lend itself to mass production. It is suggested here that with approaches like mass customisation now in effect, the integration of art and craft ideals would be beneficial to product delight. REFERENCES [1] Dorffles G., “El Diseño industrial y su estética” Labor. Barcelona.1968. [2] Hernández, F. et al: “Que es la educación artística”. Sendai ediciones Barcelona 1991. [3] Lloveras, J., Molokwane, S. and Montoya, J. Product appreciation and aesthetics, subject structure International Engineering and Product Design Education Conference. 2-3 September 2004 Delft, The Netherlands. [4] Molokwane, S. and LLoveras, J.,On product aesthetics. In: Computer-Based Design. Proceedings of the Engineering Design Conference 2002 (EDC02), King’s College, London, 9 11 July 2002. Ed. T.M.M. Shahin. Professional Engineering Publishing Limited, London, pp 499-506.

VOLUME PRODUCTION AND THE GENERIC TEACHING, LEARNING AND ASSESSMENT OF PRODUCT AND FURNITURE DESIGN Michael Marsden* Department of Product and Spatial Design Faculty of Art and Design, DeMontfort University The Gateway Leicester. Peter Ford** Department of Product and Spatial Design Faculty of Art and Design, DeMontfort University The Gateway Leicester. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT To the prospective ‘new student’ the array of ‘artefact’ based design courses could seem extremely confusing. Courses include BA’s, BSc’s, BA/BSc’s, and also MDes, all of which can embrace Product design, Engineering Product Design, Industrial Design, Furniture design, 3 Dimensional design, Design Products and Design for Industry to name but a few. Within these categories courses can range from the more craft and styling orientated to the more engineering end of the spectrum. There seems to be a compulsive desire to compartmentalise subject areas into even more fragmented disciplines in the hope they may appeal to potential student applicants. The result being a plethora of courses that are essentially the same with the real danger that learning outcomes may be worded to emphasise differences, which in truth do not exist. At undergraduate level this could be seen as producing seemingly more and more specialist graduates; (should this not be the domain of postgraduate education?). At the same time however ‘the profession’ is often quick to criticise graduates as not possessing the ‘sufficient basic skills’, presenting university design education with a potential dichotomy. Using the Design Products Subject at De Montfort University as an example, this paper will demonstrate how Product, Furniture and Industrial design can be taught from a common, generic set of learning

*

Programme Leader Product and Furniture Design, Department of Product and Spatial Design Faculty of Art and Design, DeMontfort University The Gateway Leicester LE1 9BH. ** Principal Lecturer and Consultant in Industrial Design, Department of Product and Spatial Design Faculty of Art and Design, DeMontfort University The Gateway Leicester LE1 9BH.

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criteria and target learning outcomes and assessment criteria. The paper will illustrate how students have the option to either generalise in combinations of Product and Furniture design, or for example specialise in the design of medical products or contract furniture. The paper will describe that in order to maintain integrity in teaching and learning the only overriding criteria that has to be applied is that of repeatability or not with the manufactured item. That is ‘one off’ craft based furniture would not conform within the Design Products Subject, it could however be valid in a more Craft orientated Subject. Keywords: Design education, generic teaching and learning. 1 INTRODUCTION Product design courses in the UK it would seem, have been continually developing over recent years to accommodate changes in industry and the perception of students to the nature of both industry and education alike. To address these perceptions ‘Product design’ courses have seemingly reinvented themselves by adding preceding titles based upon product type and process. Examples include: Consumer, Medical and Sports Product Design, Innovative, Sustainable and Creative Product Design (is product design not creative?). There are currently 19 differently titled product design courses [1]. However Furniture design courses, shown as a ‘single’ subject, tend only differentiate themselves into either Furniture Design or Furniture Maker courses, avoiding titles such as Creative Furniture Design or Contract Furniture Design. One could come to the conclusion that the market for such courses would be so small that there isn’t any need to propose such initiatives or perhaps argue that furniture design is just another subset of product design. De Montfort University’s ‘Design Products’ cluster of courses covers Product Design, Furniture Design and Industrial Design. Combinations are available in Product and Furniture Design and Furniture and Product Design, the preceding title denoting the main area of study. Within each of these subject areas further specialism is possible, i.e. lighting, medical design, contract, domestic furniture design, therefore it could be possible for a student to become a so called specialist in ‘contract furniture and medical product design’. Although this provides recruitment and marketing departments with a larger number of courses to use to attract ever more students, it is the view of the authors that many of these courses are the same, sharing the same learning objectives and outcomes, there is only differentiation in the actual object that is being designed.

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2 A POTENTIAL PROBLEM De Montfort also offers a comprehensive degree in Design Crafts, which seemingly could and some might say, should overlap Product and Furniture design. In order to clearly differentiate and effectively deliver all these courses a clear differentiation has been established based on the production context of design projects. For example craft orientated ‘one-off’ or low volume production as opposed product orientated, repeatable (production) manufacture. Furniture design at De Montfort University is taught in the context of repeatable production (storage systems, contract furniture etc) and not in the context of craft. Inevitably this also dictates a certain differentiation in the nature of manufacturing technology and associated materials. This structure makes for a clear differentiation in the delivery of Product, Furniture and Industrial design. Nevertheless there is sufficient diversity here to make consistent teaching learning difficult, therefore a structure of generic teaching, learning and assessment has been established in order deliver all these courses effectively. This system was introduced in the early 90’s and has proven highly effective provided the differentiation between craft production and industrial production is maintained. 3 DESIGN TEACHING The nature and complexity of understanding design and design education has been widely documented. Design students are largely taught by the methodology of ‘learning by doing’, supported by the design process theory of analysis, synthesis and evaluation [2]. Design briefs provide vehicles for students to practice, whilst taught skills such as drawing and CAD provide an underpinning of the necessary tools, enabling students to engage in the design process. The ‘designed’ artefact itself being less important than the process used to solve the identified problem and therefore experience and gain appropriate knowledge. The issue could be a quantifiable mechanical one or one based more on visual appearance, however this is of minor consequence, it is the application of

Figure 1

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the design process underpinned with the necessary skills structured around a generic set of learning criteria that is the critical factor in simultaneously undertaking for Product, Furniture and Industrial Design. 3.1 COMMONALITY ACROSS CURRICULUM Within the broad plethora of design subjects many skills, process and knowledge aspects remain common. The need to use drawing to create, develop and communicate ideas is as important in architecture as it is for furniture design. Similarly the importance of identifying and defining ‘operational parameters’ is again, as important to an architect as to a furniture designer. Although the problems of articulated lighting design and magazine storage remain different, they are both similar in many ways. ‘The process of design is the same whether it deals with the design of a new oil refinery, the construction of a cathedral or the writing of Dante’s Devine Comedy’ [3]; although Sydney Gregory gave an extreme illustration, it does demonstrate the generic nature of the design process. As a final product they need to be appropriate for their market in terms of cost, function and appearance. The underlying processes used to resolve the issues will remain the same, the process of identifying the issues and using a process to resolve them. The range of skills used remains generic, drawing (sketching through to technical part definition) the use of CAD and traditional modelling techniques for development and presentation will all need to be used to complete the design process. The ‘learning by doing’ (against a carefully structured set of generic teaching, learning and assessment criteria) principle enables students to learn from each successive project. Each successive area is introduced at level (year) one, are then developed at level two and practiced in their final year(s) of study. Introducing different opportunities through a range of briefs allows students to experience a broader range of product design projects such as: medical, consumer electronics, needs and special needs, contract and domestic furniture. However this ‘catch all’ situation would suggest that what is actually needed is an abandonment of design (product, medical, sports et al) courses which can be replaced with uniform ‘design’ courses where students study a common design process that is ‘flavoured’ by different projects, such as ceramics, glass design and product, furniture design. As has been stated this is not the case and at DeMontfort University the differentiation is achieved by applying the overriding criteria of ‘repeatability/production’ within a mass-market context. Fig. 1 demonstrates the massmarket context. The product is a piece of furniture design, the problem is children’s storage and the solution is a series of interlinking ‘tubs’. The outcome is injection moulded and is aimed at retailers such as Ikea. This would be differentiated from a more craft based approach in that the design would have to be manufactured in a cost effective method, consider consumer needs, sustainable aspects such as ‘disassembly’ and ‘recycle-ability’, packaging (does it ‘flat-pack’ to reduce volume?), aesthetics etc.

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3.2 GENERIC TEACHING OF THE DESIGN PROCESS The principle of generic teaching across the ‘design products’ cluster of courses at DeMontfort University can be illustrated using the example of a ‘commercial targeting design’ module. The students are taught by a series of lectures, tutorials and projects. Issues such as the identification of the consumer and their needs, cost and operational parameters are all taught within the context of products whose manufacture can be repeated. This principle continues throughout the curriculum, drawing and communication modules use generic principles and materials to guide and teach students, though commonality exists here across the whole of the design spectrum it does become manufacturing related when applied to CAD. The application of CAD was once taught generically throughout design institutions and across a broad range of courses [4]. Now the range of CAD software extends from two dimensional vector based programs (typically used within graphical applications) through animation to advanced three dimensional modelling packages that can be used to test, evaluate and produce data to allow the production of prototypes and the final artefact. Therefore specific CAD packages are used which support the design process from concept generation through to the manufacture of the artefact, again these principles are taught generically to all product, furniture and industrial design students. The only exception to this is BSc industrial design students who are taught additional software, supporting the more engineering aspects of their course. 4 DESIGN ASSESSMENT The experiences at DeMontfort University show that by defining a common set of learning and assessment criteria a broad range of projects can be assessed, under the same criteria of process, outcome and skills. Table 1 shows a typical range of criteria used. 4.1 MASS MANUFACTURE DESIGN Fig.2 shows an example of a piece of product design and furniture design that are both assessed under the same criteria illustrated in Table 1. To the casual observer the furniture piece may not appear to conform to stereotypical views of ‘product’ production techniques, this is largely explained because of the perception of the materials used. Examples of the criteria under ‘the product in technological terms’, such as material specification and assembly methodology, demonstrate that the furniture piece utilizes appropriate mass production techniques, as does the product design example.

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Figure 2 Table 1 1 Initialising The Project Design Brief To establish and interpret the requirements of a design brief Research & Marketing To be able to gather diverse and appropriate research material To identify the needs of the market To selectively prioritise research information Project Analysis To identify areas of opportunity and constraint To interpret information and set assignment strategies and objectives To identify and appreciate problem areas 2 Concept Generation Concept Design To generate a wide range of assignment concepts and innovative solutions To fully explore and develop assignment concepts To evaluate design proposals against established project objectives 3 Design Development Aesthetics The manipulation of space, form, scale and proportion The detailed treatment of colour, light and surface texture 4 Design Development Function To satisfy the functional requirements defined in project/product objectives Technology To interpret mechanical principles To select appropriate materials and manufacturing processes To select appropriate manufacturing methods To consider the limiting factors of cost and scale of production Human Factors To appreciate the need to cater for ergonomics and anthropometrics Environmental Issues To be sympathetic to the needs of the environment and sustainability 5 Communication Graphic To communicate design solutions at a variety of different levels Communication Working Data To produce working data at a variety of different levels Prototyping To use prototypes in the testing/development/realisation of design

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solutions Verbal Communication To communicate effectively in provide appropriate and effective support 6 Project Management Project Management To manage an assignment with respect to time scales, critical paths and people Design Methodologies To appreciate and apply design methodologies in the design process

5 CONCLUSION Our experience indicates that generic teaching, learning and assessment strategies can be successfully applied across a range of design disciplines where there is a common element of ‘repeatability’. This would include areas, which traditionally sit firmly on the craft side of design, such as, glass, ceramic and jewellery design, providing that they are viewed in the industrial manufacturing context. However this leads us towards courses such as ‘Design Products’ and ‘Design for industry’ and away from the trend of creating more specifically titled courses with their ability to attract more students. This leaves us as an industry with a further dichotomy; the nature of design and the design industry is organic and changes as the needs of society change. Emerging technologies provide designers with new possibilities both as possible products to design and the technology to enable the design process. REFERENCES [1] http://www.ucas.com/search/index05.html [2] Lawson B., How Designers Think; the design process demystified – Completely rev. 3rd ed. Architectural press, Oxford, 1997. pp. 38. [3] Lawson B., How Designers Think; the design process demystified – Completely rev. 3rd ed. Architectural press, Oxford, 1997. pp. 30. [4] Ford P. and Marsden M., CAD and Fostering Creativity within the Studio Environment. Proceedings of IEPDEC, Delft, 2004, pp.617-625.

FUTURISM & DADA: THEORETICAL ADVENTURES IN DESIGN CONTEXT Barry Wylant* Assistant Professor, Industrial Design Program, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada Antony Gellion Craig Badke Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT In his discussion of product meaning, Krippendorff argues that potential users will cognitively ‘place’ an object [1] into a context for the evaluation of that product. Seen out of context, it is quite difficult to understand the significance of any given artifact. This imaginative mechanism of ‘placement’ on the part of the user is also a device available and readily used by designers in the design and creation of new objects [2]. In addressing a given design problem, designers will work to establish design intent. They work in a variety of media such as sketches, models and other deliverables, which act as a facsimile for the intended object. To evaluate their design intent, designers will place their work into imagined contexts. Within this exercise certain aspects of the design can be isolated and evaluated, based on any prevailing context of consideration. Yet the question arises as to the degree to which contexts, and especially higher order contexts, can inform and influence the results of the overall design effort. Sometimes such higher order contexts are driven by corporate or client agendas. These contexts (and the attending values that go with them) are not necessarily explicit. They can be assumed and, if not clearly established, they can go unquestioned. This paper describes a studio exercise where a dominant design context is quite explicitly established. Indeed the context provided to students lies outside of typical client-based boundaries. In this exercise students are required to reinterpret the early 20th Century modernist theories of Futurism and DADA and to then use this new theoretical insight as a prevailing context for the design of a personal media device. As a result of this mandate, students investigate *

Industrial Design Program, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr.SW, Calgary, AB, Canada, T2N 1N4, 403-220-8456, [email protected]

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and arrive at rather novel comprehensions of contemporary technology and, in turn, generate fresh and innovative ideas for new forms and uses of media technology. Keywords: Design theory, design context, Futurism, Dada, technology 1 INTRODUCTION The application of theory in design can take on a variety of forms. For example, there are technical theories which inform the design of plastic parts and ergonomic ones that suggest more comfortable shapes to enhance product use. Other theories work in a more abstract way to inform an understanding of values embodied within a given product and its role within our culture and civilization. This paper discusses the use of such latter theories in an academic studio exercise intended to encourage students to become better aware of theoretical thinking, its role and implications, in the pursuit of their design work. Such insights are important given the pervasiveness of product culture in society today. The corporate context that drives most new product development tends to place a significant emphasis on the application of theory which addresses product use, market position, cost of production, timing and time-to-market, etc. All of these are essential to meet corporate goals, satisfy shareholders and facilitate the effective launch of the product into the marketplace. Yet is this sufficient to understand the role of products and technology within our culture? Heidigger (circa 1954) addresses this in his essay The Question Concerning Technology. Here technology is seen in a very general sense where everything made is understood as technology, from mundane things such as garbage cans to high technology items such as supercomputers and cellular phones. Heidigger approaches the topic in two ways: one is in a more positive manner, where technology acts as a poetic revelation which facilitates a greater knowledge of the world and the position of the self within it. And then there is a more sinister or negative sense to the word where the convenience provided by technology does the opposite, where one’s focus is so exclusively framed within technological functionality that a greater insight into the world or the self is precluded [3]. In this latter instance, the individual’s role is secondary to that of technology. As future purveyors of product culture the implications of this dynamic is important for students to understand. 2 A CHOICE OF THEORY Two groups active at the beginning of the last century, contributed to the dialogue on technology in a way that can be seen to foreshadow Heidigger’s discussion. These were the Italian Futurists and the Zurich Dada. Each group had a distinct take on technology, its relationship to humanity, its role in our civilization, and how it should be expressed in art and design. Futurists, found themselves ultimately smitten by technology, they had a kind of ruthless wonderment with it where the qualities of speed, aggression, misogyny, violence, and the negation of all history were considered to be of the highest aspirations for man. First published in 1909, the Futurist Manifesto places technology at the pinnacle

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of human achievement and suggests that it deserves our devoted worship, effectively to the near negation of our own humanity. To the Futurist, if technology fails then it is the fault of frail humanity; the machine (and even more specifically the race car) is the new ‘beautiful’ and rightly supreme. From the Futurist Manifesto: 1. We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of energy, and boldness. 2. The essential elements of our poetry shall be courage, daring and rebellion. 3. Literature has hitherto glorified thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and sleep; we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. 4. We declare that the world’s splendour has been enriched by a new beauty; the beauty of speed. A racing motor-car, its frame adorned with great pipes, like snakes with explosive breath…a roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace [4]. The Futurists set a precedent with the bombast and rhetoric published in their manifestos, though in the end the Futurist promise seemed to be horrifically realized in the First World War. The war demonstrated quite clearly (at least to those in the trenches) that mechanized, manufactured death is not at all beautiful. In morbid irony many futurists died in the explosive quagmire that was the war. The war also engendered many intellectual refugees who found themselves drawn to European centers away from the conflict. One group of artists and café intellectuals collected around Hugo Ball and his girlfriend Emmy Hennings in Zurich. They called themselves Dada. Dada built on the publicity precedent of the Futurists but with one significant difference: Dada was repulsed by the war. Dada held no great love for the machine, seeing the pursuit of such technological endeavors ending in slaughter and destruction. For the Zurich Dada (Dada was later recycled in various forms in Berlin, Paris and New York) art should lose any cultural baggage and strive to express the elemental. This humanist search for the elemental meant that one should focus on chance, spontaneity and the uncorrupted innocence of childhood and, according to critic Robert Hughes, this focus meant Dada was never an art style in the way of Cubism or Expressionism [5]. To achieve the elemental, Dadaists created their art as performances in a café known as the Cabaret Voltaire. Usually these were stiff attempts at primitive music and poetry that incorporated unexpected elements such as animalistic masks and other cardboard props and costumes. They also created a body of work incorporating aspects of sculpture, collage and found objects. There is a polarity represented in the two movements, both of which contribute to an essential dialogue on technology and culture that has permeated the last century. Elements of a tempered Futurism are easily seen in the ever increasing pace of technological change and in various televisions shows on The Learning Channel, The Discovery Channel and History Channel (available in North America) and in a variety of movies which showcase new technologies, magnificent machines and the history of warfare. Elements of Dada are discernable in Beat culture, the hippy movement of the 60’s and later in the arrival of punk in the back half of the 70’s. Given this polarity, the two movements were seen as providing a useful basis for the intended studio exercise.

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3 WORKING THEORY If theory is truly to have a presence in design work then the question arises as to how. Krippendorf’s discussion on product meaning and product semantics suggests a mechanism as to how this might occur. He discusses the way in which consumers will understand and contemplate a given product, “Seeing something in a store as a chair requires imagining its use at home or in an office, a context that may or may not be realized in practice [6].” In other words consumers and users comprehend and interpret an object by imaginatively and cognitively placing it into a given context. The nature of such contexts is quite varied, naming the object places it within the context of language and complexity can grow from there, “What something is (the totality of what it means) to someone corresponds to the sum total of its imaginable contexts [7].” Krippendorf argues that the professional designer must develop a sensibility for the contexts that potential users will place the artifact into. The notion of “conceptual repositioning” evident in Krippendorf’s cognitive placing is similar to Buchanan’s discussion on design thinking [8]. Buchanan describes contexts as placements, drawing the distinction between these and context categories as something more fluid. Categories, he argues, have fixed boundaries of definition, whereas a placement is something more flexible. When a designer considers (or places) an idea for a product’s form into a given context placement it can result in a new perception for that design idea and/or the context into which it is placed. A type of gestalt is arrived at which consists of the thing placed, seen against and in combination with, the context into which it is situated. For example, in a design exercise for a new cell phone, the designer may imaginatively place an idea for the phone’s overall shape into a particular use context to ergonomically evaluate that shape and the manner in which it’s held. This could lead to a design change to the proposed shape or to the designer’s understanding of how it could or should be held, or both. Further the designer may then examine how such changes could affect the overall appearance of the phone. A further change to the appearance may then require a new examination of the phone’s grip. The designer might also entertain the ease with which a given shape could be molded. Each of these examples is an exercise in placement and effectively the designer must cycle through a variety of placements that address use, appearance, manufacturability, etc. to arrive at a satisfactory design result. The success of the design exercise ultimately lies in the designer’s ability to effectively play through all of the necessary placements to fully consider the design problem. The idea of placement can become a device for understanding how one might rigorously incorporate theoretical insight into the design effort. A given theory can act as a specific placement for the consideration of any proposed piece of technology and its relationship to our society and culture. This idea served as the departure point for the proposed design exercise that students undertook. 4 STUDIO EXERCISE IN THEORY The project was structured in such a way that students had to first study the theories at play and then apply this understanding in the design of a personal media player. The first part also represented an exercise in re-contextualizing theory. Futurism and Dada came

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about in a time of tremendous political, cultural, ideological, social and world change and thus arose under very different circumstances than exist today. Students (working in pairs) were thus required to go beyond simply researching Dada and Futurism rather they had to reinterpret them to create a sense of what they might be like if developed in today’s setting. In effect they had to become what might be called New Futurists/Dadaists with attending insights into today’s culture, society and technology. Within the project this goal was achieved via two deliverables. The first required students to create an event that provided for a Dadaist/Futurist experience for their classmates and instructors. The second required students to establish a Dadaist/Futurist position on contemporary technology with a specific focus on personal media technology. The experience events provided for interesting results. In one Dada group, the pair effectively hijacked an elevator, placing out-of-order signs on other floors. They then decorated the interior of the elevator car with Dadaist themed graphics and provided each participant in the event with an individual CD player loaded with a custom mixed CD, each specific to the participant. The recordings narrated readings from Dadaist sources and mixed these with music. Moving up and down in the elevator car as a group yet with everyone listening to something completely different created an isolating effect indicative of the view that modern technology engenders significant and socially isolating experiences for users. In general Dadaist positions tended to be more critical of technology where Dadaist positions typically addressed the isolating and dehumanizing nature of technology. For their event, a Futurist group crammed all of the participants into a small workshop room that had been fitted with several monitors, computers, fans, and sound systems. A cacophonic presentation using all of these media was then used in this small space to overwhelm participants with the presence of technology and the mystery of how it all works. Student positions from a Futurist perspective tended to discuss the role of technology as a necessary and ultimate enhancement to achieving some task. The student design projects for the personal media device had to strictly adhering to their Dadaist and Futurist positions. One Dadaist group developed an MP3 player called sHeLLs. Intended to expand social contact, it required both hands to hold it, had fixed volume levels and a limited playlist of songs. Only as the device entered into proximity with other sHeLLs could both the volume and the playlist increase. With a number of users these could increase sufficiently to support a small party or rave. Another Dadaist intervention provided for a camera-cellphone that spoke to an individual’s inner child, relying on a retro rotary dial to introduce a playful and fun quality to the design. Another group developed a design intended to allow users to engage familiar aspects of their environment in an unfamiliar and fresh way (see Figure 1). The students designed a disposable pebble-like transceiver that could sample environmental noise and rebroadcast it to a dedicated headset. The headset allowed the incoming noise to be mixed and played with music to provide for a completely new environmental experience. Based on the premise that communication technology is more about the communication itself rather than the significance of the message, one group designed a media device that translates the spoken word into emoticons via a badge worn on one’s clothing. A Futurist design proposed a wrist based RF communications device that allowed users to quickly and privately exchange personal profile data that could enhance business and/or dating interactions. Another Futurist group developed a media headset that used

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sensors to monitor the user’s state of mind. Incorporating LCD eye lens, the device would increasingly improve sound quality and cloud over the lens only as the user became more serene to allow for a complete Futurist absorption into the music experience. Still another group developed a media player that allowed dedicated athletes to better fixate on that ultimate ‘zone’ of performance through various interfaces. Overall the results of the studio were quite extraordinary. All the student projects served to effectively reflect and convey their basis in Futurist or Dadaist theory. Students often found that the exercises allowed them to understand the role of theory in their design work in a real and significant way. Students were also surprised to find that the theories examined are in fact still quite relevant today in informing one’s understanding of the role of technology, and its creation, in contemporary society.

Figure 1. EAS audio sampling system. REFERENCES [1] Krippendorf, Klaus., On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition that “Design Is Making Sense (of Things).” The Idea of Design, edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995, pp. 156-184. [2] Buchanan, Richard., Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. The Idea of Design, edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995, pp. 3-20. [3] Heidegger, Martin (1954), The Question Concerning Technology. In the translation by William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1977, pp. 4-35. [4] Taylor, Christina J., Futurism: Politics, Painting and Performance. University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor Michigan, 1974. [5] Hughes, Robert., The Shock of the New. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002. [6] Krippendorf, op. cit., p. 159.

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ASSIGNMENTS WORKLOAD AND DESIGN LEARNING OUTCOME Gudur Raghavendra Reddy* Communications and New Media Programme, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The relationship between assignment workload and students design learning outcome is quite volatile. It was observed that too much or too little stress can cause adverse effect on student learning outcome. This paper is about ongoing project investigating relationship between assignments workload/stress and design learning outcome of level two design course taught at Communications and New Media Programme (CNM), National University of Singapore (NUS). The objective of this investigation is to find a balance between students’ academic workload and learning outcome. Keywords: studio-based teaching, design pedagogy, learning approaches, assessment, academic workload 1 BACKGROUND CNM is an inter-disciplinary programme offered by Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and School of Computing, NUS. Modules offered under this programme broadly fall under two categories, “Information and communications management” and “Interactive media”. Crucial component of Interactive media segment is basic design module “Principles of Visual Communication” In this paper I wish to share results of recent investigation into influence of academic workload on students learning outcome. Basic design module titled “principles of visual communications” will be used for this case study. 2 INTRODUCTION Pedagogy of teaching design fundamentals to non-design students in interdisciplinary university setting is quite different from traditional design school setting. Factors that *

Communications and New Media Programme, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570, Email: [email protected]

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differ from traditional design school setup and impede traditional teaching methods are. 1. Student’s background and exposure 2. Teaching and Learning environment 3. Lack of support structure Once the problems were analyzed, I thought coming up with appropriate solution would not be too difficult. However, it turned out to be much more time consuming and complex affair. Over past 4 years 2 major revisions were made to the curriculum to get desired design learning outcome. The end result though satisfactory has resulted in a new problem – possible excessive student academic workload. (Reddy, G. R., 2004) 4 PROBLEM Above revisions though produced encouraging results the offshoot of this exercise was increase in academic workload. My quest for getting desired learning outcome has increased students’ workload by almost 200% over past 4 semesters. Over past 2 semesters faculty level module review showed that on an average roughly 15% - 20% of my students felt that the workload was too much to handle. As this feedback is anonymous, there is no way for me to know who exactly is facing this problem. Initially I struck it down thinking it must be an excuse coming from students who hardly showed up for lectures. But, this semester I have noticed that couple of students (10%) who were doing well at the beginning of the semester started to under perform towards the end. This has forced me to look closer if the slip in performance has got anything to do with academic workload and learning environment. 5 METHOD 5.1 LITERATURE REVIEW 5.1.1 Approaches to learning

Table 1. Motive and strategy in approaches to learning and studying. Approach Motive

Strategy

Surface

Reproductive: limit target to bare essentials and reproduce through rote learning. Is meaningful: read widely, interrelate with previous relevant knowledge. Is based on organizing one’s time and working space:

Is instrumental: main purpose is to meet requirements minimally: a balance between working too hard and failing Deep Is intrinsic: study to actualize interest and competence in particular academic subjects. Achieving Is based on competition and egoenhancement: obtain

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behave as ‘model student’. (Biggs, J ., 1987)

5.1.2 Learning approaches and academic outcome Brief literature survey on perception of learning environments, learning approaches and academic output in university environment has revealed some eye opening empirical studies. Below are few relevant research findings. (Lizzio, A., Wilson, K. and Simons, R., 2002) • Research indicates that there is a strong relationship between students’ perceived workload and learning approach. A heavy perceived workload and inappropriate assessment influences students towards surface learning approach. • Students’ perception of bad teaching environment (teaching and, appropriateness of assessment) influences them towards surface learning approach. Of course, it is not just that simple; there are factors which influence student’s perception of learning environment and academic workload. Like… • Interest in subject: Subject interest influences perception of workload • Personality and lifestyle: personality and lifestyle priorities influences perception of workload Most of the relevant studies I came across are conducted in engineering field. Sadly, so far I have not found much in design education based on studio model. Interesting thing about studio in this context is that most of the problems associated with surface learning can be effectively tackled in studio. Some of the advantages of studio model are… • Design critique: feedback/evaluation is instant. • Small group: encourage one on one interaction • Clarity in assessment: because of studio format instructor is better informed about students performance 5.2 DATA COLLECTION Frankly, at this stage I was not sure where to start and what exactly to look for. Hence, decided to conduct initial study to understand the problem and also to see if existing theories apply to studio learning environment. A questionnaire was developed to find out (among other things) students perception of workload and learning experience. The primary objective of this survey is to collect data from different perspectives which I was hoping would help me understand the problem and device frame work for in-depth study. The survey contains 4 components. 1. Quantitative component: Time spent by students on self-study component and students’ workload perception 2. Qualitative component Learning experience and stress in learning

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3. Felder-Silverman Index of learning styles (ILS) (Ideally I should have also asked them to fill Biggs’s study process questionnaire) 4. Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator test 5.3 PARTICIPANTS Questionnaire was distributed to all 37 students in the class on the last day of the semester. 29 students responded and 25 responses were used for the study. 4 responses were discarded as they were incomplete. 6 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION At this point I am going to only present data from first 2 components of the survey as they are directly related to the immediate problem of possible excessive academic workload.

Table 2. Response from students who scored very high (75% & above) in CA. Time spent on self study per week

Workload Perception

Perception of assignment importance to module objectives

Perception of performance in stressful environment

60% spend more than 6 hours 10% spend 4 to 5 hours

100% feel it’s heavy but manageable

100% feel it’s very important

70% said they perform better in stressful environment 30% said they perform better in non-stressful environment

30% spend 3 to 4 hours Comments on academic workload, stress and learning experience Enjoyed module, more stressful, equate to better absorption Forced to come up with something, really have to think, by which learnt the process I tend to get lazy if there is no deadlines to meet constant workload keeps me learning and moving to the next phase

Students are placed into 3 groups based on their performance (Continuous assessment is taken as performance indicator). The data is collated to observe if there is any relationship between students’ performance and their perception of academic workload.

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Table 3. Response from students who scored above average (60% - 75%) in CA. Time spent on self study per week

Workload Perception

Perception of assignment importance to module objectives

Perception of performance in stressful environment

75% spend more than 6 hours

100% feel it’s heavy but manageable

100% feel it’s very important

37% said they perform better in stressful environment 63% said they perform better in nonstressful environment

25% spend 4 to 5 hours

Comments on academic workload, stress and learning experience working constantly will help in understanding concepts well, but sometimes the workload is very excessive Less stress and workload may allow learning at a comfortable pace, more time for experimenting new ideas Assignments so hands down which is most effective way in learning concepts, workload not too heavy, helps us in being consistent in our work

Table 4. Response from students who scored below average (40% - 60%) in CA. Time spent on Workload self study per Perception week

Perception of assignment Perception of importance to module performance in objectives stressful environment

30% spend more 12% feel it’s very 60% feel it’s very important than 6 hours heavy, could not cope 14% spend 4 to 5 57% feel it’s hours heavy but manageable

40% it’s not very important

50% said they perform better in stressful environment 50% said they perform better in non-stressful environment

14% spend 3 to 4 31% Moderate hours 42% spend 2 to 3 hours Comments on academic workload, stress and learning experience Perhaps both book assignments and the final project could be given more time. very heavy workload as I tend to perfect each picture/design On average it is more manageable for someone who has design application knowledge.

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Above results indicate some evidence of excessive academic workload. Top performers are achievers and generally thrive in competitive environment. They tend to perform better in stressful environment. Most affected group is above average performers. Who seem to be feeling some amount of stress and are unable to cope with it adequately. This is evident from amount of time they spend on self-study and their response to stress coping. Most of the students from underperforming group hardly showed up for the lectures. I take it that they are not interested in the subject/lack motivation. Cause for concern - one of the students in the underperforming group was actually doing quite well at the beginning of the semester. She just stopped showing up to the class for the last few lectures. When I talked to her she said she just could not cope with the workload and it was affecting her studies for other modules. In any case, I consider this exercise as just an exploratory survey hence, it is not appropriate to draw any serious conclusions. In a way, it served its purpose by answering few questions and most importantly helping me device a frame work for in-depth study. 6.1 FUTURE DIRECTIONS This small study made me realize how complex this whole issue is. There are so many variables that it is almost impossible to conduct a controlled study. Next step in this investigation would be to device an instrument to find out students’ approaches to learning in studio. I am presently devising an instrument based on research studies of Marton & Saljo and J.B.Biggs. In present study, I have also noticed interesting relationship between student’s personality types, their perception of learning environment and learning preferences. I would also wish to look into this a bit more closely. 7 CONCLUDING REMARKS What is optimum workload? It is difficult to answer this question. Actual workload is different from perceived workload. Perception of workload depends on student’s background, subject interest and personality (Kember et al. 1996). If one takes a closer look at the data, one will find that only around 55% of students spend more than 6 hours on self-study. University requirement for 4credit hour module requires students to spend 6 hours on self-study. Technically speaking, the academic workload for this module is just about right. What now, should I reduce academic workload? It’s a very hard thing to do. The basic pedagogic strategy I am following is to keep students on their toes, not letting them ease up completely. So far this strategy is producing results and there is no indication (apart from few exceptions) of students switching to surface learning. That being said, some students do feel the stress and frustration of constant work pressure. Which is definitely not desirable and something needs to be done to rectify this problem. I’ll run this survey again next semester with necessary instruments to get a better picture on students’ motivation, learning preferences and strategies before I decide to make any changes.

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REFERENCES [1] Kember, D, Ng S, Tse H, Wong, ETT, and Pomfret M., An examination of the interrelationships between workload, study time, learning approaches and academic outcomes. Studies in Higher Education, 1996, volume 21, No 1. [2] Lizzio, A., Wilson, K. and Simons, R., University students’ perceptions of the learning environment and academic outcomes: implications for theory and practice. Studies in Higher Education, 2002, volume 27, No. 1. [3] J.B. Biggs, Student Approaches to Learning and Studying. Hawthorn, Victoria, Australian Council for Educational Research, 1987. [4] Reddy, G. R., Challenges in teaching a design foundation course to non-design students, IEPDE conference, Delft, Netherlands, 2004 [5] Reeves, M., Evaluation of training. The industrial society, UK., 1993

Chapter Four TEAMWORK

INNOVATION THROUGH COLLABORATION: EXPLOITING KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IN ENGINEERING PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT K L Edwards* Head of Innovation and Knowledge Transfer Derbyshire Business School, University of Derby, United Kingdom. D C Parkes Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The market place is changing rapidly and in order for businesses to compete and grow successfully they need to continually innovate. However, improving products and taking ideas for new products to market is difficult, especially for small companies, who often lack the necessary knowledge, skills and resources. There is a plethora of sources of advice available to businesses, but accessing expert help is vital to most new product development, and this is obtainable externally in universities. This paper describes how product innovation can be supported successfully through universities and businesses working in partnership, mutually benefiting both parties in the process. Generalised actual case study outcomes are used to disseminate best practice on collaborative new product development with an emphasis on small companies. Keywords: Knowledge transfer, industrial collaboration, product innovation 1 INTRODUCTION The ongoing development of existing products and the introduction of new products are essential to business growth and profitability. However, product development requires significant commitment in time, effort and expertise, especially the introduction of *

Head of Innovation and Knowledge Transfer Derbyshire Business School, University of Derby, Kedleston Road Derby, DE22 1GB, United Kingdom, Tel: +44 1332 591729, Fax: +44 1332 597741, Email: [email protected]

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completely new products. The requirements on engineering product development are especially demanding. Many businesses, particularly small businesses (SMEs), have limited access to key resources to pursue development activities, creating a significant barrier for evolving existing products and introducing new products to the market place [1]. This leads to declining sales volumes as products become out dated and not replaced, stifling future business growth. A lot of companies survive on a succession of minor or cosmetic modifications to old designs, giving the appearance of new and better products, but this situation tends to be temporary, making it difficult to sustain the business. So how do companies break out of this unfavourable situation? There is considerable professional advice available from regional business support organisations, and where appropriate access to modest amounts of business development funding through the regional development agencies. However, maximising business potential through product innovation needs continuous support, resourced over prolonged periods, to allow change to become embedded. Large companies can draw on internal resource and influence their supply chains, although increasingly lean operations, heavily constrained to core business activities, inhibit this capability. Small companies, with limited resource, rely heavily on external sources of advice and support, and to some extent are similar to a lean large company. 2 THE JUSTIFICATION FOR COLLABORATION Universities can and do provide important business support services, typically ranging from immediate short-term consultancy guidance to long-term collaborative activities for product (and process) innovation. Nationally, the Lambert Review of BusinessUniversity Collaboration highlights the importance of developing partnerships between businesses and universities [2]. However, Lambert acknowledges that a significant

Table 1. The main benefits of industry/academia collaboration. Benefit

Industry

Knowledge transfer

Acquire new knowledge and expertise

Enhanced performance

Increased profitability through new products, services and processes Use of high calibre personnel

Essential resource Additional finance Dissemination Additional opportunities

Subsidised funding schemes available Publicity and promotion Access to wider university facilities and potential for ongoing relationship

Academia Better understanding of industrial requirements and commercial imperatives Up to date research and teaching materials and more relevant curriculum Potential for increasing staff Supplements core funding Learned publications Student placements/projects and potential for ongoing relationship

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amount of work needs to be done by both parties to improve the effectiveness of process. The process is normally bi-directional with both parties mutually benefiting from the arrangement, as shown in Table 1. Amongst the many mechanisms of support available to businesses, a long established DTI funded scheme exists in the form of Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP), formerly known as TCS [3]. This scheme enables businesses to access the expertise of their local universities whilst utilising the skills of a high calibre graduate as resource for a business strategic project. This type of collaborative arrangement normally facilitates a permanent transfer of knowledge with tangible business benefits, in this case product, process and people innovation, the university acquires professional design practice experience, and the graduate receives invaluable design training and personal development, often being retained by the company post programme, as shown in Figure 1. KTP has now been in existence for around 30 years so has evolved into a very effective method of collaboration but is not the ultimate solution to all knowledge transfer between universities and industry [4,5]. KTP needs to be included in a portfolio of different knowledge transfer mechanisms available to meet the diverse range of needs of industry. Depending on location, there may be some similar schemes available locally, but these tend to be of a much shorter timescale. Another national scheme is the Shell Technology Enterprise Programme (STEP), which offers businesses the chance to benefit from the use of an undergraduate, as opposed to a graduate for short placements, often in vacation periods. There are many more schemes available including grants for investigating an innovative idea, grants for research and development, knowledge transfer networks, and collaborative research and development. Collaboration also has wider economic and social benefits for communities at the regional level with innovation features strongly in most Regional Economic Strategies [6]. Innovation is a critical area of East Midlands Development Agency’s Destination 2010 strategy of which a priority for action is ‘to improve the transfer of knowledge from universities and other research institutes to businesses’ [7]. At a more local level, the funding for investment is devolved to sub-regional partnerships (SSPs). The University of Derby with the support of Derby and Derbyshire Economic Partnership have established a Graduate Innovation

Figure 1. The aims of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.

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Programme, based on aspects of KTP, in order to support the delivery of some of the East Midland’s regional key action priorities. 3 THE ROLE OF INNOVATION Innovation is a business process for creating change such as a product improvement or new product introduction. However, having a good idea for improving or introducing a new product is relatively easy compared to the sourcing and putting together the necessary skills, expertise and resources needed to make it happen. For a small business especially, the main challenge is therefore about bringing new knowledge and expertise into a business to develop new, high value-added products, processes and services [8]. Innovation enables businesses to compete successfully and profitably, which is very important in today’s rapidly changing market place. Therefore the position of the country’s knowledge base in supporting innovation is apparent. Effective harnessing of this knowledge remains the biggest barrier to successful innovation, especially in small companies, the majority employer [9]. 4 THE SMALL COMPANY SITUATION Many businesses reach a point in their life cycle where, in order to grow further they need to change, mostly in part but occasionally overall, and this will require significant time, effort and expertise, especially when the whole company is involved. In contrast, changes in small companies almost always tend to involve the whole business [1]. Although small companies are agile and flexible, most SMEs do not have access to the key resources necessary to affect change and so there is a significant barrier to business growth. Change, if any at all in a lot of SMEs, especially micro-businesses, tends to be rather organic in nature and often leads to poor competitiveness and low profitability. Access to advice is not the main problem and although helpful, cannot be fully utilised because of the limited resource available to act on the advice. The dilemma is frustrating but can be resolved by accessing the resources say of local universities (and colleges). Further, there are subsidised funding schemes available to facilitate the collaborative process such as KTP. However, many businesses, especially small businesses have little or no experience of working with academia so do not immediately see the benefit of collaboration. The reality of collaborating effectively with small businesses is the need to appreciate fully the business context even when assistance is only required in technical aspects of design or product development. 5 THE COMPANY LIFECYCLE EFFECT All companies, large or small, typically follow a development life cycle, the timescale being a function of the interaction of the business with the market. In the case of a design-based company, the business development cycle may be a function of the product development cycle [1]. If the development is considered to occur in stages, at the initial

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or emergent stage, the competitive position is being created, at the next stage or growth stage the competitive position is being improved, followed by the maturity stage where the business has to be sustained, and finally at the ageing stage, regeneration, abandonment or selling are involved. At any one time, large companies can experience parts of their business at different stages, reflecting product development, so it is possible to manage a balance across the business. This is not the case with small businesses, where the development life cycle tends to be the whole business. Add to this a constantly changing market and it is easy to see why many small businesses fail. Small businesses are therefore heavily reliant on external assistance to affect change in their products and processes. Clearly, the support required would be different depending on the stage reached in the development cycle. Universities have a diversity of support available, but harnessing this support to meet the needs of industry often involves accessing several different subject areas (e.g. business and technology), hence departments simultaneously. This support has to be internally co-ordinated to provide a coherent service, sensitive to the business cycle, as well as size of operation, resource limitations and timescales. 6 LESSONS LEARNED FROM CASE STUDY OUTCOMES The higher education sector has a developing track record of ‘out-reach’ activities, increasing significantly over recent years with changes in central government funding support and the need to diversify away from core teaching activities. Most universities now have a business partnership or equivalent office, co-ordinating academic staff engaged in varying amounts of commercial activity. These activities include consultancy, contract research, short courses, in-company training and collaboration, the latter mainly through KTP, although the list is not exhaustive. Apart from the obvious income generation benefit of working with business, the academic staff involved also benefit from the experience gained ensuring teaching relevance, and provide the opportunity to for student placements and projects. This so-called ‘toolkit’ of provision for working with business, spread across the enormous breadth of subject expertise, provides essential third party support to an industry that has all but subcontracted everything apart form core business activity. However, even for core areas such as design and product development, some companies still persist in operating in unplanned and unstructured ways, failing to link technical and commercial aspects of the business efficiently, leading to poor company resource utilisation and operational effectiveness. Small companies and any company growing rapidly are the most vulnerable to the adverse consequences of unstructured operations. The University of Derby has a long track record of working with business especially with local businesses in all the forms described above. A large amount of activity goes into supporting new product and process development (and associated business process re-engineering and change management). Typically, businesses new to accessing university services are naturally apprehensive. This is especially evident for smaller businesses and businesses who do not employ graduates, making it difficult to appreciate or utilise university services. This has led in part to a strategy of longer-term relationship building, often with small initial commitment building with time. An example that constantly repeats itself in new product development begins with a feasibility study

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exploring different design concepts through a consultancy arrangement, concept selection and prototype development through contract research, and design for manufacture and market introduction through a collaboration programme. The provision of training (mostly bespoke and delivered in-company) often follows the problem solving, for which the university sector in general is well set up to deliver. Undergraduates (in the form of placements and projects, individually and in groups) and graduates can and do form an integral part of this process, providing fresh ideas and invaluable resource whilst at the same time developing themselves personally and professionally. Depending on the type and scale of project and organisation concerned, students/graduates often become a member of an actual multidisciplinary design/development project team, thereby exposing themselves to the interdependency of tasks/issues (‘hard’ and ‘soft’), and provides context to their own allocated job responsibilities. By their nature, students and to a lesser extent graduates are inexperienced and less productive than skilled employees. However, their induction is often rapid and generally benefit from the support of academic staff at the university. The University of Derby manages a large number of placements and ‘out-reach’ activities with local businesses, the latter involving KTPs. At the University of Derby, a placement is acknowledged as an important part of an undergraduate degree and students now have the opportunity to take a Diploma in Professional Practice as part of that placement. It helps students formally relate academic knowledge and skills to practical aspects of industry but importantly it recognises the invaluable contribution played by business in the education process. Some companies only want ad-hoc support, but others are much more focused in their requirements. The difficulty comes in a lot of cases in servicing the often short-timescale intensive task oriented activities of companies with the broad long-term agenda of universities (teaching and research). If the resource is in the form of students then is equally as difficult because it is only available during certain times of the year. Academic staff are equally not that readily available. Arguably, by involving universities with the same businesses over extended periods allowing the timescales to become more synchronised and planned resources allocated. A true partnership in developing product (technical and commercial) from concept to market is inherently more realisable, and both parties gain in the process, in ways more than financial. 7 CONCLUDING REMARKS Successful collaboration between academia and industry in product, service and process innovation has long-term benefits, financial and non-financial, to both parties. When students and graduates are involved, they benefit personally and professionally, and often find employment with the businesses. However, differences in strategic priorities and operations between universities and businesses can obstruct the quality of outcomes. Small companies, the majority employer, are highly sensitive to market changes and with limited resources are in most need of external support. Their business development cycles generally reflect the relatively short market response to their products and services, creating a need for constant change. A similar situation is being experienced in larger companies who are increasingly organised into smaller profit centres. Supporting small

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businesses through knowledge transfer is therefore a challenge, by being responsive to their needs within a total business context. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors are grateful to the many engineering organisations that have participated in knowledge transfer, providing the general outcomes discussed in this paper. REFERENCES [1] Edwards, K.L., Organising for new product development in small engineering business: a case study in improving design capability, Proceedings of 4th International Conference on Advanced Engineering Design, Glasgow, UK, 2004. [2] Lambert, R., Lambert review of business-university collaboration, HMSO, 2003. [3] DTI Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, HMSO, 2004. [4] Eggbeer, D., Rees, J., Dorrington, P., Millward, H. and Lewis, A., Product design education in practise – evaluating the key transition from undergraduate degree to initial industrial position, Proceedings of 1st IE&PDE Conference, Coventry, UK, 2003, pp. 127-134. [5] Evans, M. and Waterworth, S., Industrial collaboration and its importance to ensuring currency in design education, Proceedings of 2nd IE&PDE Conference, Delft, The Netherlands, 2004, pp. 467-473. [6] Williams, D.J., The jobs factory, regional competition and the role of the education system, Proceedings of 5th IDMME Conference, Bath, UK, 2004. [7] Destination 2010: Regional economic strategy for the East Midlands 2003-2010, EMDA, 2003. [8] DTI Succeeding through innovation, HMSO, 2004. [9] CBI Innovation: making it happen, Business guide, Caspian Publishing, 2002.

INDUCTION INTO THE COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE OF AUTOMOTIVE DESIGN Mike Tovey* John Owen** Ray Land*** Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT A key characteristic of industrial design education is developing in students capabilities that enable entry to the community of practising designers. Our approach, outlined here, brings students to a point where they are eligible to enter the international transport and product design industries. It is informed by a conceptual framework of learning drawing on notions of situated cognition and the community of practice theory of [1]Wenger (1998). Students are engaged to a point where, through acquisition of conceptual skills specific design discourse, and development of spatial awareness, they are acculturated into the “ways of thinking and practising” of the designer. Plans to expand the scope within the community using direct virtual conferencing with shared computer and physical models are also described, along with a strategy for establishing a global network of partners. Keywords: Community of practice, spatial awareness, automotive design, computer aided design 1 COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE Wenger defines the major principles of a community of practice in three separate, but related quotes that help to place design of products and transport devices at the centre of such structures.

*

[email protected], [email protected], *** [email protected] **

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“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and who interact regularly to learn how to do it better.” “A community of practice is not merely a community of interest people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice.” “The community: in pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other.” Because learning within a community of practice transforms who a student is, and what a student can do, it is an experience of identity formation, not just an accumulation of skills and information Through this ‘transformative practice’ (wenger, op cit), professional identity is formed. Wenger helpfully describes features of a well formed community of practice that seem to demonstrate close accordance with those found specifically in design studios. “Indicators that a community of practice has formed would include: • sustained mutual relationships – harmonious or conflictual • shared ways of engaging in doing things together • the rapid flow of information and propagation of innovation • absence of introductory preambles, as if conversations and interactions were merely the continuation of an ongoing process • very quick set up of a problem to be discussed • substantial overlap in participants’ descriptions of who belongs • knowing what others know, what they can do and how they can contribute to an enterprise • mutually defining identities • the ability to assess the appropriateness of actions and products • specific tools, representations and other artefacts • local lore, shared stories inside jokes knowing laughter • jargon and shortcuts to communication as well as ease of producing new ones • certain styles recognized as displaying membership • a shared discourse reflecting a certain perspective on the world”

2 EDUCATION AND COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE Participation in a variety of essential practical studio-based learning methods is the crucial means by which students develop the technical knowledge, cultural awareness, and professional design skills which eventually constitute the identity of the transport or product design practitioner. Much of this process remains tacit and embedded within the practices of the professional community and is acquired obliquely through communal discourse, studio conversation and direct involvement in practical design projects.

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Learners are not just surrounded by the context of their activities but actively interact with it through design activities that have their own discourse, rules, roles and structure. Students experience a holistic, immersive environment where they encounter multifaceted, complex spatial phenomena. Skills of problem-formulation are developed through the pattern of group brief, expanded brief, intermediate critiques and final review, replicating design practice. At the heart of this process is the development of spatial intelligence [2] Gardner (1993) and subsequently access to a language of visual design. “Central to spatial intelligence are the capacities to perceive the visual world accurately, to perform transformations and modifications upon one’s initial perceptions, and to be able to re-create aspects of one’s visual experience, even in the absence of relevant physical stimuli…spatial intelligence emerges as an amalgam of abilities. The most elementary operation, upon which other aspects of spatial intelligence rest, is the ability to perceive a form or an object…appreciating how it will be apprehended for another viewing angle, or how it would look (or feel) were it turned around…Such tasks of transformation can be demanding. The ability to solve these problems efficiently is special…” Gardner identified seven distinct attributes of personal intelligence, calling them ‘multiple intelligences’. He identified: linguistic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, spatial intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence. Students learn what Gardner terms the “language of space” and “thinking in the spatial medium” to gain a more sophisticated visual-spatial understandings of complex surfacing. Through manipulation of forms, they acquire “threshold concepts” [3] (Meyer and Land 2003) distinctive to international automotive design such as manipulation and understanding of double-curvature fluid surfacing. These skills are eminently portable to other product design industries, for example, many Transport Design graduates have become very successful in the design of sports equipment and footwear. Tovey and Owen [4] (2000) described processes of CAD and physical modeling where fidelity of three-dimensional form in automotive design was discussed. Three methods to ensure coherent 3D intent were

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Figure 1. Which is the odd one out in each strip?. described with the ‘simultaneous approach’ being selected as the safest method to resolve the design. Recent developments in CAD technology and teaching methods present students with models of their designs more quickly, but evaluation of their surfacing requires a better understanding of surfacing and spatial understanding to make best use of these advances. Spatial awareness testing has been done using representations of solid figures transformed by rotations around one or more major axes. Subjects are asked to select an exception in a set of four similar figures, normally a mirror-image transformation along one axis. The following figure shows two such examples, one with major axis rotations and the other with an additional local rotation Further development is required to establish a more refined battery of tests to extend the range, allowing those with a more acutely tuned ability to be evaluated. We are especially interested in defining understanding of forms containing surfaces with double curvature and how they join similar surfaces, conditions seen usually in automobiles and increasingly in products. 3 ENGAGEMENT WITH INDUSTRY Engagement with leading industrial designers from the transport industry, is key and distinctive strength providing a useful model for emulating professional practice through

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live design projects. In the programmes of study, representatives of the design industry are invited each week to give a lecture, open to all staff and students, keeping open the two way interchange of ideas necessary for developing a shared understanding. Eminent design professionals are also engaged to contribute to courses at a theoretical and practical level, industry provided design briefs with specific requirements or constraints are a spur to creative thinking. Students are required to critically review the task, and to question the brief, exploring the creative possibilities thus, formulation of the project brief becomes a dialogue and then contract between client and designer. 4 INDUSTRIAL DESIGN PROCESSES Spatial understanding, creativity and innovation are central to design ideation while the engineering and the ergonomic credibility of products are crucial to commercial success. ‘Stylists’ produce a near replica model, at full-size, that is used for all body surface information required by engineering departments for structural design analysis, for tooling design and specifications. It represents the main formal communication device between the stylists and the engineers. To a significant extent styling is an intuitive process, with a strongly nonverbal culture, and it thus seems to be difficult to analyse and externalise in detail. Furthermore the processes may vary considerably from one designer to another and from one studio to another. Automotive stylists are expected to display visual flair within a controlled and yet changing formal vocabulary, the group culture is such that they recognise a shared but exclusive language. Their ability resides in tacit knowing - an apparently subliminal appreciation of the shapes acceptable for a car design and trends in automotive styling domains central to their work. The characteristics of the community of automotive design practice are clearly visible through case histories. A close collaborator Ford, represents such an established community. They have provided examples of designers’ detailed activities from their “Fusion” concept car as a basis for curriculum development; here design representations, CAD and physical models clearly show the design culture and its dependence on visual language. Because such groups are small, and they may work together for a number of years, their group language may be idiosyncratic and atypical. Our work to establish a regular network of studios and complimentary educational establishments is designed to launch a wider community of practice with mutual aims. 5 WIDENING THE NET We have developed various forms of collaborative and industry project work, an example is a recent project with Renault to design “The Next Thing”, following other innovative designs by Renault such as Twingo, Scenic and Espace. Five student groups produced virtual and physical models supported by flatwork and visual marketing analysis. Designers from Paris visited fortnightly to assist with teaching and learning and a large group attended final presentations.

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Considerable commitment to developing student practice has been shown by Renault and others who have a clear need to operate globally. The use of CAD to develop and present student design solutions on project work is now an established feature of industrial design programmes, the next step forward will be the use of computer-based modelling and presentation techniques, together with network technologies, to facilitate the sharing in group design activities with fellow design students and design experts from all over the world. The group critique process will be conducted in a similar manner to the way in which they are conducted now with the tutor physically present. As an alternative to, or a supplement to a physical model, students frequently create either Powerpoint presentations with embedded animations, or Alias models of design proposals for direct interactive manipulation, why not extend the impact of these digital presentation to a bigger and dispersed audience.

Figure 2. One solution for the Renault project.

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Figure 3. A group ‘crit’ in the Digital Interactivity Studio (DIS). The remote interaction approach has been technically validated using existing equipment such as web cams and virtual conference tools. We are currently establishing environments called Digital Interaction Studios (DIS) that serve this purpose; although they use virtual images for direct evaluation of designs, they are not seen as virtual learning environments, more an extension of the studio. Each DIS will mirror current industry practice where separate design studios can converse and see shared content. Each of these studios will comprise a number of computer workstations with web-cam communication. Face-to-face dialogues between students, or between students and design experts, can be conducted while participants interrogate a shared CAD model (typically constructed using Alias StudioTools and shared using EON Professional stereo software) or a real model (via web cam) that displays some stage in the research and development of the students’ design proposals. With the addition of an LCD projector a group of students can witness a series of individual critiques of their work by a remote tutor or design expert who needs only a workstation and web cam at their end to participate. The DIS will also support the assembly by students of their individual studio portfolios and their reflective design journals. Both of these devices are key components in the development of the student identity as the move is made from a peripheral position towards a fuller membership of the community of industrial design practice. The DIS, with all the affordances available in this domain, including animation and interactivity, will facilitate the studio portfolio and the reflective journal becoming more integrated and mutually supportive documents.

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6 CONCLUSION The car industry is large and international; belonging to the community of automotive designers requires experience in international dimensions of design practice. The development of digital interaction studios allows the collaboration that is fundamental in achieving our ambitions through the high level of shared design understanding that it supports. REFERENCES [1] Wenger E., Communities of Practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press, 1998. [2] Gardner HE., Frames of Mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books, paperback, tenth anniversary edition with new introduction, 1993 [3] Mayer JHF., and Land R,. (eds) Overcoming barriers to student understanding: threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge, Abingdon Oxford. Routgedge Falmer 2005 [4] Tovey M. and Owen J., Sketching and Direct CAD Modelling in Automotive Design. Design Studies Vol. 21, 2000 pp. 569-583

DEVELOPING AND ASSESSING GROUP DESIGN WORK; A CASE STUDY Dr Patrick Barber* School of Arts, Design and Technology, University of Derby, Derby. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The paper deals with the complex issues surrounding the development and usage of group work within the teaching of Engineering and Product Design. Group working is a proven and effective way of producing high quality design work yet it is a hard skill to learn. The teaching of group work is complex and difficult as it requires the development and assessment of both individual and group skills. The paper draws on the authors experiences and offers a selection of practical suggestions to improve the usage and development of group work. Keywords: Group work, Engineering Design, Development 1 INTRODUCTION Being able to operate in a team or group is essential for any designer, as the majority of design work is done within teams. The problem is how can effective team work be developed, and individuals performance assessed as effective team work often masks the work of individuals. This problem became apparent to the author whilst teaching the Engineering Design module at The University of Derby[1]. In this module the students have to work in a group in order to complete the task but an individual mark has to be provided. The paper explores the reasons, why team working skills are difficult to develop and why students tend not to like operating in groups. It then goes on to show how team working skills can be developed and methods of assessing an individuals contribution to a group. *

School of Arts, Design and Technology, University of Derby, Kedleston Rd, Derby DE22 1GB, Tel 01332 591765, E-mail [email protected]

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2 THE REQUIREMENT FOR GROUP WORK The use of groups or teams in all areas of design work has been common for many years as it has been found to be the best method of producing high quality engineering design work, especially if a multidisciplinary approach is applied. This is due to a number of factors which make a team more effective than the sum of its parts. These attributes of group work mean that it has become the development method of choice for many companies and industries over the past 20+ years and so group working skills need to be developed within engineering design courses[2]. 3 BARRIERS TO GROUP WORK DEVELOPMENT Having identified the need for group work, the next step was to determine and analysis the reasons why group work is so difficult to develop effectively within the majority of university design courses. The barriers were identified by means of the authors and colleagues observations and experiences of teaching engineering design. The author also used knowledge gained about the current educational environment within the schools sector[3]. The following are the barriers to group work that have been identified:• Exams, the majority of students coming from a school background are used to constantly sitting exams from the age of 14. In many cases been put under considerable pressure by the school and parents to perform well in these exams. • The other commonly used means of assessment within schools is course work, here the emphasis is on the individuals efforts and again it is often the ability to transfer of facts from the student to the assessor, that is being assessed. • The culture of “continuous assessment” within schools means that students are often convinced that there is a “score for everything” as they are used to being assessed continuously and there every mistake noted. • The fear of getting a “slacker/passenger” within your group means that students often do not want to participate in group work as “all their work” is credited to the rest of the group. These issues and barriers mean that it is extremely hard to get students to consider group work as a worthwhile exercise as they see it as a way in which their marks could be reduced. 4 GROUP WORKING EXPERIENCES The experiences shown here have been observed and recorded by the author over 3 years of teaching engineering design and through the experiences of other members of staff teaching on the same programmes.

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4.1 THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE The students first worry when confronted by group work is “who’s going to be in my group” this is always a problem, it does not matter if the groups are selected by the lecturer or the students as in both case someone the student doesn’t want or know could end up in their group. The fact though is that in industry they will often have to work with people they do not like or respect. The next problems students face is finding and communicating with their group as often they cannot find, or claim they cannot find, certain members of their group. This appears to happen most when students are placed in groups with people they do not know. This situation leads to the group splitting into two or three disparate sections which never appear to meet and who blame each other for the problem. This then leads to petty arguments and the students worst fear, low marks. Once the group has been formed and the above two problems have been hopefully overcome in the students eyes the next part is seen to be reasonably easy as it involves the development of the project often with a deadline which is felt to be a long way off. At this groups tend to achieve more if a clear leader appears within the group, to organise the group and set clear deadlines. If a leader does not appear then often groups will drift along with little being achieved. With the development period over the next big problem in the students eyes is preparing the work for submission, here the deadline often creeps up on them and if the group by this stage is not very coherent then a wide range of problems happen, including lost work miss-communications and elements being missed. Some examples of what can happen in this situation are:• One member of the group deciding that the rest have done nothing and so doing all the work themselves, then becoming angry with the rest of the group for either doing the work later or letting them do all the work. • Elements of the group disagreeing with the rest of the group and producing a counter proposal/ second submission. • The “unfound” members of a group doing nothing and then appearing for any final presentations/ interviews and taking credit for the work and nobody in the group voicing any opinion on this for fear of causing trouble and so being marked down. • The last minute rush to complete the work leading to duplication of effort or missing sections. The worst being missing sections were everybody thought somebody was doing that particular part. Often leading to splinter groups, accusations etc being cast about. This is the nightmare situation for a student as they see their grades been affected and the lecturer doing nothing about it. The final area of trouble for students is the assessment of the final output as all students tend to feel hard done by when they receive their final mark. Often they feeling that their mark does not represent the work they put into the project. Students feel that other members of the group “pulled down” their mark, by not doing as good a job as them, or that the lecturer marking the work did not notice their contribution to the work

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as it was masked by the rest of the group, often they feel a sense of injustice as the “slackers” in the group somehow got the best marks. 4.2 LECTURERS EXPERIENCES The lecturers that the author has interviewed about this topic and including the author, have all had bad experiences when dealing with group work, often finding that it is more demanding and time consuming than any other type of teaching or assessment. The first problem faced by lecturing staff is the choosing of the groups, this is a potential mine field due to the issues outlined in the students experiences. Proactive students will often lobby the lecturer to be placed into the group they want, on the other hand the vast majority of students will just leave it up to the lecturer. The lecturer also has the added problem of whether to mix full and part time students or to segregate them. Experience has shown it is best not to mix them as these two types of students as they have completely different, work effects, motivation and social life although part time students are often better at working within groups, as they have gained the emotional maturity and are used to group work as they are often part of teams within their work place. Once the groups have been selected the next problem is how do you know if the group is actually working together or if they have even found each other. In the current situation of ever increasing demands on lecturers time this is becoming increasingly difficult to monitor and influence. Many lecturers use a lassie faire approach, waiting for the students to come to them with problems and then attempting to sort it out. This approach works but the lecturer can only know about the problems that are brought to their attention. At this point the worst problems of all from a lecturers point of view, in the authors opinion start, the “bickering”. Students in the groups begin to fall out with each other and make judgments on who they feel is a “waster/ slacker” in their group and then start to make moves to rubbish that person or get them removed from their group. This places the lecturers under a great deal of pressure, as the lecturer cannot be sure the stories being told are true in addition one of the objectives of group work is for the student to learn to work with people they don’t like. This leads to the feeling within the student body that the lecturer does not care in the authors opinion. The next stage and the most time consuming and possibly the most critical for the lecturer is the assessment stage. Here the student requires an individual mark for their work. It is often very hard to develop this mark as it is often unclear as to the contribution a student has made. This means that the members of a group often end up getting the same mark. This mark is then disputed by individual students so leading to a long winded appeals process and a feeling within the student body that a true representation of their efforts has not been provided. This difficulty in providing an individual mark also encourages “slackers” as they feel they will get a good mark as the rest of the group will drag it up for them.

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5 INDUSTRY’S VIEW The use of group work is wide spread throughout the industry’s[4] that the students from Derby are likely to be working in. This means that the students have to learn how to operate effectively in a group and group work must form part of the academic courses. This view is always emphasised by visiting employers who say that they require people who can work well in groups and have the ability to communicate their ideas well. 6 THEORY The current literature shows that group work is considered to be an effective way for students to develop skills and learn. The theory works on the principle, that people learn better in a group, as they gain information and advice from their peers within the group. These elements work effectively once the students have learnt how to operate in a group. The current theory on group working shows that it is a skill and that it is developed late in human terms, the abilities required only being developed during the late teens[5]. This means that by the time many students start University they have not fully developed their group working skills and as highlighted earlier in this paper it is a set of skills that is not practiced regularly in schools. These factors mean that group work is a skill that students are still developing when they start a University course. Group work needs to be treated as a skill to be developed and not as something everybody knows how to do. 7 IMPROVING GROUP WORK So far this paper has investigated a set of negative issues surrounding group work and its usage, the paper will now show the methods used at Derby University to improve the situation in order to make group work an effective way for students to learn. All the methods listed below are used by the author and his colleagues to develop the group working skills of their students and to improve the overall outcomes of the work produced. 7.1 TRAINING IN TEAM WORK The aim here is to develop the students awareness of team work as a specific skill, many students have very little perception of what is actually happening within a group and how to behave in one. The training demonstrates to them group dynamics, Belbins[6] team types and how to gain from a group exercise. This type of training also has to deal with conflict resolution and dealing with people you do not like/ know. Typically this training takes the form of a series of lectures and group working seminars.

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7.2 GROUP MAKEUP The students within a group can make a great difference to its performance. It has been found through trial and error that mixing up groups so the same students don’t always work together is an effective way of improving a students group working skills. They are forced to communicate with, and work with, different sets of people. This approach though is not popular with students as they get used to working with one set of people. Problems have been observed with mixing full time and part time students, they tend to operate with completely different mind sets, different motivations and time available to do the project. This means that it is best to keep these two groups of students separate but again to mix them up within their peer groups. 7.3 SUPERVISED SESSIONS This technique has proved effective in creating group coherence and focuses on the task in hand. The method relies on the lecturer being present for the first 3 or 4 group meetings which are arranged with the lecturer. These meetings are of a formal nature with a chair and minutes being taken. To replicate to students the different “roles” they may need to play in a group. The chair is rotated at this stage so allowing all the group members to have a go at being the chair. The minutes of the meeting are circulated round all those who attended. In order to encourage the students to attend 5% of the modules mark is attributed to their performance/ attendance at the group meetings. 7.4 ASSESSMENT METHODS This is the hardest area of group work to deal with as it is often very difficult to ascertain the true value of an individuals input into a group. The particular assessment systems in use in many University’s, including Derby’s, demand an individual mark for each element of work, so making the need for a means of determining each individuals performance vital. The method the lecturer has had most success with is a combined assessment strategy were the group has to present its work to the lecturer and each individual within the group has to produce a report detailing what they have done towards the project plus a peer assessment form. The concept behind this approach is to discover how well the students worked as a group through the presentation and to determine their individual contributions through the report. This method has worked well as it shows up good and bad group working. Groups which have functioned well produce reports that show this through evidence in the reports and ones that have worked poorly do the same. This approach allows an individual mark to be generated for each student which the author is confident reflects that students abilities. The peer assessment is used as a final guide to what was happening within the group. The authors experiences and those of colleagues has shown that this method of assessment can be problematic as students often do not want to give bad marks to there fellow students, who are often their friends or they will have to work with them again, so in the authors opinion this method of assessment can only be used as a guide.

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8 CONCLUSION The paper has demonstrated that there are a large number of challenges in the use of and development of group work, but to effectively prepare students for industry means it is an essential element within any Engineering Design course. The findings drawn from the authors and colleagues experiences show that it is an element of the course that has to be taught and developed through the whole curriculum, for it to be at its most effective. The main areas of concern which have to be addressed are the students negative attitudes to group work and their often very low level of experience in operating as a group. These factors mean that when they attempt group work it does not go well so helping to reinforce the negative attitude. In order to improve the student morale they have to be taught how to work as a group and be provided with some positive experiences of group work. REFERENCES [1] Barber P R, Development of Concept Designs for a Disaster Relief Shelter a Student Project, 25th SEED Annual Design Conference, September 2003 Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK , ISBN 1 86058413 6 [2] Smith P G Reinersten G D, Developing Products in Half the Time, Van Nostrand Reinhold 1991 [3] Ellis Edwin J The Scope and Limitations of Using Performance Data to Improve School Effectiveness 2002 [4] Teamwork:m Success Through people, Advisory Booklet ACAS, September 1996 [5] Rust C Wallace J, Helping Students to Learn from Each Other, SEDA 1994 [6] Belbin, R M, Team Roles at Work, Butterworth-Heinemann 1993

ENTENTE CORDIALE: DEVELOPING DESIGN ALLIANCES D. Hands* School of Art and Design, Course Leader, BA [Hons] Design Management, University of Salford, United Kingdom. M.A. O’Brien** School of Art and Design, Course Leader, MSc Design Management, University of Salford, United Kingdom. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper will discuss the research and development of a recently established franchised Master of Science programme, International Business and Management for Design, between the University of Salford, UK and l’École Internationale de Design, Toulon, France. The programme is predominantly aimed towards the specific requirements of recently graduated designers from both the realms of product and communication design. It was developed following extensive research into the growing demands and opportunities of emergent European markets whilst also anticipating the potential growth of East Asian and Chinese marketplace activity. The programme commenced in September 2004, being delivered at the EID, Toulon, France, with the final Master’s degree being awarded by the University of Salford. Ten students have been accepted within the first cohort; with the majority of students taken from an industrial design background. Keywords: Design; Education; Curriculum Development; Design Management 1 INTRODUCTION There is a growing demand for business aware and commercially focused design graduates that can anticipate, understand and respond to the vicissitudes of fluid *

School of Art and Design, Course Leader, BA [Hons] Design Management, University of Salford, Salford, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom, M3 6EQ, Tel: +44 (0) 161 295 7167, [email protected] ** School of Art and Design, Course Leader, MSc Design Management, University of Salford, Salford, Greater Manchester, United Kingdom, M3 6EQ, Tel: +44 (0) 161 295 6177, [email protected]

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European and emergent Asian markets. The ‘International Business and Management for Design’ programme focuses heavily upon the role and importance of effective design management within the organisation [1,2,3]. Design can lead to a variety of positive strategic benefits. However, for these to be commercially realised, a framework of organisation and planning is necessary. Design managers (or employees who have traditionally taken on this role) have generally assumed the role as intermediary, to organise the design process and manage relationships between designers and other managers. However, since the business environment has changed, design has become more involved with the goals of other business functions, playing a more significant part of the company’s strategy. As an inevitable result, the role of design has broadened with the responsibilities of the design manager expanding [4, 5]. Organisations utilise design throughout a variety of different ways, providing many benefits in the way they behave and communicate to their customers. Design can be a powerful tool for managing and coordinating how the business looks and communicates to its customers. Design is also a useful instrument that could be harnessed to help the organisation realise and evaluate potential future business opportunities, in both the service and manufacturing sectors. At a strategic level, design can help maximise the company’s potential to deliver desirable products and services to new markets whilst also defending existing markets from competitors. As a result of the growing development of design management as a worthwhile academic discipline and business asset, new opportunities have arisen that led to the initiation by the University of Salford, to the development of potential design management programmes between other European academic institutions. 2 INITIAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT At the initial developmental stages of the programme, it was considered critical that the University of Salford undertake extensive market research into industry requirements thus informing the academic composition of the postgraduate curriculum. A French speaking researcher from the University undertook an intensive one week scoping study in France, interviewing key academic and industry figures, in an attempt to elicit a detailed and culturally informed understanding of how design management is currently perceived and valued by both education and industry. 12 interviews were arranged with the view that findings and issues arising would provide a balanced and rich source of data that could be incorporated within the new programme [Table 1]. This was supplemented by additional telephone interviews and questionnaires. The preliminary study provided a rich seam of information and often unanticipated findings through interviewing the diverse range of industry and academic commentators.

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Table 1: Participants in Preliminary Studies Company

Activity

Paris Team Creatif 3e-oeil

Venise Large Design Consultancy Large Design Consultancy Small Design Agency: Interactive and advanced design IFD Institut Francaise Private organisation : promotion of design to du Design enterprises and students Dragon Rouge Large Design Consultancy Décathlon Sports equipment retailer PSA Peugeot Citroën Automotive sector Alcatel Télécommunications – Mobile phone division M. Phillipe Laniepe Independent consultant in Design Management Mme Brigitte Borja De Mozota Professor in Design Management M. Gérard Caron Founder of one of the largest design agencies in France Areca Small design and colour study agency Renault Automotive sector

2.1 INITIAL FINDINGS: ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVE Professor Brigitte Borja De Mozota [Assistant Professor in Management Science at the University of Paris X Nanterre] provided an intimate understanding of the role and value of design management in France, suggesting that it was quite unique for design schools to embrace complex management issues within teaching curricula. At that time design management was predominantly taught only as a single module within MBA and related postgraduate programmes. She argued that any new master’s programme in design management should contain: • Organisational and Management theory • Marketing [with high emphasis on semiotics and consumer behaviour] • Branding and Brand Management • Business Strategy and Leadership However, she suggested that ‘…all aspects of management theory should be delivered through the ‘lens’ of design, relating the topics to the many different facets of design enhancement and current design research in France’. Also, it was considered important to undertake research into particular aspects of French business practice [the way in which certain businesses in industry differentiate themselves on unique aspects of cultural identity; Jean Paul Gaultier; Christian Dior].

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2.2 INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE: M. Gerard Caron founder of Carre Noir, one of the most successful and largest of the design agencies in France, M. Caron has extensive experience of working with clients to fully realise their organisational potential through design. His initial comments suggested that the French design education system has quite a limited international perspective, in terms of reference and input. Consequently, design graduates entering into industry often learn ‘on the job’ developing their awareness of business issues through a lengthy period of practice. Small businesses in France do not fully understand the potential of design and how design could effect commercial and competitive advantage. Caron argued that the new programme should strongly anticipate the current needs of the French home market, whilst inculcating the students with an understanding of emerging markets in central Europe and the cultural nuances connected to these markets. Philippe Picaud, Design Director at Decathlon oversees one of the largest integrated design teams in France, with over 60 designers working on a variety of design projects involving sports equipment and sporting fashion apparel. He commented that predominantly large companies in France have started to integrate design within the organisations and that the role of the designer is slowly changing, demanding that design professionals view themselves as a strategic resource. Consequently, he argues that the role and application of design management operates on three distinct levels: • Operational; the day-to-day management of design activity; often creating the right conditions for creativity and managing that process in an effective and efficient manner • Strategic; how the company views and manages design at a corporate level, using design to differentiate and develop new products and services • Leadership: design leadership as a visionary activity to identify and develop new business opportunities through design. Sherry Boudry, Production Director at Team Creatif [5th largest brand identity and packaging agency in Paris] strongly argued that “…designers would be better designers if they were exposed to business and organisational issues...” Also, interestingly, she noted that Team Creatif only employ designers who speak English. The reasoning for this was twofold; firstly, it reduces repetition of work, in particular the translation of design briefs into French [she adds that design briefs that they often receive are in English] and secondly, by working with international clients, English is more frequently used. 3 PROGRAMME DEVELOPMENT Initial research identified and informed the nature and direction of the development. Programme titles were tested and the nature of the programme had to be understood by and be relevant to, both an international, as well as a French domestic audience. Through distilling the comments of both industry and academic professionals key aspects of business and management practice were considered important to be included within the master’s programme. Firstly, Marketing; Design Industry developments and Strategic

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Management modules were created that featured a high degree of international perspectives. Secondly, an intensive course in English language was developed that allowed non-English speaking students to be introduced to and improve upon their current understanding of spoken and written English language. Thirdly, and arguably the most important, the new programme was aimed at design graduates who were either unfamiliar with business issues or had a limited understanding of business practice. In an article written by Topalian [2002] on the different types of Design Management programmes in the UK, he identified 4 distinct characteristics of programmes [Table 2]

Table 2: Four different Types of Design Management Programmes [1] Management for Designers [2] Management for Managers [3] Design for Designers [Source: Topalian, 2002]

[4] Design for Managers

It was decided that the underlying philosophy of the MSc International Business and Management for Design programme was to be principally aimed at a design trained audience who were unfamiliar with management issues [quadrant 1 of Topalian’s Design Management programme matrix]. It was anticipated that the programme would fill the gap in the design industry [as identified through market research] for professionals who wished to further enhance their current design knowledge to engage in business and management issues. To achieve this, extensive modules were offered that included: • International Marketing for Designers • International Design Industry • Design and Brand Strategy • Design Contexts and Consumer Culture • Design Project Management • Professional, Financial and Legal Issues in Design • Strategic Management and Organisational Behaviour • Research Methods On completion of the programme, graduates are expected to enter into [design] management positions where they could be involved in brand management / identity; project management; new business development; design management and other related activities, it is expected that many will enter design consultancies and that in years to come some will establish their own practices. 4 PROGRAMME COMMENCEMENT September 2004 witnessed the launch of the programme with academic staff from the École Internationale de Design, Toulon and the School of Art and Design, University of Salford present. The first cohort of students [10] were also present to meet academic staff and understand the programme philosophy that underpins it. It is still too early to make a considered assessment of the programme. In its first year of operation, there has been an

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extensive series of presentations and guest lectures from a wide range of international speakers and early student feedback is very positive. Certain issues have arisen that the programme team are addressing: a significant number of applications (25%) have come from students with management rather than design backgrounds, interest in the programme has been expressed by individuals in employment, unable to undertake a twelve month full – time programme, and the importance of work based ‘placement’ activity in the French design educational culture has become more evident. In response to these issues a series of amendments have been made to ensure that the programme is appropriate to a wide variety of students. Ten students are expected to graduate in 2005 some undertaking their major project (dissertation) in the UK and most undertaking ‘live’ project work within organisations. The programme is attracting international attention and demand for places is healthy, student numbers will be limited to around fifteen in the academic year 2005/06. REFERENCES [1] Blaich, R. (1993) Product Design and Corporate Strategy: Managing the Connection for Competitive Advantage. McGraw-Hill, New York [2] Bruce, M. and Bessant, J. (2002) Design in Business: Strategic Innovation through Design. Pearson Education, Harlow. [3] Bruce, M. and Jevnaker, B. (1998) Management of Design Alliances: sustaining competitive advantage. Wiley, Chichester. [4] Cooper, R. & Press, M. (1995) The Design Agenda: A Guide to Successful Design Management. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester. [5] Design Council (1998) Designed to Compete: How design can make companies more competitive. Design Council Red Paper 1. Design Council Publications, London. [6] Topalian, A. (2002) ‘Design Management Education in the UK’. Design Management Journal, Vol 13, No.3 Summer 2002.

HOW TO ACHIEVE THE IMPOSSIBLE Paul Wilgeroth* National Centre for Product Design Development and Research, University of Wales, Institute, Cardiff Gareth Barham** National Centre for Product Design Development and Research, University of Wales, Institute, Cardiff Steve Gill*** National Centre for Product Design Development and Research, University of Wales, Institute, Cardiff Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper describes a multiple team working experiment, involving staff and students of the Product Design Programme (PDP) at the University Wales Institute Cardiff, collaborating with The National Centre for Product Design Research (PDR) and Alloy Product Design. The aim of the experiment was to design and prototype an interactive information appliance within a 24-hour time frame. This paper explains how, through flexible multi- interdisciplinary team working, professionals from different organisations were able to collaborate successfully to fulfil the requirements of a product design brief from initial briefing document through creative problem solving activities to the full design and prototyping of and interactive information appliance. The paper also explains two methodologies recently developed at UWIC for rapid product design prototyping and the prototyping of digital user interfaces. Both methodologies were integrated into a team based rapid product development process which ensured an enhanced level of co-ordination and co-operation between the teams designing the product functionality, the digital user interface and the interactive working prototype.

*

UWIC, Western Avenue, Cardiff [email protected] UWIC, Western Avenue, Cardiff [email protected] *** UWIC, Western Avenue, Cardiff [email protected] **

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To conclude, the paper describes the advantages of the two design methodologies developed at UWIC and demonstrate how they can be used by collaborating multiple interdisciplinary teams to design and prototype an interactive information appliance within the unprecedented short time of 24hours. Keywords: Team working, collaboration, multi-disciplinary, prototyping, interaction appliance, rapid design, rapid prototyping. 1 INTRODUCTION The overall philosophy and management of the experimental, Audi Foundation sponsored, 24-hour product design project are described in Griffiths (2004) and the specific schedule of activities is described in some detail by Gill et al (2005). This paper focuses on the interdisciplinary team working aspects and the specific prototyping methodologies employed by the team based at the University Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC). The project started at 8.00am with an outline design brief which was to “Design a communications device for use by design-aware 18-25 year olds who are interested in extreme outdoor pursuits including mountain biking and orienteering. Your solution, which will be launched in 2010, should consider their needs, aspirations together with advances in materials and technology. The product should have a suggested retail-selling price of less than £500.” 2 THE EXPERIMENT Over the next 24-hours the project achieved what many considered the impossible task of progressing the design through all the stages of the Total Design process (Pugh, 1997) from Market Analysis, Specification, Concept Design, Detail Design and finally to the manufacture of a working prototype and facsimile model. 2.1 MARKET ANALYSIS & SPECIFICATION The first stage undertaken was market analysis and was carried out by two teams working in parallel. One team interviewed potential target users and the other analysed possible competitor products using Lateral Thinking (DeBono, 1990) and Six Hats (DeBono 1990) techniques. This market analysis was then used to refine the brief and produce an initial Product Design Specification (PDS). Each team included a balance of professional product designers, professional design engineers, academics and undergraduate students from the Product Design Programme (PDP). Careful chairing of each design team ensured that the team working was nonhierarchical with the students having an equal say as the design professionals. This

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resulted in a very broad range of skills, experiences and backgrounds contributing to a common goal. This unusual blending of such a disparate group resulted in a much broader range of creative thinking than might usually be expected from a more “normal” design team. The undergraduates’ contribution was perhaps surprisingly valuable as it was relatively unconstrained by convention, manufacturing limitations, and extensive experience, whereas the contribution from the professional designers was very valuable as it was steeped with an understanding of materials and manufacturing limitations! 2.2 MARKET ANALYSIS & SPECIFICATION The next stage to be undertaken was conceptual design. As with the previous stage this was undertaken by a team consisting of a balance of professional product designers, professional design engineers, academics and undergraduate students from the PDP. This time the team employed the Creative Problem Solving (CPS) technique (van Gundy, 1988). CPS involves five stages:- Preparation, Question formulation and reformulation, Ideas generation, Ideas clustering, and Action planning. Again careful chairing of each design team ensured a flat non-hierarchical structure to the team. In addition a new rule that stated that there was no such thing as a “bad idea” helped to ensure that creativity was not constrained in any way. Once again the undergraduates’ contribution proved to be surprisingly valuable as it was conspicuously unconstrained by convention, current technology or manufacturing limitations. In addition, this creative free thinking style appeared to have a liberating effect on the more experienced members of the team and encouraged them to move outside their habitual thinking style. The result of this rampant creativity was an unusually broad range of conceptual design ideas than might normally be expected ranging from the seemingly absurd through to the relatively conventional. This diversity of suggested conceptual design solutions may be seen as a very positive outcome of the combination of an unusual blend of knowledge, background and experience within the teams together the beneficial application of the CPS technique. A brief period of systematic concept evaluation and selection by the review panel resulted in final concept selection at about 11am.

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Figure 1. Diagram of the “dynamic software-hardware prototyping” technique. The next 4 hours were dedicated to developing the chosen concept into a more detailed 3D CAD model. This involved a team made up of a mixed group of students and academics from PDP, design consultants, and professional designers from PDR. It was agreed that the CAD model at this stage should consider the external features only. The overall shape, form and colour aspects of the design were refined together with the touch screen and five-position rotary dial control together with the associated interface graphics. This mixed discipline team worked well together apart from the traditional discussion between designers and engineers as to which is the most important – aesthetic appeal or functionality. 2.3 DETAIL DESIGN The external data CAD model was then given to two independent teams tasked with developing an interactive prototype with a working user interface. It was decided that the prototype would utilise the “dynamic hardware-software-hybrid prototyping” technique (Gill 2003) developed here at UWIC. Because this is a specialist prototyping technique developed at UWIC it was decided that these teams should consist only of those academics that are expert in activity. The “dynamic hardware-software-hybrid prototyping” technique combines a software driven simulation of the product interface on a computer screen with a physical prototype of the proposed design. The prototype is fitted with user input devices (e.g. switches, buttons etc) that are used to trigger the appropriate response on the simulated interface.

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Detail design of the GUI One of the teams was tasked with developing the interactive software for the graphical user interface (GUI) and the other team with designing and producing a physical prototype of the proposed product complete with a five-position rotary switch and a simulated touch-screen to trigger the interactive software and GUI. The GUI team’s first task was to develop a state transition chart of the user interface using a series of carefully numbered and interlinked Post-it notes. This state transition chart was then used to create an interactive simulation of the user interface using PowerPoint together with Visual Basic for Applications to create the hyperlinks linking the various states of the interface together. Detail Design of the prototype hardware (physical prototype) During this time the physical prototyping team developed the existing 3D CAD model to include all internal features necessary to accommodate the user input devices. In this case it was decided to prototype the five-way rotary switch. As a suitable, off the shelf, fiveway rotary switch was not available to the team it was necessary to simulate the action of the required five way switch using an array of five discrete micro switches. These switches could then be triggered using purpose-designed cams built into the rotary mechanism. The flexible touch screen specified for the product was simulated using an array of micro switches mounted underneath a thin flexible plastic membrane. It was also necessary to consider the accommodation of wiring necessary to trigger the GUI simulation being designed by the other team. The method chosen

Figure 2. Post-It State Transition Diagram. for the rapid manufacture of this prototype was technique called Rapid Double-sided CNC Prototyping (RDCP) as this was readily available and was known to be capable of

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producing accurate, robust and reliable interactive models. This technique was developed at UWIC in order to rapidly and inexpensively prototype complex injection moulded plastic parts by machining them directly from tooling board. Rapid Design Change An initial C.N.C. ‘soft model’ was quickly produced to allow the aesthetic appearance team to evaluate the basic ergonomics and external appearance of the product design. This ‘soft model’ was also used by the GUI team to understand the nature of the interactive surfaces on the product and also by the Physical Prototyping team to evaluate the opportunities for making a functional working prototype. It was during this evaluation that a member of the team working on the design of the physical prototype questioned the apparent absence of an On/Off switch from the Product Design Specification (PDS). This query was shared with the interactive software design team who also expressed surprise. The query was then rapidly expanded to include all the other teams and individuals involved in the project. This rapid and comprehensive involvement of all team members very quickly resulted in the collective agreement that there was a high probability that the target user would expect this function on the product and that the design should be amended accordingly. The detail design team quickly made the appropriate modifications to the external features 3D CAD model and GUI design which was in turn fed back to the “dynamic hardware-software-hybrid prototyping” teams thus completing the design change loop. Assembly & Test By 7.30am the following morning the physical prototype had been CNC machined, the twelve switches simulating the function of the rotary switch and touch-screen interface fitted and wired up and the whole

Figure 3. Testing the interactive prototype.

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prototype assembled. The physical prototype was then connected via an electronic device called an IE unit (Gill 2003) to a computer programmed with the simulation of the GUI using Microsoft PowerPoint. The IE unit is a device which triggers the GUI to respond to switch activations on the physical prototype, allowing an interactive simulation of the GUI on the computer screen triggered by the switches in the physical prototype. 2.4 DEMONSTRATION OF FINISHED INTERACTIVE PROTOTYPE At 8.00am (i.e. exactly 24 hours after the start of the experiment) the whole team was assembled for a demonstration of the interactive prototype of Mohawk - their solution to the original brief. (Gill 2003) describes Mohawk as a device which is designed to appeal to the “PlayStation generation”. The device allows users to record their performance in a real world activity (in this case mountain biking), publish it to the internet, keep track of their “tribal” and world rankings, and challenge and meet others from their “tribe”. Users could even race “virtually because the device would have the ability to “ghost” and image of a competitors experience on top of their own. 3.0 CONCLUSION The successful creation of a working interactive prototype of a digital electronic appliance, complete with simulated graphic user interface, in the specified 24-hour timeframe is a significant achievement. Not only did the project successfully demonstrate proven time compression technologies of rapid product development using complex 3D CAD and CNC technologies, it also demonstrated the newly developed methodology for designing and prototyping an interactive graphic user interface for information appliances. The general educational benefit of the experimental project was that it highlighted the success of the carefully considered, comprehensive and pre-determined team management structure together with predefined roles and pre-determined lines of communication. This empowered every team member to be considered equal and valid in a non-hierarchical way, thus facilitating the emergence of a true multi-influential environment. The least experienced team members could confidently contribute and the more experienced professionals and academics be encouraged by the un-tethered style to think outside of their habitual design boundaries. This equitable blend of enthusiasm, knowledge and influence propagated a fertile concept development process that in turn stimulated the sub-group contributions at the detail design stage. In conclusion, the experiment was very successful and clearly demonstrated that there are significant benefits to multi-interdisciplinary team working and the adoption of “dynamic hardware-software-hybrid

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Figure 4. Model of the final design. prototyping”. These benefits include enhanced creativity, very rapid design changes, and the ability to achieve the seemingly impossible task of designing and producing an interactive prototype of an information appliance in 24-hours. REFERENCES [1] Gill, S. (2003) Developing Information Appliance Design Tools for Designers. The Proceedings, 1st Appliance Design Conference, May 2003, HP Labs, Bristol, UK [2] Gill, S., Johnson, P., Dale, J., Loudon, G., Hewett, B. and Barham, G.: The Traditional Design Process Versus A New Design Methodology: A Comparative Case Study Of A Rapidly Designed Information Appliance; Human Oriented Informatics and Telematics Conference 2005, University of York [3] Griffiths, R. (2004) The 24-hour Product – From Concept to Interactive Model In Less Than a Day, Proceedings of The 2nd International Engineering and Product Design Education Conference September 2-3, 2004, Delft, The Netherlands [4] De Bono, E. (1990) Lateral Thinking – A Textbook of Creativity, Penguin, England [5] De Bono, E. (1990) Six Thinking Hats, Penguin, England [6] Pugh, S, Total Design: Integrated Methods for Successful product Engineering, Addison Wesley Longman, 1997 [7] Van Gundy, A. B. (1988) Techniques of structured problem solving. Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York.

PROFESSIONAL INTERNSHIPS AND COOPERATIVE PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION James Kaufman* IDSA, The Ohio State University, USA. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT With design curriculums becoming more crowded for educators to handle all subjects required, and practitioners demanding more of these graduates, it may be time to consider adopting formal cooperative education or internship programs. This paper explores the ramifications of such curriculum changes and possible scenarios for implementation of such programs. What are the advantages and disadvantages of mixing professional experience with academic curriculum? What are the building blocks to create a successful product design coop program? What are quality indicators of such programs? How can all of this be implemented? Keywords: industrial design, cooperative education, internship, work-study INTRODUCTION For years other professions have discovered the value of practice based education, training and experience working in relationship to academic education. The best examples are requirements in the medical and public education professions. The medical profession, not only requires clinical education throughout medical school but also internships in the final years of medical education. Varying lengths of residencies (post graduate learning by mentors) are required for learning medical specialties. Students that intend to teach in public schools are also required to have prescribed hours of classroom observation, then a period of time of student teaching (a teaching internship) before they are granted a degree and deemed qualified to teach. These are just a few of many educational programs that require professional practice experience to earn a degree or be certified to practice a profession. When designers and engineers are responsible for the creation of many essential products and product systems, it seems rational to take a serious look at the same type of experienced education. *

IDSA, The Ohio State University, 128 North Oval Mall - 380 Hopkins Hall, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA, (614) 292-2534, [email protected]

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BACKGROUND The author made a recommendation at the 1999 Chicago IDSA Education Conference concerning the improvement of design curriculums in the USA. “All undergraduate programs need to move to five years curriculums with Cooperative Work-Study. This change would involve a national placement system and summer school at all schools. It should increase enrollment at most schools with no addition to physical resources.” [1] This bold statement came from an extensive survey conducted with the industrial design practice community that included several questions about Cooperative Education. This survey conducted in 1998 asked 31 practicing designers about design education including the value of lengthen academic programs, specifically adding cooperative education and if they would pay new graduates more if they were better prepared. This is how those practitioners responded: • Slightly more that half of those questioned concurred that ID programs need to be lengthened beyondfour years. • Almost all agreed that ID programs should have an internship or cooperative work programs as a requirement for a professional degree? • 68% said they would pay more if recent graduates were better educated and trained. [2] After the results of this paper were presented to the industrial design education community in Chicago, the requested a follow up paper to examine the ramifications of implementation of such a sweeping curriculum change across the USA. This paper is an abbreviated and updated version of those findings. What are Internship programs? Schools and curriculums of industrial design may vary somewhat, but generally they are the training ground for preparation for a professional practice. Academic studio experiences are simulations of this professional experience. A few schools allow students to earn credit for this experience substituting it for a studio classes. In most cases design students are paid an hourly wage for their participation in these internship experiences at consulting offices or in design offices within corporations. Other internships are not paid and are non-participatory and observational only. In a few design programs student internships are required. The majorities of programs have no formal provisions for internships, but do encourage summer design work, which could be interpreted as an internship. There are few examples or guidelines, if any, for the timing, duration or the extent of an internship experience. Pretty much just get out there a get some real world work experience. This casual and capricious system, at best, only helps a few individuals and makes only slight impact on our professions. What are Cooperative Education Programs? A cooperative education program (co-op or professional practice) is one in which the educational institution is in partnership with outside businesses or agencies that provide work related experiences and training within a real work culture. This type of educational program is implemented by requiring the students participate for a fixed amount of time in this work environment. This participation, which is evaluated and graded, counts toward the awarding of the degree in a specialized field of study such as industrial design, mechanical engineering and/or accounting. “Co-op enriches the student’s education because work experiences reinforce what is learned in the classroom. In addition, exposure to the real world of work and career

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options promotes the student’s sense of independence, further develops communications and critical-thinking skills and fosters professional maturity. Upon graduation, the student is fully and realistically prepared to work effectively alongside other professionals in the field.” [3] What is the history of Cooperative education? The University of Cincinnati (UC) has the largest co-op curriculum in the world. “In 1906, Herman Schneider, Dean of the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering, founded the cooperative system of education. The cooperative education program, or “co-op” as the program is now widely known, was an immediate and resounding success and, with adoption at other schools, was often labeled as the Cincinnati Plan. From a starting base of 27 students and 13 participating employers, cooperative education has expanded to roughly one-third of the post-secondary education institutions in the United States. While many schools offer co-op programs, UC is one of a small number that include the program as a key component of the institution’s overall mission. At the University of Cincinnati, we currently have the largest co-op program of any public post-secondary school in the United States with nearly 4,000 student participants and 1,400 employer participants.” “…Our students have co-op positions in 36 states and a number of other countries and have gross annual earnings of over 26 million dollars.” “…Graduates of the program consistently evaluate the learning from the program as having been of significant value in their overall education.” [3] How does Cooperative Education work? “The University of Cincinnati operates on a quarter system. Students enrolled in Professional Practice participate on a year- round schedule that results in the prescribed number of professionally related work experiences prior to graduation. And, the schedule is arranged so that co-op students have about five weeks of vacation each year. The schedule is comprised of two alternating sections - Section I for Summer and Winter work quarters and Section II for Autumn and Spring work quarters. Two students are assigned to alternate on each co-op job so that one or the other is always on the work assignment while the other is in school. Each student admitted into Professional Practice is assigned to a co-op faculty member who helps the student secure a cooperative learning experience and monitors and facilitates the student’s accomplishment of learning objectives. This faculty member works with the student, the cooperative employer and the degree-granting academic department in the planning and delivery of this program. All prospective co-op students are required to complete the course, “Professional Development I,” which is designed to teach the concepts of career planning and to prepare students for effective participation in the program.” [3] BENEFITS TO EMPLOYERS • Co-op is a proven, cost-effective method to meet both immediate and long-range human resource needs. • Co-op is an opportunity to evaluate potential career employees. • Co-op students can perform well on some professional-level assignments, thus freeing career employees for advanced responsibilities. • Co-op decreases the turnover of graduates employed in career positions.

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• Co-op is a ready source of obtaining employees. • Co-op arrangements are ideal for technology transfer. • And, co-op fosters on-going, productive relations between the campus and employer communities. [3] BENEFIT TO STUDENTS • Earn money while on co-op assignments • Obtain an edge in the job market • Many co-op students receive job offers upon graduation through their co-op employer. In general, co-op students receive more job offers than non-co-ops, and often at higher salaries. Many employers, use their co-op program as the dominant source of hiring graduating seniors. • Over 90 percent of employers would hire BGSU Business Administration students as a permanent, full-time employer if they could. • Gain valuable on-the-job experience • Student testimonial: “I have learned to practice ethical behavior, to act responsibly and honestly, and to diplomatically address projects and problems. I have observed and participated in professional business conduct and believe I am better prepared to pursue a professional career and future business relationships.” • Stimulate personal development - CBA students rated their co-op experience high on the following items: opportunity for learning; realizing their own strengths and weaknesses. • Student testimonial: “Given the opportunity to work independently on projects as well as a part of a team, allowed me to gain an in-depth understanding of my own strengths and weaknesses. Over the weeks of learning new things, I could identify my progress as a whole.” • Studies have revealed that some co-op students’ grades improve substantially more than the grades of non-co-op students and that participating in a co-op increase the likelihood that a student will graduate from college. Also, employers will strongly urge students to complete their college degrees. [4] BENEFITS FOR THE ACADEMIC INSTITUTION: • It takes advantage of resources by using them year round. You can increase enrollment and maximize facilities use. • It also allows more students to participate, in some cases, almost doubles the student graduation productivity. • It allows for faculty to have various academic terms off, not just summer. • It promotes better relations with industry partners – university research possibilities. DISADVANTAGES OF COOPERATIVE PROGRAMS FOR ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS AND STUDENTS: • It requires a year-round effort for the participating institutions. • It requires more faculty participation (summers) and an additional staff member.

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• It may bring hardships to some students because they have to move often to fulfill their co-op requirements • Some students may not be able to find positions in some markets or locations and/or because of inadequate preparation of their portfolio or academic dossier.

RECOMMENDATIONS If these programs work so well why don’t more institutions implement co-op programs or formal internship programs in design and/or engineering curriculums? There is no compelling data to support that the majority of industrial design programs now support internship programs, and only two institutions of industrial design in the USA fully supports and requires a co-op program to earn a degree. I have found that most programs encourage internships; some have formal courses that can be used for this purpose. Throughout my forty years in higher education I have observed that faculty encourage students to seek internships, mostly in the summer, as a means to bolster their resumes. I believe that most employers or recruiters expect some type of work experience such as an internship, and most students pursue these programs to the extent of their availability. For students to attain a quality professional education, maintain consistency across programs, and improve credibility with the practice community, there is a need to add work-study programs within our curriculums. Which is best, a formal internship program or cooperative education? The answer to this question is the extent of what can be implemented at your institution. In my experience as an educator and academic administrator I can safely say that the road to implementing either program will be embellished with red tape and bureaucratic potholes and the entire implementation process will be time consuming. First, I recommend that you put your teeth into some type of internship program, even if it is not formally required. Say one that is recommended for one academic term and one summer. Two, I would then try to expand that to a fully integrated required internship program of 44-48 weeks, three semesters or four quarters. Three implements a full time and required co-op program. Or, if you believe that your program is a mostly academic or scholarly program then I recommend you partner with other schools that would support a 4 plus 2-year curriculum plan. What is required to support a formal internship program? You will need a policy to govern the program. To help encourage such a program, I recommend you give academic credit for each internship unit. This means that the students should pay some modest fee. These fees can be used to help pay for the essential faculty or staff coordinator you will need. This dedicated job placement coordinator and evaluation monitor, actually a faculty, will manage the process of the student’s being assigned jobs and monitor their performance during their internship. This position can be held by a faculty or a qualified staff member, but must be a regular assignment with some longevity and consistency associate with it. You will also need to lengthen your academic program by one semester or year to accommodate the additional academic terms need to cover this program. What is required to support a formal co-op program? This program requires a policy that is committed to running a year-round academic and work-study program. This commitment would include administrative personnel and staff to handle during the

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summer term. You also need a full time placement and evaluation coordinator. And, you will need full time faculty to cover required courses for the summer term. Roughly this means adding 1.5 FTE faculty or stretch your existing faculty to cover summer terms. Remember you may be doubling your student population and that will bring in more student fees and can easily cover the additional cost. Your program will also require an adjustment to some of your facilities since you will have double the students in residency for the entire freshman year and part of the sophomore and senior years. Also, since your program will be running year round, you’ll need to adjust for increased facility usage and expect more breakage. Semester coop model

I have diagramed five possible models but only one is show below. See the other four models and the entire text of this paper at: http://accad.osu.edu/~jkauf/index.htm Coop Quarter Model – five years (typical at the University of Cincinnati) Internship Semester Model – four years Internship Semester Model – four years Plus Internship Semester Model – 4+2 (internship at graduate level)

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REFERENCES [1] Kaufman J.C., TNT ~ industrial design curriculums, IDSA Design Education Conference Proceedings, Chicago, 1999, pp. 117-130 [2] Kaufman J.C. Why design education? IDSA Design Education Conference Proceedings, Long Beach, 1998, pp. 25-31 [3] University of Cincinnati – Cincinnati, Ohio USA, http://www.uc.edu/propractice/ [4] Bowling Green State University – Bowling Green, Ohio USA, http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/sa/career/students/coop.html

DEVELOPING AUTHENTICITY IN TEAM-BASED DESIGN PROJECTS Chris Dowlen* Department of Architecture and Design, London South Bank University, UK. Stephen Prior** Product Design and Engineering, Middlesex University, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT After discussing the topics of assessment and authentic assessment the paper describes two design projects that demonstrate features of authentic assessment. The first is a group project at London South Bank University with a live client and the second is a final year group project at Middlesex University. A feature of the second project was a novel group selection process that benefited the authenticity of the outcome. Problem-based learning in groups should be about empowerment, ownership, fun and promoting success. These ingredients are promoted by authentic assessment. It becomes an important learning experience and leads to students becoming independent learners. Keywords: Assessment, Authenticity, Design Projects, Teamwork 1 ASSESSMENT Race [1] advises students about assessment saying: “In a nutshell, it’s the most important thing that happens to you in Higher Education. ‘You’re there to learn’, they keep telling you, but however much you learn it’s what you’re found to have learned which counts. Actually, it’s not quite as simple as that. It’s how well you can show what you have learned which counts. Nor is it as simple as that! It’s how well you can get your act together, in the right ways, at the right times and in the right places, to show what you can do with what you have learned that counts.” (p3) Is it right that the university *

Department of Architecture and Design, London South Bank University Borough Road, London SE1 0AA, UK, +44 (0)20 7815 7609, Fax +44 (0)20 7815 6134, [email protected] ** Product Design and Engineering, Middlesex University, Trent Park Campus, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ, UK, +44 (0)20 8411 5275, Fax +44 (0)20 8411 5683, [email protected]

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examiner evaluates students’ ability to answer a specific exam paper over a 3 hour period on a particular day in an examination hall, based largely on their memory of information gained in a formal lecture setting? Is that what students are educated for? Schwartz and Webb [2] state “Everyone knows that assessment is the main ‘driver’ of learning”, (p1) whilst Heywood [3] says “Curriculum design, assessment and evaluation begin at the same point” (p23). These statements place assessment at the centre of the educational process and, as pointed out by Brown [4] “Assessment shapes learning, so if you want to change learning then change the assessment method, match the assessment tasks to the learning outcomes; match the criteria to the task and learning outcomes; keep the criteria simple; be fair, reliable and valid in your marking; provide meaningful and timely feedback” (p6). This last statement implies a multiple role for assessment – confirming satisfactory progress, providing feedback to improve future work and also implying that assessment drives how students learn and develop professional skills. 1.1 AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT Hart [5] defines authentic assessment as that which involves students in worthwhile, significant, and meaningful tasks. She says that such assessments look and feel like learning activities, not traditional tests and goes on to state that authentic assessments presents students with tasks that are interesting, worthwhile and relevant to their lives. She suggests that it challenges them to pose questions, make judgements, reconsider problems, and to investigate possibilities. It follows that much teaching has focussed on easily tested material, but it is apparent that authentic assessment requires a focus on finding means of assessing real learning and the ability to apply that learning to a real context. Observation of students working and assessment of tangible products and the stages of achievement needed to develop those products are central to authentic assessment [5]. Moon [6] develops Schön’s [7] concepts on the importance reflective learning: and it is clear that reflection also plays a useful role in formative and summative assessment; being a unique experience for each student it must be authentic. In the workforce, staff rarely (if ever) take written exams but are continually evaluated formally or informally by their actions, presentations and reports, not only by superiors, but also by peers and subordinates. As working in teams has become more common, peer assessment has become more important in evaluating skills and subsequently determining career direction. If students are to work in realistic design teams, then peer assessment is one authentic approach to improving and rewarding performance. 2 EXAMPLES OF AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT IN PRACTICE 2.1 A ‘LIVE’ SECOND YEAR PRODUCT DESIGN PROJECT This is a specific example of a project done by second year students on Product Design courses at London South Bank University. This was one of two design assignments in a semester, and lasted about seven weeks. This core unit was meant to major on the product design aspects and not on subsidiary ones. Students were split into groups of about four

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or five, and it was envisaged that they would be able to use their specific skills to tackle different aspects of the product development: Engineering Product Design students perhaps concentrating on product function, Industrial Design students concentrating on appearance and client and user interaction, and Product Design Computing students developing the overall computer modelling work and computer presentations. A real client put forward a brief, which was for the students to produce designs for either a shopping trolley or for a child’s ride-on garden toy [typically a tricycle]. In this instance the required deliverable output the students had to produce were deliberately kept as intangibles. Students were not specifically asked to produce items such as sketchwork, models or presentation boards, but were to be assessed on aspects such as creativity, product development, appeal, practicality and resolution. The client involvement was essentially at two points. They presented the project at the outset, and they were involved in the final presentation and assessment process at the end. Teaching staff carried out an interim assessment part way through the project. A major part of the assessment process was that each group of students had to present their ideas to the clients at the end of the project, judging the most appropriate means and developing the most suitable vehicles to do this. A final group mark was modified by a peer group assessment to produce individual marks for the students. 2.1.1 Project results Although students were not specifically required to produce market research or product specification information, they clearly understood that this was expected of them and did so. The lack of a specific output requirement led one group of students, who judged that a functional model was not necessary to demonstrate their design’s functionality. Unfortunately every other group decided that was an essential requirement, and thus this group was effectively penalised for not producing one. In contrast to this group, three of the groups were able to demonstrate a full-size model to the clients – most impressive. All the

Figure 1. Tricycle-cum baby walker prototype, shopping trolley rendering and sketch.

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groups decided that some form of computer presentation was required. One group made particular use of some specific web-based skills developed by one of the Product Design Computing students in this respect. Figure 1 shows examples of two of the project submissions. The one on the left is a photograph of the final functional prototype of a tricycle-cum baby walker produced by one of the groups, and the other two pictures show a computer rendering and an early concept sketch of a folding shopping trolley produced by one of the others. 2.1.2 Authentic assessment The reality of having a client certainly gave students motivation for this particular project. Because their whole outlook was set on being able to achieve design skills of an industry standard, they felt they wanted to rise to the challenge. This lifted the assignment from being simply another example of the development of design expertise to one that became worthwhile, significant and meaningful and which related to the real world. Students were required not only to produce product synthesis in an ill-defined manner, but the final deliverable outcomes of the project were deliberately ill-defined, making the students ask questions of what work the real client might appreciate and how exactly to demonstrate that the ideas would work in practice. 2.2 THE MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY SWIMMING ROBOT CHALLENGE This project was initially instigated as a means to enter the UK BBC TV Techno Games 50 metre swimming event in 2002; subsequently in 2004 we developed the concept for the project into a robot design which had to get into, swim across and get out of a swimming pool semi-autonomously. The project (under both scenarios) formed a Design Team Project module which was a compulsory part of our Product Design and Engineering degree programmes, and was undertaken over a 12-week period, during the first semester by all final year students. 2.2.1 Team selection Teams consisted of between four and five students, selected by the tutor, based on one of several formats which changed year on year. This strategy was an attempt to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each format. In brief, the choices in selecting team-based groups are [8]: 1. Let the students choose their own teams. 2. Use the alphabetical class order in the register. 3. Use another alphabetical order, i.e. by last letter of first name. 4. Randomly select groupings. 5. Select team members based on previous performance. 6. Select groups based on a heterogeneous mixture, i.e. sex, age, nationality. 7. Select a team leader and let them pick one additional member in turn. 8. Select team members based on sitting or standing position. 9. Select team members based on astrological ‘star sign’ or month of birth.

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10. Select team members based on their Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. 11. Issue coded labels to students, who then form groups based on the codes. Several good books have been written on the dynamics of group work in an educational context, e.g. Jaques [9]. Having explored many of the above scenarios in other teambased situations, it was felt that there must be a more systematic and scientific method of selecting a team. The methods used during the team selection for this core module therefore consisted of 5 and 7 above. Initially, teams were selected by placing the top performers from the previous Mechatronics module into teams according to their previous grade, leaving the bottom group with no prior experience. The first assumption in using this method might be that the best students will succeed and the weaker students would clearly fail. However, this is not the case. Just as the best football team does not necessarily consist of the best players, so the best design team does not necessarily consist of all the best students. What actually happens is that team rated as ‘top’ goes through a period of euphoria and elitism, usually losing sight of the goal. In contrast, the team rated bottom goes through a period of retrospective reflection in which it seems to come to the conclusion that it is ‘sink or swim’ time. In the following year, teams were selected by first choosing the team leader, based on previous performance and then selecting additional members based on the next iteration cycle. In future PBLE projects, it is intended to use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator to profile teams based on a heterogeneous mix of personality types (10 above). 2.2.2 Team organisation Once the team members were selected, and they had formed into a group, their first task was to select the leader and second-in-command (2ic). This decision tended to be made easier since on most occasions a leader either volunteered, or was put forward by other members of the group. During the first three week cycle each team had to undertake a literature review of past work, construct a mind map and produce a Gantt chart showing their project plan. This culminated in the submission of an initial project progress report. Student groups met several times per week and were closely supervised by a member of academic staff. However, the direction that the teams took in terms of the creative solution to the problem was entirely their own decision. Ownership of the final design was an important outcome and motivating factor. Figure 2 shows some of the final designs during the demonstration and testing phase of the project. 2.2.3 Learning outcomes, assessment and awards The learning outcomes for this module involved: • Producing an acceptable and viable solution to the brief. • Gaining a sense of autonomy, freedom and flexibility in learning.

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Figure 2. Swimming robot working prototypes being tested in the Trent Park pool. • Having an appreciation that design involves synthesising design parameters. • Working effectively as an individual, and within a team. • Managing/organising their time (planning skills). • Developing their transferable skills (especially creativity). • Being able to critically evaluate solutions to problems. The project was assessed at various stages during the 12 week semester; using a number of assessment methods: 10% - initial project progress report (week 3) 40% - prototype demonstration (week 10) 20% - group reflective journal (week 11) 15% - group PowerPoint presentation (week 12) 15% - individual performance in the presentation (week 12) These assessment components have been fine-tuned over a number of years to allow both the team and the individual to be rewarded for their efforts. In terms of the BBC TV production, one of our teams was awarded the innovation award for their design of ‘Stingray’ robot (see figure 3), which swam just below the surface of the water and was watched by an audience of six million viewers. 2.2.4 Authentic Assessment In summary, problem based learning in groups should be about empowerment, ownership, fun and promoting success through competitions and the media. Of these, the most important is having fun. These ingredients are exactly those that are promoted by authentic assessment and why it becomes one of the most important learning experiences that students have on their courses.

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3 CONCLUSIONS The Middlesex experience of running Mechatronic team projects over a number of years has shown that there is no single method of team selection that delivers all the benefits with no drawbacks. However, placing the best performing students into the top team and the bottom students into the bottom team did have the effect of forcing each team to ‘rise to the challenge’, producing a high standard of output, and appeared to produce lower levels of internal conflict amongst team members. It has also had the added advantage of improving the weaker students’ performance in subsequent modules.

Figure 3. The Stingray swimming robot at the Techno Games TV finals. In both the Middlesex and the London South Bank projects it is clear that the students rose significantly beyond the assessment requirements to achieve learning outcomes in excess of those expected. Students have grasped the intrinsic importance of the project and have taken it on for their own benefit rather than for the extrinsic reason of obtaining appropriate marks from the experience. They were also able to reflect on their learning experience in a qualitative manner. This sort of behaviour is not uncommon where an authentic type of assessment is used, and leads to a can-do attitude and a realisation that students can take charge of their own learning and skills-development processes. REFERENCES [1] Race, P., Assessment: A guide for students. Assessment Series no 4. 2001: LTSN Generic Centre.

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[2] Schwartz, P. and G. Webb, Assessment: Case studies, experience and practice from higher education. 2002, London: Kogan Page. [3] Heywood, J., Assessment in higher education. 1989, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. [4] Brown, G., Assessment: A guide for lecturers. Assessment Series No 4. 2001: LTSN Generic Centre. [5] Hart, D., Authentic assessment: A handbook for educators. 1994, Wokingham: Addison Wesley. [6] Moon, J., Reflection in learning and professional development theory and practice. 1999, London: Kogan Page. [7] Schön, D., The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. 1991, Aldershot: Ashgate. [8] Race, P., The lecturer’s toolkit. 2nd ed. 2001, London: Kogan Page. [9] Jaques, D., Learning in groups. 3rd ed. 2000, London: Kogan Page.

WHO’S DEGREE IS IT ANYWAY? Roger Griffiths* National Centre for Product Design Development and Research, University of Wales, Institute, Cardiff. Paul Wilgeroth** National Centre for Product Design Development and Research, University of Wales, Institute, Cardiff. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT After five years of lecturing graduates of the Product Design programme at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff (UWIC) the counselling of students should get easier. However, the there remains the ethical dilemma of who’s work is it anyway? Research studies (Surowiecki, J., 2005) suggest that the product of group creation can often be better than that of an individual with specialist knowledge in a particular area. This is due, in part to the provision of new, unadulterated concepts from individuals within the group with little or no knowledge of the subject planting provocative statements, which spawn and encourage enhanced, creative thought. This paper discusses how a dilemma may arise when academic staff offer a suggestion that would enhance the proposal beyond the thought capabilities of that individual or their peers. The challenge of embracing the proposal and developing the concept then falls to the student (effectively the project leader) and the collaborator. Pressure to counsel students, sometimes in a direction which may not be favoured or indeed initiated by the student comes from the desire to identify and maximise commercial opportunities for undergraduate projects. Naturally, not all projects will have this opportunity but those that are identified as having potential value to both the student and university should be given appropriate support to ensure that any opportunity is maximised. This support may go beyond that given to their peers and may appear to some as being preferential.

*

UWIC, Western Avenue, Cardiff. CF5 2YB, [email protected] **

UWIC, Western Avenue, Cardiff. CF5 2YB, [email protected]

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The paper describes how staff at the University of Wales Institute Cardiff, (UWIC) are embracing this concept by systematically reviewing all student projects in order to identify those that, in the opinion of an internal review panel (comprising lecturing staff and enterprise managers) should be offered appropriate support to maximise its potential. The Wales Innovators Network (WIN) was established specifically to provide a support mechanism for entrepreneurs and innovators to get their ideas to market and is seen as an example of good practice for inventors clubs across Britain. The paper explains how, UWIC has established a formal agreement with WIN to offer support and guidance for undergraduate projects once they have been identified as having commercial potential. The student is required to submit a Pro-Forma, which includes details of the projects and its research and supported by a detailed business plan. Once approved, WIN’s own Review Panel interviews the student. A case study is presented where the Product Design Programme will be submitting two projects to the WIN Review Panel for consideration and aim to report on progress at the September conference as well as presenting a short case study for the design of a washbasin undertaken by students on the final year of their studies. One project will be undertaken with the student choosing not to adopt staff advice whilst the other project will be adopting ‘crowd theory’ (3) benefits. Keywords: Ethical, Dilemma, Knowledge, Transferable, Intellectual Property, Holistic, Integration, Product Design Process, Total Design, Curriculum, Education. 1. INTRODUCTION Product design development in academia poses some unique problems - despite rigorous academic process (Pugh, S, 1997) employed by the design staff, a student may opt to develop their project in a direction which offers no commercial development opportunities and is resigned to the plan chest for portfolio or reference only. The common theme between student and project brief (Figure 1) can rapidly deteriorate towards a battle of wills in which the student stoically attempts to cling onto a position of self-expression almost to the point of ignorance of other, sometimes critical design criteria. Many students are yet to adopt the skill to assess user needs and marketing or manufacturing criteria that will mould the design proposals which are acquired through the application of methodical research, observation, evaluation and development. 1.1 FINANCIAL AND COMMERCIAL CONSIDERATIONS The reduction in government support for higher education has resulted in increasing pressure on academics to engage more widely in income generating activities. In the case of product design lecturers at UWIC this has resulted the desire to maximise commercial opportunities for undergraduate projects to the mutual benefit of all parties.

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In addition, student debt is at an all time high and so it may be argued that students should be made aware of the potential commercial value and benefits of their academic work. After all, who could argue that some of the best undergraduate design students are not a match for some professional firms for creativity upon graduation? Access to excellent support, guidance and facilities can produce results on a par with some of the design industries most experienced exponents. This can raise a dilemma for lecturing staff who on one hand pride themselves in creating an environment that nurtures creativity with a minimum of barriers yet, in the harsh reality of student design education must offer every opportunity for the student to establish themselves as astute, commercially-minded product designers.

Figure 1. The Knowledge Gap.

Figure 2. Sources of project manipulation. Naturally, not all undergraduate design projects will have commercial possibilities, but those that are identified as having significant potential value to both the student and university should be given appropriate counsel. The necessary support required to achieve this may go beyond that given to the student’s peers and may be seen by some as being preferential treatment. This will undoubtedly raise a few ethical academic

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eyebrows but as design education and the volume of students studying the subject continues to expand in Britain, then so must our focus on the harsh commercial realities. The key dilemma arises when lecturers suggest a significant enhancement to the design proposal that would take beyond the original capabilities or aims and objectives of the student. The challenge of embracing the modified proposal and developing the concept then falls to the student (the project leader) and their team (Figure 2), of which the staff member forms part of their ‘crowd’. Furthermore, the commercialisation of student projects ensures collaboration with industry, where in some cases the student may become an integral part of the industrial design team, benefiting from the physical resources and counsel of program staff. As a result the student may receive a higher grade for the project than they might have achieved without preferential counsel. Whilst there will be those that might question the ethical consequences of this approach, the positive outcome for all parties should be given prominence. 2. SUPPORT FOR UNDERGRADUATE DESIGNERS Wales has been fortunate to receive substantial European funding to aid the manufacturing, innovation and entrepreneurship industries. Whilst academic research benefits from financial support, there are few resources available to stimulate design innovation at academic level. Reliance is placed on making the most of limited programme resources or seeking industrial support in the way of sponsored or ‘live’ industrial projects that deliver two objectives: to push the creative boundaries of the client and produce proposals which are commercially feasible. The rewards are plentiful, but so are the penalties. No amount of money can compensate for rejection at such an early stage of a students career. The Wales Innovators Network (WIN) was established by the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) specifically to provide a support mechanism for entrepreneurs to get their idea to market. Seen as an example of good practice for inventors clubs across Britain, UWIC has established a memorandum of understanding with WIN that offers business mentoring, financial and procurement advice for undergraduate projects once they have been identified as having commercial potential. WIN’s project review panel invite students to submit a detailed business plan, which includes details of the projects and its research. Staff of the Product Design programme at the UWIC are embracing this dilemma by systematically reviewing student projects in order to identify those that, in the opinion of its own internal review panel, comprising lecturing staff and enterprise managers, should be offered appropriate mentoring to maximise its potential. 2.1 DESIGN OWNERSHIP AND BY WHOM? The theme of ‘design ownership’ can take many directions. In its simplest form, today’s student designers often want to retain their design as originally conceived, as a manifestation of their self-expression. This approach may lead to a number of conflicts en route to the products possible commercialisation. Product design students rarely appreciate the complexities they create for technical and production faculties but are

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better placed to bring intellectual and original thought to the table. With so many members in the students’ creative crowd, what exactly can they rightfully claim to own in relation to intellectual property of the project? As we view the process of design more holistically, the introduction of a new design concept can only be achieved by mutual consent, in that all stakeholders must provide an equal contribution that moulds the shape and functionality of the output. Design is ultimately about compromise and this can be a difficult position to accept for new advocates of product design. Today’s design education system is not geared to develop the needs of the individual. Cohort sizes continue to increase as design and technology retains its popularity at all levels in the education system. Yet this places pressure on young students to find new ways to be recognised from their peers. This places higher education on the back foot from the very outset for preparing undergraduates for their first taste of employment. The curriculum too often focuses on ‘innovation’. Research studies (Roy, R. 1992) argued in favour of ‘incremental innovations’ championed by the Japanese economy rather than striving to introduce pure innovation into the marketplace. The far eastern model illustrates how an evolutionary approach can often secure improved product performance, quality and reduced costs. Our higher education model is biased towards innovation rather than evolution, focusing unfairly on novelty rather than on more fundamental needs of consumers, society and the environment. 2.2 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY The ownership of the intellectual property of ideas conceived at university has for a long time been one for dispute. Many universities adopt the position that they own student work outright or at best, offer some design ownership to the student. In reality, the antithesis of this position prevails. In Britain atleast the position is clear: the ownership of any intellectual property (IP) belongs to the student, and it is the university that has to be invited by the student to share in any IP that may reside in the work. However, the intellectual property is not normally in the original idea itself, it is in the development of that idea. This is where the boundary of design ownership can become blurred. Few students are equipped with the ability to develop a coherent design proposition in its entirety. The process demands far more than the student is able to provide on their own and the efforts of academic staff and other external resources need to be acknowledged when filing IP applications. Opportunities to develop a patent are limited and greater protection is sought in unregistered design rights, design registrations and copyright. Deciding not to prepare patent or other IP agreements prior to discussion with collaborators may often be regrettable and most often appear unprofessional. Most students fail to appreciate opportunities to commercialise their work or to develop a network of industrial contacts. It is crucial to build relationships in any sector of business and this skill cannot be taught within the confines of academia alone. Most projects become a fusion of student, collaborator and staff creativity, and as such, all parties should be acknowledged. Live projects can challenge many of the established processes within a company and get clients to question current resource capability and limitations. Most companies engage new product development (NPD) processes (Pugh, S, 1997) that are dominated by sales targets, time-to-market and margins. Whereas a constant stream of unconstrained innovative ideas should be fuel for future NPD.

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For students, collaboration is essential to simulate the commercial experience. The realities of commercial NPD can assist their personal development and their ability to defend their design proposals. Moreover, it enhances their understanding of the marketing and strategic requirements of new product development now that design is recognised as having parity with other organisational roles. Tomorrows products must be accessible, high performing, ubiquitous and more often than not, mass-produced. 3. CASE STUDY The case study will discuss two students’ projects, a washbasin device and a luggage device. In both instances the client companies did not wish to meet with the student or to place any design constraints on the brief, preferring instead to allow the students’ creativity to prevail. As the projects progressed, it became clear that neither student could not see beyond the basic physical and ergonomic improvements for their design. To staff it was clear that both clients were open to creative suggestions beyond those that had immediate commercial applications. In the case of the luggage project, detailed market research by the student involving video recording of the air travel process with particular emphasis on departure lounges and luggage carousels, identified the principle problem was one of identifying luggage at the baggage reclamation zone. The student focussed his ideas on aesthetics and protection devices for the luggage that were feasible but did not embrace new technology or challenge the student or the client technically. With client presentations pending, it was necessary to step in and suggest major enhancements for the project including the use of photo chromic polymers and smart materials that could be enabled to personalise the luggage. Advantages included: ease of identification, evidence of tampering or abuse and the addition of personalised graphics or pattern on the external surface of the luggage. In the case of the washbasin, the key problem identified was the ‘skum’ line or other residue left after the water is evacuated, particularly after a man has shaved. There was a need to introduce a flushing system similar to that found on toilets. Whilst appropriate mechanical flushing systems were developed, the student was unable to appreciate some user requirements of key aesthetic considerations that would produce a market-ready design that was commercially viable. Again, staff counselled the student to consider major aesthetic and practical enhancements to the design to ensure it met all material, processing, marketing and user requirements. 4. CONCLUSION Following presentations to the client, both students have been asked to continue development of these ideas and consolidate all innovations into a new range of products. Whilst the technology proposed in the suitcase is currently feasible, it is unlikely to be adopted immediately by the client. The designs will be used for development and marketing purposes only and is unlikely to receive support from the Wales Innovators Network. Conversely, the proposal for the washbasin has been warmly received and the university is collaborating with the client to develop the proposal further and ensure appropriate intellectual property is protected and that the product is launched

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commercially. The development work on both these projects is owned jointly by the student and by the staff who have contributed to develop both proposals extensively. A business plan is being prepared for the washbasin proposal for submission to the Wales Innovators Network to seek support for further development. University intellectual property documentation is being amended to reflect the equal contribution and reward for all parties. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors gratefully acknowledge the participation of students and staff from the Department of Product and Engineering Design at UWIC and staff at The Patent Office. REFERENCES [1] Pugh, S, Total Design: Integrated Methods for Successful Product Engineering, Addison Wesley Longman, 1997. [2] Roy, R. Winning By Design. Design Innovation Group, Blackwell, 1992 [3] Surowiecki, J. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, Abacus, 2005 [4] Wright, I. (:12) Design Methods in Engineering and Product Design, London, 1998.

EXPERIENCE DESIGN & ARTEFACTS AFTER THE FACT Andy Milligan* Course Director, Interior & Environmental Design, School of Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art University of Dundee, Dundee. Jon Rogers** Lecturer, Innovative Product Design, School of Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art University of Dundee, Dundee. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT In this paper the authors discuss a new interdisciplinary project which integrates product design innovations from IDEO, in particular experience prototyping, and touches upon aspects of Eddie Obeng’s design paradigms such as fog and quest [1]. The project, ‘Artefact after the Fact’, weaves experience design directly into a New York study trip, which is then further developed by interdisciplinary student teams within a neutral studio space. The authors describe this process, involving 120 students from 5 design disciplines with a staff team with expertise ranging from Product to Interiors, and with contextual input from the School of Architecture, Design History Theory & Practice. Mediating artefacts, (convenient shorthand for ‘product’ objects, as experiential metaphors for process and product), are explored, which may be relevant to engineering students, or other ‘non’ product disciplines. As educators, there is much we can learn from industry, but much we need to be wary of within design education; modular inflexibility, reduced teaching time, and a growing obsession with grades, collec-tively threaten the kind of ‘connected’, ‘holistic’ and experimental ‘experiential learning’ which institutions exist to foster, industry demands, and learners need [2]. Interdisciplinary

*

Interior & Environmental Design, School of Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art University of Dundee Perth Rd, Dundee, DD1 4HT Email: [email protected] Phone: 01382 345303 Fax: 01382 201378 Web: http://www.dundee.ac.uk/ ** Innovative Product Design, School of Design, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art University of Dundee Perth Rd, Dundee, DD1 4HT Email: [email protected] Phone: 01382 348871 Fax: 01382 201378 Web: www.idl.dundee.ac.uk/~jon

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learning echoes those types of product innovations and collaborative and critical team working valued in the creative industries, and in this context, is a means of exploring the changing nature of product design, (the experience economy rather than just the object economy). Interdisciplinarity lets us tentatively cross, and challenge, imaginary disciplinary boundaries, and in sharing our imaginations we transform our horizons. Keywords: Interdisciplinarity, Experience Prototype, Artefact, Free Sketching, Transforming Horizons, Holistic Learning INTRODUCTION Design at Dundee has been undergoing change. A new modular framework brings challenges and presents new opportunities. A large scale, interdisciplinary project, Artefact after the Fact, is set to become a regular

analogue& digital artefact presentation

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emotive playful making event within third year design. It combines a New York study trip, and design studio practice with concepts of experience design, pioneered by IDEO and most notably, Interval Research [3]. Experience prototyping revolves around interdisciplinarity, interaction design and the experience economy [4]. It can be in any medium, and any representation such as story-boards, informance, (the mixing performance and information), scenarios, body storming, (physically situated brain storming), virtual simulations, enacting, or proxy objects, and as such seems ideal for a high mix of disciplines working in an interdisciplinary context. A ‘performance’ analogy was also adopted very early on in the Artefact project. Student teams became ‘the Actors’, the interdisciplinary staff ‘the Producers’, whilst a team of second year ‘appraisers’ became ‘the Audience’. Interdisciplinarity is also a part of a HE strategy to enrich the learning experience. New hybrid BSc(hons) programmes have come on-line in Innovative Product Design and in Interactive Media Design, (delivered jointly between the School of Design, Division of Mechanical Engineering and the division of Applied Computing respectively). INTERPRETING ARTEFACTS AND EXPERIENCE PROTOTYPES Artefacts are the objects which disciplines make as part of their normal process. IDEO’s artefacts exist essentially before the fact of the final product. We inverted this by considering the artefact as coming into existence after the fact of the event of NYC, rather than before it. In the context of this paper, artefacts represent a convenient shorthand for products, and allow non product students access to innovative product concepts, and in the process, allow new perspectives to emerge. Artefacts have also been the focus of a recent research conference [5], artefacts as triggers for collaborators, or artefacts embodying meaning beyond the appearance of the object or artefacts as cultural probes. Buchenau and Suri’s paper [4], Experience Prototyping, was influential to our own Artefact project - describing experience prototyping as an attitude, rather than a technique. New York has been the setting for year 3 design students at DOJ for some years. Study trips have always happened, what hasn’t happened with any coherence at

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DOJ, until now, is re-connecting this ‘experience’ very directly back into creativity and design thinking through interdisciplinary learning. THE BARE FACTS ABOUT ARTEFACTS AFTER THE FACT The project was created in response to repeated requests from design students for greater multidisciplinary opportunities, and developed between Interior & Environmental Design and Innovative Product Design. It linked earlier theory & industry presentations, (one month prior to the rip), with a New York trip, which then developed into interdisciplinary team work over four taught days, (or 24hrs, spread over a rather fragmented two week period), and set within a deliberately neutral internal 45 metre long internal ‘street’. The project had simple aims: to explore the concept of experiential designing; to enhance creative design thinking; to use New York as a meaningful springboard for collaborative working and reflection; to allow greater insight into each subject areas creative approaches; to work within interdisciplinary contexts; to enhance presentation and communication skills and to eroding the boundaries between the design disciplines. A prize of £2000 was awarded to a winning team and unusually, a team of second year design students were invited to ‘appraise’ rather than mark all twelve third year interdisciplinary teams. Staff

The street /studio

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Broadway peepholes

Proxy environments guided, but did not interfere with the decision of the ‘appraisers’. The criteria for appraisal had to be very clear and unambiguous: what is your emotional response to the artefact? How effectively does the artefact reflect your impressions of New York? An interdisciplinary staff team, covering Interiors, Textiles, Graphics, Jewellery and Innovative Product Design, divided the 120 plus students into 12 NYC student teams – with 10 students per team, (each with students who visited NYC, and those who were unable to). Five disciplines were involved; the new BSc(hons) Innovative Product Design, and four BDes(hons) programmes in Graphics, Textiles, Jewellery & Metal Design and Interior & Environmental Design. Over the 4 day / 2 week experience, staff met at the end of each day to discuss progress and problems as they emerged. Staff became conscious that they too were ‘learners’ on a par with the students. An open and neutral studio setting was crucial, both logistically and creatively. It allowed all students to observe peers learning directly and informally, it was generous enough to allow large scale work, as a semi public space, it generated curiosity throughout DOJ, it allowed staff to observe teams with relative ease, and it provided an ideally ‘public’ platform in which to present teams work.

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Gesalt psychology theory sees such ‘optimal tension zones’, as a necessary strategy which can promote creative problem solving [6]. IDEO see this hot house environment as something of a ‘deep-dive’. The authors equate the deep dive with ‘deep learning’ [7] where learners seek meaning, context and comparison between new ideas and existing knowledge. This is in contrast to the emotionally disengaged notion of ‘surface learning’, where facts are recalled without reference, (and the authors would add, without feeling), to deeper meaning. John Welford’s excellent Brainware site at Edinburgh University, (which brings the emotions into learning), also promotes experiential and holistic learning as an alternative to the reasoned intellectual competences associated with Aristotelian modes of learning common in University, but useless as a model to understand creativity [8]. Interdisciplinarity opens the floodgates to creativity, is experiential, endorses play as discovery to learning, builds relationships, and is holistic. In contrast to Aristotle, John Heron’s ‘holistic learning’ is an ideal model in which to link learning to the creative process. It has four psychological modes, two of which fit Aristotelian concepts; thinking (intellectual statements), and practical (resolution), whilst the remaining two link, feeling (method acting) and imaginal (ludic dreams & visions), aspects to learning, (or as Welford puts it), relax>think>dream>act. So, rather than the tenet form-followsfunction, projects like Artefact after the Fact enable emotions to affect experience which affect education, or a form-follows-feeling approach to design learning through making, doing and experiencing. Design education needs a holistic play ethic [9], not just an Aristotelian work ethic. Play was important within the Artefact project, but, let’s not underestimate the potency of play in design education, or our lives, or within industry, or fall into the trap that both play and interdisciplinarity lack rigour. Modularity leaves little space to embrace play, but has to make time for interdisciplinarity. Our project showed that learners were just as prone to perform exceptionally well, moderately well or badly. Conflict, passive learning and resistance were evident in the Artefact project, but so were humour, drive, energy, inventiveness and excellent interdisciplinary working. Just as we forget that staff can be learners, along with the students they are teaching, we also accept that it is the students which transform the disciplines we work in: students do the projects - staff do not! Childish play, and inventive serendipity, (shorthand for interdisciplinary discovering), was responsible for the telescope, [10]. Playfulness re-surfaces within interaction product design. The RCA’s Equator Project, illustrates new product thinking, (products as cultural probes or reflectors with a certain fuzzy functionality), as open ended products which users invest with personal meaning rather than designers producing products with pre-packed meaning. These approaches embrace technology, ritual and experience, but also questioning utility as the only meaningful marker of product success [11]. Indeed, many of the Artefact after the Fact outcomes were not meant to be design solutions to product problems; was there really a problem which needed solving, or an experience to be conveyed? Many weird creations were the result of energised play, and whose function was appropriately fuzzy. Utility was opened up, and reflects an idiosyncratic Japanese term, Chindogo, meaning ‘Weird Tools’, [12] which have no conventional purpose, shows that not all ‘useless’ design is a necessarily a design failure.

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REMOTE (SECONDARY) EXPERIENCE & DIRECT (PRIMARY) EXPERIENCE The authors saw parallels within other elements of the students learning, and some connection between IDEO’s use of proxy devices. Here ‘direct experience’ of being actually ‘their’ in NYC, equated with ‘primary research’, whilst ‘remote experience’, (being stuck in Dundee), related to ‘secondary research’, seemed typical of primary / secondary research applied to their dissertation, and to their design thesis. The remote secondary experience provokes the student into inventive improvisations, akin to the adhoc aesthetic of proxy devices in some of the case studies outlined in experience prototyping. FROM FREE WRITING TO FREE SKETCHING TO FREE THINKING In preparing a strategy for the Artefact project, connections emerged between the written and the visual. Concepts of ‘free writing’ were reinterpreted in day one as an ‘icebreaker’, developed into a visual equivalent experiment we called ‘free-sketching’. All 120 students participated in this during the very first minutes of the studio project. In ‘free writing’, the rules of syntax, grammar, meaning, structure, spelling and format are bypassed to allow anxiety to subside, allowing a free flow of thought. The ‘free – sketching’ technique was used to help reduce similar emotional barrier to learning, such as fear. It allowed students to visually articulate actual and envisioned memories of nyc informally. Clearly, this technique could be used, alongside expressive artefacts, in other disciplines where visual skill is not the norm. A 36 metre sketch sheet was used, and later expanded through mind mapping, and developed through dialogue between student teams. Staff helped to initiate conversations between team members to explore other experimental projects previously undertaken. The ‘free sketching’ relates to the role of narrative in design, and oral, drawn, written, digital and enacted, (and re-enacted), ‘storytelling’, [13]), where memories are evoked and then shared with an audience. The meaning of ‘audience’ shifted continuously throughout the project, occurring between team members, teams & staff, culminating in a presentation by all 12 teams to a team of year two students invited to ‘appraise’ their peers.

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PLACEBO PLACES & PROXY OBJECTS The authors saw a relationship between direct and indirect experiencing of NYC with proxy devices. Many teams created proxy environments, often using a similar improvisational inventiveness found in IDEO. Found objects were customised rapidly in the workshop to create props. Hi, and low fidelity interactive technologies, (sensors, data projectors, props and lighting), led to dramatic artefactual interventions. Sound was also incorporated into some teams thinking. It was assumed that these spatially defined artefacts emerged due to interior students team role, but this was not the case. CONCLUSION In conclusion, we found that by connecting and contextualising learning through dynamic group learning, experience design and rewards, rather than marks, the following points emerged: • interdisciplinary projects are challenging, difficult to coordinate, hard to slot into a rigid modular system, but exciting to teach • given the nature of modularity and pressure for resources, interdisciplinary learning makes educational, experimental and economic sense • feedback is essential • staff, as well as students, undergo disciplinary change as a result of interdisciplinary working • the experimental approach we illustrate here is transferable across many disciplines as neither conventional product or visual capabilities are that crucial • interdisciplinary learning provokes institutional, individual and disciplinary reflection • holistic learning should compliment more formal approaches to learning This project has reinforced the notion that teaching design is a design activity, and as designer educators we have attempted to show a new approach to teaching and learning that has implications that reach far wider than the project and disciplines presented in this paper. REFERENCES [1] Burns, C., Culture of Innovation Event, The Lighthouse, Glasgow September 21, 2004 [2] Design Council, Facts and Figures: Design in Britain in 2002 - 03 [3] Buchenau, M., Suri, J.F., (2002?), Experience Prototyping [4] Myerson, J., IDEO Masters of Innovation, Revised Edition, Lawrence King Publishers, London, 2004 [5] ARTEFACTS EXPO [6] Baillie, C., DeWulf, S (1999) CASE, Creativity in Art, Science and Engineering, How to Foster Creativity, a DfEE Funded Project quoting Perkins in Sternberg, in 1997, a DfEE Pub, 1999 [7] Fry, H., Ketteridge, S., Marshall, S., (1999), Teaching & Learning in Higher Education: Enhancing Academic Practice, quoting Marton and Saljo, 1984, Kogan Page, London, 1999 [8] Welford, J., (2004), Brainware, The Imaginative Curriculum: Creativity, Taught & Caught, University of Strathclyde, October 13, 2004

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[9] Kane, P., The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Life , Macmilan Publishers, 2004, pp 69-89 [10] Carey, J., The Faber Book of Science; Galileo and the Telescope, Faber & Faber Pub, 1995, pp 8-16 [11] Garver, B., Boucher, A., Pennington, S., Law, A., RCA Equator Project, Drift Table, http:www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/equator/index.html [12] Wu, S., (2005), Wired: High Concept, No Purpose: pp60 [13] Lidwell, W., Holden, H., Butler, J., (2003), Universal Principles of Design: 100 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through Design, Rockport Publishers Massachusetts, 2003

EDUCATING THE DESIGNER FOR TEAM WORKING: AN EXPERIMENT ON THE EFFECTS OF PROTOTYPING ON TEAMS Sean Kingsley* Innovative Product Design, School of Design, University of Dundee, Scotland. Seaton Baxter** Centre for the Study of Natural Design, University of Dundee, Scotland. Tom Inns*** Chair of Design, School of Design, University of Dundee, Scotland. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper examines the gap between Design as taught in Education and Design as practiced within Industry. It outlines why design teams are used within Industry and some of the problems associated with team working. It then focuses on a pilot experiment used to investigate how the performance of a team might differ according to the prototyping methods used. Conclusions are drawn from this study and the authors suggest ways to effectively expose students to team working. Keywords: education/ teams/ prototype/ industry/ problem solving/ collaboration/ teamworking

*

Innovative Product Design, School of Design University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HT, Scotland 01382 345 332 [email protected] ** Centre for the Study of Natural Design, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HT, Scotland 01382 348062 [email protected] *** Chair of Design, School of Design University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HT, Scotland [email protected]

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TEACHING DESIGN Personal observations and anecdotal evidence from teachers strongly suggests teaching design for industry (rather than craft) tends to focus primarily on the education of the individual, rather than on the individual as a member of a group or team. An inspection of some current university prospectuses for industrial design degree courses shows little indication team-work is taught explicitly, although it appears to be practiced and assessed [1]. As far as is known, no course in the U.K. allows a student to do their final year project as part of a team. Some of the reason for this may lie with the difficulty of assessing such a large part of an individuals’ final mark based on work they have done in groups. DESIGN IN INDUSTRY – WORKING IN TEAMS TO SOLVE PROBLEMS Students therefore enter the workplace with underdeveloped team-working skills. They may even misunderstand the way design is normally done and have an inaccurate sense of their own importance. They will often find themselves required to work in design teams and multi-disciplinary teams. The reasons industry does this includes the attempt to take advantage of potential productivity gains through the use of teams when compared to individuals [2]; they may be dealing with problems more complex than any one person can manage [3]; and teams are seen as good way to seek solutions for specific problems, spearhead innovation and bring new products to market [4]. THE BENEFITS AND PROBLEMS WITH TEAMS When a group of individuals work together, it may become an effective team. A team is a specialized type of group, which must have few members [5], who trust each other [6], feel mutually accountable [7], and are committed to the team’s common purpose and performance goals [8]. These requirements make reaching the potential benefits of team working difficult. In addition, there are particular problems that come with working in a group or team, including issues of co-operation [9], trust [10], leadership [11] and groupthink [12]. Groups can encounter group deficit problems that result in the output being lower than the potential of the sum of the individuals involved. Causes include difficulty in the coordination of group actions; social comparison processes, where group members tend to maintain a level of output which is similar to other members [13]; and ‘social loafing’, which comes as a result of the impact of instructions being divided when given to a group, as opposed to individuals [14]. These issues become ‘hassle’ factors that work against the potential of the group or team to fulfill its aims. In spite of these difficulties, it is possible to have a team attain the goals for which it exists. The key appears to be in how team-like (i.e. team effective) the individuals are. There is a direct relationship between team effectiveness and team performance. In other

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words, if a team really does become more effective it is likely the output will improve [15]. TEAMS IN INDUSTRY There is evidence to suggest organizations are not benefiting as much from teams as might be expected [16]. This appears to be for two main reasons, one external to the team, and the other internal. The external problem is where the teams’ host (the company or organization) does not give the support (resources) and signals (autonomy, being taken seriously, given credit) needed to create or maintain an effective team [17]. The internal problem is created when the wrong mix of people has been brought together and the skill variety is inadequate and/or the correct balance of personalities is not achieved [18]. Michael Schrage highlights that trying to be innovative by creating innovation teams often fails [19] and results in ‘pseudo teams’ [20]. ‘Pseudo teams’ can come about when the directive to create an innovation team has been followed and something that looks like a team has been created, while it is actually a group of people. This situation can confuse organizations into believing they are being innovative when they have done everything required to be so [21]. SUGGESTED SOLUTION – COLLABORATION LEADS TO HIGH PERFORMANCE TEAMS Schrage suggests that instead of spending time attempting to pick teams, the emphasis should be on allowing people to share ideas and work in collaboration, which is at the heart of innovation [22]. Schrage suggests this is best achieved through the successful making and sharing of prototypes, which in this sense means anything used to test and share ideas [23]. In other words, the practice of prototyping promotes the creation of optimized teams through collaboration. POSITIVE TASK INTERDEPENDENCY Schrage’s idea of focusing on prototyping appears to be a way to develop positive task interdependency, which is thought to help make a team more effective, i.e. more teamlike [24]. If a team becomes more team-like, their performance output is likely to increase. This means that where teams are required to solve problems, greater teameffectiveness is likely to lead to better solutions [25]. But, do different prototyping methods have different effects on team working? PILOT EXPERIMENT A pilot experiment was made to try to establish a difference in a team’s task interdependency when using different prototyping tools. Two teams were created to work on the same problem over the course of one afternoon (1pm – 5pm).

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METHOD Potential participants (selected from a cross-section of staff from the University of Dundee with varying backgrounds in design education and industry) were screened using Belbin psychometric tests. These tests identify ways in which people are likely to act in a team environment. The test results were used to select two small groups of people more likely to act in a similar manner in the same situation, than if they had been chosen randomly. The treatment on both groups was similar. The experimental sessions were held at the same time, in similar rooms with identically positioned video recording equipment. Both groups were given the same brief to design a bicycle pannier and to present their designs to the video camera at a specific time at the end of the session. The groups were given the same background information. None of the subjects knew the nature of the experiment and all believed they were being tested on their design output. The prototyping tools given to one team were drawing tools and materials. The other team were given modeling tools and materials. GATHERING DATA The data gathered took the form of a questionnaire, video film, still photographs and the material products and final designs generated by the teams. The Questionnaire addressed how the Subjects felt about themselves and others before, during and after the experiment and was designed to map the internal dialogue of the participants. The video camera was mounted on a tripod, remained fixed and captured the activities of the Subjects from a corner of the room. The Subjects were asked to remain within marked parameters in order to remain within view of the camera. The whole of the experimental sessions were filmed. An assistant took the still photographs at intervals of approximately 20 minutes. The photographs followed the material progress of the groups, capturing drawings and models as they happened. The material products and final designs were collected. The Belbin psychometric profiles were also available as data. ANALYSING DATA To prepare for the analysis, the videos were made a manageable length by impartially editing both films in the same way (i.e. reducing their length from 4 hours to 1 hour long). The resulting edited films provided the sample from which quantitative and qualitative data was drawn. Initial exploration of the data identified three main areas for analysis. The first was to work from the video to count behaviours that might indicate interdependency. The second was again from the video. This was the recording of a subjective description of the activities, moods, energy and apparent intentions of the Subjects. The third was from the questionnaire. This was the quantitative evaluation of the opinions of the Subjects. This mixture of quantitative and qualitative evidence could then be tested against each other to identify which group was the most team-like.

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Interpersonal Behaviours - Laughter, Touch and Gaze The interpersonal behaviors selected for analysis were Laughter, Touch and Gaze. These were chosen because they are reasonably likely to indicate Interdependency and because they were readily countable. Laughter is closely related to smiling, which is an indication of interpersonal attraction, itself an indicator of interdependency. Touch is a way of indicating the proximity of individuals to each other, without attempting to measure actual physical location. Greater proximity shows an increased liking for others and is another indicator of interdependency. Gaze is defined as a look towards another person’s eyes and can be an individual gaze, performed by one person, or a mutual gaze, where the other person returns the look. Increased gazing is associated with increased liking for others, which in turn indicates the likelihood of greater interdependency between people. Pilot Experiment Results The qualitative data suggested that the modeling group had more fun, enjoyed each others company more, felt happier about their end design, were more committed to the goals of the group, appeared to have consistently higher energy levels and had greater interest in the project, than the drawing group. These impressions seem to indicate the modeling group experienced greater team interdependency than the drawing group. This conclusion is marginally upheld by the quantitative data showing more Laughter and Touch in the modeling group than in the drawing group. However, this is not the case in Gaze. Gazing in the modeling group dropped dramatically at a point during the experiment. Closer investigation showed this happened when the group had finished preparing to build the model and actually started the build. An explanation might be modeling is a ‘heads-down’ activity, with individuals focused on their part of the job. If the team is organized in such a way, modeling can involve everyone working on a part of the model. By contrast, the drawing in the drawing group was done by one person allowing, or compelling, the team members to continue building their relationships through gaze, rather than focusing on their own activity. In spite of the extra opportunity to maintain direct personal relationships in the drawing group, the lower levels of laughter and touch suggest that the relationships in the drawing team, where not as good as in the modeling group, as is concluded from the qualitative data. This may explain why the drawing group appeared to be less hierarchical in their team structure, with no clearly accepted leader emerging in this group. There was some evidence the person drawing had more control over the direction the team was taking, but this persons’ leadership, according to the questionnaire, was not accepted by others in the team. On the other hand, it may be that drawing does not demand as structured an approach as the making of a model, which requires more organisation. Other factors influencing leadership and hierarchy other than the prototyping method used were taken into account. For example, the most dominant person in each group had skills most suited to completing the brief, as one was a product designer and the other a skilled draftsperson. Other factors affecting their domination are the status within the university and age.

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PILOT EXPERIMENT CONCLUSION Both the qualitative and quantitative data shows the modeling group acted more interdependently than the drawing group, except for in the case of Gaze. This anomaly is explained because of the way modeling is done in this group when compared to drawing in this group. It is unclear whether the greater interdependency shown in one group over another is as a result of the individuals involved or the activity they were doing. It is my view it is a combination of both, with prototyping through modeling requiring greater dynamism, commitment and organisation in order to complete the brief, and which brought out a more team-like approach from the individuals, than prototyping through drawing. This study was too small to be conclusive, but the evidence, suggests there is a difference in the effectiveness of a team according to the prototyping methods used and is enough to justify further research. CONCLUSION - EXPOSING STUDENTS TO DESIGNING IN TEAMS The study did three things. Firstly, it showed that researching design teams working on projects is worthwhile. Secondly, it developed and demonstrated the foundations of a useful method for studying the area. Finally and as a consequence of these, clearer questions can be asked. We can postulate that improvements in a student’s career performance could be made by explicitly teaching about the real problems and benefits of working with others in design teams. Students do get some exposure to this area. They are bound to absorb some skills and become aware of some of the problems associated with working with others. However, deeper skills and understanding could be brought about by reflection through video recordings made of the students collaborating together. Thoughtful exposure to different prototyping methods for collaboration would give students the experience of different team dynamics brought about by the prototyping influence. The challenge to teachers of design is to be convinced of the educational benefits to their students in devoting major parts of the curriculum to team working. Group assessment methods need to be adopted and potential employers need to be persuaded to see beyond the individual portfolio. REFERENCES [1] Brunel: Product Design BSc http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/acad/sed/sedcourse/ug/design/prddn/%20detail/ Loughborough: Design and Technology http://www.lboro.ac.uk/prospectus/ug/cd/idat/ Napier University; BDes Hons Consumer Product Design http://www.napier.ac.uk/depts/dama/html/%20cpd_des.html [2] Katzenbach J. R. and Smith D. K., The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization. Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, 1992. p15 [3] Homer-Dixon T., The Ingenuity Gap. Jonathan Cape, London, 2000. [4] Dougherty D., Organizing for Innovation. Handbook of organization studies. ed. by Clegg S. R., Hardy C. and Nord W. R. Sage, London, 1996. p 424

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[5] Belbin R.M., Beyond the Team. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 2000. p14 [6] Douglas T., Groups: understanding people gathered together. Tavistock, London, 1983. 126133 [7] Op Cit, 2, p.60 [8] Op Cit, 2, p. 49-55 [9] Op Cit, 3, P123 [10] Op Cit, 3, p126-133 [11] Belbin R. M., Management teams: why they succeed or fail. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1983 p. 10 [12] See Janis I., Victims of Groupthink. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1982. and Op Cit, 5, P16 and Fig 2 [13] Brown R., Group Processes - Dynamics within and between groups. Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, 1988. p 180 [14] Op Cit, 13, p 183 on Latane’s social impact theory [15] Op Cit, 2 [16] Op Cit, 5, P16 and Fig 2. AND Op Cit, 4 [17] Op Cit, 4 [18] Op Cit, 5, p.17 [19] Schrage M., Serious Play: how the world’s best companies simulate to innovate. Harvard Business School Press, Harvard, 2000. p. 28-29 [20] Op Cit, 2, p.84 [21] Schrage M., No More Teams! Mastering the dynamics of creative collaboration. Doubleday, New York, 1995. p.xi [22] Op Cit, 19, p.28 [23] Op Cit, 19, p.7 [24] Op Cit, 13, [25] Op Cit, 2

TRADING TECHNOLOGIES: AN INVESTIGATION AT THE INTERSECTION OF ARTIFACT AND INFORMATION Stephanie Munson* Assistant Professor, Industrial and Interactive Product Design, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This proposal addresses the conference theme “Crossing Design Boundaries”, with a focus on the challenges for the future of industrial design education through discussion on the impact of technology on the field of industrial design due to recent advances in computing technologies. Computers and computing technologies are changing the world through the ways we live, work, and play, and their influence is apparent in its effects on the field of product design. Computing technologies have had much impact recently on the field of product design. This paper will discuss examples of this along with a specific case study that examines design within a trading environment. The specific project this paper will showcase is the design of physical products, entitled Trading Technologies, designed during a yearlong senior studio course. This joint studio effort between the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Industrial Design Program and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) touches on many of the conference categories including the links between industrial and interaction design, studio-based design projects, new technologies in design, interdisciplinarity, and industrial collaborations. This course involved the collaboration of a unique set of participants – a university-based Industrial Design program, graphic designers, a prominent local industry (The Chicago Mercantile Exchange), prominent local design professionals (Motorola), and computer science consultancy for assistance with electronics prototyping. The student-designers performed research within

*

Industrial and Interactive Product Design, School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago, 106 Jefferson Hall (M/C036) 929 West Harrison Street Chicago, IL 60607-7038 [email protected]

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the trading floor environment, discovered emerging technologies, and applied this learning to the designed products. A goal for this paper is to explore issues related to the confluence of industrial and interaction design, and spark a discussion around this topic. Keywords: studio-based design projects, interdisciplinarity, new technologies in design, design collaboration, industrial collaborations, interaction design 1 INTRODUCTION Interactive computing technologies have had much influence over the past several decades on the field of product design, influencing design methodologies and products themselves. This paper examines the influence of technology on products through examples of work that showcase this impact, and a specific discussion on a yearlong design project. Interactive computing technologies provide us with the abilities for products and surfaces to: respond to their environments, sense and react to a user’s physical state, connect and communicate with one another, move information within an environment, and be customized to an individual users needs. This paper will begin by discussing these concepts within a larger context through examples of recent work within these arenas, and will then move within a specific context – the application of these influences to this specific studio project. The specific example discussed is a senior level, undergraduate industrial design studio that examined the design of products for traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). During this project, the University of Illinois Chicago worked with the CME’s Center for Innovation on the design of products for traders during the year 2010. This studio involved the participation of both industrial and graphic design students, professional designers as critics, a prominent local industry, and assistance with electronics prototyping. This touches on connections to the conference theme due to the interdisciplinary nature of the project, and specifically through the design of soft computing and wearable products. 2 COMPUTING TECHNOLOGIES AS THEY INFLUENCE PRODUCT Computing technologies have had a great impact on products over the past several decades. This project looked at some ways that computing technology has influenced product. 2.1 PRODUCTS CAN RESPOND TO THEIR ENVIRONMENTS AND TO A USERS PHYSICAL STATE There are many recent examples that illustrate a products increasing awareness of its environment, and a users needs within that environment. This studio project necessitates

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these types of interactions, and technologies were investigated that contain these capabilities. One project found that illustrates a surfaces’ responsiveness, is a project at The University of Virginia that looks at a sensor imbedded carpet that analyzes people’s footsteps and foot patterns in order to detect warning signs of certain diseases. “Unlike monitors that require users to wear sensors, walk on special platforms, or be videotaped, this device sits on the floor unobtrusively.” [1] It measures vibrations through imbedded sensors, and monitors a person’s normal walking habits in order to detect any pertinent changes. Another example of experimentation with responsive products is at Adidas through a running shoe concept. Adidas is in the process of developing a running shoe that responds to the individualized human form – taking measurements and adjusting the performance of the shoe as a runner moves through space through an imbedded microchip in the sole and a sensor that measures the compression in the shoe with each step. This ensures a shoe that is tailored to an individual runner’s strides. Loop is a London-based studio that develops reactive surfaces and objects. Two projects of interest from this studio are Blumen and Light Sleeper. Blumen is a reactive wallpaper-like surface that reacts autonomously to the environment as botanical patterns blossom in response to programmed settings. [2] Another project that responds to an individual’s needs is the Light Sleeper, a surface that responds to ambient light levels through an “illuminating, personalized alarm integrated into your bedding.”[3] 2.2 PRODUCTS CAN CONNECT TO INFORMATION, AND COMMUNICATE WITH ONE ANOTHER The Ambient Orb by Cambridge (Massachusetts)-based company, Ambient Devices, is a device that connects information to object(s). “Ambient’s vision is to embed information representation in everyday objects: lights, pens, watches, walls, and wearables. With Ambient, the physical environment becomes an interface to digital information rendered as subtle changes in form, movement, sound, color or light.”[4] Their first well-known product, the Ambient Orb, was designed to display information visually on a small, eggshaped form – the colors of this object are programmed to change in response to weather, stock prices, or job opportunities in a certain city. Another product that aims to provide connections between people through information imbedded within objects is the ntag, developed by ntag Interactive Corporation. It is a system built around an interactive name badge in the form of wearable objects (tags) that seek to improve networking between people through identifying the things people have in common and presenting that information to one another upon a first meeting. “When people meet, their nTAG’s identify things they have in common and provide that information right at the beginning of the conversation.”[5] 2.3 MOVING INFORMATION AROUND: PHYSICAL CONTROLS FOR DIGITAL INFORMATION One component of the studio project that became important was the need to move information around within this environment. Technologies were investigated that allow

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people to do this in seamless, intuitive ways. One technology available for this purpose is glove input devices. While traditional input devices (mouse, keyboard) provide for twodimensional input, these provide the ability to recognize and utilize human gesture(s) as an input device for digital information. “A glove is generally quite lightweight, with flexible sensors which accurately and repeatedly measure the position and movements of the fingers and wrist. Pressure sensors on the gloves palms measure occurring during object grasping.” [6] The Crossing Project is another example of a project that explores computing based clothing and interactions with physical icons, with a goal of improving the hand-eye integration. “The Crossing Project presents alternative paradigms of information access, integrating the hand and the body in the act of computer-based learning and communication.” [7] This project investigates alternative means of manipulating digital information, and “demonstrates futuristic forms of information access in which the technology surrenders to the human hand.” [8] Interaction Ivrea’s Interactive Wallpaper – Not So White Walls – is a project that allows a person to interact with a digital surface. This surface is designed to allow you to read your e-mail, view digital photos, control house appliances, monitor the weather, and monitor changing barometer levels according to the humidity detected in the environment. Behind this surface is a grid of sensors, conductive materials, and resistors that allow the person to interact with the wallpaper directly through physical touch. 3 RESEARCH WITHIN THE TRADING ENVIRONMENT The specific project this paper describes in relation to the research discussed above, was a studio collaboration between UIC’s Industrial Design program and the CME’s Center for Innovation (CFI) performed during the 2004-2005 academic year. This project performed research within an actual trading environment, with the project goal being to envision products for traders in the year 2010 based on today’s work needs and on emerging technologies. The Fall 2004 semester was spent conducting the research for the project and in envisioning future scenarios, with the second semester (Spring 2005) spent on designing and prototyping the products. 3.1 RESEARCH OVERVIEW The research performed during the Fall 2004 semester included information gathering on the history of trading artifacts, a demographic analysis of traders, current trading artifacts (what is used to trade today), an analysis of work processes (differences between electronic and physical trading), and emerging technologies. Secondary research methods used included interviews, online searches, and contextual inquiry. The question examined was: “How can products be designed to facilitate trading at the CME in the year 2010? These products should be intuitive to use, efficient, and facilitate information exchange. How can existing means of trading be leveraged in order to ease the transition from physical to electronic trading?” One of the primary challenges for the project was in predicting, and negotiating, the transition from physical trading (called ‘Open Outcry’ and historically performed in a trading pit through the use of hand signals and trading

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cards) to electronic trading (a more recently and increasingly utilized form of trading performed online). It became clear that a major challenge (and need) for this project was in designing for this hybrid environment, and that our designs would have to satisfy the needs of two very diverse groups of people – both open outcry and electronic traders. 3.2 TRADING ARTIFACTS TODAY In looking back at the development of trading artifacts, simple paper cards and hand signals were the first used methods of trading. These methods conveyed information necessary to trade such as buy and sell amounts, length of trading contract, month, and date of delivery. Within the trading pit today, hand signals and trading cards are still used in open-outcry trading to translate information. Hand signals enable fast communication over potentially long distances (as much as 30 or 40 yards), and are more practical than voice communication due to the noise level and number of people on the floor. Other objects used within this environment to facilitate trading are telephones, timers (to denote time of transaction), earphones, printers and screens (placed throughout the environment to show news and information about what is happening in the market). Increasing, handheld electronic devices (similar to a PDA) are used in order to trade. Process differences between the open outcry method, and the electronic method will be discussed below. The first electronic interfaces were unfamiliar to the pit traders, so the interfaces were designed to resemble trading cards. 3.3 TRADER DEMOGRAPHICS Next, methods of contextual inquiry were employed in order to assess the differences in the two types of traders (open-outcry vs. electronic). It was discovered that pit trading was a very male oriented arena with 95% of traders being male – the majority were older, Caucasian, had varying education levels, varying backgrounds, were competitive, and height was somewhat important for success (taller traders are more visible in the pit). The electronic trader was also predominately male, but there was more diversity in terms of age and ethnicity. These traders were on average younger, but still mostly Caucasian, patient, more educated, analytical, and with strong computer aptitude. 3.4 WORK PROCESSES: DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ONLINE AND PHYSICAL TRADING Trading processes were assessed in order to analyze differences between the open-outcry (physical) environment and electronic trading. The process in the pit can take anywhere from 30 seconds up to 3 minutes, and the process is as follows: 1) The trader calls the order desk at the exchange to place an order, 2) The person at the desk calls a runner to carry the order to the pit, 3) The runner takes the order to the broker in the pit, and 4) The order is executed by the broker. The electronic trading process is executed through Globex, the CME’s online trading interface. Trades made within this environment are done as a one-person operation – the person trading directly inputs and makes a trade instantly using the online interface. The

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order is instantly received and executed, and electronic trading is open 24 hours a day. The execution of an order takes mere seconds. An analysis was made of the differences between these two methods, in order to understand where some of the design opportunities lie. Are there transferable aspects that could be utilized in designing new technological products and systems for traders? Open Outcry Trading has advantages over electronic trading that included: the emotional aspect of trading, the exciting physical floor environment, and the collaborative nature of the work environment. The project sought to capture these elements in the end product designs. 4 FROM RESEARCH INTO DESIGNING – PERSONAS AND SCENARIOS In order to transition from the research phase of the project into the design phase of the project, it was necessary to develop a picture of what the future world of trading would look like since it is currently a time of rapid change. This was necessary in order to help the designers understand the needs of the traders, develop an understanding of what this environment would look like in ten years, and assess what types of products should be designed for this group of people. This was accomplished through the development of trader types (archetypal representations of the different types of traders, their use characteristics, and corresponding behaviors), personas (fictional people created based on the different trading types), and scenarios that illustrate personas behaviors in action. Three trader types were identified: the ‘CME’ trader, the ‘on-the-go’ trader, and the ‘trading firm’ trader. Each type was distilled into archetypal characteristics, which included information on work behaviors, needs, desires, daily routines, and personal characteristics. Three personas were then developed for each of the trader types, and several scenarios were then developed based on each of these personas. After these exercises, important product characteristics emerged that would be important to encapsulate in the end products. These overarching characteristics include speed, efficiency, easy access to information, and intuitive use. 5 DESIGNING AND PROTOTYPING PRODUCTS During the second semester of the project, the class was divided into three groups and each group was assigned a particular product emphasis based on the scenarios presented at the end of the first semester. The products assigned were a wearable product, an interactive workstation, and an interactive information display board. It was necessary for each product to work interactively with the others in order to design the most efficient trading environment. In order to facilitate the designing, each groups’ initial task was in determining a design brief, design criteria, aesthetic descriptors, and inspirational imagery. After this, the groups moved into the ideation phase and begun sketching and presenting ideas to the client on a weekly basis. During the design phase many concepts were discussed in relation to trader needs, as well as the overall product system and the

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interrelationships between the three projects. The capabilities discussed above in section 2, were all utilized in some way in the final design concepts. Final results of the class included: a series of images that show how the three projects relate to one another, charts that describe the relationships between the features/functionality/information/technologies of the projects, scenarios that illustrate how the objects are used together, and product prototypes that illustrate the form relationships amongst the three. 6 CONCLUSION This project was challenging in many ways. Firstly, it was a challenge for these studentdesigners in that it introduced them to client-sponsored design. Prior to this experience, students worked on design projects of their own creation, and hence were not accountable to any ‘true’ end-user. This is an imperative experience for any student to have prior to entering the working world. During this project, student-designers were able to present and receive feedback regarding their ideas to a group of users targeted to use their products. Additionally, it pushed their presentation and communication skills within a client environment – this was greatly beneficial in improving (and obtaining) the necessary design communication skills. A second major challenge for this course was an incredibly complicated subject matter – understanding the psychological underpinnings of a trading mind was incredibly difficult for everyone involved. It presented a tough challenge, but garnered interesting results. Thirdly, was in balancing client expectations with industrial design needs. This project dictated working at the intersection of tangible product and futurist, visionary thinking. While the client demanded innovative, futureforward thinking – the industrial design aspect demanded that the results be grounded. Lastly, is in tackling the difficulty of designing interactive products. It was learned that designing products in the future (those influenced by computing technologies) necessitates a true multi-disciplinary effort. In this class, an ideal outcome would involve participants from industrial design, graphic design, architecture, computer science, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, psychology, and anthropology. This dictates new needs for the industrial designers of tomorrow. New skills are necessary in order to illustrate product interactions, and prototyping that showcases actual product interactive behaviors. REFERENCES [1] MIT Technology Review. Carpet Sensors. July/August 2004. [2] [Web document] 2004. http://www.loop.ph/new/blumen.html [3] [Web document] 2004. http://www.loop.ph/new/lightsleeper.html [4] [Web document] 2004. http://www.ambientdevices.com/ [5] [Web document] 2004. http://www.ntag.com/ [6] [Web document] 2004. http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol1/ncp/ [7] [Web document] 2004. http://www.crossingproject.net/ [8] Ibid.

Chapter Five CONTEMPORARY DESIGN ISSUES

THE INCLUSIVE CHALLENGE: MAKING MORE OF DESIGN Alastair S Macdonald* Product Design Engineering, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper argues for a context-based approach to and strategic use of the methods and processes of design education to meet complex societal challenges, in this particular case those brought by an ageing population. The author discusses how this approach to using design education can be delivered to a wider range of disciplines other solely to students of design. The author compares and evaluates, through two case studies, the delivery of similar material to two dissimilar groups of students, one design-related and subject-based, the second non-design-related and context-based. Keywords: Inclusive design, context-based, strategic use of design education 1 INTRODUCTION As the demographics of an ageing population will increasingly present us with some tough challenges, are we being strategic enough in how we use the methods and approaches of design education to help anticipate and prepare for these challenges? Are we too pre-occupied with the idea of design as a specialist subject and not as a set of knowledge, methods and activities that can be deployed to greater effect in a contextbased approach across a wide range of disciplines? These questions arise from the experience gained by the author when introducing the theme of inclusive design to two different types of audience, using essentially the same material but adopting a different approach in each case. In the first case, an inclusive approach to design has been embedded in an undergraduate level UK curriculum where product design engineering is the specialist subject area; in the second, this approach has been modified and developed into a context-based approach for a broad range of non-design graduate students in Japan through a short, intensive stand-alone course. For both of these cases, an outline of the content of the curriculum is discussed, as well as the findings and implications resulting from these two experiences. *Product Design Engineering, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ, Scotland. Tel: ++44 141 353 4715 Fax: ++44 141 353 4655 Email: [email protected] Web: www.gsa.ac.uk/pde

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2 TWO GROUPS, ONE CONTEXT 2.1 CASE 1 – INCLUSIVE DESIGN IN A DESIGN-CENTRED ENGINEERING CURRICULUM In the first case, that of the Glasgow Product Design Engineering (PDE) course, (run jointly between the Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow) there is no separate ‘inclusive design’ syllabus as such, due to the pressures of both an established accredited engineering curriculum and a demanding design studio project programme. Instead an ‘inclusive’ agenda is adopted within the department by the teaching staff, and in turn within the student cohort group. Such an approach required, e.g., advocacy to demonstrate its benefits both to departmental staff and students, personal individual (staff) commitment to that agenda, separate briefings, access to self-learning materials, and appropriate strategies and guidelines for an inclusive approach to designing. Fortunately, this agenda has been enthusiastically adopted and embedded in the ethos of the department, facilitated by a steadily growing interest in medical, welfare, rehabilitation and assistive product areas. This has helped promote beneficial and growing collaborations with disciplines such as, e.g., healthcare, physiotherapy and clinical medicine. Imparted through a series of briefings related to the project activity, the ‘inclusive design’ content in this case provides some context (change in population demographic, lifestyle and technological trends), ‘people’ models (how one thinks about a range of different capabilities and how these differ from individual to individual and dynamically with age or illness), universal design principles (with which to evaluate concepts, designs and services), and a typology of user research methods (as an understanding of, and involvement with, users from the earliest stages of the design process is crucial for successful, usable, and desirable design proposals). Additionally, access to self-learning resources and case study exemplars, such as found in the excellent website developed by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) [1], is invaluable. This approach appears to have been fruitful as students have achieved success in inclusive design categories in national student design competitions. PhD level research activity has also emerged, ranging e.g. from an ‘inclusive’ software tool for designers that provides a bridge between biomechanical data and its value to designers in developing products for an ageing population, to design tools for exploring motives for the (non-) adoption of technologies by different generations. 2.2 CASE 2 - INCLUSIVE DESIGN FOR FUTURE POLICY MAKERS The second case study discusses the post-graduate master’s level course run in two successive years (2003 and 2004) at the Center for Global Education and Research at the Ritsumeikan (Rits) University in Kyoto, Japan. Here, the central concern is one of how to engender, in societal policy makers and in shapers of technological strategies (who may become the future commissioners of design), sufficient understanding of the value and efficacy of an inclusive approach to design for all aspects of the built environment. In an enlightened and strategic approach by the Rits, ‘inclusivity’ is seen as one area, amongst others, of crucial expertise required to produce a class of enlightened bureau-

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technocrats with the awareness and knowledge to anticipate and prepare for emergent and pressing societal needs in the areas of, e.g., governance, welfare, security, technology and design. The Rits does not have design as a subject specialization as such. Masters students from a wide range of disciplines including law, sociology, health studies, core ethics, policy science, business administration, human (interface) engineering, and mechanical engineering have elected for this one-week intensive lecture and assignment-based ‘inclusive design’ course. Again, for this to succeed, such an approach required commitment to and advocacy of the ‘inclusive’ agenda, to make a case for the benefits of a design-led approach to both supporting staff and elective participants. Here most of the content delivered is similar to that in Case 1. However there is much greater emphasis on context - on the nature and scale of the emerging inclusive challenge in order to highlight the need for a more strategic approach through a number of specialist fields working together). The ‘people’ models, universal design principles, user research methods, and access to self-learning resources are similar to Case 1. Design process, which in Case 1 is familiar through the normal curriculum, is introduced in the Case 2 curriculum to illustrate, through a number of exemplars, how designers can embody principles, services, and technologies in a ‘humanized’ or user-centric way [2]. One major component of the Case 2 curriculum is a forum for discussing issues of e.g. enabling, disabling, acceptability, inclusivity and exclusivity, as the efficacy of a response to a situation or a problem may depend on how both the problem and the solution are perceived and whether this is through a ‘medical’ or ‘social’ mode. 3 MODES OF RESPONSE The metrics for evaluating outcomes in the second case are harder to define as any benefits accruing will not be as immediately – or tangibly – obvious as in the first, but it would be useful to compare the outcomes common to both cases and those which are unique to each. In each case, limited time is available for exploring inclusive issues, context, values, ideals, methods, models and exemplars, but within each, a heightened awareness of inclusive design issues and the need for a more inclusive approach to shaping our built environment, products and services has undoubtedly been observed in participating students. 3.1 CASE 1: SUBJECT-BASED RESPONSES In the case of an established course such as Glasgow’s PDE, ‘inclusivity’, like the issue of ‘sustainability’, has been embedded into an existing curriculum. Activity at senior undergraduate level tends to be more individually based in the form of a major project over a single session. The single discipline of expertise, i.e. PDE in this case, requires that a ‘product’ outcome is produced - so there is an element of pragmatism in the approach, and the responses (i.e. solutions) tend to be more (but not exclusively) in the ‘medical’ mode (implying that people are disabled as a consequence of their own condition – this mode seeks to either remedy or correct the impairment through medication, rehabilitation and surgery etc, or to offer adaptive aids and equipment as a

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physical remedy). The student’s habitual approach and response is modified only to a limited extent by contact with other disciplines and this contact is again ‘pragmatic’ in nature – i.e. it is being driven by the need for an informed and inclusive ‘product’ outcome. In this case, students consolidate their field of professional expertise and embody inclusive principles and ideals to realize manufacturable product solutions that can make a measurable difference to the quality of a person’s life. Examples might include innovative surgical, rehabilitation, self-medication, or assistive devices. Figure 1 illustrates an enlightened ‘product’ response to the problem of ill or elderly people unable to attend a dental practice, in the form of a portable dental surgery. In this particular example, it offers not only an engineered product solution, but extends social provision by virtue of its approach through design. This in itself illustrates the added dimension that design can bring to a ‘traditional’ engineering-based discipline. 3.2 CASE 2: CONTEXT-BASED RESPONSES In the second case, at the Rits, the Inclusive Design course opens up, within the limitations of 15 consecutive sessions over five days, a new ‘space’ in the student’s typical subject-based curriculum to address a shared context-based - and in this case, a pressing - societal issue, that of the demands induced by a rapidly ageing population. This space provides the opportunity for potentially any discipline in the university to benefit from a mutual sharing of the knowledge-base, perceptions, and methods of others, and creates a certain freedom for participants to respond to the context and issues being addressed in ways perhaps not habitually associated with their own subject discipline. In this case, there is no pressure or requirement for a specific ‘designed’ outcome as such, but rather, using a design-led educational approach, to develop a critical view of the existing built environment and its infrastructure, associated products, interfaces and services, and to highlight opportunities for improvement that could be service-based, policy-based, or product-orientated. The method by which this critical and reflective approach is developed is through an assignment themed on ‘the modern journey’ (Figure 2), inspired by the Nordic Council’s competition of the same name [3], that provides the means and context for both a tangible analysis and also an application of the knowledge and issues raised in the accompanying lecture series (which provides core information on relevant issues, and exemplars through case studies) and group discussions on the one hand, and the development of a personal ‘portfolio’ or ‘agenda’ on the other. This assignment asks students to record, photographically and through noted observations, a continuous journey involving several modes of transport. This is used throughout the course as a context within which to evaluate the e.g. knowledge and principles imparted, and issues discussed. Here, because of the particular mix of disciplines, one could generalize and say that the responses tend to be more – but not exclusively (as engineers in the group tend to produce responses in the medical mode) - in the ‘social’ or ‘psych-biological’ modes (this sees people as disabled or enabled by the social context in which they function and proposes that changes in the social context or environment can remove or alleviate disability and where the needs and aspirations of the individual are viewed in relation to their

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Figure 1. Portable Dental Surgery, Scott Maguire, PDE, Glasgow, 2003.

Figure 2. ‘The Modern Journey’ students from mixed disciplines at the Rits. biological inheritance, chosen lifestyle and aspirations, cultural background, or their social or working environments). Additionally, in the Rits case, students have been able to significantly develop their awareness of the relationship between their professional field of expertise and the others participating, and to understand that there is a common agenda shared amongst different professional fields that requires a coordinated context-based approach to tackle the complexity of the ‘inclusive’ challenges facing society in the ‘real’ world outside academia. What can be clearly observed in Case 2 is that responses range through a broad spectrum from legislative change, through the need for a more human presence and involvement in systems or environments, to product solutions. Students are able to see, at one and the same time, divergence of approach and solutions offered in response to the same challenge. Sometimes these responses are not typical of their own field, e.g. a

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policy scientist responds with a product design solution, or a healthcare student suggests a policy solution although they may not have the particular skills to detail that in any depth. However, all can enjoy sharing the debate and discussing their responses referenced to the same context. 4 DISCUSSION: DESIGN, CONTEXT AND STRATEGIC CHALLENGE The Rits experience of introducing masters level students with no previous formal design education or exposure to structured thinking on design, inclusive design or issues of inclusivity, has demonstrated that even through the limited exposure of the short intensive course at the Rits, a more considered, person-centred appreciation of the value of design can be fostered in a range of disciplines other than design. This suggests that if, as a result of this, future policy-makers, and commissioners of design are more enlightened, emerging design professionals might find, as a result, better opportunities and be able to provide better solutions to attain the inclusive ideal. Such an approach would help extend the recommendations in the UK Design Council’s ‘Living Longer’ agenda for plugging the knowledge gaps in inclusive design [4]. Our society will always require individuals with the professional design and engineering skills to translate people’s needs into the tangible, realizable products and services required for the ‘made’ world for our daily lives. These will need to be humanely designed, embody accessible and inclusive features, and be pleasurable and lifeenhancing to use. At the same time, we are faced with an enormous demographic shift that presents us, in the developed world, with a population that will have a greater range of capabilities and lifestyle requirements than ever before. Two thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2030: this population will be an ageing one and this will require us to think about how the environment and services in these cities should be shaped so that we create inclusive, ‘intentional’ cities rather than exclusive ‘accidental’ ones. This author argues that there is a strong case for exposing those who will never consider being designers per se to the models, processes, exemplars and methods of design education to provide insights that will enable other professional sectors to commission design and use designers more effectively as part of a wider societal strategy: the inclusive issues brought by an ageing society suggest we should do this with some urgency. However, there is another issue, not just that of an inclusive approach to design, but concerning the benefits that can be brought to non-design subject disciplines by those design educationalists who have seen their audiences as traditionally in design-related disciplines. Research by Kimbell et al [5] indicates that “design education…enables students to acquire a distinctive array of skills…(but) the potential power… is not being adequately recognized or harnessed…and specifically it is the knowledge of, and transferability of design skills that is being threatened by the tunnel vision of design courses assuming that all their graduates will become designers.” The Inclusive Design course at the Rits is not anchored in a single subject-driven discipline. Rather it is context driven: the context in this case is that of an ageing population and the challenges that this brings with it to include as much of the population

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as possible. At the Rits, there was an enlightened recognition of the “need to train a new generation of techno-bureaucrats, health planners, policy makers, service providers, and appliance makers…” and of the “…value of the inclusive design approach for all of these…” [6]. Although at the Rits the request was specifically for an inclusive design curriculum, the generic value of a design-led and context-based approach for a wide range of disciplines can be argued. It also suggests that within existing subject discipline courses, space should be provided in the curriculum for not only habitual subject-driven responses but also to allow a freer and more critical examination of societal issues that will require a wider range of disciplines working in concert to address these strategically. 5 CONCLUSIONS Creative design education appears to have a real value to disciplines other than design. The well-documented Case 1 has demonstrated the value of adding design to engineering. In Case 2, a broad range of other disciplines have benefited from a people-centred design-led educational experience. The issue of context and the opportunity of mixed discipline working may help students develop a more holistic understanding of the range of complementary responses that may be required to address complex and pressing societal challenges. In this context, it may also facilitate a more reflective appreciation of the appropriateness of the particular types of response associated with their discipline of study. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Japan Foundation, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the Center for Global Education and Research at the Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan for aspects of this research. REFERENCES [1] http://www.inclusivedesign.org.uk/ [2] Macdonald, A. S. Humanising technology. In Clarkson, J., Coleman, R., Keates, S., and Lebbon, C.S. (Eds) Inclusive design: design for the whole population, Springer, London, 2003. [3] MIRAKEL Film and TV AB (2002). The modern journey – from another perspective, Sweden, The Nordic Council [4] Coleman R., Living longer: the new context for design, Design Council, London, 2001. [5] Kimbell R., Saxton J., and Miller S., Distinctive skills and implicit practices. Goldsmiths University Report to the Design Council, 1999. [6] Cassim, M., President of the Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, Beppu, Japan, in conversation with the author, Kyoto 2003.

MODULAR DEGREES FAIL TO DELIVER Bethan Hewett* National Centre for Product Design Development and Research, University of Wales, Institute, UK. Paul Wilgeroth* National Centre for Product Design Development and Research, University of Wales, Institute, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper asserts that there are fundamental pedagogical difficulties with Product Design courses that are delivered using the standard modular degree structure and that the normal “long thin” modular delivery is counterproductive to the student learning experience. Product Design is an integrative holistic problem solving activity and is therefore not compatible with ten or more subjects being taught as separate modules. Students have difficulty with the modular structure and are unable or unwilling to apply the knowledge and skills gained in any particular module to other modules, and see them as discrete activates. As a consequence students fail to recognise or benefit from the cumulative nature of the learning experience. This paper describes how Product Design staff at University of Wales Institute Cardiff (UWIC) are addressing this problem by fundamentally restructuring the programme while still remaining within the regulations of the standard modular framework. The new structure identifies groupings of closely related modules and integrates them into a sequence of “super modules” that by their very nature integrate the knowledge and skills required by the student at various stages of the design process. In addition the delivery changes from ten, “long thin” modules running in parallel to “short fat” modules running sequentially. This restructuring which will start in September 2005 will enable the students to acquire the necessary leaning via an integrated learning experience that will allow significantly larger design projects to be addressed in a more holistic and meaningful way.

*UWIC. Western Avenue. Cardiff. CF5 2YB. UK.

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A case study is presented describing preliminary experiments where the learning outcomes of two or more modules were assessed via a common design project and compared with discreet project for the same modules. These experiments have yielded very positive results and suggest that the proposed restructure will be effective. The long-term effectiveness of the new structure will only be proven following a longer-term study of the student’s performance over the next few years. Keywords: Knowledge, Transferable, Holistic, Structure, Integration, Product design process, Total Design, Learning, Modules, Super Modules, Curriculum, Education

Table 1. The Original Modular Structure of level-1 modules. Level 1 Modules

Value

The Marketing and Design Interface 0.5 Design Models and Methods 1 Ergonomics in Design 1 Effective Communication of Design Concepts 0.5 Engineering Science 1 Technical Specification (2D CAD) 1 An Introduction to CAID 1 Materials & Manufacturing Process Selection 1 Workshop Practice and Model Making 1 Computer & IT Studies 1 Design in Context 1

1 INTRODUCTION The Product Design related courses at UWIC were fundamentally changed in 1995 when the University adopted a modular framework model for all its undergraduate and postgraduate courses. It was at this time that all the subject areas and activities where grouped into a framework of discrete modules. 2 MODULAR FRAMEWORK In the case of the honours degree, UWIC modular framework consisted of 30 modules with ten modules at level-one, ten modules at level-two and ten modules at level-three. These modules were to be discrete units of academic activity. The normal mode of delivery of these modules was to deliver them all in the “long thin” mode i.e. all modules to be taught in parallel throughout the academic year with all the assessment to be carried out near the end of the academic year.

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2.1 ORIGINAL MODULAR MODEL The original modular model for level-1 of the Product Design Programme (PDP) is shown in Table 1 and consisted of a wide range of discrete modules. Nine of these modules had a value of 1.0 and two with a value of 0.5. Each of these modules was delivered and assessed separately. After a period of time it emerged that this mode of delivery proved to be somewhat unsatisfactory for two main reasons. Firstly it became clear that many students were unable or unwilling to apply the knowledge and skills gained in any particular module to the other modules, and saw them as discrete activities. As a consequence many students failed to recognise or benefit from the cumulative nature of the learning experience. In addition Petty, G. (2001) argues that the completion of an assignment does not guarantee learning. Secondly the concurrent “long thin” delivery of the modules crowded all the assessment activity in a short period near the end of the academic year thus overloading the student. 2.2 NEW MODULAR FRAMEWORK The new modular framework being adopted by UWIC in 2005 states that for an honours degree there will be 36 modules, twelve at level-one, twelve at level-two and twelve at level-three. The imposition of this new framework presented an opportunity to address some of the shortcomings of the previous modular structure whilst still adhering to the modular academic regulations. Based on the successful outcome of the case study presented later, it was decided to group several modules together in order to form fewer, larger, coherent units of academic activity. These larger modules were constructed from carefully selected

Table 2. The Proposed Modular Structure. Level 1 Modules

Value

Effective Communication of Design The Design Process & User Needs Computer Aided Technical Design IT & Research Studies Design in Context Engineering Science

3 3 3 1 1 1

groupings of the learning outcomes from the original modules. The new modular structure is shown in Table 2 Figure 2 shows that there are three large modules with an equivalent value of 3.0 modules balanced by 3 smaller single value modules. The rational for these groupings is as follows: The large module named Effective Communication of Design is designed to act as a short foundation course in graphical communication for product designers. It will effectively facilitate a balance of these basic skills for the new students from differing educational backgrounds. The next two large modules The Design Process and User Needs and Computer Aided Technical Design together form 50% of level-one. As shown in Figure 3 these two modules essentially cover the first four steps of the Design Core

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(Pugh 1990) of the Total Design (Pugh 1990) product development process on which the course is based. The remaining 30% of the modules at level-one are designed to provide the students with some contextualisation of the other modules together with a range of transferable skills (Walklin, L. 1990:24). “They need to be given opportunities to step back from their work and think about what they did and what they learned.” Kenny, P and Silver, E. (1993: p229–238) Delivery and assessment within the new framework In contrast with the previous exclusively concurrent modular delivery model, the new framework will be principally delivered via a series of larger, “short fat” modules that are delivered and assessed sequentially. This new model of delivery will be supported by the smaller value modules that will be delivered in parallel to the core modules as shown in Table 3. Advantages of using “short fat” modules The main advantages of this new model of delivery are as follows: a) There is significant integration of the core element of the course by virtue of the larger integrative modules. Thus eliminating the previously inherent problem with many of the students failing to apply the knowledge and skills gained in any particular module to other modules.

Table 3. The proposed modular delivery pattern. Term 1 Term 2 Term 3 Effective Communication of Design The Design Process & User Needs Computer Aided Technical Design IT & Research Studies Design in Context Engineering Science

b) The new structure allows clear identification of the role of each module particularly in relation to the Total Design (Pugh 1990) process. c) The pattern of assessment has been significantly improved by spreading a large proportion of the assessment throughout the academic year in contrast to the traditional concurrent mode of delivery and end of year assessment. 3.0 CASE STUDY This case study investigated three, level-two modules on the PDP. The three modules involved were Computer Aided Industrial Design (CAID), Information Ergonomics (IE) and Modelmaking. During academic year 2002-3 the learning outcomes of each of the three modules under investigation were assessed via individual discrete assignment

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briefs. Whereas during the academic year 2003-4 all the learning outcomes for these modules were assessed via a common design brief. 2002-3 IE was assessed via independent design project to design and develop an on-screen prototype of a visitor guide for a Techniquest Science Centre using the features of PowerPoint. The submission included an “electronic copy of PowerPoint presentation and Visual Basic codes. The presentation must use key inputs and the keys to be pressed to trigger appropriate controls.” This assignment was presented in 2D, but a relationship between virtual prototyping and three-dimensional modelling appeared desirable and consequently it was presumed by using this module in the case study with the introduction of the Model Making module, the learner could instinctively progress through the product design process and transfer knowledge of crucial elements to produce a 3D model with an interface, thus increasing design efficiency and usability of the product. These two modules were extremely compatible and with the introduction of Computer Aided Manufacture facilities at UWIC an opportunity was born and the introduction of such technologies could not be missed. Detailed computer drawings drive the ability to produce rapid prototyped 3D models, instantly a distinct pattern emerged and the introduction of CAID was the next logical step. 2003-4 During this period the CAID, IE and Modelmaking modules were assessed via a common assignment which was to design and develop a user friendly interactive appliance complying with Norman’s (1998:2) statement that a “well designed object are easy to interpret and understand. They contain visible clues to their operation.” Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between the three modules during the assignment and reflects the iterative nature of the design process as described by Wright, I. (1998:12). To prove the hypothesis of ‘fundamental pedagogical difficulties’ outlined in the abstract, an analysis of the module marks for 2002-3 and 2003-4, were conducted. The results shown in Table 4 indicate that when the modules were assessed via a common design project the average mark was significantly higher than when assessed via three independent assignments. Not only does the increase average confirm a better understanding of the linked modules, a distinct improvement can be seen in the amount of A grades being achieved. In 2002-3 only 1% of the students achieved an A grade in Information Ergonomics, in 2003-4 this increased to 3 %. The number of A grade

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Figure 1. Module Relationship Cycle. Table 4. The average module mark achieved in 2002-3 and 2003-4. Module Title

Average Average Mark 2002-3 Mark 2003-4

Information Ergonomics 49 Computer Aided Industrial Design 50 Modelmaking 52 All other modules 51

55 56 60 51

students in CAID remained at 3% for both years. Although for the same period the number of nonsubmissions reduced from 4% to 1%. The average mark for all other modules did not change over the two years thus confirming the effect of the common design project. In order to further confirm this improvement in the students’ performance samples of the average student work were analysed and compared. Figure 2 shows a typical example of an average performance for the CAID module in both years. The design work for the 2002-3 submission on the left is obviously unrefined and displays a clumsy handling of 3D form with little aesthetic appeal. There is also a lack of resolved technical, manufacturing or assembly issues in evidence. The example from 2003-4 is of noticeable higher quality with a clear and appropriate definition of 3D form. There is evidence of a fundamental grasp of the manufacturing issues with draft angles, and part lines clearly shown. There has also been an attempt to integrate standard parts into the design together with some consideration of the interactive aspects. CONCLUSIONS Assessing the IE, Model Making and CAID as discrete modules presented a high work load for the students and did little to describe the relationship between the modules. The role of each module in the PDP was explained at the beginning of each module but the students failed to benefit from the experience and this consequently created confusion.

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The results clearly showed that strategically linking the assessment of the learning outcomes of all three modules to a common design brief yielded many positive results. It is argued that this greater attention to detail shown in the average 2003-4 submission is largely due to the fact that the students had the opportunity to revisit and scrutinise the design at least three times, once for the IE module, once for the CAID module and a further time for the model making module. Conducting the study using the same modules ensured consistency, especially as the modules were delivered and assessed by the same tutors. As a result of the successful outcome of this case study it was decided that the policy of combining the leaning outcomes of several complementary modules into one summative module should be adopted by the PDP at the earliest opportunity and this is reflected in the modular structure if the PDP described above.

Figure 2. Example of average CAID submission for 2002-3 (left) and 20034 (right). REFERENCES [1] Norman, D, A. (1998:2) The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press ed. s [2] Kenney,P. Silver,E. (1993:229-238) Student Self Assessment in Mathematics, in National Council of Teachers of Mathematics 1993 yearbook: Assessment in the Mathematics’ Classroom, ed. N.Webb, Reston. [3] Pugh, S, Total Design: Integrated Methods for Successful Product Engineering, Addison Wesley Longman, 1997 [4] Petty,G. (2001) Teaching Today A Practical Guide, second edition. Nelson Thornes Ltd. [5] Walklin, L. (1990:24) Teaching and Learning in Further and Adult Education. Stanley Thornes Ltd. [6] Wright, I. (1998:12) Design Methods in Engineering and Product Design. McGraw-Hill.

INTRODUCING FORM AND USER SENSITIVITY TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING STUDENTS THROUGH INDUSTRIAL DESIGN PROJECTS André Liem* Department of Product Design Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway. Trond Are Øritsland Carl André Nørstebø Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Based on a specialist-oriented model [1], this paper discusses a teaching methodology customised for mechanical engineering students. Derived from the educational goals of ‘competency-based learning’, where students specifically hunt for the skills they need to acquire, a more intuitive and flexible way of designing has been taught to stimulate their creative, as well as to complement their adaptive aptitude towards problem solving. Within a studio environment, year 4 Mechanical Engineering students were introduced to three project-based assignments, which were: “Pragmatic, Syntactical and Semantic Analysis”, “Pragmatic, Syntactic and Semantic Design”, and “Creative Idea Development on Form and Functionality”. The assignments were organised as to gradually transfer their skills and mindsets from a structured and constructive to a more intuitive, emotional and flexible character. Results have shown, through a collection of completed assignments, how a systematic approach in teaching and curriculum planning at the NTNU, Department of Product Design will efficiently develop the more intuitive and creative skills of students with several years of pure engineering background. Keywords: Industrial Design Skills, Creativity, Form, User *Department of Product Design Norwegian University of Science and Technology Kolbjørn Hejes vei 2B 7491 Trondheim Norway Phone: +47 73590122 [email protected]

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1 INTRODUCTION In an age where industries and economies worldwide are undergoing tremendous changes, the differences in job scope between engineers and industrial designers are becoming less. Only one third of product design and development jobs are categorised as pure mechanical engineering. Furthermore, non-technical competencies are forecast to become increasingly important in the future. To meet the need for more integrated problem solving, designers and engineers are expected to cross-over into each others field of expertise. Moving towards this need for more integrated approaches in solving design problems, both are expected to be versatile and well-rounded in generating innovative design solutions at systems, product and component level. The ingredients, which make up an innovative aptitude, are creativity and communication, as well as the ability to generate ideas, undertake research and conduct experiments. The emphasis in engineering design training has shifted from technological knowledge and skills towards creativity and innovative thinking. In fast moving societies with an ambition to become knowledge base economies, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, findings indicated that job requirements of engineers and industrial designers have become more interwoven [2]. In the past, design engineers focus primarily on solving technical problems or improving the technical performance of a product. However, as user requirements are becoming more diverse and complex, engineering tasks in the development of a product cannot clearly be defined anymore. The design engineer is expected to be more versatile, being able to consider usability and form issues to a certain extent. From a methodological perspective, four stages can be identified in the design and development process of a product: planning, designing, prototyping, and engineering. The corresponding design skills for each stage are: 1) Planning Stage: knowledge of market, marketing, design, engineering, and planning; 2) Designing Stage: abilities in ideation, creativity, aesthetics, sketching and drawing, as well as model making, etc.; 3) Prototyping Stage: abilities in making sophisticated prototypes for appearance models, operating models, mechanism models, etc.; 4) Engineering Stage: specialized engineering knowledge of mechanisms, moulding tools, electrical engineering and manufacturing [3]. In reference to the above stages, engineering students have been exposed sufficiently to design knowledge and practice, as described in stages 1, 3 and 4, however not much emphasis has been placed on a formal training in iterative divergence and convergence in the generation of a design solution. They usually solve the problem within a limited scope of alternative solutions. These solutions are mostly generated using a structured approach of combining existing technical sub-solutions, for example Product Architecture [4] and Morphological Chart Method [5]. To complement the training profile of an engineer, Van Der Lugt has indicated that sketching is a very relevant tool: 1) to support a re-interpretive cycle in the individual thinking process, 2) to support reinterpretation of each other’s ideas in group activity, and 3) to enhance access to earlier ideas [6]. At the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), an elective course, ‘Product Design Introduction’ (PD-Intro) has been designed to educate Mechanical

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Engineering students the basics of Industrial Design, emphasising on form and usability. Based on the program and examples of student work, authors will discuss the teaching methodology, as well as its execution within a studio environment. 2 TEACHING METHODOLOGY In this 7.5 credit course of 8 contact hours weekly, 20 year 4 mechanical Engineering Students were subjected to two related minor design assignments and one major project. The minor projects were introduced to develop basic 2-D sketching and drawing skills, as well as to train their sensitivity towards form and usability in connection to the technofunctional aspects of the product. Using methods of pragmatic, syntactic and semantic analysis and design, students were given the task to visualise a ‘simple’ product followed by a redesign. Examples of ‘simple’ products were: a knife, a stapler, a teapot, a pair of goggles, etc. As there are similarities between engineering and industrial design processes in terms of research, detailing and documentation, the major project emphasises more on creativity through an iterative process of divergent and convergent idea and concept generation. Skills and methods, which were learnt in the previous two minor projects, have proven to be very useful in the development of a communicative mass of creative ideas and concepts. In terms of competency and reflective-based teaching, seminars were conducted according to a flexible time plan. Based on progress observations as well as upon request from students, additional instructions were included. 3 STUDIO PROGRAM PD-Intro stretched over semester period of 19 weeks, inclusive of study and Easter holiday weeks.

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Figure 1. Referring to a classical design and development process, only the highlighted cells will be emphasised in the major project.

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3.1 THE FIRST TWO EXERCISES The first eight weeks, students were given a series of tutorials on drawing, rendering and layout set up. These tutorials were conducted in conjunction with the first two exercises on Pragmatic, Semantic and Syntactic analysis and design. In the first exercise, students had to constructively and accurately draw a

Figure 2. Semantic (Mood Board), Syntactic (Exploded View) and Pragmatic analysis of a pair of goggles. ‘simple’ product of their choice, comprising of not more than 5 parts within an envelop size of 200 × 200 × 400 mm. Re-design was emphasised in the second exercise. Initially students encountered difficulties in constructing the drawing. Several iterative templates had to be made before the final perspective drawings emerged successfully. As engineering students are used to following methods, the quality of drawings and renderings had improved significantly in the second exercise. The number of templates was reduced significantly and a greater consistency was achieved among the three presentation panels

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Figure 3. Semantic (Mood Board), Syntactic and Pragmatic design of a pair of goggles. 3.2 THE MAJOR PROJECT The remaining 11 weeks were allocated to the design and development of a kettle. The main objectives of this major project were to introduce iterative divergent and convergent thinking among students, as well as sensitivity in form creation. Besides 2-D visualisation students had to develop 3-D sketch models and a final mock-up at the end of the project. The difference in method of working between the first two exercises and major project is that, a mass of alternative solutions were required for the latter. Having undergone intensive training in drawing during the first two exercises, students felt more confident, and were more efficient and competent in producing a wide range of presentable variations. Tutoring sessions mainly focused on ergonomic issues and development of the overall form as well as holistic integration of its exterior components. At the final stages of the concept development, while moving into the detailing phase, sketch models proved to be very useful in gaining a better understanding of the form. Students were also able to communicate their design intent better, as tactile interaction with the concept took place. 4 DISCUSSION As an elective, the focus of PD-Intro was to: • Aid Mechanical Engineering students to think visually by engaging them in drawing and modelling activities. • Enhance student’s creativity through iterative problem solving using methods of divergence andconvergence • Introduce user and form sensitivity to students Within a flexible studio environment, the above mentioned objectives were achieved using a new method of reflective-, and competency-based teaching.

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Figure 4. Concept development of a kettle, based on Semantic, Syntactic and Pragmatic design principles.

Figure 5. Variations of kettle design (Sketch Models) At the beginning of the course, basic visualisation skills, such as drawing, rendering and model making were taught methodologically. This systematic approach was preferred by engineering students, because of their technical background and structured mindset. If, on the contrary, a start was made from a design management perspective, emphasising on less structured creativity techniques, students should be able to generate a wide range of possible solutions, but may encounter difficulties to concretise a selected number of good designs, because of a lack of basic visualisation skills. Ultimately, a basic structured training in visualisation is essential for mechanical engineering students when iteratively generating ideas and concepts.

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REFERENCES [1] Vinke D., Industrial design at TU/e: the student as a junior employee, Interim report, September 15, 2003, World Wide Web: http://www.industrialdesign.tue.nl/education/ [2] Heskett J., The Design Task Force: A Strategic Review of Design Education and Practice , The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, 2003 [3] Ho, M. Q., Lai, M.M. and Chang, C. F. (1997) Design Education of Cooperative Participation—The Role of Design Research Center Plays in Training Design Talents. Proceeding of Training Professional Design Talents Conference pp 183–187 (in Chinese). [4] Ulrich K.T., Eppinger S.D., Product Design and Development, 3rd International Edition, McGrawhill, New York 2003 [5] Cross N., Engineering Design Methods, Strategies for Product Design. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1994. [6] Van der Lugt R., How sketching can affect the idea generation process in design group meetings, Design Studies Volume 26, Issue 2 , March 2005, Pages 101–122

ENABLING STUDENTS TO COMMUNICATE IN A PRACTICE SETTING Lee Hall* Senior Lecturer, Transport and Product Design Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry University, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The current political climate in Higher Education focuses upon the importance of interprofessional teaching and learning strategies that foster an ethos of collaborative working. The authors’ experience of 20 years in the transport product engineering arena has brought to the forefront a realisation that barriers exist between key departments who participate in bringing products to market. Given the role of teaching engineering and manufacturing principles to future transport designers, it is felt that emphasis should be placed on appreciating the process, how it works and how the potential barriers may be addressed. The use of role-play is ideally suited to empower designer communication in a language easily identified with by other departments and thus enable the practice of future designers. By tasking students with redesign of a major vehicle system in groups of 4 and then adding an individual assessment element, where students enact 8 distinct departmental roles to review the redesign from the departmental aspect, using role-play, in a peer learning environment, barriers are experienced at first hand and from the perspectives of both designers and other equity holders. The primary aims of this assessment strategy are to build student fellowship, communication with peer teaching, to sustain growth in student motivation and self-esteem, whilst developing appropriate skills and attitudes for future practice. The assessment is in the form of reflective analyses and details the journey taken by each student and the feelings associated with the roleplay. These reports along with student feedback lead the proposed paper to review and argue the suitability of this exercise. *Transport and Product Design Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry University, Priory Street, CV1 5FB, [email protected]

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Keywords: Reflective

Assessment,

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Manufacturing,

Product

Engineering,

1 INTRODUCTION This paper aims to review a method of imparting to transport and product design students, the manifold interactions between various departments involved in new product launch. The increased awareness of real-world interactions and communication needs will aid students as a transferable skill, applicable to most design environments and result in a longer term improvement in product launch processes through a more open forum for cross department launch issues.

Figure 1. The Pugh Process. 2 BACKGROUND Twenty years of industry experience have highlighted to the author that a number of inherent barriers to open and fluent cross departmental interaction during product launch persist despite attempts to mould the product launch environment and structure to diffuse potential issues. With the time to market being a critical element in ensuring a profitable product, interference with the launch process adds risk and should be avoided. There are a number of management practices and design processes which propose that communication on an interprofessional level between departments is institutionalised within manufacturing industries. The most notable proponent of increased communication being Dr Deming, [1] whose 14 point management method includes a point dedicated to breaking down barriers between staff and the need for team work. To inform the next generation of designers an understanding of the functions of all equity holding departments and the individual and specific needs of each department is needed. This will be useful in removing these barriers at one source. The addressing of these aims forms part of teaching to transport and product design students via a year two design and manufacture module. The method of delivery for this element has evolved

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from a review of the Pugh [2] design flow (see figure. 1) and a discussion of what functions within a manufacturing organisation require input at the individual stages. 3 JUSTIFICATION The interdisciplinary teaching agenda currently gaining momentum in higher education is a blending of different disciplines [3]. The path towards a truly cohesive curriculum includes the first steps of bringing awareness and understanding of different departmental functions and how the interactions influence the product outcome. It is these aims and a stronger focus on the Deming inter-team working mentioned above that this paper addresses. 4 INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVES The issue of interdepartmental barriers is one which has long been recognised, across a number of number of business disciplines and industry types, the inherent structure of the business in its set up can sometimes promote these barriers [4]. The “over the wall” analogy of one department passing the product to another by throwing it over the wall to them with no communication or consideration for the requirements of others is a very real concern in all industries. An Internet search on “Interdepartmental Communication” will draw a number of results containing business tools to formalise the process and ensure the correct information follows at each the transitional phases identified by Pugh. The emphasis proposed in this paper is one of open communication and a face-to-face interaction to develop the common product goal and strengthen bonds between departments. 5 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Educationalists have always argued that it is useful for students to spend time learning from each other without a tutor [5], as they speak the same language, see problems from a wide range of perspectives and feel comfortable approaching each other for support and therefore this could potentially allow for different learners with different learning styles to construct knowledge necessary to succeed. It is suggested [6] that a powerful way to enhance learning is to devise situations that require students to interact with each other. Habershaw et al. (1992) [7] indicate that it is possible to facilitate inter-student communication so that they feel at ease and participate confidently in free-ranging discussion and group-work, whilst trying out ideas and deepening understanding. Both formally structured and spontaneous student-student interaction can enrich learning experiences due to motivational and social outcomes. Learning is a dynamic, constructive process where students need to work actively with new information, ideas and skills in order to learn them. They can assimilate this new material with their existing knowledge or use it to reorganise concepts. Using a constructivist approach to teaching allows the individual to make connections between

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facts and foster new understanding. This can be achieved using role-playing and simulation techniques. Simulations are complex, role-playing situations that imitate real experiences and thus, taking on the values and acting the part of an individual from a distinct department can allow the student to invest some emotional purchase in the situation, allowing individuals and groups to take an alternative viewpoint throughout and after the exercise, whilst also empowering them to consider the roles of their peers who are experiencing alternative perspectives. These situations allow the student to learn in a safe and supportive environment and reflect upon their experiences before translating this to the industrial remit. Humanistically, facilitating this form of group work can allow the individual to develop appropriate attitudes, interpersonal skills and self-awareness that will be valuable in the transition from student to employee and colleague in the Industry setting. 6 METHOD During the delivery of the Design and Manufacture module, within a transport and product design BA course, a number of sessions are dedicated to the process of design, implications of manufacturing needs culminating in a role play workshop, where eight senior management positions are taken by students. A brief outline of the role and a number of essential considerations are given in handout form, fifteen minutes prior to the session. The role-play session is then introduced as the method to be applied to both the individual and group elements of the required assessed submission for the module. The group element requires work in groups of up to four students to redesign a vehicle system (Doors in 2003/4 and Dashboard in 2004/5). The individual element requires the students to take each of the given eight roles and hold a meeting with a minimum of four groups to conduct the role of the given departmental head and apply their knowledge of that role in a design critique. This is then written up as a reflective essay. The reflection is permitted either from the student viewpoint or the departmental head viewpoint. The departmental interactions in any given product launch for any given company are manifold and complex in nature. A number of key interactions have been isolated and involve the most culturally different departments. The roles played are detailed below with some of the individual considerations. • Managing Director • It was felt essential to include the cohesive role of the Managing Director into the role play for this roles has interest in all the various needs of all the functional departments. • Chief Product Engineer • The CPE is responsible for product functionality and this can often conflict with manufacturing and quality functions. This role often has allies in sales and design departments. The balance between tried and tested technology with new advances is one which impacts on all departments.

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• Purchasing Director • The purchasing director and quality director can conflict on a simplistic level of product cost versus supplier and part quality. Purchasing also need to preserve continuity of supply and work with the Quality department to ensure supplier robustness. • Sales Director • As launch approaches the sales director will commit significant investment in advertising literature, late changes will be costly if they are visible. Sales are also required to plan for the life cycle of the vehicle in relation to feature ‘giveaways’ and initial feature content for pricing and market placement. • Quality Director • The quality of the final product and the quality of bought in parts are vital to business success and this role requires the student to rigorously impose standards upon the project and the other roles. • Chief Finance Officer • With the cost driver seen as an ever increasing element to economic sustainability, the conflicts between finance and all other roles requires a greater depth of product and end customer understanding. • Manufacturing Operations Director • Often the manufacturing operations team is the focal point for issues with quality, cost, functionality and level of product complexity. The ability to produce the final product and ship to dispatch for sale is most directly related to product success from within an organisation. • Head of Design • Design is responsible for the direction, in terms of product sense, of the organisation and compromises to the new design are not easily accepted. The list of roles above were chosen, as these functions require the greatest level of interaction and potential conflicts such as price versus quality and will require a compromise in order to progress. As with all work from the students, a tutorial time slot is allocated to offer guidance and support for the entire cohort, the allocation of module specific tutorials is one that may require formalizing into the curriculum to ensure time conflicts do not occur. 7 EVALUATION The majority of the submitted work shows little in terms of self-reflection, with only four out of eighty nine submissions showing any statements of how the student felt about adopting the role. All work showed a commitment to the task and all have asked pertinent

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and searching questions in their respective managerial roles. The position of quality manager has drawn the most varied set of questions. Points such as recyclability, simplicity of design, material usage, tolerance management for ease of manufacture and the issue of supplier capability are ones, which were deliberately avoided in the role-play session. This depth of questioning evidences that commitment and also the manner in which the students approached the task. The marking criteria involve giving a percentage mark for each of the eight reflections considering each of the following six points; • Quality of questions asked • Description of the design • Student feelings and Evaluation of the design • Analysis of the design in relation to the given vehicle and its suitability • Conclusions drawn • Action plan development for design improvement These points generally follow most reflective processes and are felt to be most suited to the submission, student understanding of reflection has been mentioned as a point of concern and the action plan for future delivery includes the provision for a teaching session to focus on reflection. A simple spreadsheet that feeds directly into a word-processed document is used to help automate the process of marking, however it is important to consider the submission as a whole and a short written comments section is included to ensure inherent knowledge is rewarded. Student attitude to the activity has proven to be varied and the dominating concerns raised were that of fear of the individual to group interaction and trepidation towards reflection. This was shown to be unfounded; with a pass rate of 94% the method has clearly demonstrated a success. A more significant key to success is the evident depth of involvement demonstrated in the submitted work. 8 ACTION PLAN FOR THE FUTURE The level of reflection in the submitted work could have been more searching in its declaration of how the students felt. The main emphasis was on technical aspects. To facilitate this, for 2005/6 it is proposed to add a discussion on a number of reflective models. In particular the Gibbs “Description-Feelings-Evaluation-Analysis-ConclusionAction Plan” Cycle is to be described along with an adaptation of the Deming Plan-DoCheck-Act Cycle. To add further weight to the proposition of improved communication a further amendment to the 2005/6 delivery will be to include selected industry practitioners to act as guest mentors and lead group tutorials to discuss and validate some of the issues raised.

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9 CONCLUSION Whilst it is important to attempt to synthesize real life experiences to promote understanding of the practice setting from a communication context, it is also essential to bear in mind a number of significant factors and ensure that these are adequately catered for in any student communications. • Understanding the reflective maturity of the student • Interaction complexity must be carefully considered to avoid confusion • Capitalising on the constructivist nature of learning and embracing student experience With the points above given due attention then any attempts to improve student appreciation of practice will improve both the transition of the student from study into practice and in the longer term, the practice itself. 10 REFERENCES [1] Deming W.E., Out of the Crisis. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, Cambridge, MA, 1986. [2] Pugh, S., Total design: integrated methods for successful product engineering. AddisonWesley, Wokingham. 1991. [3] Klein, J.T., crossing boundaries: Knowledge disciplinarities, and interdisciplinarities. Univeristy of Virginia Press, Charlottesville 1996. [4] Kilmann, R., A completely integrated program for creating and maintaining organizational change, Organizational Dynamics. Fall 5-19, 1990. [5] Dart, B., Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. The Australian Council for Educational Research Melbourne 1998. [6] Habershaw, S., Gibbs, G., Habershaw, T., 53 Problems with large classes : Making the best of a bad job. Technical and Educational Services Limited, Bristol 1992. [7] Cannon, R., Newble, D., A Handbook for teachers in Universities and Colleges: A guide to improving teaching methods (4th Ed) Kogan Page London 2002.

Chapter Six SUSTAINABILITY

DEEP DESIGN AND THE ENGINEERS CONSCIENCE: A GLOBAL PRIMER FOR DESIGN EDUCATION S. Baxter* Centre for the Study of Natural Design, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT 25 years ago, the engineer Meredith Thring enunciated six global propositions whose resolution, he concluded, must lead us from an affluent to a creative global society. This paper revisits and updates these propositions and re-examines his idea of a creative society. It explores his postulated relationships between standard of living and quality of life with specific regard to product design strategies. In addition, it considers the synonymy of this relationship with other relationships like stress and performance, and the paradox of choice. Resource issues are considered in relation to global inequity, one of Thring’s propositions. Suggestions are made for the reconsideration of guiding principles for design drawn from ecological concerns. The paper concludes that design education needs to be recontextualised if design is to make a useful contribution to a future global society. Keywords: Standard of Living; Quality of Life; Happiness; Ecological design; ethics; vision 1 INTRODUCTION In so far as this paper starts with global issues, it covers no new ground, yet it does need to start here. The issues are so important and of so much consequence to society that engineers and designers and indeed everyone needs to participate actively in the debate. In 1999, Patel [1] writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement said “Engineers must be aware of their stewardship of the planet not just during their lifetime but for future generations” and that the concept of sustainable design “…is to be ingrained in the * Centre for the Study of Natural Design, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK, DD1 4DY Telephone: +44 (0) 1382 348062, Email: [email protected]

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thought process of all students and practitioners of engineering and engineering design” This paper takes as its starting point in this debate, the published views of an engineer, Meredith Thring, writing in the 1970’s & 80’s [2]. The paper is provisional and speculative. Provisional, in that it rests mainly on Thring’s ideas and, in the limited space available, it makes no attempt to justify these ideas (especially the propositions) by reviewing the extensive, penetrating and often controversial literature on the many global problems. As a result it is also speculative, but in addition it tries to connect Thring’s conjectures with more recent information to lead to further speculations relevant to the future direction of design education and practice. 2 THRING’S PROPOSITIONS – THEN AND NOW In ‘The Engineer’s Conscience’ (1980), Thring set out 6 propositions for a future society. In summary, he believed that in order to have a stable, though clearly a dynamic global society in the 21st Century, a fundamental shift was needed from our present worldview (ethos). This meant that global population needed to level off at around 8 billion people by 2025 and by now, (one generation after he wrote these propositions) everyone should have an adequate standard of living and education. Average per capita consumption of resources needed to stabilize around 1980 levels and no form of pollution, which would ultimately adversely affect people, animals or plants, should persist. He believed that the gross differences between the rich and the poor should be eliminated and that this could be achieved by the rich societies divesting themselves of unproductive activities like weapons manufacture etc and diverting their attention to helping the poorer societies to reach a better standard of living. He must be disappointed now! The estimated world population in 2005 is 6.5 billion people; approximately 44% more than existed in 1980. This is still generally in line with Thring’s projections but is continuing to increase at a rate faster than he would have liked, estimated to reach just over 9 billion by 2050. The problem however is not just one of numbers but of resource inequity. Many of the 1980’s poor do have higher (though only slightly) standards of living and more education (not nearly enough) but the gap between rich and poor is increasing with the former (<20% of the population) taking a greater (>80%) share of the world’s resources. In addition, it has been estimated that the resources of 3 planet Earths would be required to provide all the Worlds population with a standard of living equal to that of the richest societies. Clearly not achievable. Yet it is difficult to deny the poor the means to raise their living standards. How they do so, without repeating the West’s mistakes is perhaps the greatest engineering and design challenge we now face. The growing affluence of China and India will present immense problems for resource acquisition, use and disposal. Clearly in one generation we have not achieved Thring’s objectives and although we have yet to see a third World war, (some would claim that global terrorism is the latest form of World War) warfare still forms a most distressing element of our current civilization. In 1993 an estimated 50 wars were going on at any one time. 1000 soldiers and 5000 civilians were dying per day, every day resulting in more than 2 million deaths per year [3]. The latest war in Iraq has cost the USA around $162,000,000,000, enough to combat global hunger for 6 years [4]. Although there are many cases of local pollution abatement, rivers now carrying fish that have been absent

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for years, cities free of smog etc, global pollution continues to increase with potentially serious consequences for climate change, natural resource destruction and human health problems. New types of pollution are on the increase resulting from scientific and technological creativity e.g. genetically modified crops, electro magnetic radio waves etc. As Homer-Dixon [5] has pointed out, our technological ingenuity continues to add to the complexity of the world thereby giving rise to new, unpredictable emergent situations some of which may be harmful to life. Our ingenuity is unlikely to keep pace with increasing complexity. 3 AFFLUENT AND CREATIVE SOCIETIES In his consideration of the developed world’s affluent societies Thring identified the following paradox – as the rich societies increased their consumption of resources they appeared to get less happy, whilst the poor societies who had not enough resources, were also unhappy. Why are we acting in ways which make both rich and poor societies unhappy? His response was to suggest the idea of a creative society defined as follows – “A world society in which all the peoples of the world live in stable or quasi-stable longterm equilibrium with the environment, (animal, vegetable and mineral, destroying as few wild species as possible) and in which every person can find an interesting and worthwhile job which enables them to earn enough to provide for their children and themselves with everything needed for full physical, mental and emotional health, privacy and companionship, travel and variety, education and development of all their potential capacities and creative self fulfillment through their own freely chosen, artistic or craft skills and hobbies”. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing a modern society intent on transition to a creative society is to learn how to consume less material resources whilst sustaining or even increasing its level of happiness or quality of life. To do so would mean substituting the idea of ‘more’ with that of ‘enough’, and considering ‘sufficiency’ as important as ‘efficiency’, amongst other things. In his earlier work, Thring considered the relationships between production / consumption and standard of living and happiness. In 1980, he postulated a non-linear, parabolic relationship between Standard of Living and Quality of Life, the former identifying with consumption etc and the latter with happiness. In a general sense, the two notions of Standard of Living and Quality of Life would appear to contain some overlapping conditions so Thring separated them by defining them as follows – Standard of Living embraces the quantifiable and at a collective level is measured as Gross National Product (GNP) or energy consumption per capita per annum or any other measure directed at an objective assessment of materialistic wealth. On the other hand, he considered Quality of life to be essentially subjective and qualitative and to express the sum of a society’s feelings and emotions about a life worth living. Clearly this is an oversimplification of what are complex relationships and there is a limit to what can be derived from such a speculation although more recent data appears to broadly substantiate his proposal. For example, money alone (financial wealth; level of income) does not correlate linearly with happiness i.e. there appears to be a decline in the amount of happiness at higher levels of income [6]. Governments too now realize, or have realized for some time, that material wealth, though a major driver of economic

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conditions, is not the sole or even best measure of the state of a stable, satisfied perhaps even sustainable society. Government funded research in the UK and elsewhere is pursuing measures of Quality of Life and of Happiness. Happiness appears to have returned to popularity again with 4 new books appearing recently [7]. Richard Layard for example has suggested that the study of happiness has become a science involving psychology, neuroscience, sociology, economics and philosophy, and has also pointed out that for most people in the West, happiness has not increased since 1950 and in Britain it has been static since 1975 [7]. Yet, living standards have more than doubled and there have been massive increases in real income at every point on the income distribution scale [7]. There is also evidence that underdeveloped countries in general increase their state of happiness with an increase in material wealth from a low level. Both conditions would appear to support Thring’s positive relationship of Standard of Living to Quality of Life. What of the negative relationship? There is far less substantial evidence for a decline in happiness, but the alarming state of mental health in many rich societies may correlate with such a decline. A major pan-European study for example, confirms the high prevalence of depression in Europe and highlights the impact it has on the individuals quality of life and on the loss of productivity in society [8]. In the USA, the annual costs of depression in 1990 amounted to $43.7 billion of which only 28% is attributable to direct cost i.e. costs of medical care [9]. It is also possible that these modern illnesses in rich societies may be related to the gross differences in income between rich and poor, a symptom perhaps of the loss of community and its role in the coping strategy of individuals [10]. It is perhaps no coincidence that stress and performance are also related parabolically. So, could it be that the pursuit of materialism beyond a certain point is stressful to the extent that our performance, as reflected in Quality of Life, is reduced? Product design and development is generally about putting more new products into the consumer marketplace, so stimulating the economy through consumption and, it is said, raising the Standard of Living. But does it always lead to a higher Quality of Living for the consumer? Recently Barry Schwartz [11] has argued that for some people, he calls them ‘maximisers,’ more freedom of choice can result in unhappiness through disappointment and that the extreme version of this may be helplessness, depression and for the few, even suicide. In a more subtle way, but still implicating product development, space and time might also follow a parabolic relationship. Heschel [12] has suggested that modern society has devoted its efforts to colonizing space (not outer space) by its concentration on material goods and artefacts which identify us with space and place. As we have pursued this style of living we have given less thought to time only to find later on that we no longer have enough time to enjoy our pursuit of material space. The more we concentrate on material space, the less time we have to enjoy it. Finally, a very large, global study [13] has concluded that in the last 50 years, eco -systems have changed more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history and this has resulted in a substantial and irreversible loss in the diversity of life on the planet. So, although the exploitation of the world’s eco-systems has resulted in gains to human wellbeing and economic development it has been achieved at the cost of degradation of ecosystem services and an exacerbation of the poverty of some societies. The MA [11] has recently predicted that “ the degradation of eco-system services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century” and that the challenge of reversing eco-system

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degradation “….will involve significant changes in policies, institutions and practices that are not currently underway” The conclusions of the MA findings suggest “…that human actions are depleting Earths natural capital, putting such a strain on the environment that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.” Now we have greater reason to be unhappy! So it would seem that one generation (25 years) after ‘The Engineers Conscience’ we are beginning to understand the concerns and consequences of his propositions. It looks as though our destruction of the planet’s eco-system services could put us in long term difficulties and yet we are no happier and there is still gross inequality in the world sufficient to trigger more wars and more ecological destruction. What can engineering and design do now? 4 WHERE NOW WITH DESIGN? It is now obvious that unless design and engineering make their contribution to the world in a way which conserves our eco-systems and the services we receive from them, then in the long-term our very survival is at stake. So all design should be ecological design, where the products and processes of our endeavours are seen as part of mutual coevolution with the natural systems of the world. Three different engineering design strategies emerge from Thring’s non-linear postulations. For example, the condition of the developing nations needs its own strategy, much of which has already been suggested by Papanek [14]. In addition however, the strategy should not blindly follow the developed world to its present condition with the almost inevitable consequence of a decline in Quality of Life. What would be preferable would be a strategy which accelerates Quality of Life whilst stabilizing the consumption of resources. This is the imaginative challenge for design to develop creative societies in the developing countries. There is no need for them to follow the West’s early trajectory nor its present position. For the developed societies a different design strategy is needed. Here more thought in product design needs to be given to less materialism and more happiness through perhaps non-material experiences. Of course new material products will continue to be developed but they should follow the principles of good ecological design. For this, several guiding principles have already been suggested since 1980. In 1984 for example, John & Nancy Todd outlined a set of precepts for ecological design [15] and in 1990, David Wann proposed a list of ‘biologic’ principles [16]. At around this time, the architect William McDonough also framed the Hannover Principles which were subsequently adopted for the Hannover World Fair in 2000. These principles are not meant to substitute for the designer’s imagination and skills in problem solving. They are meant to reframe the boundaries of the larger problem space. Designers and engineers have a reputation for creative and imaginative problem solving which should not be inhibited. Such creativity however should be given some direction. For example it seems unwise to call for unbridled creativity in industry or unqualified technological innovation if this only compounds the type of problems already outlined by Thring. Clearly design principles alone are not enough – they need to be applied from a new ethical perspective and to lead towards a new vision for a sustainable future. A vision,

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few have had the courage to construct although some have hinted at what might be expected for a future sustainable society [17]. 5 CONCLUSION In 1994, Tony Fry [18] suggested that whilst design had the capability of ensuring a better world, design itself needed to be redesigned to do so. This paper is mainly about context because it suggests, at minimum, that design education needs to be recontextualised. The world has changed dramatically for the worse, and the design industry has done little to improve the situation in the last 30 years, indeed it continues to add to the problems. To survive in the longer term we need a co-evolutionary strategy with the natural world. Designers and engineers need to learn and participate, at the highest level, in future state visioning, to practice ecological design and to do so within a new ecologically ethical position. All three together are a truly Gaian strategy, and what some are now calling – natural design. REFERENCES [1] K. Patel., Why Engineers Must Go Back To Nature. Times Higher Education Supplement. 29 October. 1999 [2] See especially M.W. Thring., The Engineers Conscience. Brandish, Suffolk. 1980., M. W. Thring (Reprinted 1992) Chpts 2 & 3. [3] J. Keegan., A History of Warfare. London. Jonathan Cape. 1993 [4] National Priorities Project., http://costofwar.com./index-world-hunger.Html 09.04.2005 [5] T. Homer-Dixon., The Ingenuity Gap. London. Jonathan Cape. 2000 [6] See for example J.B. Schor., The Overspent American. NY. Basic Books. 1998, and R.H. Frank., Luxury Fever. Princeton. N.J. Princeton University Press. 1999. [7] See for example D. Morris., The Nature of Happiness. London. Little Books Ltd. 2004.; P. Martin., Making Happy People. London: Harper Collins. 2005.; R. Layard., Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London. Allen Lane. 2005. and D. Nettle., Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile. Oxford. OUP. 2005 [8] J.P. Lepine et al., Depression in the Community: The First Pan-European Study. Int. Clin. Psychopharmacol. Vol 12. Issue 1 1997. pp19-29. Summary http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query [9] P.E. Greenberg et al., The Economic Burden of Depression in 1990. J Clin. Psychiatry. Vol 54. Issue 11. 1993. pp. 405-18. Summary http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query. [10] R.G. Wilkinson., Unhealthy Societies The Afflictions of Inequality. London. Routledge. 1996., and R. Wilkinson., Mind The Gap. Hierarchies, Health and Human Evolution. London. Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 2000. [11] B. Schwartz., The Paradox of Choice. Why More is Less. NY. HarperCollins Publs, Inc. 2004. [12] A. Heschel., The Sabbath. NY. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux. 1975 [13] Bob Holmes., The World Can’t Go On Living Beyond It’s Means. New Scientist Apr 2005, pp. 8-11 [14] V. Papanek., Design for the Real World. London. Thames & Hudson. 1985. [15] J. Todd & N. Todd., Bio-Shelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design. Sierra Club Books. USA. 1984.

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[16] D. Wann., Biologic. Johnson Books. USA. 1990 [17] D.H. Meadows et al., Beyond The Limits. London. Earthscan Publs. Ltd. 1992 [18] T. Fry., Remakings. Ecology, Design, Philosophy. Sydney, Envirobook 1994

CONTEXTUALIZING CONSUMPTION Craig Badke* MEDes, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada. Stuart Walker PhD. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT A context provides a setting for the consideration of any given issue. It is a way of placing design issues into a wider framework of discussion as a means to gain a meaningful understanding of our role as designers in the production of material culture. It is important to realize that often because of their familiarity we are not always aware of the contexts that influence our design process. Keywords: context, consumerism, media, image, sustainability, subversion INTRODUCTION There are many obstacles to implementing sustainable design solutions. Paramount among these is a required cultural shift in thinking away from consumerism and toward sustainability [1]. It is at the intersection of product conception and consumption that designers as experts in material culture can play a vital role in the way goods are produced, perceived, and consumed. Dissident Design, originally part of a larger Master’s design project [2], is an attempt to facilitate such a shift. It was developed as a means to investigate, critique, and raise awareness about issues surrounding contemporary consumer culture and design’s role within it. The writings and design investigations that constitute the original project cover a wide range of issues connected to material culture, from the individual and social drives behind consumerism, to economic and political control structures, through to issues pertaining to professional design practice. The project was aimed at bringing each of these fragments together to begin building a wider context in which to place and discuss the role of design in the cycle of consumerism, the contribution of design to problems * Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Canada e: [email protected] p: (403) 244.9879

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inherent in over-consumption, and the potential for design to mitigate some of those problems. This paper will summarize some of the main points of Dissident Design. Specifically, it will look at the idea of context and how it can influence our understanding of contemporary consumer culture and design’s role within it. It will also explore how the ideas and principles discussed in Dissident Design can inform a powerful and positive future role for the design community as an agent of change. CONTEXTS Design today is highly creative. Designers are leaders at integrating current and emerging technologies into our everyday lives, frequently creating objects that have not previously existed or breathing new life into existing products and markets. In each case, it is expected that the product will be created or re-created in a way that will make, interesting, innovative, and novel so that consumers will want to buy it. It requires enormous ingenuity to keep pace with today’s competitive consumer marketplace. Design is a communicative art. The artefacts created by designers do not communicate directly through words, but they do they reflect the culture that produced them. These artefacts carry with them meanings related to social values, cultural priorities, and societal understandings. If one were to look directly at the products and media images of our consumer society, one might conclude that we are an optimistic and playful culture enamoured with the new, with change. One might see the strong allegiances to the technological, where the advancement of technology is seen as a measure of progress [3]. Reading these objects, one might infer that ours is a carefree society of fun-loving individuals, harmlessly shopping and pursuing pleasurable, entertaining lives. If we were to step back further and connect to a wider social discussion taking place between concerned citizens, dissenting voices and critical analysis, we might get a different reading of contemporary consumer culture. This second reading might reveal a society lost in the acquisition of goods. Through such a lens, the pursuit of consumerism might appear to be the predominant drive for both producers and consumers. This view may reveal a people seemingly unconcerned or unaware of the physical and social costs of their material consumption. The production of consumables and their wasteful disposal would appear to preclude any deep concern for the environment. The pervasive nature of marketing and advertising would appear to reflect a disregard for individual privacy and for deeper human social values. In such a context, other human, social, and ecological concerns might appear to be subordinate to those of an economic imperative. There are certainly great pleasures associated with consumer culture and many of them are positive. Ours is an economically driven culture. Much of our society is structured around business and enterprise. We need business, we need to have an active economy, and we need work. Profit and a certain amount of wealth are necessary for both public and private use. However, many social observers would argue today that consumerism has gotten away from us and become something that no longer serves our interests, and in many ways operates against us [4].

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What we seem to have lost is much of the ability to distinguish between the good and the bad, between our needs and our desires. We seem to have lost the ability to recognize when something—including our own behaviours—maybe harming us irrevocably. We do not consume in a vacuum. The low purchase prices and easy availability of the products that characterize our consumer society often conceal the true costs associated with their production and disposal. These hidden costs may include war over oil and development [5], exploitation of developing nations [6], economic inequality [7], instability, and insecurity, tax subsidies, diminished human and labour rights, pollution [8], and resource depletion [9]. Many of these, social critics argue, are often perpetrated in order to prop up the consumer life-style of Western nations [10]. Success in the current consumer economy is based on growth, but as Andrew Howard has said, “Human needs have material limits. This is not good for the economic imperative.” To compensate, he goes on to explain, “New demands have to be ‘created’ so that they can match the profitable output of industrialized production. This is the inversion of supply and demand.” [11] The market discovered long ago that altering the look and style of a product was an easier means to increase consumption than pursuing costly functional innovation [12]. It is in this arena that design has come into its own. In the face of widespread consumerism and the wasteful nature of over-consumption, designers may sometimes be left with an uneasy feeling that our creative efforts are being channelled into superficial, meaningless, and even harmful directions. A SOCIAL PROBLEM “The goals of sustainability can be expressed in two very general principles, learning to live better consuming less while regenerating the quality of the environment.” [13] Ezio Manzini, Sustainable Solutions for Urban Life 2004 Sustainability is a word that is often abused and thrown around with a variety of meanings, but it can be understood simply as the idea that our material interventions should be as environmentally and socially benign as possible, while still being economically viable. The Social requirement of this definition of sustainability is an important one and where the efforts of this project are focused. One of the fundamental discoveries of the Dissident Design project is that the environmental decline associated with our consumer culture is a social problem not an environmental problem. [14] Today, much of design is inextricably linked with the ubiquitous images propagated by marketing and advertising. It is often difficult to separate consumer products from the brand image or lifestyle they represent. This effect of advertising and marketing has contributed to consumerism becoming an increasingly dominant source of social meaning. In a consumer society, objects have become symbols and codes, which, in some fashion, are used as outward representations of who we are [15]. Our identities have become closely associated with the collection and display of consumer objects. A car, for example, is not exclusively a means of transportation in this system of codes and exchanges, it is also a symbol - a sign. It is a sign of your taste, your consumer habits, your sophistication, your ability to afford such an object, your social grouping, your status, etc. People invest their world with meaning through the display of these consumer signs. They buy into the idea of an association between an object and its projected

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lifestyle. As Stuart Lansley has said, “products today are valued less for what they do for us and more for what they say about us… providing symbols of how we want to appear.” [16] In a consumer society, what we are really consuming is image. In this context environmental decline can be seen as a symptom of this social nature of consumption. In terms of sustainability, addressing the ills of consumer society as environmental issues alone has pragmatic short-term benefits, but they are often exercises in being ‘less bad’ and are not likely to lead to significant change [17]. This is akin to treating the symptom of the problem and not its cause. The use of Contexts can give us clearer insights as to where our efforts are needed. We must find ways of dealing with, through design, the social contexts of consumerism. DISSIDENT DESIGN For designers wishing to pursue a more sustainable agenda, it can often seem that there is little opportunity to do so in a society largely unaware or uniformed about the real impacts of consumerism and a need for change. Dissident Design arose out of the premise that in order to begin implementing economically viable, socially and environmentally sustainable design solutions, a cultural shift in thinking away from consumerism and toward sustainability is required. [18]. For certain, designers can play a key role in the development of sustainable systems and product solutions, but there is also a significant role to be played by the designer in encouraging cultural shifts. Our consumer environment pervades our daily existence, its forms and presence constitute a kind of language that for the most part goes unchallenged. Its mere presence is a kind of enframing that leads us to believe that this is how things are and how they always will be. Dissident Design proposes using the design process not to create viable products, but rather to create design works that investigate, inform, and potentially subvert our current understandings of material culture by encouraging dialogues to take place around those works. It uses the design process as a means to re-contextualize the familiar ideas, images, and products of media and consumer culture. The design works are intended to be inherently subversive and consciously provocative in order to plant critical seeds so that when the reader is confronted with a similar image in the market place they might see it in a different, more critical light. These sorts of polemical works have a substantial pedigree in both the art and the design world as can be seen in the work of artist Barbara Kruger [19], of graphic designer Tibor Kalman for Colours Magazine [20] and product design works such as Anthony Dunne’s ‘Faraday Chair’ [21] The intended outcome of Dissident Design is to encourage both designers and consumers to play a more active role in understanding consumer culture, to critically address the consumer messages we are exposed to daily. Popular media forms such as television and magazines present an overwhelmingly positive one-sided view of consumption and encourage a very passive, uncritical role for consumers (and designers alike). These media tend to present information in brief bites, with little background or depth of analysis. Issues such as the environment, economics, and politics are regularly discussed, but as isolated independent topics, without connection and often without context. Discourses on design and consumption too often fall into this same trap. It is only by placing issues into a wider context that a meaningful understanding

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of them can be reached, that more fruitful means of social interaction can be revealed, and that a new, more meaningful role for design can be discovered. CONCLUSION Contextualization is a powerful tool of understanding. It is otherwise difficult to understand our actions in any meaningful way unless we place them against a

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background context. Art historian and philosopher Marcia Eaton gives the example of the aesthetic appeal of really green grass as sought after by many suburban house owners [22]. In many regions the only way to get really green grass is through a combination of irrigation, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. By contextualizing the aesthetic appeal of green grass against a background of chemical and water usage we are forced to consider that our ethical concerns do not always correspond to our aesthetic sensibilities. We should understand that the products of our society are emblematic of values and of the way that the world works. As designers we have an impact and we can continue to condone the consumer messages that are out there or we can use design as a means to generate some alternatives or even commentary on the values that are driving our world. REFERENCES [1] Manzini E., Sustainable Solutions for Urban Life. Interview by Stuart Walker. Calgary, 19 Feb 2004. [online] Available from: http://www.ucalgary.ca/UofC/faculties/EV/about_faculty/archives/2004/Manzini_webcast/index .htm [2] Badke C., Dissident Design - Resistance Through Form. Unpublished Masters Thesis. University of Calgary, 2004. [contact [email protected]] [3] Postman N., Technopoly. New York: Vintage, 1993, pp. 42, 117 [4] Chomsky N., Free Market Fantasies. San Francisco: AK Press, 1997. AK009CD. Mono CD, 56 min [5] Ali T., Imperialism: Then & Now. Lecture. Porto Alegre: Alternative Radio broadcast, 26 Jan 2003 [6] Klein N., No Logo, Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf, 2000, pp. 195-257, 266267 [7] Lansley S., After the Gold Rush: The Trouble With Affluence. London: Century, 1994, pp. 173193 [8] World Watch Institute, State of the World 2004: The Consumer Society. New York: Norton, 2004, pp. 15-19, 22-23, 44-45, 96-102, 117-118, 144-150 [9] Papanek, V., The Green Imperative - Natural Design For The Real World. New York: Thames, 1995, pp. 17-28 [10] Klein N., pp. xiv-xxi [11] Howard A., A New Kind of Dialog. Adbusters, Design Anarchy. No 37, Sept/Oct 2001. [12] Postman N., Amusing Ourselves To Death. New York: Penguin, 1985, pp. 4 [13] Manzini E. [14] Badke C., pp. 74-96 [15] Baudrillard J., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 10-29 [16] Lansley S., pp. 98 [17] Braungart M., Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point Press, 2002, pp. 45-68 [18] Manzini E. [19] Eaton M., In the Eye of the Beholder. CLA Today, Summer 2003 [online] available from http://www2.cla.umn.edu/clatoday/Summer03/Eaton.html [20] Kruger, B., Remote Control: Power, Cultures, And The World Of Appearances. MIT Press 1994 [21] Hall, P., Tibor Kalman: Perverse Optimist . New York: Princeton, 2000, pp. 240-329

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[22] Dunne A. and Raby F., Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects. Boston: Birkhauser, 2001, pp.36 [23] Badke C., illus. pp. 19-37, 113-142

SUSTAINABILITY, DESIGN AND CONSUMERISM IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD Ian Lambert* School of Design & Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The research collected and presented in this paper is based on the author’s first-hand observations of the lifestyles of people living in and around the Dodoma region of Tanzania. The research was conducted using a number of creative research methods including still photographic surveys, video diaries, and indigenous physical artefact collection [1]. This paper examines the contrasting attitudes of different cultures, especially the cultural differences that exist between Western-European and Tanzanian models of consumption. In the global village, which grows smaller every day, there are places and countries where people have no notion of “the brand”. In the Tanzanian market place there are no Harvey Nichols or Conran shops, soap powder is soap powder, buckets are buckets, soap comes in long, unbranded bars (fig. 1). Products, in this context, are bought purely on physiological need. A Dodoma consumer might correctly ask, where is the material value in a brand?

1 INTRODUCTION This investigation into design in the developing world started with the use of solar cookers for sterilising water and cooking. At The Sunseed Trust, a desert technology research centre in southern Spain, researchers have been developing solar cookers using simple technology that was appropriate for self-assembly in rural areas of Tanzania. Designs varied in type: glass boxes with a reflective back; concave dishes that focussed heat onto one spot, and more crude, but surprisingly effective versions using cardboard and tin foil, called cookits (Fig. 2). *School of Design & Media Arts, Napier University, Merchiston Campus, Edinburgh, EH10 5DT, UK. Tel: (0131) 455 2678, e-mail: [email protected]

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In Tanzania only a small percentage of the population have an electricity supply to their homes. In urban areas cooking methods vary, but charcoal or kerosene stoves are common. In rural areas, the main method of cooking is on the traditional 3 stone fire (fig. 3), using wood collected from the surrounding countryside. However, the problem with wood is that trees are not being replanted, and as the population grows, firewood is increasingly becoming scarce; women can spend over four hours a day collecting enough firewood for cooking, let alone sterilising water [2]. The visit to Tanzania was originally to see if there was any way in which a more highly developed means of solar cooking could be employed (possibly with the support of international aid), but these plans were laid to rest soon after arrival. The charity Sunseed Tanzania, had already turned their attention away from Solar cookers, and were implementing the use of wood burning Lorena ovens, which, coupled with the use of heat retention methods could reduce the wood normally needed by up to 65%.

Figure 1. Unbranded items including a close up of bags of washing powder (right), on a Market Stall in Dodoma. Solar cookers were being used in some parts of the country, and it is widely known that they have been very successful in other parts of Africa, India, South America and China [3-5]. However, there were two main factors hindering their popularity in the villages around Dodoma: firstly, there had been some considerable difficulty in persuading people to part from their traditional cooking methods, which always took place inside on a wood fire; and secondly there was cost. The concave reflector cookers (fig. 2) cost approximately £40, and were way beyond the earnings of rural Tanzanians. Even the simplest cookits, made from an old cardboard box and tin foil were considered beyond the means of some. The bottom line was that firewood lying around on the ground, although scarce, was also free, and open fires are simply quicker. Cardboard packaging, on the other hand, and much to my surprise, was a local commodity, a raw material that could be sold and not mere refuse as is often the case in the UK. Indeed, many forms of packaging and refuse were routinely used as raw material for other products, which is where the attention of this study began to focus.

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2 BRANDING AND PACKAGING However, there is not an abundance of waste packaging. A colleague who had worked as a packaging designer in an Eastern block country in the early 1980s found that in a noncompetitive market place his work was straightforward. For example, washing powder came in oblong card boxes that had only “Washing Powder” written on them. In many of the market stalls in Dodoma, washing powder came in bags (see Fig. 1) with the price handwritten, stacked on a table alongside unpackaged old fashioned bars of soap (half a metre long), buckets and sufurias. While there are BP petrol stations (branding architecture [6]), also selling kerosene, and Fanta and Coca-cola bottles (filled and refilled in a local bottling plant) in cafes, evidence of any

Figure 2. The Cookit (left) and Concave Reflector Cooker (right) with Pastor Fuataeli S.Muuisi, Lutheran Church of Tanzania.

Figure 3. Three stone fire, Chonde village.

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branding in the market was scarce, apart from the occasional slogans on Western clothing, and the second hand branding found on the kerosene lamps made from old drink cans (fig. 4). The intricate and skilled manufacture of these items is a delight, but the reason for their abundance (they hang in their hundreds from the stalls) only becomes clear when reminded that only a tenth of the population have electricity in their homes. The lamps are a vital and cheap means of lighting. They are manufactured by the roadside or in doorways by men using soldering irons, heated with kerosene primus burners, or in charcoal fires (see fig. 5). The speed and skill with which these items are made is astonishing, especially given the limited resources they have. And the fact that they use reclaimed materials adds to the charm - but we should not be misled into believing that this is through some drive towards sustainability. The cans are used because they are a ready, cheap and convenient material close to hand. If the raw materials were cheaper, or simply there was no further use for this used packaging it would be dumped along the roadside and in streams along with the plastic bags and bottles (see fig. 6) for which there is much less potential for reuse. 2.1 UNDERSTANDING THE BRAND In our consumer society, there are many reference sources that talk about the “sociology of consumption” [7] and branding, including Naomi Klein’s 2000 book, No Logo [8]. Klein and other writers, such as Daniel Miller [9] have talked at length about how the brand is not a physical entity, but representative of aspirations, expectations, and beliefs that make a product distinctive. There are those who might shake their heads in disbelief, but as consumers we are generally aware of the fact that some people will spend £39.99 for a corkscrew made by Alessi, when one can be found in PoundStretcher for £1.99. Although the Alessi corkscrew is arguably a more delightful item of superior manufacture, much of the additional price is for the brand value.

Figure 4. Kerosene lamps (and a filling funnel) fabricated from discard food and drinks cans. These are used to light the many homes in Tanzania that have no electricity.

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Figure 5. Local makers at the roadside use soldering irons to make kerosene lamps. One method uses a primus heater (left), the other a charcoal fire. The material value of a brand was something I had much difficulty explaining in Tanzania. Take for example, a bucket. This is an important item in a country where water is often collected from a well or stand pipe. To a rural Tanzanian, a bucket was a bucket. The bucket would continue to be used until it no longer held water, and could not be repaired – even then, the raw material of the ex-bucket would be used to make something else: a knife handle, for example (fig. 7). In the UK a bucket (manufactured in the Far East) can be bought from a DIY chain store for about £1. Alessi don’t make buckets, but it occurred to me that if they did, they might retail at about £40 in Harvey Nichols. When this notion was put to a group of Tanzanian schoolteachers, it was met with guffawing disbelief. “Why?” one man asked, “Why would someone spend forty, when they can buy the same thing for one pound? This is madness.” 2.2 THROW AWAY CULTURES The teachers had difficulty accepting our throw away culture. The same man explained that he has six radios: only one works, but he has kept the other five. Although broken, they represent the money he has spent – they are still his accumulated material assets. He went on to describe a trip he had made to England, a few years before: “I stayed there [in the UK] for four days. I saw nothing strange except for the big buildings, but when we went in the village, on the way to their [the hosts] home I saw a skip. After passing two or three streets, I saw radios, sofa sets; I saw videos, so many things. They were outside. I just looked surprised. I asked,

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Figure 6. Rubbish dumped in a stream behind Dodoma market (left) and at the side entrance (right).

Figure 7. The knife handle is made from the plastic of an old bucket; the blade from a car panel. ‘won’t they get stolen?’ and they said, ‘No they have thrown those things away.’ Then I was very sorry. I said, ‘Throwing away? Why?’ ‘Because they have new things.’ Ah, it didn’t enter my head.” It was explained that, in the UK, where many electrical goods are manufactured cheaply on the other side of the world in countries with low cost labour, the cost of getting a radio repaired would be more than the radio was worth. This the teachers easily understood, but that people would discard a perfectly good working radio or other electronic devices (or anything useful) the minute a more up to date one hit the shops was ludicrous. They were particularly shocked at the amount of computer hardware dumped, simply on the grounds that it could not run new software. Labour costs are low, and radios (a very important medium for communication: news is on the radio, weather forecasts, and even funerals are announced so those relatives in neighbouring towns will attend) might be repaired several times in their lifetime When expired, any remaining working parts are transplanted, like human organs, so that other radios may continue to work. The man gave another example of this.

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“…this watch, if it is damaged, to repair in England is more expensive then buying a new one. So it is better to buy a new one than repairing this. And if you have replaced it, then this is nothing so you can throw it away. That is their principal. But here it is very different: it is very basic, very less money to repair. But to buy a new thing is still difficult. I can repair for £5, but to buy a new thing is £20 or £30, so I spend the £5.” 3. CONCLUSION While the kerosene lamps provide a charming example of recycling, the idea of these odorous and sooty items being the soul source of lighting in a UK home would not be well received. We should be striving to improve living conditions in Tanzania, ensuring that 100% of homes have clean and safe power sources, while implementing recycling methods for the drinks cans that will no longer be needed to make kerosene lamps. Despite the widespread use of old packaging (or rubbish) as a raw material, we have already seen how litter in Dodoma is dropped and dumped in a manner that would not be acceptable in Western capital cities (fig. 6), and besides, most of this litter can be reprocessed to into new materials, as it already is in many industrialised countries. In the UK we still have more to learn. It is known that recycling is not merely a matter of finding new uses for our rubbish. In a large western economy, the recycling and re-use of our waste has financial costs, and needs careful management, and more importantly a cultural shift in our general attitude (and urgency) towards this issue, for which there seems to be little awareness in Tanzania. Victor Papanek and other academics have for many years been telling us to reduce our material consumption in order to preserve our resources and reduce waste. It has been ten years since Papanek stated, “Consumers are also implicated in this ecological crisis. In our greedy rush for more and more material goods in the West, we have seriously neglected our links with nature and our responsibility to the environment…” [10], yet some design courses in the UK still teach sustainability only in terms of recycling. While we strive to improve the living conditions in the developing world, the poor should be careful of the trappings of branding and over consumption. As countries such as India move elevate themselves from the developing world status to a serious industrialised economy, the rural population are already regarded as “a large untapped marketing potential” [11]. The absence of branding in Dodoma Market is very refreshing. However, it is both ironic and predictable at the same time that in the UK, those most susceptible to the trappings of branding and the superficial social status it confers, are often from the most impoverished socio-economic groups. What separates us from most Tanzanians is they consume goods through necessity. There is no material value attached to their utility goods and we have already seen how the notion of buying new items to replace old ones that still work is for them, difficult to grasp. The Tanzanian Teacher finished our conversation with this: “Maybe that is one of the reasons which makes a difference between us: you throwing things, we maintaining.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to: Mike and Bridget Bridgewater of Sunseed Tanzania (Dodoma); Geoff and Dilys Beaumont of Sunseed Tanzania (UK); Graham Savage at Sunseed Spain (Sorbas). REFERENCES [1] IDEO, IDEO Method Cards: 51 Ways to Inspire Design, Palo Alto, 2003. [2] http://www.sunseedtanzania.org/ (April 2005) [3] Sponheim, T., Solar Cooking Momentum in Uganda. Solar Cookers International, Solar Cooker Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, Nov 2003, pp. 8-9 [4] Singhal, A.K., India’s Solar Cooking Program. Solar Cookers International, Solar Cooker Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, March 2003, pp. 1-4 [5] Xiaofu, C,.Development and application of Solar Cookers in China. Solar Cookers International, Solar Cooker Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, July 2003, pp. 1-4 [6] Jones, H., Packaging Petroleum, in, Pavitt, J., (ed.), Brand New, V&A Publications, London, 2000, pp 144-147 [7] Campbell, C., The Sociology of Consumption, in, Miller, D., (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption, Routledge, London, 1995. pp 96-127. [8] Klein, N., No Logo, Flamingo, London, 2000. [9] Miller, D., A Theory of Shopping, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998 [10] Papanek, V., The Green Imperative, Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture, Thames and Hudson, London, 1995. [11] Kumar Velayudhan, S., Rural Marketing: Targeting the Non-urban Consumer, Response Books, New Dheli, 2002.

Chapter Seven PHILOSOPHY

THE DETERMINANTS OF CREATIVITY: FLEXIBILITY IN DESIGN Casakin, H.* Department of Architecture, The College of Judea and Samaria, Israel. Kreitler, S.** Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Israel. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This research deals with the empirical study of creativity in design problem solving, with a particular focus on flexibility as one of the major elements of creativity. The two main components of the current approach are motivation for creativity, and the cognitive processes that implement creativity. Results showed that both are indispensable for understanding, predicting, and improving creativity in design. Keywords: creativity, design problem solving, flexibility, motivation, cognitive processes 1 INTRODUCTION Design problems are by definition ill-defined since they are complex, inaccurate and lack clear goals (e.g. Goel, 1985). Solving such problems requires something more than mere expertise and acquired knowledge. This additional requirement could be called creativity. The designer’s personal motivations and cognitive processes seem to play an important role in creative designing. By and large, the issues of creativity in design have not been adequately addressed. There have been few if any theoretically comprehensive approaches, and hardly any empirical studies supporting them. The present approach suggests a comprehensive theoretical framework that has been tested in other fields, and is accompanied by a methodology specifying assessment tools for empirical research. The two major *The College of Judea and Samaria, Department of Architecture, P.O. Box 3, 44837 Ariel, Israel. *ESLab, Environmental Simulation Laboratory, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. Tel. +972-3-6405718 Email: [email protected] **Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel. Tel. +9723-5225371 Email: [email protected]

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components of our approach are motivation for creativity, and the cognitive processes that implement creativity. Our claim is that both are indispensable for understanding creativity in design. Therefore we suggest calling our approach the motivational and procedural approach to creativity in design, with a particular stress on design flexibility as one of the major components of creativity. The motivational component is based on the cognitive orientation theory that deals with predicting, changing and understanding human behaviors in diverse fields (Kreitler, 2004). It rests on the assumption that human acts, such as design problem solving, require the underpinnings of a motivational disposition that emerges when the person has a sufficient number of relevant beliefs supporting that action. The cognitive component that regulates the procedures of creative designing is grounded in the theory of meaning (Kreitler & Kreitler, 1972, 1990b) that deals with identifying the sets of cognitive processes involved in the successful performance of diverse acts, including creativity. (Kreitler and Kreitler, 1990a). Understanding the two specified components and their conjoint contribution to creativity is a necessary precondition for an intervention program designed to improve the motivation of students of design and to develop their cognitive processes for enhanced creativity. Following a brief theoretical introduction, an empirical study is presented with preliminary findings concerning one of the aspects of creativity – flexibility. 2 CREATIVITY IN DESIGN: THE DESIGNER AND THE PROCESS The modern idea of creativity is of a human ability that surpasses the daily and routine processes of thinking and doing, and is able to produce outstanding and innovative outcomes (Coyne, 1997). In the design domain, creativity has been examined with respect to aspects related to the personality of the designer. Creative designers are considered to have a higher intelligence than average, a large variety of interests, a strong motivation, personal goals, verbal fluency, spontaneity, a sense of play, independence of judgment, and flexibility (Hanna and Barber, 2001). While looking for new knowledge, creative designers are ready to establish associations between different domains of knowledge, are generally eager to undertake risks, tend to challenge the unknown, and aspire to excel in their fields. Creativity in design has also been examined in relation to the design process. Candy and Edmonds, (1996) defined the design process, as an inherently creative and exploratory activity. Their study showed that creative cognition processes are critical in the generation of new ideas and in the making of new artifacts. They found that some key factors which distinguish an innovative thinking approach from a routine one are expertise in the knowledge of the field, thinking in parallel about other domains, generalizing and transferring lessons from one domain to another, and considering the problem as a whole rather than as small details. All of these enable to perceive design in a different frame of reference, and to break out of conventional knowledge. But more information is needed for better understanding of how creativity occurs in design.

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2.1 FLEXIBILITY IN DESIGN Flexibility is one of the major components of creativity (e.g., Guilford, 1981). It is usually conceived as critical to the ability to redefine problem parameters, reducing functional fixedness and opening up a rich vista of possibilities for problem solving. In the framework of design, flexibility is related to the capability of the designer to frame the design problem from a variety of perspectives. Schon (1983) referred to this as a ‘conversation with the designer’s materials’, in which creative ideas come into view. This mainly happens in the early stages, where the design problem is tackled on a wide front, and candidate solutions are considered as a part of a general concept rather than decomposed into components (Candy and Edmonds, 1996). In a process characterized by flexibility, alternatives are explored and analyzed by investigating a variety of options, where the creative designer tries to broaden the scope of candidate solutions until the best one emerges (Lawson and Loke, 1997). According to creativity and design research (Cross, 1997; Roozenburg, 1995) the more alternatives are explored extending the scope of the problem space, the better possibilities to create innovative solutions. In a study carried out by Casakin (2004) about expertise in design, it was shown that the affordance of visual stimulus helped students to enhance flexibility in design and expand their explorations on design alternatives. Design flexibility was also studied by comparing traditional with digital media. For example, Bilda and Dermikan (2003) found that designers were more effective in evaluating and producing alternative solutions in the traditional media. This was due in part to the designers’ habits, but also to the inflexibility of the available CAD software to adapt and apply knowledge to a problem beyond their domain. 3 STUDYING MOTIVATIONS AND COGNITIVE PROCESSES IN CREATIVE DESIGN The objective of the study was to demonstrate that both specific motivation for creativity and particular cognitive processes contribute to creativity in design. In this presentation we will focus only on one particular aspect of creativity, which is flexibility. Accordingly, the presentation is designed to serve as a demonstration of our particular motivational and procedural approach to creativity. Method: The participants were 52 students of architecture, in their first to fifth year of studies. They were requested to solve and present graphically their solutions to a design problem as well as the stages of the involved process. The problem dealt with designing a small museum for promoting the cultural life of a little town. The museum had to be located in an area of town over 100 years old. A major constraint was to propose a creative design solution that should establish a system of relationships between the old Town Hall and a natural park. Figure 1 illustrates an example of a conceptual design solution proposed by one of the participants. In addition, all participants were administered two questionnaires which they completed on their own. One was the Cognitive Orientation Questionnaire of Creativity which was designed to provide a measure of motivation for creativity. It

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consisted of four parts. The statements in, whereby the first part referred to included statements referring to oneself (e.g., I am a highly curious person), in the a second part included statements referring to one’s goals and wishes (e.g., I wish I could spend more time playing fantasy games), in the a third part included statements referring to one’s view of reality (e.g., Playing fantasy games may alienate a person from reality), and in the a fourth part included statements referring to rules and standards (e.g., A person should try to stick only to ideas that are functional). The statements referred to contents reflecting attitudes identified in previous research as relevant to creativity (e.g., playfulness, freedom from strict functionality, curiosity, desire to contribute to the social welfare of society). The participants were requested in regard to each statement to check one of the four response alternative reflecting the extent of their endorsement of the statement (very true, true, not true, not at all true, scored 4 to 1, respectively). Accordingly, the measure of motivation consisted of four scores representing four types of beliefs (about self, goals, reality and norms) based on the degree to which the participants endorsed the various presented statements. The second questionnaire was the Test of Meanings, which was designed to provide a measure of the availability of cognitive processes subserving creativity. The Test of Meanins consists of 11 stimulus words (e.g., street, telephone) presented to the participants who were requested to communicate their interpersonally-shared and personal-subjective meaning to some other imaginary person of their own choice. The meaning communications were coded in terms of a standard set of variables that represent cognitive tendencies, such as causal or functional thinking. Previous studies identified specific cognitive variables as characteristic for creativity (e.g., reference to structure, to manner of operation, emotional connotations, metaphors, and symbols). The measure of cognitive processes based on the Test of Meanings consisted of an index that represented the availability of specific cognitive processes in the communications of meaning written by the participants, identified as characteristic of creativity Each cognitive processes of creativity that the participant had used in this Test in a frequency matching the creativity profile was scored as 1. In the case of cognitive processes contributing positively to creativity, the frequency in the participant’s test was expected to be above the mean, whereas in the case of those contributing negatively, the frequency was expected to be below the mean. The measure of flexibility in designing was based on the evaluations of three experts (all experienced architects) who were requested to judge, each independently, the designs presented by the participants. The criterion for flexibility was the availability of one or more alternative plans in the designs of the participants – any part or stage of the design or the whole of it presented as the final product. Alternatives were used as a criterion for flexibility because they require a dissociation from a previous design, and hence are based on flexibility as a necessary though perhaps not a sufficient prerequisite. The variable of flexibility had three values: no alternative at all (flexibility=0), 1 alternative referring to a part of the design (flexibility=1), 1 alternative or more referring to the design as a whole (flexibility=2). In regard to this criterion there was complete unanimity among the three judges.

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4 RESULTS The results were evaluated by stepwise discriminant analysis. The predictors were the 4 scores of beliefs (assessing motivation) and the index of cognitive processes of creativity (assessing cognitive processes). The dependent variable was flexibility, assessed in terms of a categorical measure with 3 values. The predictors formed two functions, (with Eigenvalues 1.53 and 1.42, respectively, indicating the stability of the functions) accounting for 55% and 45% of the variance, respectively. The first function was defined

Figure 1. Example of a design solution for the museum problem by one student. primarily by beliefs about self and beliefs about goals (in that order), and the second was defined mainly by the index of cognitive processes and beliefs about norms. The first contributes mainly to differentiating between participants who had flexibility 2 and flexibility 1, the second – between those who had flexibility 2 and flexibility 0 (according to the group centroids). Comparing the predicted and the actual classification of cases into groups showed that the total correct identification was 72% which is highly significant (p<0.001, 36% better than chance expectation, which is 33.3% correct). 5 IMPLICATIONS The results show that both motivation and cognition play a role in regard to creativity in design and have to be considered if one wants to predict creativity in design and to improve it. In particular, motivation and cognition were shown to be important with regard to the flexibility in design, an essential aspect needed to restructure problem parameters, challenge functional stuckness, and explore a variety of alternative design

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solutions. The functions based on the discriminant analysis represent groupings of the predictors that differ in the nature of their contribution in the present context. Thus, the first and main function represents purely motivational predictors, which moreover are highly personal (viz. beliefs about self and one’s goals). Notably, this function accounts for the relatively larger portion of the variance among the participants. The second function represents mainly the availability of the cognitive processes necessary for creative flexibility as well as standards and norms of the participants about how one should proceed. This second function is more impersonal in nature. The findings show that motivation for creativity accounts for how much flexibility the subject actually employs or manifests in designing, whereas cognition appears to be responsible mainly for the occurrence of flexibility. Remarkably, although the two functions are similar in the amount of variation for which they account, the motivational predisposition carries the larger weight. Thus, it appears that both cognition and motivation complement each other and conjointedly contribute to shaping creativity in design. Awareness of the importance of cognition in regard to creativity is shared commonly. Accordingly, the finding that cognition accounted for a fair amount of the variance does not come as a surprise. However, there is much less awareness of the importance of motivation in regard to creativity. Most investigators would not believe offhand that simply being motivated for creativity would lead to the production of creative designs. Hence our finding about the important role played by motivation in design is unexpected. Yet, it is to be emphasized that we are dealing with a special level or type of motivation that is neither conscious nor volitional in the common sense of the term. In the framework of the cognitive orientation theory motivation is a predisposition to act or perform in a certain way without necessarily consciously deciding to do so on rational grounds but rather out of inner drive or need. Be it as it may, our findings emphasize that both cognition and motivation are to be considered and handled whenever creativity in design is targeted. Further, our study suggests advisable procedures for improving motivation and cognition. Increase in motivation will result from enhancing support for the specific themes that make up the cognitive orientation of creativity, whereas increase in the cognitive abilities will result from training the specific cognitive processes that constitute creativity and that have been assessed by the test of meanings. Both training methods are based on structured pretested procedures and may be expected to promote flexibility in creative design when applied separately, and especially together. REFERENCES Bilda, Z. and Demirkan, H., An insight on designers’ sketching activities in traditional versus digital media Design Studies, Vol. 24, 2003, pp. 27-50. Candy L. and Edmonds E., Creative design of the Lotus bicycle: implications for knowledge support systems research. Design Studies, Vol. 17, 1996, pp. 71-90. Casakin H., Visual Analogy as a Cognitive Strategy in the Design Process: Expert Versus Novice Performance. The Journal of Design Research , 4, 2004. Coyne R., Creativity as commonplace. Design Studies Vol. 18, 1997, pp. 135-141. Cross N., Descriptive models of creative design: application to an example. Design Studies, Vol. 18, 1997, pp. 427-455. Goel, V., Sketches of thought. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA,1995.

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Guilford, J. P. Potentiality for creativity. In J. C. Gowan, J. Khatena, and E. P. Torance (Eds.), Creativity: Its educational implications (2nd ed.,). Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt, 1981, pp. 1-5. Hanna, R. and Barber, T., An inquiry into computers in design: attitudes before-attitudes after. Design Studies Vol. 22, 2001, pp. 255-281. Kreitler, H. and Kreitler, S., Psychology of the arts. Durham, NC: Duke UP., 1972. Kreitler, H. and Kreitler, S., Psychosemantic foundations of creativity. In K. J.Gilhooly, M. Keane, R. Logie & G. Erdos (Eds.), Lines of Thought: Reflections on the Psychology of Thinking. Chichester, England: Wiley. 1990a. Vol. 2, pp. 191-201. Kreitler, S. and Kreitler, H. The Cognitive Foundations of Personality. Traits. New York: Plenum Publishing Corporation, 1990b. Kreitler, S. The cognitive guidance of behavior. In J.T.Jost, M. R. Banaji, & D. A. Prentice (Eds.) Perspectivism in Social Psychology: The Yin and Yang of scientific progress. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2004, pp. 113-126. Lawson, B. and Loke, S. Computers, words and pictures. Design Studies, Vol. 18, 1997, pp. 171183. Roozenburg N. F. M. and Eekels J., Product Design: Fundamentals and Methods Wiley, Chichester, 1995. Schon D., A The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. Temple Smith, London, 1983.

EXPLORING DIMENSIONS OF DESIGN THINKING Barry Wylant* Assistant Professor, Industrial Design Program, Faculty of Environmental Design University of Calgary, Canada. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The idea of design as a linear process to create things does not seem to do justice to the nature of the intellectual activity undertaken in the process of creating such deliverables. This shift in focus from the creation of things to the quality of thought is indicative of design thinking emerging as an autonomous area of inquiry. It is both the difficult nature of the design problem, coupled with the potential ramifications of introducing things (or new technologies) into peoples’ lives, that predicates a clear discussion on the many characteristics of design thinking. To suggest a way for mapping such a discourse this paper offers an exploration into some of the dimensions of design thinking. For instance, a mandate for design can be discerned from Heidigger’s criticism of modern technology and what he describes as its enframing character. In the act of design, designers will bring their abilities as creative thinkers to bear on a particular problem. It is the particular character of the design problem, described by Buchanan as indeterminate [1] which makes the management of design ideas quite intriguing as a complex activity. Through an examination of these insights, an initial sketch as to the dimensions of design thinking can be illustrated. Such insights can aid future researchers and educators in understanding that though the topics designers address can be quite universal, the manner and extent of how we investigate any topic can perhaps be seen to lie within discernable boundaries of thought. Keywords: Design thinking, indeterminacy, placements

*Industrial Design Program, Faculty of Environmental Design University of Calgary 2500 University Dr.SW, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4 403-220-8456 [email protected]

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1 INTRODUCTION Design and the design process are often thought of in terms of deliverables. Design brief, sketches, models and CAD work establish the metric through which the activity of design is understood. Under the rubric of design process, these specific deliverables are typically nested within larger blocks of activity that reflect the greater goals to which these deliverables are applied. This would include things like problem definition, design analysis (or design research), idea or concept generation, concept refinement and design specification. The nomenclature used to describe these steps is to some extent incidental, most designers will do something that approximates these activities in a process that is often similar, but rarely the same, across projects and designers. Ultimately these steps are about the management of ideas and they serve to provide a framework that allows for the generation and evaluation of design ideas, notions and concepts. The activity that permeates these steps can be referred to as design thinking. Richard Buchanan argues that design thinking should be recognized as a “new liberal art of technological culture [2].” This is derived from the recognition that many disciplines are undertaking design-like activities as they endeavor to create the artifice that populates our technological world. Such disciplines increasingly accept that the creation of technology requires design. And as design finds its way into other fields, the specific description of steps focused on deliverables becomes less useful. Understanding the way in which one thinks as they go through those steps seems more relevant as the activity of design extends into new realms. 2 A MANDATE A mandate for design thinking in the development of artifice can be derived from Heidigger’s discussion of technology. He addresses both the positive and more sinister aspects of technology, with the latter largely directed at contemporary technologies. Here technology is seen as anything made by humans and today this could include everything from the lowly ballpoint pen, to a spatula, to supercomputers and cellular communications. Moving beyond more common definitions of technology such as a means to an end, Heidigger seeks to understand something of the essence of technology and its place in our lives. Initially he examines what causes technology. This is undertaken in a broad sense, beyond simple cause and effect. In examining any object Heidigger discusses the causes which must exist for any human made object to exist. Based on classic Greek notions, Heidigger identifies these causes as form, material, method of fabrication and end use [3]. Further to this, Heidigger notes that although these causes might be isolated for discussion, their true impact and causality lies in the interplay between them. One cannot create form without understanding a material’s ability to sustain that form. Material cannot be used without understanding how it can be fashioned and so forth. Enactment of the causality described by Heidigger serves to bring some thing (artifice or technology) into its existence. This is a type of revelation which in the best sense Heidigger terms as poesis [4] or a kind of poetic revealing. This speaks to the marvel inherent in technology and what it might allow someone to do. It also addresses the

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boundaries of human knowledge that allows for the revelation to occur. Consider that nature’s ability to provide the materials and their relative performance properties has always existed and that it is only with the advent of human knowledge that allows one to understand how something might be made or used to a desired effect. It is in this sense of poesis that technology can be seen to celebrate its revelation and in turn, the human insight and interaction with the natural world that fostered it. A more sinister sense of technology though can be seen in the convenience that it engenders. Consider the materials and infrastructure required to make any piece of electronics today. Everything from mining to transportation, materials processing to management and legislation are all required to make (or support the making of) the televisions, radios, computers and communications equipment that many of us use on a daily basis. Yet how often does one think about the extent of human endeavor and natural material required to create a television? We focus foremost on the functionality afforded by this equipment with little thought for anything else it might mean. Additionally this gear is so profoundly good at providing for its intended functionality that one rarely considers alternate means of achieving that end or even of a simpler end. Examples of this are extensive. Many North American suburbs are built around a spaghetti plan layout that consists of roads arranged in bays and cul-de-sacs. Such layouts serve the convenience in the use of automobiles. The suburb is laid out in a manner that does not preclude walking or cycling for daily activities, rather its layout enhances the use of the car so completely that alternatives fall from sight. Heidigger refers to this as the enframed view. This is where one considers technology and its use within a narrowly defined perspective. A cellular phone is likely to be considered a good thing exclusively because of its ability to deliver communication. The effort necessary to make it or the significance of a handwritten letter are not open for consideration. In this, the technology is still revealed, but its revelation occurs within a tightly framed view. The danger associated with this is that one rarely considers their actions and goals outside of the technological framework. The notion of self is superseded by the notion of the self within this dominant context of technology. To circumvent this, Heidigger suggests that in developing and using technology one must endeavor to see beyond the enframed view and aspire to see in the widest sense possible [5]. Herein one may find a mandate for design and design thinking. One also encounters the very challenging quality of the design problem. 3 THE DESIGN PROBLEM The exact means of seeing in the widest sense is difficult to arrive at. This is in part due to the exhaustive number of things that must be considered. Designers will draw upon expertise established in other areas such as fine art, material science, natural science and the social sciences in the way they address a given problem yet design itself has no true subject. Design may draw on a general body of knowledge that is established in other subject areas but in the end designers will focus on the creation of a specific thing. In fact design can be described as the way general knowledge is applied in addressing the creation of the particular. If there were to be a subject matter for design it would be this application. As Buchanan notes, “design has no special subject of its own apart from

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what a designer conceives it to be. The subject matter of design is potentially universal in scope, because design thinking may be applied to any area of human experience [6].” Having no specific subject, yet addressing many leads to a sense of what the inherent quality of any given design problem is: indeterminate. Indeterminacy does not mean that a solution to a given problem cannot be found, that it is undeterminable. Rather it refers to the conditions under which a solution may be found. Working within a specific subject such as any in the natural sciences, a given experiment will establish the conditions under which new knowledge is established. In this instance these conditions are determinable. The new knowledge established is therefore determinate in nature. With design, the brief may attempt to identify the conditions for a solution, however the brief can be questioned and in turn, the conditions adjusted. Also the brief may not be fully inclusive, new conditions may arise as a result of subsequent design work and require a change to the understanding of the design problem. Buchanan notes, “Indeterminacy implies that there are no definitive conditions or limits to design problems [7].” In effect designers will use the brief to orient and contextualize their investigation of the problem. The initial solutions they arrive at are more like questions directed back at fully understanding the design problem. In working through initial solutions designers work to establish and map out the possibility of what the solution can be. Yet this work more accurately addresses and refines the nature of the problem. In ruling out a potential solution the designer is effectively refining the accepted and understood nature of the design problem. 4 NAVIGATING THE DESIGN PROBLEM Working through a given design problem is also a tricky endeavor. To meet Heidigger’s objective and see in the widest sense is difficult, if not impossible because one cannot entertain every issue in the same instant. A conceptual device is required that allows one to raise and consider all of the impacting issues in an appropriate manner. Buchanan suggests the “doctrine of placements” [8] as a means of navigating through the various issues that can impact design thinking. How this doctrine might work can be seen in Krippendorf’s discussion of product meaning. Krippendorf identifies the way in which consumers may come to understand a given product, “Seeing something in a store as a chair requires imagining its use at home or in an office, a context that may or may not be realized in practice [9].” Effectively consumers comprehend the potential impact of an object in their lives by imaginatively and cognitively placing it into a particular context. The nature of such contexts is varied. It can include the simple naming of the object which places it into a language context and complexity can grow from there, “What something is (the totality of what it means) to someone corresponds to the sum total of its imaginable contexts [10].” Buchanan notes that designers will, in a very similar way, place ideas for their design work into contexts to understand and evaluate their thinking. Buchanan refers to these contexts as placements, and draws the distinction that the placement is fluid and not strictly defined. The designer, in reviewing an idea within a given placement, can allow their consideration of that placement to be shaped or influenced by their view of the idea nested there. For example in the design of a grip for a power hand tool, a designer might

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first consider a sketched form aesthetically and then ergonomically. The designer is effectively moving between two placements. If the designer finds aspects of her sketched intent awkward, she can do two things, modify the shape or reconsider the nature of the placement under consideration so that a satisfactory result is achieved. Further the placements can be as broad or as narrow as the designer determines. It is important to note that this process is not intended to be prescriptive rather it is more descriptive of the cognitive mechanism that occurs as one ponders and executes a given design exercise. The designer will likely not name this act of consideration as a placement at all and the thought given to a sketched feature could occur in milliseconds. This notion of placement also represents a kind of gestalt where the idea under review within a placement, and the placement itself, can be seen to constitute a greater whole. As a gestalt the idea/placement combination is a type of figure/ground relationship where both the figure and the background are fluid in their respective natures and can be adjusted to achieve a new perspective on the whole [11]. 5 PLACEMENT DIMENSIONS As with a figure/ground relationship, the designer’s idea may be seen to dominate its placement or conversely the placement may dominate one’s evaluation of the idea. In the example of the handgrip above, if the designer feels that the aesthetic quality is to be maintained at all costs, then a review of it within the ergonomic placement may be considered in a fashion where it dominates that placement. Conversely if the designer feels that ergonomic issues are paramount then these may be seen to dominate the evaluation of the grip’s proposed features. In this way one part of the idea/placement gestalt can be seen to dominate the other. It then rests with the designer to be aware of which aspect is dominating their thinking and to be cognizant of which one should dominate their thinking. For the designer this notion of dominance parallels well with the consideration of composition and form. In reviewing a given composition one element may be seen to dominate another and should one alter their focus, another element within the same composition could then be seen to dominate. Dominance is therefore a fluid dimension depending upon focus and which aspect of the idea/placement relationship is given emphasis. The relative size or cognitive weight given to a particular placement will have an impact on how it is understood and used and so scale can be understood as a dimension of placements. Regarding the handgrip noted above, the overall product idea placed within a marketing position can be seen as more significant than the evaluation of a screw boss location relative to other internal components. Each carries a certain cognitive weight and each must be resolved, yet it would be pointless to spend any time reviewing the location of the screw boss until the market position, the overall shape and form of the product and ergonomic issues are worked through. The notion of scale as a dimension for placements means that contexts can be nested, with smaller ones placed in slightly larger ones. One could then conceivably move through the scales of such placements in a manner similar to moving through musical scales or move dramatically through nested placements from a very large to very small one.

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Movement and fluidity are other dimensional attributes that can be applied to the consideration of placements. The notion that emphasis can be assigned and then reassigned so that either the idea or the placement can dominate one’s thinking indicates fluidity and flexibility. This is important as it again reinforces the indeterminate nature of the design problem. Further this idea of movement and fluidity echoes Heidigger’s notion of interplay between the causalities in his discussion of technology. Buchanan notes that designers can construct working hypotheses in using placements. That is if/then hypotheses can be built around a specific placement to arrive at new insights into the design and design problem. For instance, in the handgrip example, the designer may raise certain hypothetical questions such as if the grip has a certain girth, what would be the implications aesthetically, ergonomically or in terms of production? As Buchanan notes, “the designer establishes a principle of relevancy for knowledge from the arts and sciences, determining how such knowledge may be useful to design thinking in a particular circumstance without immediately reducing design to one or another of these disciplines [12].” Relevancy can then have an impact as a dimension for placements. The notion of relevancy also leads to the idea of integrity. What placements are truly important? Is there an aspect to this placement not considered? Are the defining conditions of this placement accurate? The designer in working through exercises in placements must constantly test their thinking to understand if the placement is being used effectively. The clear articulation of the dimensions associated with design thinking serves to reinforce the complex and indeterminate nature of the design problem. Given the potential for technology to become cumbersome and dominant in the affairs of people, it is important that designers strive to establish such clarity in describing the manner in which the design activity is pursued and the challenges that any given design problem can pose. As interdisciplinary activity becomes ever more significant as a device for addressing complex human problems and as others turn to design thinking as an aid in these endeavors, an understanding of design thinking that can cross disciplinary boundaries becomes ever more useful. REFERENCES [1] Buchanan, Richard., Wicked Problems in Design Thinking. The Idea of Design, edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995, pp. 3-20. [2] Ibid, p. 3. [3] Heidegger, Martin (1954), The Question Concerning Technology. In the translation by William Lovitt, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, 1977, pp. 4-35. [4] Ibid, p. 10. [5] Ibid, p. 12. [6] Buchanan, op. cit., p. 15. [7] Ibid, p. 14. [8] Ibid, p. 6. [9] Krippendorf, Klaus., On the Essential Contexts of Artifacts or on the Proposition that “Design Is Making Sense (of Things).” The Idea of Design, edited by Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1995, pp. 156-184.

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[10] Ibid, p. 159. [11] Ching, Francis K. and Juroszek, Steven P. Design Drawing. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1998. [12] Bucahnan, op. cit., p. 16.

Chapter Eight MODEL MAKING

SINGLE-POINT DESIGN IN THE CONTEXT OF HIGHER EDUCATION Darren Southee* Course Director: BA Industrial Design & Technology, Brunel Design, School of Engineering & Design Brunel University, United Kingdom. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Low-cost customisation and flexibility in the design of electronic systems is now taken for granted. Advances in desktop design and modeling tools with interfaced rapid-prototyping equipment are also with us. The natural consequence of such available technologies is surely single-point integrated design. Form and functionality can be addressed from the same source. The terms ‘Engineer’ and ‘Designer’ are difficult, if not impossible, to define in society today, but generally engineers are associated with competence in technology and function with designers much more associated with ‘ideas’ and issues of form. When teaching on design programmes at Brunel University, we encourage our undergraduates to be technologically literate creative engineers, capable of both embedded systems design and aesthetic design at the prototype level. This paper describes the technologies and processes used by Brunel undergraduates to realise functioning prototypes. RISE, a ‘smart’ internetconnected alarm clock and recent student project, is discussed in this context. Brunel design undergraduates and graduates have won awards ahead of engineers. The author, educated as an electronic engineer, reflects that much of this engineering education emphasised the limitations of components and equipment leaving little room for creativity. The paper seeks to open the debate on this future single-point integrated designer in the context of higher education. Will it be designers, with enhanced engineering and technology skills best suited to this new role? Will it be engineers, with additional creative and aesthetic awareness, who will become the new single-point creatures? Will it need a completely new approach? *

Course Director: BA Industrial Design & Technology, Brunel Design, School of Engineering & Design Brunel University, United Kingdom Phone: +44 1895 266323 Email: [email protected]

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The paper ultimately offers a glimpse of the work at Brunel, and seeks feedback regarding future graduate requirements. Keywords: Single-point Design, Engineer, Designer, Higher Education 1 INTRODUCTION Brunel University offers four undergraduate Design degrees: Product Design, Industrial Design and Industrial Design Engineering BScs and a BA in Industrial Design and Technology. Each of the programmes seeks to provide access to a ‘toolbox of skills’ allowing graduates to become creative engineers. The final year modules for the Industrial Design BSc are shown in figure 1 to illustrate this point. The Major Project

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Managing Product Innovation 20 Credits Ergonomics 20 credits Industrial Design Methods 20 Credits Contextual Design 20 Credits Mechatronics 20 Credits Graphics Communication 3 20 Credits Environmentally Sensitive Design 20 Credits

Figure 1. BSc Industrial Design final year modules. and Managing Product Innovation are core modules taken by all students with three further options chosen by the students. ‘Engineering requires a refined set of analytical skills alongside a practical sense of what works’ [1] is a phrase that could be used to sum up the philosophy behind the technology and engineering modules offered. Interaction and communication between lecturers with a ‘creative’ background and those with a more engineering and technology bias seeks to integrate the learning of engineering skills within a design context. The problem-based approach in Mechatronics, for instance, often allows students to gain technological understanding that may be used within their final year design project. 1.1 HOLISTIC DESIGN – AN EXAMPLE FROM HISTORY ‘Villard de Honnecourt was a thirteenth century cathedral builder. His sketchbook contains subjects that might be categorized as follows: 1. Mechanics 2. Practical Geometry and Trigonometry 3. Carpentry

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4. Architectural Design 5. Ornamental design 6. Figure Design 7. Furniture Design 8. ‘Subjects foreign to the special knowledge of Architects and Designers’ The astonishing breadth and holistic nature of the skills and knowledge are in the manuscripts for all to see.’ [2] This contradicts the idea that the capabilities of craftspeople at this time were subject to a ‘static’ form of knowledge passed on unaltered from master to apprentice. The transmission of skills and knowledge was a dynamic process allowing the addition of new knowledge. There are many examples in German history of craftspeople embarking upon ‘die Wanderjahre’ – a form of sabbatical involving travel to allow the acquisition of new knowledge. The diversity of design projects carried out across the undergraduate design degrees at Brunel requires a knowledge across a breadth of disciplines. 2 INDUSTRY REQUIREMENTS 2.1 DESIGNERS AS ENGINEERS? ‘Industrial Design is an applied art whereby the aesthetics and usability of products may be improved. Design aspects specified by the industrial designer may include the overall shape of the object, the location of details with respect to one another, colors, texture, sounds, and aspects concerning the use of the product ergonomics. Additionally the industrial designer may specify aspects concerning the production process, choice of materials and the way the product is presented to the consumer Product Design is focused on products only, while industrial design has a broader focus on concepts, products and processes. In addition to considering aesthetics, usability , and ergonomics , it can also encompass the engineering of objects, usefulness as well as usability, market placement, and other concerns.’[3] The Adidas 1 training shoe “is the first footwear product that can change its characteristics in real time,”[4]. It received comment in the engineering press as follows, “What is surprising is that the developers didn’t seem to use any professional electronics engineers”[5]. The design team carried out all the tasks traditionally associated with design, but also completed aspects normally passed on to engineers. 3 DESIGN EDUCATION 3.1 RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION IN SCHOOLS The following is an extract from the OCR GCSE Design and Technology (Electronic Products) complete specification document:

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‘Microcontrollers/microprocessors • understand the use of microcontrollers as progammable interface controllers (PIC) with variable input/output configurations • understand that microcontrollers may contain internal analogue to digital (A/D) conversion capabilities ‘ [6] Fifteen and sixteen year old students are being introduced to the theory and practical use of microcon-trollers. Microcontrollers are the fundamental component within the engineering discipline of embedded systems design, and indeed it was a microcontroller used by the Adidas designers in their intelligent shoe design. 4 DESIGN AT BRUNEL UNIVERSITY – A CASE STUDY: RISE SMART ALARM CLOCK David Hunt, as a final year major project for our Industrial Design BSc in 2001/2002, designed RISE, a smart alarm clock that allows the user a lie-in or produces an early wake up alarm depending on traffic conditions. The embedded systems design involved the production of a microcontroller system able to coordinate the operations of an Internet Modem Module (IMM). This allowed the unit to access (traffic) information on the internet, and choose an appropriate alarm time, based on this information. The electronics and software development were of a level and depth appropriate to a final year electronic engineering project, but the work also addressed issues of form, ergonomics, manufacturing and materials (see figure 2). The product received press coverage both nationally and internationally [7] and company interest was shown including MSC Group Inc and OmniMetrix in America. RISE was one of many projects exhibited at ME2002, the Brunel University Design Degree show. The following comments upon that show suitably summarise the aims of the learning experience at Brunel Design: “The work shows a wonderfully broad range of ideas;” said Head of Department Eric Billett, “all brought to a realisation through a sound understanding of the design process. The strength of the graduates from this Department is this ability to prove ideas and engineer their functions in addition to resolving product interface and form.”

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Figure 2. RISE – The model with skills and understanding input 4.1 TECHNOLOGIES AND PROCESSES USED TO REALISE FUNCTIONING PROTOTYPES 4.1.1 Electronics design Brunel design offers design students’ access to electronics labs with ICEPIC microcontroller emulator systems. Theory and practice are covered across a number of modules. This allows the design and implementation of customised embedded systems enabling the realisation of functional low-cost ‘smart’ prototypes. Students are also introduced to CAD tools that enable the design of printed circuit boards (PCB) and facilities are available to have the PCB manufactured (see figure 3). 4.1.2 Form Students are introduced to Pro/ENGINEER™,, a comuter graphics suite for modelling various mechanical designs and for performing related design and manufacturing operations. The suite uses a 3D solid modelling system as the core. This enables many technical aspects to be tested prior to the actual build. ALIAS™ oftware allows rendering and issues of form to be addressed. 4.1.3 Cognitive ergonomics and human factors The ergonomics module encourages students to put into practice cognitive ergonomic theories and methods and select appropriate methods/approaches in order to evaluate products in using cognitive ergonomic criteria. They produce reports presenting the results of cognitive and physical ergonomic analysis and are introduced to human factorscentred problem identification within consumer durable product design.

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4.1.4 Materials and manufacturing Material properties and manufacturing awareness are strands that runs throughout many of the modules, including mechanics and materials, design for manufacture, structural analysis. This culminates in the final year option, technical industrial design, which seeks to provide students with an understanding of the principles of manufacturing process selection and appreciation of the design and manufacturing techniques used in manufacturing. Students are given an understanding of various systems and tools used in

Figure 3. RISE – the functioning prototype including populated PCB. manufacturing and are enabled to specify and interpret tolerances, limits & fits, geometric tolerancing and surface integrity. Finally they are encouraged to analyse the assembly of a product and suggest design changes to improve efficiency. 5 CONCLUDING REMARKS Lawson [8] discusses the idea of designing with computers within an architectural context and notes that: ‘Another problem with all these ad hoc programs is that they require their own inputs, often overlapping with those required by other programs. Again there is no evidence that designers would find this helpful either. This would lead to a design process where each time the designer wanted some help from the computer, a whole series of data would first have to be entered. Any change to the design would then have to be reflected in the data given to each of the programs in use.’ He adds: ‘An alternative approach might be to hold a single model of the design in the computer and running each evaluative routine from that. Several packages of this kind have been developed for use by architects.’ Some might argue that the form of an electronic product and the electronics designed to provide the function are independent, but are they? Do those responsible for the form decide how much room there is for the electronics, or do the electronics designers

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communicate how much space is required for the hardware and request that the form accommodates this requirement. There are no currently available CAD packages that allow this single model approach to electronics and form design. At Brunel we offer students the opportunity to gain knowledge and skills of an engineering nature. Some have taken this opportunity, and produced products regarded as innovative within the context of electronic engineering, showing a creative engineering capability within this field. That said, the most popular combination of options in the final year is Graphic Communication 3, Contextual Design and Environmentally Sensitive Design, a selection pointing towards a more traditional expectation of design education. REFERENCES [1] Robinson L.A., Childs P.R.N. and Stobart R.K., Escaping the Straitjacket of Engineering Education, International Engineering and Product Design Education Conference, Delft The Netherlands, September 2004 [2] Cooley M., Architect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology. The Hogarth Press, 1987 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_design [site visited 08/04/2005] [4] Marriott M., Designing a Smarter Shoe. New York Times, May 6th 2004 [5] Selwood, D., Running shoes and voting machines. Embedded System Engineering, Vol 12.4, June 2004, p4. [6] http://www.ocr.org.uk/, 1953 GCSE Design and Technology (Electronic Products) – Complete Specification [site visited 08/04/2005] [7] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2269144.stm, smart alarm clock lets you lie in, 20 September 2002 [site visited 12/04/2005] [8] Lawson B., How Designers Think The Design Process Demystified, Architectural Press, 1997.

THE APPLICATION OF PHYSICAL MODELS IN ENGINEERING DESIGN EDUCATION Graham Green* Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK, Ladislav Smrcek Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper argues the need for engineering and design education to engage the professional know-how and judgement ability of students in parallel with the extension of knowledge and intellectual development. It presents research evidence on the extent to which European Industry continues to value physical model making and testing in support of modern product development. Hence exposure to open-ended, design, make and test activities is identified as a very effective educational tool in support of the acquisition and development of professional judgement. It is also illustrated that the above can be achieved, within the economic and time constraints of the curriculum, with the provision of rapid design and manufacture technologies. It is also argued that the ability to provide rapid and tangible/physical feedback to students on the success, or otherwise, of their design process is an essential ingredient in the acquisition of professional artistry and judgement within students. Case study examples, taken from recent and current student work in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Design domains, are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the educational approach. Keywords: participative observation, rapid prototyping, engineering design education 1 INTRODUCTION Increasingly, young engineers and designers are expected to make an immediate contribution to the profitability of their employers. An additional challenge faced by the designers of modern products for global markets is to achieve a level of product maturity *

Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Glasgow, UK, Tel: 00 44 141 330 4071 Fax: 00 44 141 330 4343 Email: [email protected]

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(optimisation) at product launch that was perhaps previously only achieved after two or more years of exposure to the market. These observations combine to suggest that students of engineering need to develop an appropriate level of professional know-how and judgement during their engineering undergraduate study. The acquisition of ‘knowhow’ is a consequence of what Donald Schon [1] refers to as ‘reflective practice’, an approach that is gradually being adopted within engineering education. A process of ‘learning by making mistakes’ is adopted and a culture of creative problem solving established. This enables the student to experiment through trial and error and to gain tangible feedback on the result of their efforts. It also enhances the ability of students to critically examine, or evaluate, their emerging design ideas and to link theory and knowledge with practical implementation [2]. Clearly the use of physical models to aid evaluation is not new, they have been used extensively over many years to illustrate the link between design and manufacture. Additionally, they provide an opportunity for physical test and redesign to determine usability and aesthetic quality. 2 DISCUSSION Physical models are an essential tool in developing judgement via critical evaluation and reflection. They are one of the many forms of ‘Design Representation’, ranging from sketches [3] through to working prototypes. Each provides a mechanism enabling comparison between the options being proposed, and what is required of them. It is important that critical evaluation and reflection be maintained throughout the design process and that the appropriate methods and techniques are applied at the correct points within the process. It is through the skill of critical evaluation that the professional artistry of the engineer and designer develops. The acquisition of know-how and confidence in knowledge gained enables elegant solutions to complex problems to emerge. Through the opportunity of rapid evaluation of options a student quickly begins to recognise elements of ‘good’ design, to see what works and to understand why it works. The key issue is of course the lack of time and resource to provide and sustain this ‘rich’ learning experience. It is not a new, traditional crafts have employed this learning approach for centuries. The challenge is to merge learning while doing with other learning methods to provide an appropriate educational experience accessible by significant numbers of students [4]. If such a learning experience can be made available in a cost effective and rapid fashion then the possibility exists for a well-balanced learning method to emerge, one that both extends and challenges the intellect whilst aiding maturity of judgement. It is important to recognise that the above approach is limited in terms of both the time and cost required. Inevitably the number of iterations is limited, the opportunity for converging on optimum solutions is denied in many cases. It is necessary to develop the capacity for students to generate ideas, then manufacture and test them quickly and often. Emerging rapid design and manufacture technologies offer a contribution to the achievement of this goal.

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The identification of an educational philosophy or theory is one thing, the implementation another. The challenge is to achieve the essence of the philosophy within the constraints of time and finance. At the University of Glasgow a number of elements or stands of research have converged over the past few years to enable a cost effective implementation of Schon’s ideas on ‘reflective practice’. 2.1 PARTICIPATIVE OBSERVATION STUDY Starting in the early 1990‘s a close international cooperation was established of academic and professional education institutes with their industrial partners. This group of academics and industrialists have since concentrated on mainly mechanically based engineering design in a wide variety of applications. Shared experience in research, education and practice, exchange of students in curriculum and industrial projects, and staff in lecturing and workshops [5]. In the late 1990’s the group started a Leonardo da Vinci-funded research program on the validity of the modern design methodologies and its inherent techniques. The aim was to research, using participation observation methods, the actual utilisation of engineering design methods within a range of industries and to determine the effectiveness of existing engineering design methods when applied to innovation and product development processes. The companies and products that were observed covered a wide variety, but had always a mechanical engineering dimension. Through the utilisation of participative observation research methods, not only were the ‘official’ design methods and procedures detected but also the ‘hidden’ ones. Therefore the subtle or informal procedures, present in all industrial enterprises [6], could be observed and analysed. In order to closely observe and record the methods and practices in real-life industrial situations the industrial partners were asked to include our academic staff and students in actual in-company product design engineering projects and experiment together with design engineering tools. The wide variety of the context in the realized projects made it possible to draw significant conclusions. Most of the projects were done in companies, representing a wide range of industries, which were located in the Netherlands. This was due in part to the fact that Dutch companies have a long history of being willing and able to integrate final year’s students in projects, typically during a full semester. Twenty different companies, from five different European countries, supplied 27 projects that were subject to participative observation. Undergraduate engineering design students undertaking final year projects were the observers embedded with the companies and their staff for the duration of the project. The companies were categorised in terms of their ‘culture’ using the six aspects proposed by Sanders and Neuijin [7]. These aspects are: • Method of working • Management style • Commitment to the organisation • Communication • Internal Organisation • Relation with customers

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The observers were asked to rate the company against a 1–5 scale using each of the given aspects. An average value of 1 would indicate an enterprise categorised as being risk avoiding, closed and secretive, cost conscious. An average value of 5 would o the other hand categorise an enterprise as being risk taking, open, not cost driven, flexible etc. All the companies were judged to fall within categories 1 to 4. The individual projects were categorised in terms of how open-ended they seemed. Once again a 1–5 scale was used to report the views of the participative observers. A score of 1 would indicate a project that was very limited in scope and was predominately concerned with translating needs into modified technical elements. A predominant score of 5 would on the other hand categorise a project that was very open-ended in scope, perhaps requiring fundamental research and the creation of new technical insights. The project types were judged as spanning all five categories. The observers were also required to record the range and details of al the engineering design support methods utilised to support the early stages of the design process, the aim being to obtain a view of the degree of utilisation of particular engineering design methods within particular company and project categories. Some fifteen different engineering design support methods were identified. Their use in each project was recorded and then mapped onto each project and company category. A normalization process was used to make clearer the relative degree of importance or dominance of each engineering design method within each company or project category. The normalization process involved dividing the total number of references to the use of a particular method by the total number of projects or companies within each category. In this way a normalized value of 1 would indicate universal use of this method within this particular category. By scanning across categories we can find methods that appear to have universal application and thus may well be judged to represent a core method to teach within an engineering design curriculum. The results of this analysis are summarized in Figures 1 and 2 revealing a number of interesting points. Firstly, Category 3 companies and projects utilise the widest range of engineering design methods. Secondly, companies and projects at the extremes of the category ranges seem to use the fewest methods of which a few well-known methods appear to dominate. However the most significant observation is the continued use and relative importance when compared to other design methods of physical modelling (indicated as Prototyping in the Design Methods) within the Category 3 and 4 companies and projects. This continued utilisation of physical models in this way is somewhat surprising given the rise of virtual prototyping technologies. This observation supports the view that industry values the contribution that physical models can make to the product development process. Young engineers need to therefore be aware of the techniques of physical modelling and the benefits to be gained from their use. 3 CASE STUDIES The following case studies are drawn from the Mechanical and Aerospace engineering disciplines. They seek to illustrate and explain how the above considerations of educational philosophy, converging research strands and involvement with industry combine in practice to provide a relevant and engaging educational framework.

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Figure 1. Categorisation of Participating companies.

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Figure 2. Categorisation of Project Types.

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Figure 3. Product Example – Rapid Prototyping. 3.1 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING DESIGN The following case study concerns small group project work undertaken by students in the final year of a Master of Engineering programme. The course is entitled Applied Design Systems and it aims to introduce students to design activity within a distributed design and engineering environment. The student groups use various software tools to mimic the environment experienced by a geographically distributed design team. Their challenge is to undertake the design of a product whilst sharing data and reporting progress within the software environment. The students are exposed to various design process models that they use to guide and manage their design activity. The products to be designed vary significantly and the physical model output is diverse (Fig.3). The common element is the integration of rapid prototype parts. These parts are initially created as virtual 3D models, normally using SolidEdge or SolidWorks software, then converted into stl.files that allow them to be rapidly prototyped. The 3D printing process is normally used simply because of the quicker turnaround time to make and deliver the models as well as the lower costs involved. A quick transition between virtual and physical model is the key to allowing the ideas of reflective practice to be implemented within an academic timetable. In this case the models are delivered within a week thus fitting the academic timetable. Without access to rapid prototyping (RP) this continuity of teaching could not be economically or practically achieved. The result is that the students have the opportunity to reflect upon their initial design decisions, to check issues of manufacturability and assembly. The accuracy achievable from the RP parts allows a realistic judgement to be made by the group. Thereafter design changes can be made that result in a move towards a final design that is further optimised in terms of performance, ease of use and manufacturability. The process of making the RP parts provides an opportunity for the student to also reflect on the accuracy of the data needed to secure the physical output desired (Fig.4). The students are therefore able to view their stl.files and to identify lack of integrity within the data of their model.

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Commercially available software permits viewing of the stl.file data and to provide data corrections to be applied. This experience reinforces in the student’s mind the need to learn to reflect across a range of

Figure 4. Rapid prototyping stl.files. conflicting issues. Not only are they engaged in evaluating the manufacturability they are also considering how crucial the accuracy of the manufacturing data is to ensure a quality product. This activity represents the professional ‘know-how’ exercised by experienced professional practitioners [8]. 3.2 AEROSPACE ENGINEERING DESIGN In the 1980’s the British aircraft industry changed its approach to the management of projects from a system where a project office would manage a project and rely on a series of specialist departments to support them to a more process oriented method, using systems engineering models, whose most outwardly visible signs were the introduction of multidisciplinary product teams. One of the problems with the old method was that the individual departments often had different priorities and projects would get uneven support. The change in the system was only made possible for complex designs by the electronic distribution of data giving instantaneous access to all involved in the project. In 1997 the Defence and Aerospace Foresight Panel emphasised the need for a system engineering approach if British industry was to remain competitive. The Royal Academy of Engineering recognised that the change in working practices also changed what was required of a chartered engineer and redefined their requirements in 1997 [9]. The result of this is that engineering degree courses are now judged against new criteria with more emphasis placed on the relevance to industry rather than on purely academic content. At the University of Glasgow it was realised that the students ought to be made aware of current working practices and that there ought to be a review to ensure that the degrees give students the skills required by industry. It was decided to introduce design courses into each year of the Master of Engineering five-year curriculum to be taught by both university lecturers and practitioners from a range of companies in the aerospace industry. The reaction of the students was favourable in terms of the content but it seems ironic that the main criticism was that there was not enough discussion involving the students.

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Reference [10] relates to some of the competences required to be effective as a design engineer - which is regarded as somewhat limited - and has been chosen to take a wider view of the requirements. The conceptualisation of a complex product as a system, and of the activities involved in design, manufacture and support as a process, is not widely understood, nor, in particular, is the way in which the product and process are inextricably linked. It is therefore essential to develop physical and virtual models initially, together with the concept of supply chains, not only in the production stage of the process, but also in the design and verification stage. The physical modelling will also contribute to understanding the life-cycle of the product, from concept design through detailed design, development, production and support, to disposal. The Design, Build and Test Case Study is in the second year of the MEng course at the University of Glasgow, whereby the aim of the project is to design, build and test a model of a glider that would sustain flight in a controlled manner. The Gliders (Fig. 5) are built, by student design groups, out of pieces of balsa wood of different thickness, using glue, scalpels and sand paper. Blu-tack is used in the later stage of the project to add weight and to perfect stability. The observation of one of the design groups was as follows:

Figure 5. Balsa Wood Models of Gliders.

Figure 6. Examples of Images of Physical Models of MAV. “Making our glider was a very enjoyable experience. As a team, we all learned the value of good planning and working as a team. Also, construction of the glider was a very

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interesting experience. Learning to work as a team, where we learned to listen to each person’s idea, was possibly the most valuable lesson.” In the final year of the undergraduate programme, students have to recognise that, after their graduation, they will face a research and design company, which develops new products and technology for the next generation of global appliances. These companies require design engineers educated to a good degree standard in an engineering/design discipline, who are capable of crating innovative design solutions and developing these into a commercial product, working as part of a team. They will be involved during the complete product life-cycle. This might include concept derivation, detail design, prototyping, validation, testing tooling, ensuring a smooth transition into the production process and support. Once in production, the final year project should reflect the above requirements. Some of the design case studies at the University of Glasgow provide an in-depth analysis of the micro air vehicle (MAV) concept, the focus being to investigate the challenges that hinder the design and the concepts, which are currently in development, in order to be capable of designing a feasible MAV that would be low-cost and capable of performing its identified mission goals. The current definition of MAV is that the vehicle must be designed in such as way as to be a semi-autonomous airborne vehicle, measuring less than six inches in any dimension (i.e. wing span and chord), weighing less than 100 grams that can accomplish flight mission at an affordable cost. Examples of MAV physical models [11, 12, 13] are in Figure 6. 4 CONCLUSION This paper has argued the need for engineering and design education to engage the professional know-how and judgement ability of students in parallel with the extension of knowledge and intellectual development. It has presented research evidence of the extent to which European Industry continues to value physical model making and testing in support of modern product development. Hence exposure to open-ended, design, make and test activities is identified as a very effective educational tool in support of the acquisition and development of professional judgement. It is also illustrated that the above can be achieved, within the economic and time constraints of the curriculum, with the provision of rapid design and manufacture technologies. It has been argued that the ability to provide rapid and tangible/physical feedback to students on the success, or otherwise, of their design process is an essential ingredient in the acquisition of professional artistry and judgement within students. Case study examples, taken from recent and current student work, have been used to illustrate the effectiveness of the above educational approach. In conclusion, this paper therefore places the recent ‘OpenDynamic-Design’ research within the philosophical framework established by Schon and provides examples of implementation within the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering disciplines at the University of Glasgow. It is argued that physical models support the concurrent optimisation of design and manufacturing processes and that they represent a generic tool to support engineering design education.

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REFERENCES [1] Schon, D.A., Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1987. [2] Green, G., Kennedy, P., Redefining Engineering Education: The Reflective Practice of Product Design Engineering, The International Journal of Engineering Education, 17, 1, 2001, pp.3-9. [3] McGown, A., Green. G., Rodgers, P.A., Using concept sketches to track design progress, 4th Design Thinking Research Symposium: Design Representation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, US, 1999, pp.89-108. [4] Blockley, D.I., Engineering from Reflective Practice, Research in Engineering Design, 4, 1992, pp.13-22. [5] Green, G., Gerson, P.M., Open Dynamic Design – towards a European model for an engineering design curriculum, in: N.P. Juster (Ed), Proceedings of 21st SEED Annual Design Conference and 6th National Conference on Product Design Education, Glasgow, 1999. [6] Nicolai, L. M., Viewpoint: An Industry View of Engineering Design Education, International Journal of Engineering Education, 14, 1998, pp.7-13. [7] Sanders, G., Neuijen, B., Bedrijfscultur: diagnose en beinvloeding, Assen: Van Gorcum Publishers. The Netherlands, 1999. [8] Green, G., Rapid design and manufacture – its role in the acquisition of professional artistry and judgement, Ed: Childs, P.R.N. and Brodhurst, E.K., Proceedings of the 22nd SEED Annual Design Conference and 7th National Conference on Product Design Education, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, 2000, pp.97-104. [9] Standards and Routes to Registration - SARTOR 3rd Edition, Engineering Council, UK, 1997. [10] Building Integrated Systems, The Report of the Defence and Aerospace Foresight Panel, Technology Working Party, IEEE, 1997. [11] Moore, C.J., Coldbeck, D.P., Smrcek, L., Aircraft Systems Engineering - A Teaching Approach, Engineering Design Seminar, Glasgow, 1998. [12] Michaelson, R., Steven, R., Update on Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle Research: On-going Work to Develop a Flapping Wing, Crawling “Entomopter”, 1998, http://www.avail.gtri.gatech.edu/RCM/RCM/Entomopter/EntomopterProject.html [13] BAE Systems, MicroSTAR Micro Air Vehicle, http://www.iews.na.baesystems.com/business/pdfs/01d49001.pdf [14] Micromechanical Flying Insect Project, http://robotics.eecs.Berkeley.edu/nrouf/mfi.html

T-LIGHTS TO TRIANGULATION Craig Whittet* Product Design Engineering, The Glasgow School of Art, United Kingdom. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT There is an opportunity for traditional craft practitioners and the designers of mass-manufactured products to utilise similar techniques, process’ and technologies in the pursuit of new product development (NPD). This potential approach is interesting when we apply the flexibility of new and emerging design, development and production tools. Many of these tools have a new value for the craft practitioner resulting in changes to their working practice and aesthetic. As an example: Relatively low-tech products can be designed and produced predominately with specialist software and prototyping tools, thus providing the designer with an overview and ability to manipulate the object without physically ‘touching’ the materials used for exploration. This paper discusses innovative practice using these tools through a potential project involving two distinct professions, Product Design Engineering and Ceramics and current Product Design Engineering student work. The paper sets out the objectives and achievements, the processes, practice and tools utilised and how two normally different fields were able to innovate in practice together. The initial findings from this collaboration suggest that the approach of utilising Advanced Design Tools could be applied across a greater range of disciplines, resulting in the greater discussion and removal of the traditional boundaries between them. Keywords: Reverse Modeling, Three Dimensional Data Capture, Form Manipulation 1 INTRODUCTION TO PHASE 1 The educational experience of a design student can be greatly enhanced by the introduction of Advanced Design Tools and exposure to other creative departments and schools. One must be careful in the selection of such tools and the preferred outcome *

Product Design Engineering, The Glasgow School of Art, United Kingdom. e. [email protected]

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when considering a project that will allow specific course learning outcomes to be met and new experiences to be explored and developed. Concerned as to the best method for introducing new technologies through department specific projects, this paper outlines a potential project that could be a vehicle for Product Design Engineering (PDE) and Ceramic Design (CD) students. The initial discussions that have taken place with the CD department, the potential to develop a creative process and use of relevant technology have been met with interest as to what the joint student experience could be. The outline plan is for CD students to work collaboratively with students of PDE. This joint project would be launched at either Year 1 or 2 of the Product Design Engineering and Ceramic Design Curriculum. To date this project has not been introduced to students as the working knowledge and application of the technology is still in development. This current knowledge, experience and the potential PDE/CD project will be outlined in more detail in this paper, and should be taken as an opportunity to discuss

Figure 1. Styrofoam Sketch Model, Examples of 3D Laser Scanned Sketch Model with CAD Detailing. Phase 1 and the potential of introducing Advanced Design Tools to two different cultures charged with the production of three-dimensional objects. 2 WHAT ELSE HAS BEEN DEVELOPED AND ACHIEVED THAT SUPPORTS PHASE 1 PDE students’ in the senior levels of the course (years 4 and 5) have utilized the Reverse Modeling technology in a creative and highly productive manner. The studio experience is outlined and discussed in more detail [1]. Examples of the application of the 3D Laser Scanner are: Plaster casts of human heads that are scanned. The 3D scans are then used to generate Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of a Support Collar for Motor Neuron Disease sufferers. This allows the student to quickly alter his design by not having to create a mesh from scratch of each individual head that would be used for the FEA. The FEA software Abacus was used to complete the analysis of neck brace and its interface to the human

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head. The interesting aspect of this particular project was the facility to scan different shaped heads and anaylse these and compare product features and details very quickly. A number of students have developed physical models and then digitally scanned the model to create a CAD file of the object. Certain students were concerned at their ability to ‘drive’ the CAD software in order to achieve the chosen aesthetic, tactile quality and character of their product. This has enabled the students to develop their product and apply their creativity and design process in a timely and appropriate fashion. A model that has been produced for scanning and the detailed CAD visual output is shown in figure 1. The introduction to the three dimensional data capture tools and software can be covered in approximately two hours (depending on form complexity). When you consider the time taken to develop skills to produce a CAD model of the complexity of a human head or the object shown in figure 1 it is an obvious route for a student to take. The development of CAD skills is not discouraged. On the contrary, CAD skills are developed as the files are imported into packages ranging from Rhino, Solidworks and Solidedge. At this stage the files are refined and detailed, these further developments can included part features and design iterations of component packaging. 3 PHASE 1, THE PROJECT PROPOSAL PDE and the CD department embrace parallel issues when developing products and artefacts. Both encounter the need to manufacture and produce three-dimensional objects with varying states of complexity and purpose. Both departments explain the principles of ‘object development’ at an early stage in their respective curriculums. The design of a slip cast mould in CD has many features that are similar to the basics that are covered in the early years of PDE, for example; draft angle, shrinkage, registration, cores and parting lines. The proposal is to base a project around the process of Slip Casting. However, the route to the manufacture of the slip cast product introduces 3D Solid and Surface Modeling, Reverse Modeling and Computer Aided Manufacture (CAM). Traditional techniques will also be covered, especially towards

Figure 2. Project Proposal Process and Stages of Development. the end of the process where the products are possibly glazed and then fired. Further to this, the CD department has recently invested in CAD workstations and is looking at the potential of using Rhino as a tool for ceramic design and craft exploration. An outline of the project proposal process and stages of development is shown in figure 2.

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4 WHAT IS THE PRODUCT AND WHY? The chosen product, a T-Light holder, is an inexpensive and relatively simple product, which has basic engineering requirements, functionality and scope for design exploration. This type of product also has qualities that can be ‘quantified’ and quickly realised by students early in their educational experience. Another plus point is that the product could be produced in quantities for sale. Many of the Craft based courses at The Glasgow School of Art produce objects in order to raise funds for student travel, exhibition and their own tools and resources. This experience and outcome is extremely valuable to the student and provides a sense of ownership and achievement. There is also a requirement to consider a product that has a balance of form, material exploration, scale, and engages the student and challenges participants from various disciplines. By introducing specialist tools that are relevant to both parties at this early stage it is hoped that this would foster an innovative application and deployment later in their studies, independent of whether these projects are staff or student directed. The immediate impact could be a higher level of confidence that young students would have in this area. Further to this, it’s obvious when you walk around an Art School that Departments have their own cultures and process. This area of investigation would potentially introduce students to the culture of their creative neighbours. One could ask the question; ‘How would the students adapt to and explore new territories and tools?’ For example: ‘How does a Product Design Engineer approach a brief that asks them to design a single component ceramic product or how does a Ceramic Designer approach a brief that does not promote the physical crafting of objects but ask them to develop form by the application of CAD/CAM?’ These challenges are part of the basis of the Phase 2 project. Phase 2 would also be an ideal opportunity for academic and technical staff to build upon their working knowledge of their specialism, especially when a ‘fresh’ pair of eyes is exposed to a new method of working. It would also provide a vehicle for crossschool collaborations and synergy, an area that GSA openly promotes in its Strategic Plan. Prior to the actual conceptualising of the product students are asked to analyse the TLight. This stage allows them to gain knowledge of the requirements and features. They will produce a CAD model of the T-Light; this will be used as a framework to design around. The fact that these objects are inexpensive also allows for experimentation without the fear of wasting valuable resources. We are aware that a T-Light is a simple form, but go back to when you first used a CAD package. What were the first things you constructed? More than likely these were primitive forms. After this stage, it is expected that students would generate a Focus Board [2] to provide a visual understanding of their product and market. This also allows the mixed teams to discuss individual design knowledge, direction and potential inspiration by producing a board that visually explains the direction the team will take. It is envisaged that the students will not physically build a model of their concept during the conceptualising stage. The peer and staff evaluation of this will rely upon digital imagery of the concepts. Each team member will vote to select the most appropriate concept for the brief. After the selection

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Figure 3. Image of Virtual Product, Initial CNC blank and a CNC blank that has been machined after 3D Laser Scanning Form Manipulation. of the chosen concept the students will be inducted to the use of a 4Axis CNC machine. Once again an inexpensive source/material is used at this stage. Styrofoam or Plaster is used for the machining of the object; the students have experience of these materials from modelmaking classes that have been timetabled at an earlier stage in the academic session. After the concept has been produced it is then scanned using a Roland LPX250 3D Laser Scanner. The experience at this stage is to introduce the cohort to Reverse Modeling (RM) of objects and non-contact manipulation of physical product features and details. The software products that have been used during the testing of a similar product are Rhino, Dr Picza (Roland) and Inus Rapidform; the initial virtual and physical output tests are shown in figure 3. The cohorts are introduced to software and the Rapidform ‘workbenches’ that include Scan, Polygon and Surface manipulation. The students can apply a range of filters and techniques to radically alter their design’s form and aesthetic. Although the software vendor develops these filters and ultimately controls the initial outcome, it is important to allow the teams to explore the potential to alter their design and experiment with the various supplied filters. One must be careful that a ‘software’ aesthetic is not developed at this stage, which is obviously driven by the software. For example: similar experiences can be witnessed when students are introduced to Image Manipulation filters in PhotoShop. When the team has decided upon the concept that they will progress to the next stage, they will be introduced to exporting a file format that can be used as the basis for another machined concept. However, it is also possible to export this file and use it to enable the production of a CAD file that can lead to the manufacture of slip cast plaster mould. This final stage of the scanning process is to generate a triangulated or meshed surface that can be imported into various CAD packages. To date the most success has been with IGES files for manipulation and STL files for machining. The 3D Scanner and Rapidform communicate by specific hardware manufacturer and software vendor formats. During the next stage the students will be introduced to the traditional production of a slip cast mould and will be expected to take this into account when they are developing the CAD file that will be machined. It would be sensible to produce a physical version of the ‘product’ prior to producing the mould. This would allow for the team to consider

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their product’s qualities in a physical sense before investing in the production of the mould. This project is not an introduction to the creation of plaster moulds as discussed in [3] although detailed information may be of value to the PDE and CD students, the main objective at this stage is to build an understanding and appreciation of mould design and related issues. However, the knowledge gained from this stage would be invaluable to the CD department if they were to consider this process of mould manufacture for future applications. The actual production stage of the project is possibly more applicable to the students of the CD department. To what extent a PDE student would utilize a slip cast mould in the latter stages of their educational experience and hopefully that of their professional career is questionable. At this stage the PDE student could be introduced to using the plaster mould for the production of a metal casting. The mould is likely to be destroyed in this process. This is not a major issue as the CAD file exists and the plaster is inexpensive and it is essential that the students gain confidence in their working knowledge of mould design by creating a feasible physical outcome in ceramic prior to experimenting with other materials and changing tool details. 5 CONCLUSION The current research is not complete and the RM and CAD/CAM experimentation is ongoing, therefore it is too early to draw valid conclusions. However, the experience of the PDE students and the value that they attach to this new method of working suggest that there is a valid reason to develop a project that covers a variety of areas that are related to Advanced Design Tools, their relevance to traditional craft techniques and the industry of NPD. The outcome of this project could also be changed to suit individual departments or collaborative and commercial ventures. It is essential that a project of this nature does not exclude students or intimidate those that are unfamiliar with the territory that includes existing and emerging technology. This technology should be taken as an inherent element of the students’ educational experience. There is also scope to develop projects that incorporate Rapid Prototyping and embrace the latest industrial buzzword of ‘Mass Customisation’. The 3D scanner can be used to scan existing objects, moulds and alter these depending on the particular requirements of the design. This is possibly another topic for discussion and the basis of Phase 3. REFERENCES: [1] Aksnes, D. Developing a student-centred studio culture for effective learning and teaching in Product Design Engineering. Proceedings, IE&PDE04, pp383-390 [2] Macdonald, A. S., and Jordan, P. W. (1998) ‘Human Factors and Design: Bridging the Communication Gap’ In Contemporary Ergonomics 1998 pp264-268. ed Hanson, M.A., Taylor and Francis, London. ISBN 0-7484-0811-8 [3] Coole, T. J. Antunes Simoes, J.F.C.P. Cheshire, D.G. and Ruy Mesquita, M.D. Analysis of CNC machining technology in production of plaster moulds. British Ceramic Transactions 2001

CLAYSTATION - DESIGN MODELLING AND CREATIVITY Alex Milton* Head of Furniture, Product and Interior Design Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh. Ben Hughes** Course Director of MA Industrial Design, University of the Arts London, London. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper explores the use of playful, collaborative design modelling as a catalyst for creativity. Play is an unavoidable and essential element in the design process, but one which is largely ignored. The dry, reductionist view of design that seeks to promote the designer as an objective, emotionless entity struggles when looking for explanations of recent design trends. Traditional design methodologies and disciplines focus on design realisation. The paper argues that the playful use of symbolic, conceptual and physical models is an essential part of the design process, and one that is ignored at great cost. This is illustrated through a series of massparticipation creative educational workshops entitled Claystation. Claystation is a mass-participation format for creative experimentation. The Design Transformation Group (DTG) devised it as a means of encouraging normally passive audiences in active participation. It is heavily influenced by theories of play, which the creators believe is key in the development of creative thought. The paper will display and discuss the design methodologies developed by the group and employed within its cross-disciplinary workshops and events, and begin to explore the role of an audience in the appreciation of design practice, theory and thinking. Suggesting that sole authorship is not always everything, and that design creativity can be explored through the playfully ephemeral. *

Head of Furniture, Product and Interior Design, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, T: +44 (0)131 221 6132 E: [email protected] ** Course Director of MA Industrial Design Central Saint Martins College of Art, University of the Arts London, London. T:+44 (0)207 514 7111, E: [email protected], E: [email protected]:, http://www.claystation.org/

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Keywords: play element in design, modelling, participation, creativity, user-complicity. 1 INTRODUCTION - DESIGNS TRANSFORMATION During the 1990s the blurring of design specialisms, the merging of digital media, and fluid patterns of employment transformed the design industry. Opening new opportunities for designers capable of communicating with a wide range of specialists, adaptable to new technologies, and above all able to conceptualise and creatively respond to commercial and cultural change. In response to this paradigm shift, a number of designers and educators founded the Design Transformation Group (DTG). The DTG operates as a distributed design collective consisting of interdisciplinary designers, who regularly collaborate with other practitioners such as architects, artists and sociologists. By utilising new design methodologies and new media the group set out to transcend physical, ideological and cultural boundaries. The philosophy of the DTG is rooted in the belief that 21st Century designers should be capable of crossing traditional disciplinary barriers and be able to respond creatively to a volatile commercial and cultural environment. Accordingly, the group aims to promote new thinking in design through symbolic, virtual, physical and scenario modelling. This new paradigm offers greater opportunity for more broadly based design interventions and debates than is typical in design discipline-specific methodologies. The psychologist Carl Jung tells us: “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” [1] This argument seems fairly natural and familiar to designers, although the play element of their work may be ‘underplayed’ in the professional context. This paper attempts to explore the notion of creative design modelling and introduce a series of projects that attempt to engage audiences for design in creative, playful, physical design activity and creation. Traditionally design aims to realise a solution through an adherence to a proven discipline specific design methodology. From brief to practical outcome, realised through professional specification and detailing, and an understanding of specialist production technologies. By contrast, design modelling offers a useful and practical way to describe design as a process of reconceptualisation that, for example, may transpose physical modelling in clay to environmental critique, collaborative interaction to diagrammatic analysis, conceptual scenarios to graphic imagery. Thus, the outcomes of design modelling may be both concrete and abstract. Thus, the aims of the Group are to interrogate, re-interpret and re-envisage material culture through interdisciplinary design modelling. Exhibiting their output to the general public. 2 DESIGNERSBLOCK One of the problems of the designer is how to effectively engage their audience who are more comfortable with consuming design in the same way as art – at a comfortable

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distance. This is one of the issues that has been tackled recently by the London-based organisation Designersblock. Since 1994 their events have been a showcase and proving ground for up and coming design talent in a variety of disciplines. It has emerged as the most influential and exciting forum for the promotion of innovative work that it has earned a worldwide reputation. Exhibitions have so far been held in Milan, Seoul, Barcelona and Tokyo, as well as London, with founders Piers Roberts and Rory Dodd being brave enough to experiment with the format and presentation of design. Creating events that are in the process of constant reinvention, whilst maintaining a core philosophy of pioneering the interests of the designers it exhibits. As a result, Designersblock have taken the initiative to start to innovate in collaborative design. They have deliberately introduced elements into their shows that are intended to draw their audience in and encourage participation and debate. Along with the promotion of designers in their exhibitions, Design-ersblock have an agenda to try and engage people with design thinking at a deep level. Co-founder Piers Roberts explains the choice of title for their events: “The name reflects where we are at in the sense of overcoming blocks and obstacles that stand in the way of progress in design and design thinking… I am interested in the interaction with place in particular, and offering spaces outside the conventional where people can engage with design at a new level [2].” During the 2003 Milan Designersblock, there was a park bench exhibited alongside a variety of engraving and carving tools. Visitors were encouraged to gouge names and messages in the chair during the course of the event. During the 2003 London exhibition a giant paint-by- numbers picture was hung in the entrance, which was gradually coloured in by visitors. At the same event the Design Transformation Group were invited to present an interactive installation, titled “Claystation,” (Figure 1) at which visitors’ creative energies were focused towards the creation of a giant, narrative-free claymation film. 3 CLAYSTATION Over the duration of the exhibition visitors were encouraged to purchase a lump of Plasticine and to spend as long as they wanted carving, sculpting, and forming it into whatever they desired. The group consciously

Figure 1. Claystation 2003.

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chose plasticine over other media because of its ease of use and evocative childhood qualities and design industries qualities. Plasticine is highly redolent of childhood, and synonymous with the unfettered playful experimentation and modelling of youth. It is also a material used in a more refined manner by the highly specialised Car and Product Design industry, having been introduced as a modelling technique by Harley Earl, the originator of the studio system, mass obsolescence and first Head of Design at General Motors. The resulting objects were placed on a ‘stage’ where their creators could manipulate them and interact with others’ design creations. A camera mounted in the ceiling of the venue recorded these objects’ positions every 30 seconds. These were then compiled into a film of the whole event. With a complete absence of narrative, or constraint in expression, participants were completely free to experiment with the format. Piers Roberts observed: “Claystation fits our model of interaction as it is an invitation for people to cross a bridge where they can involve themselves with design ideas and processes. Play is an important element in these processes and one that is a strong motivating force when attempting to get people involved.” [2] Over 300 visitors participated in this event over the course of the exhibition, creating a spectacle that was made into a film lasting more than 8 minutes that revealed emergent design collaborations and playful group working. No attempt was made to record individual visitor’s contributions, but most stayed for between 20 and 40 minutes, with many returning after having visited the other parts of the exhibition. The film was deliberately left in an un-edited state, and, with the exception of the addition of a soundtrack, was left to unfold as it happened. As a result there are short bursts of plot line, but these quickly degenerate and decay as fresh participants take over. The subject, techniques and narrative of the animation could be studied endlessly, but the key lesson is one of how active engagement in an environment previously reserved for contemplation may be facilitated and encouraged. There is no doubt that a more beneficial appreciation of the experience was achieved. The format was shown to be versatile and engaging within the context of a design exhibition, and displayed sufficient promise for further development. 4 REMODELLING LONDON ‘The permanence of even the most frivolous item of architecture and the instability of the metropolis are incompatible. In this conflict the metropolis is, by definition, the victor; in its pervasive reality architecture is reduced to the status of a plaything.’ Rem Koolhaas [3] Following the success of Claystation at Designersblock 2003, the Design Transformation Group returned the following year with a new device for encouraging visitors to get involved in design. The title of the event was ‘Remodelling London:’ On a scale model of the city, the format took on an architectural spin as the authors invited wannabe Fosters and Wrens to indulge their fantasies in the creation of a new London cityscape. Designers, Architects and the general public interacted and collaboratively produced a symbolic redesigning of the city, its infrastructure, products, services and iconography.

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Figure 2. Claystation - Remodelling London. Each participant paid £1 for a lump of plasticine, and a random square (out of 100 squares) on a 6’ map of Central London (square determined by throwing two ten-sided dice). The group was interested in exploring a collaborative mapping of the city, enabling the individual concepts, narratives and designs of over 400 participants to contaminate each other in an interesting way, to create a symbolic cityscape. Remodelling London was an evolving interactive installation, dealing with architecture, design, urbanism, society and spectacle. It’s democratic unedited nature with uncensored public interaction didn’t aim to present a unitary vision of the cities development; rather it uncovered a plurality of ideas and approaches - ideas that are inevitably circumstantial, conflictual, ephemeral and above all playful. The use of stop frame film animation to capture the event highlighted the transient nature of the installation as a cityscape was transformed by the collective interdisciplinary will of the participants. The physical and dynamic design transformations of the model city were affected by the undoubted relationship between the real and virtual. The real represented by interpretations of the existing architectural fabric of London such as the London Eye. While the personal visions, statements and experiments of participants provided an imaginary past, present and future of London, a virtual reality redolent of the situationist mapping of Debord (See Figure 2). This phenomena was discussed by Paul Virillo in his book The Lost Dimension, where he contends that ‘direct and mediated perceptions merge into an instantaneous representation of space and the surrounding environment.’ [4]

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The event presented a psychological city made anew with the accumulated traces of physical matter and the debris of previous designers, of what has been and what is yet to come. The contested squares that made up Claystations city map became an important domain for challenging the traditional method of urban planning. It projects a future form of collaborative design, that engages architects, designers, inhabitants and visitors alike in the construction of democratic design structures and identities based on crossing boundaries. Claystations cityscape was constantly changing, reinventing and renovating itself as the cross-disciplinary participants interacted with the map, models and each other. The transient nature of the claymation cityscape has parallels with Koolhaas retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York. In which he claims Manhattan was an architectural laboratory where ‘each block is covered with several layers of phantom architecture in the form of past occupancies, aborted projects and popular fantasies that provide alternative images to city that exists.’ A mythical place where ‘the testing of a metropolitan lifestyle and its attendant architecture could be pursued as a collective experiment in which the entire city became a factory of man-made experience, where the real and the natural cease to exist.’ Rem Koolhaas [5]. The Claystation event aimed to celebrate the contemporary urban condition, transient, shifting, expanding and remodelled. A microcosm of the city, Claystations over 400 participants conceptual design models and provocations argue to be included in future debates on the City and adopted as a viable collaborative design methodology. Initial evidence of this has been the integration of the Claystation projects outcomes into the research conducted by Agora a three-year multi-disciplinary European initiative that analyses and develops design elements for enhancing pedestrian movement. Its results will lead to ‘soft design solutions’ that aim to positively affect citizens’ quality of life and make European cities more environmentally sustainable. The authors have subsequently been invited to produce further Claystation style events exploring creative cross-disciplinary design. Most notably ‘Plas TV’ at the Milan Furniture Fair, ‘Remodelling Glasgow’ at The Lighthouse, Scotland’s Centre for Architecture, Design and the City, and the creation of an educational and interactive new device for the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) entitled ‘My Chair’. The installation aims to complement the Scottish showing of the Jerwood Prize for Furniture, by enabling visitors to visualise, model and exhibit their own chair designs. The groups work has been acknowledged by receiving a top nomination at the prestigious INDEX: design awards, and will be exhibited at the Copenhagen 2005 event. Further information on the projects can be found at www.claystation.org. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Thanks to Cris de Groot, all the members of DTG, the MA Industrial Design students at Central Saint Martins and all those who participated in Claystation 2003 and 2004.

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REFERENCES [1] Ackerman D., Deep Play, Random House International, New York, 2000, pp.121. [2] Piers Roberts quoted from interview conducted with the authors, March 2004. [3] Koolhaas R., S,M,L,XL, 010, Rotterdam, 1995, pp.22-27. [4] Virillo P., The Lost Dimension. Semiotext(e), New York, 1991, pp.30-31. [5] Koolhaas R., Delirious New York, 010, Rotterdam, 1994, pp.9-10.

MODEL MAKING TECHNIQUES AS A TEACHING TOOL IN PRODUCT DESIGN ENGINEERING Alejandra Velásquez-Posada* Product Design Engineering Department, EAFIT University, Colombia. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The scope of this paper is the description of techniques for building 3D physical models, and how design engineering skills can be developed, by considering the product design process as a sequence of steps to be taken by the engineer, in order to achieve communication, visualization and representation of the design ideas. According to the above, during the early phase of the design process, such “cottage type” model making techniques allow the designer to compenetrate in a more effective way with the idea and study of the product during the conceptual phase, by using this representation system. These class techniques, still unknown in many universities, have been structured by the author and improved throughout several Models courses, during a 5 year teaching experience at EAFIT University (Medellín, Colombia). Besides the technical aspect, this paper will describe its effectiveness on behalf of design education. Keywords: 3D models, mock-ups, sketch modeling, visualization, form generation. 1 INTRODUCTION The design process can be described as a sequence of steps, which starts by clarifying the task, identifying the needs, choosing a concept, making some sketches, drawing the idea through renders, making 3D models and detailing design, before building the prototype [1]. At the Product Design Engineering program, the students learn through the methodology of “learning by doing”, and this kind of teaching tool, such as model making, gives them skills to solve spatial problems. During the early phases, 3D-

*

Product Design Engineering Department, EAFIT University. Medellín, Colombia, Phone: (574) 2619500 ext. 352, Fax: (574) 2664284, e-mail: [email protected]

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sketching (as a representation system) stimulates visual thinking and innovation and increases awareness, resulting in the ability of shaping new forms and understanding their structure. Studies by McGown, Green and Rogers [2] show that digital tools alone are not enough and software programs are less effective during the creative phase of the design process; computational models allow engineering analysis in later phases. A product design engineer has to perform both, computational and physical models, because they are complementary. The analysis-synthesis-evaluation process can be experienced through expressive tools such as drawing sketches, rendering with markers, building 3D physical models (or what some people call sketch-models), drawing virtual models and constructing real objects through rapid prototyping, among others, being the main purpose of all, the communication of the designed idea. Models is a course offered by the Product Design Engineering program for undergraduate students at EAFIT University, which provides them with tools for building 3D physical models while teaching them model making techniques using simple materials. 2 THREE-DIMENSIONAL REPRESENTATION According to Rowena Reed Kostellow [3] who taught Industrial Design at Pratt Institute for more than fifty years, the three-dimensional space sketches and exercises let the students see the form in space and understand the relationships that space creates, helping them to become aware of the negative space between the positive forms. Throughout the space analysis, the student is able of developing spatial awareness, improving the ability to control and use space, as a design element. During the design process it is very important to take the idea “out of the paper” for visualizing it better and specially for making it tangible. Here is one of the biggest differences between the computational and the physical model, the virtual model lacks materiality, making it impossible to touch it or to use it, and a realistic comparison with the existing products, such as placing the model on a store shelf, is not possible. Between the physical and the computational models – which do not exclude from one another – there is a complementary aspect, by building the 3D physical model and then digitalizing it, with the aid of laser and digital technology. 3D physical models can be seen as merely the first stage in the exploration of a product idea or form (conceptual design), but they can also be used for presenting product ideas to a client through simulation of real materials (embodiment design), due to the material chosen for the construction of the 3D model and the techniques used for covering its surfaces. The construction of 3D physical models has some advantages for the product design engineer, such as: • Visualizing design concepts • Communicating ideas • Stimulating creativity • Aiding understanding • Identifying real fabrication difficulties • Allowing form modifications

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And most important of all, it is a tool used for product form generation. The Models course has a specific approach in design education, helping the students to make the intellectual link between: what is on their mind, what they are able to draw and what they are capable of building. Such idea is supported on Wim Muller’s book, in which he says “During the thinking process, drawing skills are used to prime creative powers. The visual thinking process cannot, as yet, be simulated by using computers. In this process, the sensory and intellectual powers of the designer become one indivisible whole. It is precisely within this context that we value the contribution of the expressive courses” [4]. 3 MODEL MAKING TECHNIQUES Besides the current rapid prototyping techniques for fabricating these “appearance models”, in which the construction is made by a machine that literally builds the given form (by a virtual model) in a given medium; other model making techniques are available for 3D-sketching, i.e. hand made modeling. This “cottage type” has proved to be a very effective technique during the early design phase, and has become a powerful teaching tool. It is clear that the purpose of the prototype is for physical testing, and the purpose of the model is for representation. Soft materials, like paper, card board and wood, among others, are used, and their handling techniques are easy to teach, with a methodology developed throughout the author’s experience. Among the main features of this model making system are: Originality, low material cost, availability and sustainable materials, as well as minimum required infrastructure. Moreover, a “realistic impression” and “high fidelity” are the expressive qualities that characterize the obtained models. Some examples are shown on the figure below. Each exercise is an experience, letting students to “insight” the product forms, shapes, materials and textures through discovery and revelation. As a reproduction of existing products and copying their volumes and shapes, these models are used as a representation system, allowing the student to gain control, order, organization, continuity and awareness of space, while building the idea.

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Figure 1. High fidelity models made by students. All imaginable forms are the result of dimensional, additive and subtractive transformations. Additive transformation is when a form can be considered to be a composition (an addition) of basic forms. The subtractive, is the result of a transformation obtained by removing or subtracting parts (a cut) from a form, and generally the result is a more complex form than the initial one [5]. For building 3D physical models, both approaches are used in the Models course. An overview is provided in the chart below.

Table 1. Techniques classification. Process

Characteristic

Material

Technique

Adding material

Empty volumes defined by their planar faces

Paper tape

Glue layer by Household layer of the plastic paper tape products Revolved Bottles surfaces Descriptive geometry, Kitchenware templates and agglomerating material Serial planes, Workshop agglomerated or tools separated by regular gaps

Thin card board Thick card board

Solid volumes made MDF from agglomerating material

Product

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Polyurethane Carving foam Balsa or soft Carving wood

Toys Vehicle parts

4 TEACHING STRATEGY Models, as an expressive course, is “one of its kind”. It is carried out through theoretical and practical classes and has been specifically designed to fulfill the requirements of both, the Colombian students and the Colombian society. Throughout the experience of each exercise, the students gain the necessary inner discipline to carry out assigned problems or design situations, allowing a creative expression of their own, training them to become familiar with the principles of 3D modeling, and last but no least, by achieving the designer’s primary role as a form giver. 4.1 METHODOLOGY Such course provides different experimental activities, in which “learning by doing” is the best way to improve knowledge, and since practice is the only way a skill can be developed, engineering is based on logical and reasoning processes. These three principles are the key for the “step wise method” transmitted to the students, as follows: 1. Product selection 2. Shape redesign by means of 3D-sketching 3. Mentally visualized product break-down 4. 2D-drawings for each product part (blue prints if required) 5. Technique selection according to product characteristics 6. Model construction using the selected technique 7. Model finishing to simulate product material, textures and features To achieve product architecture, as Mike Baxter [6] explains: “Embodiment design must now explore the arrangement of the elements of that product as a first step towards breaking the product down into components which can be individually manufactured”. 4.2 DIGITAL MATERIAL There is some digital material – created and developed by the author – available for the course. Prior to product selection, the students must obtain written instructions for each technique at the virtual platform EAFIT INTERACTIVA (http://interactiva.eafit.edu.co/), before returning to the workshop to begin model construction. (See figure 2). 4.3 MODEL CONSTRUCTION The first exercise, when using glue paper tape, consists of copying an existing product surface. Clay is often used to add new volumes and shapes, enhancing formal and visual

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transformations. The students can use both surface kinds, the original and the transformed one, as shown in figure 3. Another exercise is made out of card board, by using descriptive geometry, templates or material agglomeration. In figures 4 and 5 the technique of card board templates is illustrated.

Figure 2. Written instructions in “PDF”.

Figure 3. Glue paper tape models.

Figure 4. Card board templates.

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Figure 5. Card board models. 5 CONCLUSIONS It could be said, that the achieved results in the Design Project Courses, by using a unique type of 3D models - during the conceptual design phase - are very satisfactory. Engineering students, who used these models, accomplished better results in their final projects. Product design engineers have used physical models as a crucial means to create, test and implement their ideas, on the academic field. There is also the possibility for them, to use these model making techniques on the professional field. At the end, it is possible to mix and combine all techniques to obtain a miscellaneous model. The student can gain a better design control by being aware of the relationships between shapes and volumes of the product forms, achieving form-making skills through the exercises that contribute to simultaneously develop hand and mind, when experiencing several degrees of complexity demanded by each situation. REFERENCES [1] Cross, Nigel. Métodos de Diseño: Estrategias para el diseño de productos. Editorial Limusa S.A. Grupo Noriega Editores, México, 1999, pp. 29-42. [2] McGown, Alistair; Green, Graham and Rodgers, Paul A. Visible ideas: Information patterns of conceptual sketch activity. Design Studies, Volume 19, Issue 4, October 1998, pp. 431-453. [3] Reed Kostellow, Rowena. Elements of Design. Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 2002, pp. 96-118. [4] Muller, Wim. Order and Meaning in Design. Lemma Publishers, Utrecht, 2001, pp. 33. [5] Muller, Wim., op. cit. pp. 63-70, pp. 277-286. [6] Baxter, Mike R. Product Design. Stanley Thornes Publishers Ltd, London, 1995, pp. 271-298.

PROTOTYPING WITH DIGITAL MEDIA Jose Carlos Teixeira* Department of Design and Management, Parsons School of Design, New School University, New York. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Increasingly, prototypes are the key platforms applied by designers and corporations for managing the risk involved in innovating. In addition, digital media have (1) speeded-up cyclical creative processes, (2) multiplied the range of possible solutions to be explored by designers and design teams, and (3), increased human capacity to experiment with new concepts through trial and error. These forces are pressing designers to learn new skills and change their traditional processes of designing. As design schools are responsible for educating this new generation of designers, changes on traditional design methods courses become paramount. To address this challenge, this paper proposes some new teaching strategies that encourage design students to embrace digital technologies as media to design new concepts through rapid prototyping. Keywords: prototype, digital media, innovation 1 INTRODUCTION The goal of this paper is to call the attention of design educators to the unique characteristics of digital prototyping and the pre-requisites paramount to fully exploring and exploiting its capabilities for managing the process of innovation. Product innovation is a very risky business because new markets and new consumer behaviors need to be created to make a new product successful. However, the trade off is that product innovation can be a very rewarding business. In order to manage the riskrewards trade-off, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and corporations tend to adopt strategies that rely on simulation models – prototypes – to test new concepts and learn more about the unknown. *

Parsons School of Design - New School University, Department of Design and Management, 66 Fifth Avenue, room 829 - New York, NY 10011, Tel. +1 (212) 229 5391 ext. 4394, Fax +1 (212) 647 8885, Email: [email protected]

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These strategies allow innovators (i) to lower the cost of implementing a new idea through simulation, (ii) to reduce the risk of failure by adopting a development process that is flexible in incorporating new discoveries, and (iii) to speed-up research, development and implementation by anticipating problems yet to emerge. For these reasons, prototypes have become a popular technique and strategy for managing the innovation process [1]. Given the importance of prototypes for managing innovation, as well as the rise of new prototyping capabilities such as digital media, the challenge for design educators is to teach design students - future design professionals - to think within, create and communicate through, and manage these capabilities. The deployment of digital prototypes in the innovation process demands design educators to prepare students to understand and take advantage of these new capabilities. The goal is not only to teach each student how to use digital prototypes to foster innovative concepts, but even more challenging is to teach students how to work collaboratively and use digital prototypes as a dynamic shared space to facilitate the creative process; digital prototypes can be most valuable to the creative process when promoting creative collaboration, improvisation, and negotiation. Therefore, the challenge for design educators is to teach students to work through collaboration by using digital prototypes – a stable external environment with unique characteristics such as speed, flexibility, and scalability - as sources of collaborative thinking. 2 PROTOTYPES AND DIGITAL MEDIA According to Dr. William Calvin, a well-respected neurobiologist and author of “The Cerebral Symphony” [2] and the “The Ascent of Mind” [3], people have an innate ability to build scenarios and foresee the future. Humans are capable of planning ahead, and take account of numerous, diverse and extraordinary contingencies.” Some people are great at simulating new concepts. Others need practice, but this difference in proficiency has nothing to do with people’s character. It’s the result of differences in training and experience. Moreover, this capacity can be and has been augmented by the deployment of technologies. According to Edward T. Hall, humans are capable of cultivating what he termed “extensions of his organism” [4]. By developing his extensions, man has been able to improve or specialize various functions. For example, the wheel is an extension of the legs and feet, the telephone extends the voice, and the computer extends part of the brain. Thus, based on Calvin and Hall’s ideas, it is possible to define prototypes as extensions of our innate ability to foresee the future. Prototypes are the shared space (common language) that enables and stimulates interactions among participants. They are the modeling medium through which we externalize our abstract concepts about alternative futures. As such, they deliver a sense of “being there” and enhance humans’ capacity to envision how the future can be different. However, different prototypes can augment in different ways our ability to build scenarios. For example, developments in digital media have brought entirely new capabilities for prototypes. Digital media is a technology through which information knowledge, facts, graphics, images, video, or sound - is developed, distributed/shared and stored in bits (digital), as opposed to atoms (analog). When compared to analog media

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(i.e., paper photographs), digital media (i.e., pictures composed of pixels) can be characterized as being more quickly transmitted, more conducive to growing and changing in a continuous and organic way (upgradeable and scalable), and easier to exchange and mix in terms of its contents [5]. The combination of prototypes and digital media creates digital prototypes, which can be defined as the shared space in which all information is developed, shared and stored in bits. This “common language” enables virtual improvisation and stimulates fast, scalable, and mixable interactions among participants. It is the modeling medium through which we can quickly externalize, update, combine and upgrade our abstract concepts regarding alternative futures. Therefore, if traditional analog prototypes extended our ability to foresee the future, digital prototypes can further extend this ability. When compared to analog prototypes, digital prototypes exponentially enhance the brain’s capacity to think ahead. 3 BRAIN POWER AND DIGITAL PROTOTYPES When our innate ability to build scenarios and foresee the future is powered by digital prototypes the process of prototyping takes on a new dimension. Prototyping is the process of deliberately building alternative worlds to think in. We freeze a thought or idea in words and images and create a new concept upon which we direct our critical attention. Instead of merely having thoughts about the world, we can manipulate, discuss, critique, and refine our ideas to reconfigure the given world into new ones. Therefore, prototyping is the process through which we solve problems and explore alternative futures through several ideation cycles. The prototyping process can either happen through rigorous and well-defined interactions or improvised collaboration between individuals and technological capabilities. Either way, prototyping is a common way of envisioning, evaluating and refining new concepts. The results of this process - prototypes/new concepts - often depend heavily on the complex ways individuals and their brains cooperate with and depend upon various special properties of the media and technologies with which they continually interact. Andy Clark states in his book “Natural-Born Cyborgs” [6] that “we tend to think of our biological brains as the point source of the whole final content, but if we look a little more closely what we often find is that the biological brain participated in some potent and iterated loops through the cognitive technological environment.” These loops can now be seen, in many cases, in the use of the stable external environment, as sources of complementary capacities or, as described by Hall, as extensions to those capacities provided by the biological brain. The brain’s role in the prototyping process is crucial and specific, but is not the whole story. In fact, the brain’s true role is to act as a mediating factor in a wide variety of complex and iterated processes that continually loop between brain, body, and technological environment. Therefore, when the prototyping process is mediated by digital prototypes all small steps throughout the process - such as brainstorming, critiquing, rearranging, negotiating, and producing - are deeply enabled by specific properties of digital prototypes, such as speed, scalability, and flexibility. This leads us to argue that digital prototypes can (i) speed up cyclical creative processes, which

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consequently (ii) multiply the range of possible solutions to be explored; and (iii) increase human capacity to experiment with new concepts through trial and error. Next, we explain how digital prototypes contribute to these radical transformations in the quality of the prototyping process and conclude by presenting some of the implications of the prototyping process. 3.1 SPEED Creativity happens through multiple ideation cycles of analysis and synthesis. The creative process generates innovative concepts and products that can solve existing problems or produce alternative proposals for existing situations. In addition, it can be defined as a social process mediated by prototypes. It involves not only the input of creative individuals and groups through a modeling medium (prototypes), but also critiques from social members engaged in the production, consumption and discussion of a particular problem. To help explain this process, assume that there are thousands of individuals and teams at work, each with a unique solution for a problem. All of these individuals and/or organizations address their work to the field – the set of sponsors, consumers, critics, and the like. Their solutions circulate, influence, and refine each other. Of the thousands of solutions and concepts, a few will emerge and be selected as worthy of attention by the field. Of this smaller circle of solutions, even fewer become so highly valued that they will ultimately exert some effect on the problem under discussion. This cycle happens not only once, but several times, continually refining its output [7]. The process illustrates that creativity lies not only in the head (or hand) of creative individuals and teams, but also in the head of sponsors, producers, consumers, critics, and the like, as well as in the prototypes used to facilitate the process. If prototypes are based on an analog medium, a great amount of time during the creative process is spent “transporting” ideas and information back and forth between stakeholders. Unlike analog prototypes, digital prototypes can be transmitted at the speed of light, reducing circulation time to close to zero. As each feedback loop between creative members and its critics becomes shorter, the creative process is able to accommodate more cycles while still finishing at the same time. 3.2 VARIATION One of the unique properties of digital technology is that bits are much easier, faster and cheaper to combine than atoms. With no constraints limiting the activity of mixing and matching ideas, designers can develop multiple alternatives based on the same original idea. Digital technology thus enables designers to play with an unlimited combination of possibilities for any single idea. Every new idea developed through digital technology can be instantly replicated, modified, saved and retrieved. Therefore, with digital prototypes, many aspects of the creative process previously accomplished by the brain, such as memorizing, can now be outsourced to the digital prototype. Freed from having to memorize multiple alternatives, the brain can concentrate on critical activities such as comparison, evaluation, and ideation. The time and energy spent on learning a few solutions now can be spent multiplying, comparing,

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and editing several alternatives. When compared to analog prototypes, digital prototypes can exponentially increase designers’ capacity to develop and explore additional alternatives. 3.3 SELECTIVE RETENTION The fact that digital prototypes can speed up the process of developing innovative ideas and expand the number of variations has nothing to do with defining the quality of the innovative concept. Randomness, powered by speed and quantity, has no direct correlation with quality. Based on Darwin’s ideas on evolution, William Calvin states that, “randomness by itself cannot produce such elaborate results, for all the useful reasons having to do with a roomful of monkeys typing a page of Shakespeare - it would take more time than the universe has existed (15 billion years) to arrive at that particular combination of words” [8]. Therefore, speed and quantity can only relate indirectly to quality through the addition of a new element to this equation. This concept is called selective retention. Speed allows new concepts to be created faster, thus increasing the productivity of multiple alternative concepts. This is where speed and quantity relates to quality. After multiple alternative concepts are created, they are critiqued and compared to each other. Best fits are then filtered by judging concepts in accordance with selection criteria. The principle is that experimentation, which is the process of comparing and testing new concepts against contingencies, has a higher chance of producing desirable results if the solution can be selected from a wider range of alternatives and if these alternatives are tested against multiple conditions. Moreover, this process based on variation and selection is a way to anticipate problems yet to emerge; the goal being to detect and eliminate errors before they surface. Based on this understanding of the trial-and-error evolutionary process, it is possible to argue that the unique characteristics of digital media can effectively contribute to the enhancement of this process, and consequently to the quality of its outcomes. This is because digital technology improves not only the processing capability of prototypes to save and retrieve ideas, but also the speed of contrasting variations against selection criteria through multiple cycles. In this case, speed and quantity are two critical ingredients in generating variation, which increases the chances of high quality selective retention throughout the random trial-and-error selective process. According to Calvin’s explanation, “we are always talking about randomness plus selective retention of some sort, and repeated cycles of this back-and-forth two step dance serving to gradually shape up the unlikely” [9]. Calvin continues by saying that “It is the combination of randomness and selection that is so powerful, not just selection, not just randomness. They are inseparable sides of the same coin” [10]. Therefore, digital prototypes can potentially improve the “quality” of the final concept or product; quality referring to the fact that the final solution will be the result of (i) selecting the best fit from a broader spectrum of alternatives (due to the possibility of having additional ideation cycles); (ii) extensively exploring and testing uncertainties; and (iii) anticipating and trouble-shooting unknown hazards, thus avoiding potential future problems.

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4 DESIGN EDUCATORS’ CHALLENGE This paper presents the characteristics of digital prototypes and discusses their critical role in the process of developing innovation. The goal of this discussion is to call the attention of design educators to the importance of teaching future design professionals how to work collaboratively while taking advantage of the unique characteristics of digital prototypes in the process of innovation. The intention is to help design educators understand that digital prototypes substantially change the way team members collaborate during the creative process. This change requires new approaches to courses that teach future designers the process of innovation. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a teaching approach that makes digital prototypes a necessity rather than an option or a recommendation. This concept is based on the idea that educators need to artificially produce a situation in which digital prototypes become “sine qua non”; essentially, a situation that can only be managed by taking advantage of the unique characteristics of digital prototypes. This proposal is based on my experience as a faculty member for undergraduates in the department of Design and Management at Parsons School of Design, located in New York City. Students from the department are taught to explore design fields and industries while completing a business program. They learn principles of business that will support their careers as both design managers and entrepreneurs, giving them the ability to manage business problems unique to design industries. Students learn the design lifecycle, how to manage creative projects and teams, and the skills necessary to identify and implement opportunities for innovation. During their junior year students are required to take a three credit course entitled “Design Development.” For this course I teach 15 sessions of two hours and 40 minutes to, on average, 18 to 23 students per semester. The course objective is to prepare students to use prototyping as a strategy for developing and implementing design innovation. The readings, class activities, and course projects focus on building students’ competence in terms of managing creative teams to explore alternatives, forecast and simulate future scenarios, test concepts, and reduce the risk of failure by making informed decisions. The course covers processes that divide product development and project implementation into very small segments that can be tested early in development. By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to implement a culture that encourages early and low cost failure and rapid change and adaptation. Based on what I have learned from my two years of pedagogical experience, it is possible to argue that the potential of digital prototype capabilities, as described earlier, can be fully explored and understood by students if speed, variation, and multiple cycles of selective retention are intrinsic to the pedagogical approach to the innovation process. This requires the pedagogical approach to be based on teamwork managed through multiple ideation cycles. Given the characteristics of these conditions, digital prototype tools become imperative to facilitating the process. On the one hand this is because teamwork requires team members to make explicit their implicit personal concepts. It also requires explicit concepts to be negotiated, which demands that concepts be evaluated, combined and refined (selective retention). On the other hand a course sequence with multiple ideation cycles forces students to break from the misconception that the creative process is a straight path to the correct answer. Such a

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sequence forces students to explore variation and practice multiple times the concept of progressive selective retention. These two conditions become the pre-requisites that make the unique characteristics of digital prototypes a necessity. They are the foundation to generating a context that requires multiple and complex interaction among team members. They are also the preconditions to generating a level of complexity that demands the application of appropriate tools. Consequently, the adoption of digital prototyping tools forces students to develop, evaluate, negotiate, and refine concepts under the influence of the capabilities of digital prototypes, such as speed, flexibility, and scalability. This learning experience, based on hands-on activities mediated by digital prototypes, provides students with an opportunity to prepare for the challenges they will face professionally when participating in or managing the process of innovation. REFERENCES [1] Schrage M., Serious Play. Harvard Business School Press, 2000. [2] Calvin W.H., The Cerebral Symphony. iUniverse.com, Inc, 2000. [3] Calvin W.H., The Ascent of Mind. iUniverse.com, Inc, 2000. [4] Hall E.T., The Hidden Dimension. Anchor Books, 1966. [5] Negroponte N., Being Digital. Borzoi Book, 1995. [6] Clark A., Natural-Born Cyborgs, Oxford University Press, 2003. [7] Gardner H., Creating Minds. Basic Books, 1993. [8] Calvin W.H., The Cerebral Symphony. iUniverse.com, Inc, 2000. [9] Ibid [10] Ibid

Chapter Nine CURRICULUM

INCLUSIVITY IN THE DESIGN CURRICULUM A. J. Felton* Department of Architecture and Product Design, University of Wolverhampton, Shropshire. K. B. Garner Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The focus of Inclusive Design is on the interaction between users and products, more specifically it is about improving or developing products that address the needs of the widest possible population regardless of age, ability or culture. It is also concerned with the strategic use of design to meet and integrate current and future human needs without compromising the environment. Inclusive design is being driven by at least three main factors: i) Aging population. ii) The need to integrate disabled people into mainstream society. iii) Legislation. Currently professional design thinking is undergoing major change with the life cycle of the product from design to disposability and sustainability becoming a major concern. To date, project work into Inclusive Design and Design for Sustainability has been carried out in the Department of Architecture and Product Design within the School of Engineering and the Built Environment primarily at undergraduate level on the BSc Computer Aided Product Design and the BSc Computer Aided Engineering Design courses. This paper deals with products designed over the past decade and the changing nature of our Inclusive Design Philosophy as reflected in student project work. The paper focuses on three major project themes: • Socio-Medical. • Changing Lifestyle. • Recycling-Environment. *Director of Research and Scholarship, Department of Architecture and Product Design, SEBE, University of Wolverhampton, Telford, Shropshire. TF2 9NT. Tel (01902) 323852 international code (+44 1902) Email: [email protected]

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Examples of student projects and visual material will be incorporated as part of the presentation of this paper. Keywords: Inclusive Design, Design For Sustainability, Product Design, and Product Design Curriculum. 1 INTRODUCTION The BSc in Computer Aided Product Design (CAPD) at the University of Wolverhampton is fourteen years old. Conceived as a collaborative venture between the School of Engineering and the School of Art

Figure 1. Adjustable Hospital Bed. and Design it has integrated Engineering Design from the former with Industrial Design from the latter developing a mixture of technical and design skills using the computer. Felton and Bird [1] discuss how product design is rapidly changing due to the increasing use of computer-based technologies. The development of new approaches to design, including design for assembly, design for manufacture, 3D solid modelling and Rapid Prototyping techniques in developing prototypes. In essence ‘Time Compression Technologies’ to reduce lead times to get products to market faster. Inclusive Design and Design for Sustainability in the past have not always been at the top of the agenda for product designers however; legislation, an aging population, integrating the less abled person into mainstream society and taking into account product disposal or re-use at the design stage has become crucial. Thus there is a need for the academic world to foster the culture of this integrative philosophy into the Product Designers of tomorrow. The main vehicle in achieving an integrated approach on the BSc CAPD course has been the use of considerate projects, industrial based assignments and design competitions embedded within the curriculum. These have played an increasing role in achieving not only creativity and innovation to product design but raised the awareness of Inclusive and Sustainable design issues.

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2 SOCIO-MEDICAL Over the last decade staff from the School of Engineering and the Built Environment and School of Art and Design have increasingly adopted a multi-disciplinary approach to the teaching of Product Design at Undergraduate level, developing a richer blend of skills between Industrial Design and Engineering Design. We have endeavored to challenge the accepted norms within both Product Design and Inclusive Design thinking. The Changing Nature of our Inclusive Design Philosophy during the 1990’s as reflected in Student project work on the BSc Computer Aided Product Design and BSc Computer Aided Engineering Design courses. 2.1 INCLUSIVE DESIGN PROJECTS (SOCIO-MEDICAL) Our perception of Inclusive Design in the early 1990’s like many others concentrated on designing for the needs of critical user groups such as the disabled, aged and people with medical problems or socially disadvantaged. With reference to (Figures 1-4) Student product design projects at the time included: -Adjustable Hospital Bed, Lifting Bath Aid, Wheel Chair and Retrofit Work Console for disabled people. However, this perception broadened into designing for the widest possible audience. Through the latter 1990’s approaching 2000 student projects often were conceived around peoples changing lifestyles and the inevitable impact on their health. Projects included an Asthma inhaler with an easy read digital counter for the number of shots used, tablet-dispensing devices, and medicine bottle with an integrated measuring device (Figure 4). The expansion and popularity of air travel at this time also

Figure 2. Lifting Bath Aid.

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Figure 3. Wheel Chair and Retrofit Work Console.

Figure 4. Medicine bottle with an integrated measuring device.

Figure 6. Folding Step Aerobics/Exercise Bench.

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Figure 7. Night Clubbers Bottle. highlighted possible associated medical problems of Deep Vein Thrombosis. One student quickly recognized this and designed/prototyped ‘In-Flight Anti Deep Vein Thrombosis Exercise Pedals’ (Figure 5) to be retrofitted to existing aircraft seating. 3 CHANGING LIFESTYLE Over the last decade we have seen the move to a 24-hour 7-day lifestyle brought about by technological, fiscal and demographic changes. Many of the students’ product design projects have been conceived and developed to cope with today’s changing life styles. Products have included folding step aerobics/exercise bench, (Figure 6) sports equipment, and drinks containers in particular a ‘Night Clubbers’ bottle (Figure 7) to alleviate the problem of drink spiking. 3.1 INDUSTRIAL BASED INCLUSIVE DESIGN PROJECTS (CHANGING LIFESTYLE) Felton and Robotham [2] demonstrate that carefully selected company based assignments and projects can play an increasing role in achieving an inclusive design approach and how ‘Time-Compression’ technologies such as 3D Parametric CAD modeling to generate the concepts and Rapid Prototyping to produce the prototypes can play a crucial role in its delivery. Prior to supermarket chain ‘Safeway’ launching a new range of fresh noodles they turned to BSc CAPD students to design and prototype easy-to-use chopsticks as a give away with their new product. A competition was integrated within the assessed coursework for the 3D CAD Modelling module over one semester. The students were creative and innovative in their approach to the design and Figure 8 demonstrates an example of the wide range of concept chopsticks produced. Many of the students exploited the flexible material characteristics of the prototype to pick up, hold and release the noodles using just one hand, with some type of fixed spoon to facilitate the soup element of

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Figure 5. In-Flight Anti Deep Vein Thrombosis Exercise Pedals.

Figure 8. Wide range of ‘User Friendly Chopsticks’ Prototypes. the dish. Some students designed spoon and fork attachments, which clipped onto the chopsticks and others had hinged or folded arms with a fixed spring for operation. Hollow chopsticks were used in a number of the designs and one concept even incorporated an integral straw that ran in the arm of the chopstick. Overall the designs increased user participation and possibly generated a larger market opportunity.

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4 ENVIRONMENTAL-RECYCLING As the decade progressed into 2000 and beyond our perception of design has evolved from simply considering fitness for purpose and inclusivity to also majoring on environmental and social impact. Felton and Bird [3] discuss issues relating to the design for recyclability and how the latter stage of Planning for Retirement of the Product is becoming a major concern and why at the University of Wolver-hampton it has become an important factor within the Curriculum for teaching BSc CAPD/CAED undergraduate students. The goal is to design products that satisfy the customer but minimise environmental impact over the life cycle, often referred to as Sustainable Design, thus trying to alleviate the many products that often end up in landfill. With reference to ‘environwise’ [4] website who give practical environmental advice for business, the term ‘Cleaner Product Design’ is used. This ‘Cleaner Product Design’ cycle promotes continual improvement of both new and existing products via: - Product research, identifying cleaner design priorities, designing the cleaner product to develop its form and function and design Review. Developing Cleaner Product Design’s ‘environwise’ [4] also gives a number of key considerations to reduce a product’s environmental impact through: -Reduced raw material, Reduced use of energy, Less pollution and waste, Elimination of hazardous materials, Increased service life and Greater potential for recycling. 4.1 DESIGN PROJECTS WITH A SUSTAINABLE THEME Recycling now plays an integral part of the design brief for students design and make projects at all years. A design brief given to level 1 students was to design and make a chair made from cardboard for a summer outdoor concert. The chair would be given on entry to the concert as a flat pack and then assembled using only mechanical joints for fixing. At the end of the concert the chair could be taken away or recycled. A student’s design solution for tool storage is shown in Figure 9. When buying tools for DIY the packaging is often discarded. In this particular case the packaging becomes the tool storage medium and individual items can be simply locked together. Figure 10 gives a student’s design solution for Re-Usable postage boxes in place of the protective postage bags that are often used once then discarded. The Re-Usable postage boxes have an international theme and offer features such that they can be manufactured with the appropriate country’s postal logo, bar coded for automatic sorting, high impact protection for sensitive goods such as electronic components, CD’s etc, a tagging device for security and sold via the internet. 4.2 DESIGN COMPETITIONS WITH A SUSTAINABLE THEME Design competitions play an important role in encouraging students to consider inclusivity and sustainability. For instance a recent competition sponsored by THE DESIGN COUNCIL featured SUSTAINABLE DESIGN. A total of 40 Design Students engaged with the competition, initially being asked to select and appraise an artifact and

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then to redesign it with due consideration to sustainability. Some of the diverse design solutions presented included: • An ‘Oil box’ (engine oil in a collapsible bag packaged in a recycled card box) • ‘ECO Building Block’ (designed using mescanthus grass as the primary material) • Integral Shower and bath compartment (compact shower/bath that uses less water/energy) • Automatic light switch (switches off interior mains lights in the home when no personnel are present)

Figure 9. Tool storage medium.

Figure 10. Re-Usable postage boxes. 5 CONCLUSION Inclusive and Sustainable Design issues need to head the design agenda for the education of tomorrow’s product designers. There also needs to be a step change in thinking amongst designers to consider whole product life cycle design. Many new products are developed using the established practices of design for assembly and design for manufacture, however, issues such as disassembly, recycling and establishing a culture amongst product designers of Inclusive/Sustainable Design needs

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further development. This paper has demonstrated how projects, industrial based assignments and design competitions carefully embedded into the curriculum can be used with student designs to enforce contemporary inclusive design strategies. REFERENCES [1] Felton, A. J. and Bird. E., Concurrent Design ‘The Wolverhampton Model’: The Integration Of Industrial Product Design And Engineering Design. Proceedings of the International Conference on Innovation, Good Practice and Research in Engineering Education, Vol. 2, Wolverhampton, Eng-land, 2004, pp.249-252. [2] Felton, A. J. and Robotham A. J., Can Time-Compression Technologies Be Used In A Creative Process For Product Design? “The Worlds Most Useable Chopsticks” Time Compression Technologies Conference 2003, NEC, Birmingham, England, 11th-13th November 2003. [3] Felton, A. J. and Bird. E., “DESIGN FOR RECYCLABILITY: - Product Function, Failure, Reparability, Recyclability and Disposability”. GREEN4, 4TH International Symposium On Geotechnics Related To The Environment, University of Wolverhampton, (UK), 28th June – 1st July 2004. [4] ‘environwise’ (2004) Cleaner product design: an introduction for industry (GG294). http://%20www.environwise.gov.uk/

“BLINK” AND TECHNICAL INNOVATION Gerson, Ir. Philips M* Lecturer Technical Innovation, Hanzehogeschool Groningen, School of Engineering, The Netherlands. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT A long international cooperation of science, industry and education on product design engineering included combined experiments, exchange of experiences and ideas. The developed insights are the base for an international post graduate master course covering, in-depth, the full scope of product development issues, from structured incremental to intuitive innovative creative engineering design and from functional technical problem solving to emotion triggering design. Integrated in the course is the new notion of the way senior designers (should) work: in the real world they do not follow the official modern design techniques and methodologies at all; they work on trained intuition. The prescribed procedures would even prevent them from finding the best designs. However that does not mean that these scientific methods have no value: it was found that structured methods are essential in the domains of checking against goals and requirements, for communication and reporting and in education – learning the trade. An essential point for the learning experience is the real life benchmarking in industrial Design Reviews: the quality of designs is assessed not on the completeness of the design process, but on the market success, on their effect in industrial application: this requires experienced staff that are able to judge design details and their functional and manufacturing cost implications (Der Teufel sitzt im Detail). The other interesting features are the intensive workshops, developed during the ODD-programme and fine-tuned in many experiments. Keywords: Design engineering experts, methodology, education, intuitive decisions, industrial reality. *AAA Innovations, Korreweg 92, 9715 AG Groningen, the Netherlands, Ph/F: +31 50 5736319, Email: [email protected] - or at Hanzehogeschool, School of Engineering, PO Box 3037, 9701 DA Groningen, The Netherlands; Ph: +31-50-5954701, Fax: +31-50-5954999, [email protected].

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1 INTRODUCTION: THE ODD-NETWORK SHARING KNOWLEDGE During the late 80’s and early 90’s, Dutch professional higher education in mechanical engineering, also at the Hanzehogeschool Groningen, concentrated on mechanics related subjects, theory and practice and manufacturing engineering. In the Netherlands more than anywhere else, the mandate, competency and responsibility of academic and professional institutes are strictly separated: the focus of the professional higher education institutes is strictly application oriented; they are not supposed to do research. The taught theories in professional education generally are derived from the academic world (the Groningen Hanzehogeschool typically followed a Pahl-and-Beitz systematic design methodology), the practice is much towards the business, result-oriented approach. [1] For western industry the need to adapt to changing circumstances and to innovate effectively was and still is growing; the requirements and expectations for the industrial backbone, the crucial personnel: the design teams changed to more multidisciplinary, generalist ànd specialist at the same time: in the modern competitive products crucial design problems, challenges and opportunities chances can pop up in a wide variety of disciplines at all depth-levels, while conceptual and strategic overall issues determine product success as much. To develop an adequate curriculum for the challenging international self-creating industry, collaboration was sought and found with a score of international scientific, educational institutes and their industrial partners. (fig 1) The partnership exchanged staff, students, knowledge, experience and modules, shared workshops, projects, papers and supported the international design engineering bachelor’s course in Groningen IPDE, where many experiments were carried out. It became obvious how large the variety in approach was and is within integral design engineering. Not only the “technical-disciplinary” domains seemed to influence a preference for a methodology, but many other factors, even cultural ones, seemed to play an important role. The good news was and is however that in the assessment of final results of design activity: the design proposal, there is a high degree of unanimity from the very diverse – experienced - academics and professionals. To obtain a better insight in the effectiveness of design tools and methods in the real world of industrial application a research program was set up, the ODD (open dynamic design) program in which industrial design engineering projects were observed in detail and in participation. Confidentiality issues could be solved because of the long standing relationship of the academic “safe platform” and their industrial partners. Through careful planning a kind of Taguchi-DoE distribution of projects could be obtained. However in the final stages of the projects, where in-house expertise and “rules” are so essential, the ODD-participation was under-represented [2]. Students and staff of the partners observed in small teams (2+) very closely and by participation real industrial design engineering projects, and feedback from experts was obtained in in-depth open discussions with experts. (table 1)

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Table 1. Summary overview of ODD-projects Industry: 9 nations Des+Mfg industry Mass - Specials 59 projects Observ: 13nations SME, large, Full supply chain 2+ observ’g part., Feedb : 51 experts multinational B2B & B2C Few eng. phase

Figure 1. The extending network design engineering in practice. 2 EXPERT DESIGN ENGINEERING ACTIVITIES, CHAOS AND BLINK By observing the design activity so closely and from discussing with the players how it was really done in a very open and honest way, a much more differentiated picture emerged than expected and commonly accepted in academic worlds: Although the logical and sometimes even legal instruction for the use of certain structured design methods and tools were fully accepted (FMEA, DfXXX, Taguchi, QFD…) these methods are very little used during the design process itself, in finding solutions. Much more they are used “afterwards, in hindsight, to verify and to communicate or convince”: very similar what students confess to doing in their studio projects. The logical best choice for tools and methods, depending on context factors like technology domain, business environment, strategic choices is discussed in other papers, this paper will focus on the industrial experts’ approach and activities, the logic behind and the consequences for a master course Technical Innovation.

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2.1 MAIN OUTCOMES FROM ODD Most striking and confusing outcome of the ODD-research was the observation that the senior designers mainly worked on their intuition, their gut feeling or experience and claimed to have much better results that way than applying some of the methods or tools that were the object of this research (fig 2). Over the years they learned from success and failure, building up this expertise. Questioned, if they maybe used the “academic” methods intuitively and quickly in the back of their mind, they still declared that in reality the methods were more of a handicap than help in complicated design challenges. Benefits were suggested to be in learning the trade, and maybe for not overlooking details – mainly for others than the experts themselves….. To verify or to predict technical behavior of constructions the modern CA-systems did play an important role, also for the experts. Striking in the research was a “negative” observation: results of young design engineers were found to be sub-optimal for many possible reasons. The main reason mentioned was the lack of relevant background technological knowledge and experience, not misuse or lack of use of methods. [3] The only tool, that proved to be omni-valent, for young and experienced, for incremental and innovative, for consumer and industrial use, is the tangible working model, helping to understand, generate and convey problems, opportunities, solutions and ideas. Even in simple cardboard form it is worth more than a shiny PP presentation.

Figure 2. The confusing main outcome of the ODD-research: are then all scientific structured design methods of no use at all? 2.2. BLINK AND ITS LINK TO ODD In a way, recent decision making experiments and current hype around Gladwell’s “Blink, The Power of Thinking without Thinking” [4] are about the same issues as the

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ODD - observations on the way (senior) design engineer-experts do their work. Examples (fig 3) from a wide range of disciplines from art and card play to sales and warfare show the strength of the experts’ gut feeling, “thin-slicing” or reacting on the right essential but few factors, compared to a detailed, complete, even computer aided analysis. “Blink” explains how the human mind uses a kind of pattern recognition, based on former learning experiences, to solve complicated issues. Actually only simple tasks having very few parameters are thought through in an orderly, balanced way. Unluckily, this “natural” process is also unintentionally done, based on false training, upbringing, intuition; Gladwell shows many stereotypes leading to wrong conclusions. Learning when to trust the subconscious process, when to correct it by conscious scientific/logical reasoning is the essential issue, in “Blink’s world” and in the design engineering process. And building up the unconscious experience database of patterns is extremely difficult and long for some aspects of design engineering. Gathering feedback on constructions, materials, etc (easy to assemble, use…) can take years and so many failed and successful new products and constructions. This ties in with the ODD observation that the main reason for young engineers to fail in their tasks is the lack of appropriate knowledge, not so much the technique of designing. 2.3. CHAOS AND THE ODD-DESIGNER The chaos theory learned that the more complex and a-linear a system gets, the less predictable it’s behavior, even with the best number crunching computers. Only in certain areas of parameter combinations a stable, predictable behavior can be found. Based on theoretical, statistical evidence or historical data the technical behavior of constructive elements can be calculated and “mastered” or added to the experience base. Larger projects, having unknown elements, like a TGV, or Blinks example of the improvisation comedy group, need limiting rules to keep it in predictable areas. Examples are game conventions, highway codes, marketing paradigms, etc. Only if these are in place, the process of learning from direct feedback (if I do this, that is the good or bad result) and the underlying patterns can happen: Practice makes perfect – similarly in cooking, team sports, business and design engineering. But it works only if there is The Getty was satisfied. Fourteen months after their investigation of the kouros began, they agreed to buy the statue. In the fall of 1986, it went on display for the first time…….. The kouros, however, had a problem. It didn't look right. The first to point this out was an Italian art historian named Federico Zeri, who served on the Getty's board of trustees. When Zeri was taken down to the museum's restoration studio to see the kouros in December of 1983, he found himself staring at the sculpture's fingernails. In a way he couldn't immediately articulate, they seemed wrong to him. Evelyn Harrison was next. She was one of the world's foremost experts on Greek sculpture, and she was in Los Angeles visiting the Getty just before the museum finalized the deal with Becchina. "Arthur"Houghton, who was then the curator, took us down to see it," Harrison remembers. "He just swished a cloth off. the top of it and said, 'Well, it isn't ours yet, but it will be in a couple of

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weeks.' And I said, 'I'm sorry to hear that.'" What did Harrison see? She didn't know: In that very first moment, when Houghton swished off the cloth, all Harrison had was a hunch, an instinctive sense that something was amiss……… ……….Becchina gave the Getty's legal department a sheaf of documents relating to its more recent history. The kouros, the records stated, had been in the private collection of a Swiss physician named Lauffenberger since the 1930’s, and he in turn had acquired it from a well-known Greek art dealer named Roussos. A geologist from the University of California named Stanley Margolis came to the museum and spent two days examining the surface of the statue with a highresolution stereo microscope. He then removed a core sample measuring one centimeter in diameter and two centimeters, in length from just below the right knee and analyzed it using an electron microscope, electron microprobe, mass spectrometry, X -ray diffraction, and X -ray fluorescence. The statue was made of dolomite marble from the ancient Cape Vathy quarry on the island of Thasos, Margolis concluded, and the surface of the statue was covered in a thin layer of calcite -which was significant, Margolis told the Getty, because dolomite can turn into calcite only over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of years. In other words, the statue was old. It wasn't some contemporary fake.

Figure 3. Text from Blink: Introduction - The Statue That Didn’t Look Right. chaos avoiding consistency, which can be coming from any logical, legal or democratically chosen set of rules, guidelines or procedures or a strong consistent leadership and if there is a direct feedback mechanism in place. Mastering the playfield of any given set of technical and related disciplines typically is (design) engineering, making an innovative leap from there into the unknown is the challenge for technical innovation. Especially there a good balance between connection to the predictable life of engineering and the risky but promising adventure of undiscovered areas is essential. Patterns for one set of engineering disciplines might not be valid for another set. 3 THE TECHNOLOGY AND INNOVATION SPACE - TYPOLOGY The state-of-the art, the available technology and other disciplines, is the combined knowledge and know-how, which helps to understand and predict system behavior. All areas or disciplines have their own patterns, rules and regulations that can be mastered. Over time it changes in 2 ways (fig 4): by research new elements emerge in existing disciplines, or even whole new disciplines are created; and new unusual or unexpected combinations are created/invented -some based on traditional state-of-the-art, some on newly developed knowledge from the research domain. Researchers and inventors typically have very different characters, but have to work from the same knowledge base of state-of-the art.

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4 THE CONSEQUENCES FOR A COURSE TECHNICAL INNOVATION The master course Technical Innovation (in development) is the logical follow-up of the IPDE (Bachelor) course in Groningen; it will include the gained understanding from the ODD-partnership and cooperate with the well-known master course of Loughborough. The students are expected to have a solid technical knowledge base; the course intends to expand this state-of-the-art platform into the business, human factors and design disciplines as well as in the creative, innovative or inventive dimension. The goal is to guide the students, young design engineers, to become more experienced in using the right mix of gut feeling and analytical thinking, depending on the situation and their own development. Therefore the modern design methods are taught mainly as a means to check and for communication. All case-studies, exercises, studio and industrial projects are assessed against industrial validity and value.

Figure 4. The 3-D space of disciplines, - dealing with technology. The methods are seen as tools for the means. To achieve effective learning it is essential to have direct feedback from very experienced tutors and reviewers during design activities and in design reviews in “real life” industrial setting. The alternating “hands-on master apprentice” learning process and theoretical background lecturing-discussion approach is already proven in the IPDE – course to be most effective, although costly. To focus attention, intensive workshop modules are planned, each on expanding the knowledge base into a next –integral- work field: adding industrial design; deepening constructive material thinking; including the cost and business implications; finding innovative, creative, strategic concepts. To enhance the feedback it was found already in the IPDE-course, and now in the ODD-research, that the use of -even very simple cardboard- models is the strongest tool overall.

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5 CONCLUDING REMARKS Similar to the IPDE-bachelors course, the Technical Innovation Master course relies strongly on experienced tutors and lecturers and industrial cooperation for the real learning experience. For historical reasons the Dutch (professional) education system offers a good base for such an approach. The ODD-project and partnership gave this approach a solid thinking frame to make this challenging endeavor a success. REFERENCES [1] Ir. Ph.M. Gerson: Developments in Groningen Design Engineering or: Training in ResultOriented Design, SEFI-conference, Compiègne Sept 1995, [2] Green, G. and Gerson, P., Open Dynamic Design: Towards a European Model for an Engineering Design Curriculum, EDE 99, The Continuum of Design Education, Glasgow, September 1999, ISBN 186058 208 7 [3] Gerson, P.M., Green, G., “The Effectiveness of Engineering Design Methods in Industry”, 4th International Conference on Advanced Engineering Design (AED04), Glasgow, UK, 5th-8th September 2004, ISBN 80-86059-41-3 [5] Gladwell, M.: Blink, “The power of thinking without thinking”. Alan Lane, Penguin books. 2005, ISBN 071399844X

REFLECTIONS ON RENSSELAER’S PRODUCT DESIGN AND INNOVATION PROGRAM Langdon Winner* Professor of Political Science, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY. Mark Steiner** Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The experience of students in Rensselaer’s Product Design and Innovation (PDI) program offers a glimpse into how to integrate the humanities and social sciences (H&SS) into an engineering curriculum. PDI offers a dual degree program built around a studio design class each semester, integrated into a core-engineering curriculum leading to bachelor degrees in both mechanical engineering and H&SS. The program is administered through our Science and Technology Studies Department in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. The studio design courses introduce students to a broad range of open-ended design experiences, where they learn how to combine cultural, aesthetic, and technical skills and knowledge with the insight and context of social concerns and issues. As students move through the PDI program, they ultimately have culminating experiences with Rensselaer’s Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory (MDL), which serve as senior capstone design studios. We have found that compared to typical engineering seniors, PDI students clearly distinguish themselves. They are comfortable and competent with multidisciplinary thinking and at odds with the conventional mindset that tends to focus on disciplinary specialization. They represent the kinds of students that organizations in industry, government and society are asking for; educated as resourceful problem solvers and first rate technical professionals.

*Professor of Political Science, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590 **Director, Multidisciplinary Design Laboratory, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590

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This paper offers thoughts and reflections on the PDI program, starting with its original vision and goals, a report on its current status and progress, and finally some perspectives on the future directions and promise of the program. Keywords: multidisciplinary, design, education, innovation 1 INTRODUCTION, MOTIVATION, BACKGROUND The engineering profession is often called upon to solve complex problems that meet society’s needs. Seldom, however, are engineers directly engaged in framing the issues that ultimately guide their work. A visionary study by the National Academy of Engineering [1] describes the need for more broadly educated engineers, suggesting that the engineering profession seek better ways to anticipate social needs and to envision creative solutions. This presents a serious challenge to engineering education. The Product Design and Innovation (PDI) at Rensselaer attempts to bridge the long lamented gap between science and technology on the one hand, and the humanities, arts and social sciences on the other. Several years of PDI teaching and learning provides evidence that we can develop young people who gracefully combine varieties of theory and practice from widely disparate fields [2]. Many first year engineering students are undecided about which field of engineering appeals to them and are unsure about what engineers do. Many have interests that go far beyond engineering and are eager to explore a wide range of options. PDI offers an attractive alternative. Students who choose PDI often have strong backgrounds in art, humanities and design along with strong preparation in math and science. PDI gives students of this kind a flexible engineering program that is responsive to societal needs and satisfies a broad range of intellectual, practical and career interests [3]. 2 PROGRAM EVOLUTION AND MATURATION Since 1999 the PDI program has graduated 15-25 students per year. While the program includes options for three dual degree tracks that students can choose, the vast majority of students so far have followed the STS/mechanical engineering dual degree template. PDI graduates have found positions in industry, with additional placements in design firms, start-ups companies, and graduate programs. The objectives of the PDI program are to educate students who can synthesize methods from engineering, social science, and architecture in the creation of innovative solutions to design challenges of the 21st century. PDI hopes to develop a replicable program model that provides a highly technical education with a solid understanding of technology and design in societies across the world. Among the guiding values of PDI are (1) to develop designs that support democratic participation and user perspectives in design process and outcomes so that issues of race, gender, economic equality, environmental sustainability, and community needs are taken

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into account; (2) to develop designs that take society, culture, and human potential as a nodal point of reference for design innovation. 3 THE STUDIO SEQUENCE The heart and soul of the PDI program lies in its studio sequence, one studio for each of the eight semesters. Many studios are taught by faculty from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and levels of experience. The PDI studio sequence includes the following: Studio 1: Introduction of design as an on open-ended process, critical thinking, interdisciplinary collaboration, observation and perception, communication and visualization. Studio 2: Focuses on product development process with emphasis on problem definition, conceptual development and sketching, impact of design on society. Studio 3: Course objectives are to understand the role of visualization and representation, and relationships between form and function. Studio 4: An introduction to engineering design with emphasis on creativity, team work, and communication. Students are exposed to engineering design with a challenging design-analyze-build-test experience. Studio 5: Focuses on social aspects of design with ethnographic techniques using example of design of educational technology. Studio 6: Explores technical innovation and how design mediates the impact of new technologies on society and culture. Studio 7: Engineering capstone design course that immerses students in a real world multidisciplinary design experience. Studio 8: An engineering design elective: Inventor’s Studio, independent study, engineering economics

4 CONTRASTING DESIGN PERSPECTIVES An important source of tension and vitality in PDI comes in the way that the different disciplines and professions included in the teaching faculty express their ideas and work out their differences. The architects who teach in Studio 1 usually prefer a style of inquiry that presses students continually to question and redefine what constitutes a design problem in the first place. The social scientists from STS, involved in several studios, typically ask students to do research on a range of social, cultural and political contexts that influence what designers do. In contrast, the engineers who teach in PDI studios often seek paths of precise definition and technical closure so that students achieve real, tangible results by a particular studio’s conclusion. While these approaches are by no means mutually exclusive, they do exhibit tendencies that students notice and comment upon. Engineering design tends to be convergent, recognizing “real world” constraints, for example constraints of a marketplace that competes on quality, cost, and time, leading to demands for quick decision making and, perhaps, premature convergence on design

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solutions. In this light, the approaches of social scientists and architects are far more divergent, expanding the range of considerations – research sites, user needs, cultural interpretations, etc. – that designers ought to apply to their work, expecting that more emphasis upon the front end of design will produce better outcomes down the line. Obviously, there are shortcomings in both approaches. Too much convergence too soon can lead to exacting solutions that address the wrong problems and insensitivity as to why we do design at all. Too much divergence in search of ever better insights can leave us inspired but paralyzed – rich in ideas, poor in actual results. In all likelihood, these differences in how to approach design will never be resolved. Indeed, there continuing presence seems crucial to the energy and vitality of PDI. We often recommend that students combine divergent and convergent approaches to achieve balance, recognizing that faculty seldom achieve this goal themselves. 5 CAPSTONE DESIGN PROJECT RESULTS A good measure of the success of PDI education can be seen in the senior-level capstone design projects conducted under the auspices of the Multidisciplinary Design Lab (MDL) organized by Mark Steiner [4]. The MDL provides real-world capstone design experiences to students that address a wide range of issues and encompass areas such as product quality, mass customization, aids for physically and/or mentally challenged people, entrepreneurial interests, and energy independence. MDL projects all have client sponsors who bring design problems to us to solve. While PDI students are a relatively small group (less than 12%) within the body of engineering students at Rensselaer who work on MDL projects, they often emerge in team leadership roles since they tend to be more comfortable with the many issues and iterations involved with the design process. Meanwhile, they are very capable of diving into the engineering design details, yet are far more capable of helping to properly put a problem in its social context and defining it in a way that helps to insure the right problem is being solved in the first place. The following project summaries provide a sampling of the areas that PDI students get involved with and describe the roles they have played in the MDL. Saturn Ion Feature Concepts Development Project: General Motors asked students in the MDL to create a special options feature package that could be easily incorporated into their Saturn Ion car model (see figure 1), appealing to the “Gen Y” buyer. The Gen Y consumer is an emerging market force in the US of 60 million people currently between the ages of 5 and 20 years. Preliminary market research conducted by General Motors indicated that the Gen Y buyer had uniquely diverse interests that would guide their vehicle purchase decisions; however their needs and desires were not fully understood. The scope of the project included both interior and exterior features, encompassing all aspects of the driving experience, including areas such as, aesthetics, aerodynamics, passenger comfort, safety, vehicle guidance, and entertainment. A team of 40 students participated on the project during the course of an academic year. While only five PDI students were part of the effort, as a group their design experience and social science awareness allowed them to influence the direction and results of the team. One important result was a “generational study” by one of the PDI students that explored how societal influences shaped the thinking of prior generations. This PDI student was able to

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extrapolate a convincing argument for how Gen Y thinks, using it to provide design direction and propose an innovative marketing approach for the new feature package. Overall, during the course of the project, the PDI students played an instrumental role in guiding aesthetics and functional feature concept development and created models to communicate their ideas. They effectively provided design leadership, while astutely leveraging the contributions of the entire multidisciplinary design team.

Figure 1. Students with Saturn Ion. Vein Harvesting Surgical Instruments Design Project: Converge Medical Inc. has a new suture-less coupler that enables surgeons to rapidly perform coronary artery bypass grafting through small incisions (versus open heart surgery). To compliment this development, Converge Medical wants to develop a new minimally invasive approach for harvesting the saphenous vein (i.e., for grafting) from the leg. Several methods of minimally invasive surgical vessel harvesting have been tested, responding to the high morbidity associated with the long skin incision after traditional “fillet” style harvesting. Currently, the most common of these methods of vessel harvesting is the endoscopic vessel harvesting approach, which requires the use of insufflation devices, endoscopic cameras, and expensive disposable cautery devices. The goal of this project was to design and develop a less invasive approach, one that employs direct visualization methods involving multiple small incisions separated by skin bridges using a combination of reuseable and disposable devices. The project team (see figure 2) was mentored by Converge representatives to address the entire scope of the project including user needs, market analysis, product specifications, risk analysis, product design, development, and testing. Three PDI students worked on the project along with other students during initial phases of concept development and onto the final phases of detail design and prototype development and evaluation. Because they understood the value and importance of quick iteration of design ideas, these students played an invaluable role in helping the team visualize their ideas using sketching and fast model making. While PDI students did not serve as project team leaders, they contributed important design leadership, working through numerous iterations, “sweating” the details to identify better design solutions. They earned the respect of the entire team for their design knowledge, skills, and dedication. Posterior Walker with Lifting Seat Design Project: This project was the result of a partnership developed between the MDL and the Albany Guardian Society, an

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organization dedicated to the concerns of senior citizens. The goal of the project was to explore ways to help seniors maintain a more independent life style in the comfort of their own homes. One issue that can often force a senior citizen into an assisted living or nursing home is mobility: an inability to conduct simple tasks such as standing and sitting. This

Figure 2. Vein Harvesting Team.

Figure 3. Posterior Walker with Lifting Seat. project focused on the design of a posterior walker with a seat lifting feature (see figure 3), thus helping a person to stand, walk, and sit. Two of the five students who worked on the design team were PDI students, one of whom assumed the role of team leader. The PDI students showed a keen grasp of design process, guiding the team through a thorough analysis of user needs and functional requirements. Students conducted direct customer interviews with seniors and physical therapists and explored a multitude of system concept alternatives. The team ultimately converged upon the posterior walker with a lifting seat system concept. In this case, PDI students were influential in developing a productive, high performance team able to address an important social need.

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6 CONCLUSIONS The most exciting feature of PDI is that from the outset it seeks to educate students to create innovative products that address society’s needs in a more thoughtful and integrated way. As it emerges from its startup period, PDI offers an opportunity for becoming a model for similar ventures at other academic institutions. Most engineering design education in the United States concentrates its attention more narrowly on the creation of ‘utility’ and, more recently, ‘usability’ in products. The field of industrial design offers a distinctive approach, one often skewed toward matters of aesthetics and appearance. In contrast, current research and writing in STS analyzes and assesses the social and cultural dimensions of technical artifacts both as they take shape and after they have been created and put to use. As globalization intensifies and economic competition and the technological dimensions of societal problems become more visible, crossdisciplinary approaches to design are gaining increased attention. Design disciplines recognize the need to build networks of collaboration, including the creation of new schools of design. PDI addresses an often noticed lack in emerging design programs, offering a firm grounding in the social sciences and connecting it to a thorough preparation in the technical disciplines. The PDI Program at Rensselaer continues its search for ways to educate young men and women who are innovators and resourceful problem solvers. Our first generation of graduates shows that it is possible to understand and, in fact, embody multiple cultures in one’s work. In our studios and classrooms each day, faculty and students renew the search for design approaches – convergence, divergence or a more balanced ways of thinking – that will change the world, for the better. REFERENCES [1] “The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century”, National Academies Press, 2004. [2] Buchanan, R., Downey, G., Faste, R., Giard, J., Kuhn, S., “The Product Design And Innovation Program At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute”, NSF External Review Committee Final Report, April 15, 2002. [3] Newberry, B. And Farison, J., “A Look at the Past and Present of General Engineering and Engineering Science Programs,” Journal of Engineering Education, July 2003. [4] Steiner, M.W., “Using Real-World Multidisciplinary Design Experiences to Prepare Young Engineers to Enter Today’s Workforce,” International Engineering and Product Design Education Conference, Delft, Netherlands, 2-3 September 2004.

DISTANCE DESIGN EDUCATION: RECENT CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY Steve Garner* Department of Design and Innovation, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Product design education presents universities with a number of problems. The diversity of the skills and knowledge needed, together with the high level of expertise required by graduates in the crowded jobs market, has traditionally required universities dealing with full-time students to make considerable investments in local resources including physical spaces, staffing, materials and information sources. This paper examines the value of a new introductory course in design at the Open University (OU) where students are supplied with paper-based and digital resources for distance learning, and supported by regional tutors. It suggests that some key skills, knowledge and competences associated with design education can be developed via distance learning. It is proposed that campus-based universities could successfully exploit e-learning to a much greater extent in their design curricula. Keywords: Design education, distance learning, design competences 1 INTRODUCTION February 2004 saw the launch of a new second level course in the Faculty of Technology at the Open University. Design and Designing, coded T211, is a 60 point course which has a focus in product design but exploits wider illustrations drawn from, for example, fashion, architecture and graphic design. The 60 points from this course can be combined with 60 points from a new third level design course to give students a Diploma in Design *Department of Design and Innovation, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK. Tel (+44) 01908 655784, Email [email protected]

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and Innovation, and they can go on to accumulate 360 points required for an honours degree. While T211 is founded on earlier successful OU design courses from the past 30 years, it is more than an update of its predecessors. It is a new attempt to distil some of the important experiences offered to full-time undergraduate design students and to try to make these available via study from home. The first year of the course attracted 368 students who completed in October 2004 and the feedback has been very positive. This paper contrasts the new OU design course, together with the profile of the students who studied it, with typical campus based product design courses and the students they attract. While there are distinct differences between the student groups there are emerging similarities in demographics, aims and needs which suggest that face-to-face and distance models for the delivery of design education might be usefully integrated. 2 CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY Traditionally the profiles of OU students have differed widely when compared to those students on full-time courses. OU students reveal large differences in age, qualifications and intentions. Many view OU courses as a part of a broader career development, or enroll out of interest in a subject, rather than as a means of achieving employment in a particular field. However, we are seeing on T211 a significant increase in students aged 18-25 who do view this course as the foundation for a career in design. In 1996/97 12.5% of all new student registrations at the OU were from those aged under 25. By 2003/04 this had grown to 20.1%. The student population on T211 reflects this increase in younger students. If this trend were to continue it is predicted that by 2010, students under 25 would account for 27% of new registrations, 11% of continuing registrations and 17% of registrations overall [1]. Why do we see this increase in younger students? Partly, it is the attraction of part-time study - the notion of earn while you learn. Partly, the costs are significantly lower given that most younger students will be living with a parent or parents. Feedback from OU student surveys also suggest that younger students do not have the qualifications to enter an increasingly competitive sector of full-time higher education and they are not put off by distance learning and the increasing role of information and communications technology in distance education. Younger students are more likely to view a design course as a preparation for employment and this places demands on the vocational aspects of the curriculum. However, it has been clear for at least two decades that there are not sufficient design posts to absorb all the design graduates emerging from the various universities. This is particularly true in product design where manufacturers and consultancies take only a small proportion of graduates each year into traditional design posts. What we have witnessed since the early 1990s is the use of design education - and particularly product design education - to develop in young people, a range of skills and competences which have application across a broad spectrum of business, industry and commerce. Today, universities offering product design education have to confront the dual imperative of providing a vocational training such that graduates can make immediate contributions to design sector employers, whilst supporting the development of broader transferable skills which widen the employment options of graduates. Given this dual imperative it is not at

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all clear that a traditional campus based university, offering a full-time, three- or fouryear degree course in product design is the best mechanism for addressing the needs of today’s students. Of course, there will be a significant number of students who have a clear vision of what they want and will demand an intensive degree course in the shortest time possible. But there is an increasing community of students who wish to combine study and employment, who do not want to run up huge debts and who want to develop transferable and marketable skills by building their own degree from what they perceive as relevant courses. Flexibility appears to be a key notion for these students, for example, to take advantage of emergent career options. The question confronting universities today is to what extent do their design curricula require face-to-face contact, require expensive workshop and studio space and require students to develop skills such as the forming and manipulation of materials? The next section presents a closer examination of the content of the Open University’s new course Design and Designing and it reflects on its ability to develop relevant skills, knowledge and competences. It also reflects on some vocational and transferable skills that are probably difficult for students to develop in a distance learning context. 3 THE COURSE DESIGN AND DESIGNING The course consists of six printed books, A4 in size and each approximately 120 pages in length. These books adopt a broadly sequential approach taking students from the early stages of design, involving for example, problem definition and writing a brief, through concept design, configuration and component design concluding with detail design and manufacture. The final block takes the form of five case studies of commercial design practice which allow the course team to highlight and reinforce those principles and practices identified and examined in the earlier blocks. The material was produced by a highly experienced course team including Prof. Nigel Cross, Prof. Robin Roy and Prof. Chris Earl. The author of this paper chairs the Course Team. All the audio-visual material used to illustrate and support these blocks is contained on a single DVD. This was coordinated by Georgina Holden and it drew on the expertise of a wide variety of multimedia production staff at the OU. The DVD presents, for example, video sequences of designing activity and interviews and there are video sequences demonstrating sketching and card modelling skills. There are audio tracks presenting course team analysis, plus there are galleries of images and case studies. The DVD also contains the necessary software for students to conduct their own investigative and creative activities. It includes the Cambridge Engineering Selector, a visually stimulating and easy-to-use materials and processes database, and SolidThinking, a surface modelling CAD program suited to those students who are using CAD for the first time. Students are given approximately five weeks to work through each block and to complete an assignment associated with each of the six blocks. In doing this they have access to a tutor or ‘associate lecturer’ in their home region. The mechanisms for students to make contact with their tutor, other students and the course team are discussed in Section 4. The course amounts to around 100 hours of part-time study per block and about 600 hours in total. Thus T211 is roughly equivalent to one semester of full-time study, or one sixth of a three-year, full-time degree programme. The final assignment is a

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design project which makes its own particular demands on distance learning but the use of day schools during the course, where students meet face-to-face at a regional center, allows tutors to create a supportive environment and develop particular skills. There is also an end-of-course examination which must be sat by all students. This has a nominal weighing of 50/50 with the coursework assignments. Students must achieve a pass grade in coursework and examination. Although T211 is a second level course at the OU, for many students this is their first exposure to the analysis, methods and procedures of design. Because of this, T211 seeks to provide an introduction to the subject, dealing with design as outputs and designing as process. Some aspects of the course, such as the introduction to sketching, might be found in the first year of full-time undergraduate courses while many other learning experiences would be generally accepted as second level. Feedback from the end of course survey (34% response rate) collated at Christmas 2004 reveals a high level of acceptance for the content of the printed blocks. One set of questions asked students to rate how ‘interesting’ they found each block. This produced a mean of 65% who rated the blocks as ‘very interesting’. The students rated the video sequences highly. Considering the nine main video sequences, 46% of students rated these as ‘very useful’ and a further 40% as ‘fairly useful’. A number of interactive experiences were devised for the DVD. These aimed to allow students to input their own data to set sequences in order to get immediate feedback on the implications of their proposals. These interactive programs were specially written for T211 and they sought to develop skills with, for example, brainstorming and brain writing, constructing a ‘persona’, exploring configuration, morphological analysis and random stimuli. Of the 11 interactive programs, 32% of students rated these as ‘very useful’ and a further 44% as ‘fairly useful’. The materials and processes database was highly regarded with 75% of students rating this as ‘very useful’. ECO-it (a commercial program for modelling environmental sustainability of products) and the CAD software were both rated as ‘very useful’ by 32% of students and as ‘fairly useful’ by a further 32%. The likely reason for this is that neither was examined in an assignment and students are commenting on the immediate usefulness of the two programs considering the time and effort they put in. This is easily resolved. 4 DEVELOPING DESIGN SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE AND COMPETENCES THROUGH DISTANCE LEARNING The course team for T211 set the ambitious aim of devising a distance learning course that supported students in learning through design as well as about design. It sought to develop what Gardner [2] defined two decades ago as different forms of intelligence, at the same time as being conscious of Friedman’s [3] more recent observation that modern design education demands a balance of critical inquiry and reflective practice if it is to combine knowing and doing. It also sought to strengthen the notion that there are ‘principles’ of design that can be observed, learnt and applied. Participation in the generation of ideas, the modelling of conjecture, the communication of intention and the evaluation of proposals is a vital strategy for developing an understanding and appreciation of the principles and practices of design as an activity. The call for this sort

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of support and development will not be news to those universities and colleges who offer a traditional model of design education via suites of studios, workshops, lecture rooms and display spaces but the aim was an ambitious one in the context of distance learning providers. Some aspects were successful. For example, the teaching of sketching and card modelling exploited video demonstrations allowing students to study and replay sequences and compare their outputs. In some ways it might be seen as superior to teaching drawing in a face-to-face studio group - especially for beginners. One of the main barriers to learning through design at home is the lack of support resources for practical work. Realistically, design project work with the OU is limited by students’ lack of access to materials, tools and the appropriate spaces to use them safely. Of course, some students may have very good resources but the experience must be designed for a broad range of students including those studying in unusual circumstances such as those in the military services. However, even given these limitations the assignments from 2004 reveal a skilled use of a range of drawings and constructions - particularly to assist usability investigations and the evaluation of concept proposals. The students reveal knowledge of the functioning of modelling in design and partly this has been learnt through the studies of professional designers and exposure to the analysis of the course team and the other experts. But partly students have developed knowledge through participation in design activity. Many OU courses now require students to exploit information and communication technologies to improve their learning experience and the T211 DVD has already been introduced. Students were required to have a computer connected to the internet and some assignments required students to visit web sites as part of their learning or the completion of an assignment. T211 also provides a number of electronic conferences in support of teaching and learning. There is a conference dedicated to the T211 associate lecturers enabling them to raise questions, share good practice and anticipate issues. Another conference is open to all T211 students and staff for course discussion and there is a further ‘T211 café’ conference for general chat. In addition to these each tutor has a conference dedicated to their own tutor group. These conferences have proved extremely useful to those that have taken part but only about one third of the students have visited one or more conferences. Far fewer read all conferences regularly which is a pity because a number of respondents confirmed that the conferences can significantly enrich the learning experience. Students can post questions and receive a reply from their tutor and, where relevant, from the author of a block or assignment. Some students posted questions and photographs of work and created little virtual design communities around specific issues. Admittedly, there are concerns regarding the sharing of information prior to individual assessment and this needs to be resolved, but undoubtedly it created some rich group engagement and occurrences of collaborative working. 5 CONCLUSIONS In 2001 Nigel Cross [4] proposed that there was a need for a new model of design education, one suited to a post-industrial design culture. In his paper he suggested that this new model should make design education more accessible, ubiquitous, continuous and explicit. In short it should be more ‘open’ and T211 has attempted to address this.

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The course has allowed a wide range of students to develop a sound foundation of knowing about design and some valuable participation in the doing of designing. In achieving this T211 has integrated the Open University’s well established infrastructure for the development of innovative and professional teaching resources, its ability for high quality academic analysis and perception, its design of effective assessment tools and its application of support mechanisms for students. There are important messages for other universities where distance learning methods can be used effectively to support full-time students of design. Not all design knowledge needs to be developed in a face-to-face setting. Printed materials and digital resources, supplemented by computer mediated communication, can enable students to develop design knowledge. T211 has successfully used both established and recent tools of distance education to support the development of knowledge of concepts such as complexity, conflict, sustainability and markets; knowledge of associated professional fields such as ergonomics, engineering and materials science; knowledge of design practice such as techniques and processes; and knowledge of design principles. Developing design skills and competences in T211 was partly successful in 2004 and the course was revised for the 2005 presentation. Learning through design activity is understandably more difficult to manage in a distance learning environment because of the variety of students on the course and the variety of the contexts within which they are studying. There are limitations on what can reasonably be expected of a student. There are health and safety issues. And there are cost issues if resources are to be sent out to all students. Having said this there is evidence of the development of important design skills and design competences in this distance learning course. The assessments document a progression of skills and competences including the ability to make design evaluations based on observations of products and processes; the ability to select and apply analytical skills in identifying and interpreting the requirements of potential users of future products; the ability to select and apply creative approaches to various types of design problem; the ability to generate and exploit design models to explore and communicate design; and the ability to transfer principles between design contexts. As well as these subject specific competences students have also demonstrated learning management skills, communication skills and ICT skills. For the Open University the challenge is to develop T211 so that it continues to offer distance design education to large groups of people displaying great variation in their ages, abilities, needs and aspirations whilst acknowledging the needs of a new, younger cohort of students. Current marketing surveys suggest that this new cohort might comprise up to one quarter of the course in a few years time. They are likely to have particular needs and preferences for a vocationally oriented course that offers them opportunities to use their credit points to join another institution offering a specific degree in design. They will be more cost conscious, broadly computer literate but possess lower levels of qualification than those students enrolling in recent years. In contrast, many students in the 25-40 age group view T211 as continuing professional development. The Faculty is currently considering the development of further design courses that might allow students to accumulate more points – perhaps even establishing a suite of design courses leading to a design degree (the current system means students graduate with, for example, BSc (Hons) Technology or a Bachelors degree).

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For universities that offer full-time undergraduate design courses there are challenges to reduce costs. We will continue to see pressures on space and staffing and it seems likely that some parts of design degree courses will adopt distance learning tools for local study - particularly where these are concerned with the development of knowledge. Design education requires students to participate in design activity - particularly if students are to develop the skills and competences which are commercially desirable and highly transferable. This paper suggests that this can partly be addressed through the creation of an appropriate distance learning environment but that there are limits to what can be achieved without appropriate resources such as workshops and face-to-face contact between students and with staff. It seems likely that future models of product design education will consist of elements of distance learning and face-to-face learning. REFERENCES [1] Swann W., Internal Senate paper on Younger Students Strategy, The Open University. Feb, 2005, pp1-13. [2] Gardner H., Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Heinemann, London, 1983. [3] Friedman K., Design education in the university: Professional studies for the knowledge economy. Proceedings of Re-inventing Design Education in the University, Perth, Aus., 2000, pp13-27. [4] Cross N., Post-Industrial Design Education, Proceedings of International Congress of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID), Seoul, Korea, 2001, pp1-7.

DEVELOPING ADVOCATES FOR DESIGN: AN INTRODUCTORY EXPERIENCE TO INDUSTRIAL DESIGN THINKING AND METHODS OF PROBLEM SOLVING Eric Anderson* Associate Professor, School of Design Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The Industrial Design Fundamentals course at Carnegie Mellon helps nonmajors to build a broader view of design through hands-on engaging experiences. This sixteen-week open elective offered through the School of Design is a sought after course that consist primarily of undergraduate students from a wide range of disciplines including; engineering, business, humanities & social sciences, human computer interaction, and psychology. Its value has been its ability to weave design thinking, exploration, and problem solving into human centered projects in a condensed timeframe. This course seeks to demystify the product design process through discussions and lectures by introducing new skills, and engaging students in critical thinking and hands on experiences. Three interwoven goals support a holistic approach: Visual thinking—through tools and strategies developed by the author, students are taught the value of sketching, lowfidelity modeling, and imaging (photography, collages, etc.) as key tools for seeing, understanding, exploring, and representing complex information. This knowledge allows them to effectively and efficiently mediate between their minds eye and those of an audience. Humancentered design—each project introduces a different user (self, general, and target) to direct goals and opportunities. Exploration—strategies are shared for generating multiple ideas that shape complex information and lead to new discovery and ultimately a well-reasoned proposal.

*School of Design Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213 USA p. 1 412 268.3181 f. 1 412 268.3088 [email protected] www.andrew.cmu.edu/~ea

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By the conclusion of the course students have gained an understanding of design as a process of discovery through collaborative and often complex multidisciplinary processes and see stronger connections to their field of study. Further, many share their course experiences with friends and peers, which has contributed to making design more visible and valuable within the university. Such advocacy has strengthened already established ties between engineering and design by spurring new conversations about collaborative efforts and planted the seeds for others. The goal of this paper is to share the structure that has made the course successful and generate discussion that allows it to grow and others to adapt usable methodologies. Keywords: Visual thinking, sketching, human-centered design, 1 INTRODUCTION There is a greater curiosity about industrial design and an opportunity to transform that curiosity into advocacy. At Carnegie Mellon the waiting list for the Industrial Design Fundamentals, a university elective course, is long, and the roster (list of enrolled students) is diverse. Some take the course because they are makers at heart and for various decided to pursue other interests. These students want the opportunity to express themselves and to learn to think and communicate visually. Others have been inspired by the work that friends have done in the course or the program, and have a desire to think differently about products and their relationship to the world around them. The course is designed to provide such opportunities. 2 COURSE STRUCTURE AND GOALS The course introduces non-design majors to design thinking and the discipline of industrial design. It is structured around three progressive projects that explore small to large-scale products and systems. Through lectures and discussions and team and individual assignments, students begin to experience and understand some of the essential thinking and communication processes of design. Underlying themes challenge students to give significant consideration to how humans interact with physical information (usability/human factors), understand specific needs (usefulness), and product appeal (desirability). Each project follows a streamlined design process of research, conceptualization, development, and realization while exploring ideas through active sketching and physical modeling in order to discover unique solutions. The 18 students of the class meet twice a week for 110 minutes each session throughout 15 weeks. Meetings are held in a small lecture space furnished with rectilinear clustered tables, white market boards, fabric wrapped wall areas for work to be pinned up, and digital projection technology. The class adapts to the environment by transporting materials for each class.

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2.1 SHAPING THE IDEA OF DESIGN Most of the students who register for this course have a vague notion of what is design, and more are uncertain about what is industrial design. In preparation, it has served well to begin the course with a conversation that explores what students think industrial design is. Over the years more students are responding with clearer ideas about industrial design, in part because of media coverage, but also from friends within the university. Yet there is still uncertainty. This directed discussion shapes a short external assignment that asks the students to investigate and respond to the following: 1. Read the Industrial Design Society of America’s (IDSA) definition of industrial design found at www.idsa.org/whatis/definition.htm. How does the definition differ from the one you shared? 2. Investigate the various categories of industrial design by reviewing the IDEA award winners found at www.idsa.org/whatis/seewhat/idea2003/idea2003.htm. In one or two paragraphs, answer the following questions: A) Which category most appeals to you and why? B) Which product(s) in the category is your favorite and why? C) Considering your area of study, how do you think you might contribute to the design of a product? Focused follow-up discussion allows for a more meaningful exchange about design, the process, and the role of stakeholders. It further helps them to realize that their discipline could have some collaborative role and value within the process. This conversation helps to establish a shared understanding and a more personal connection, and prepares a foundation for the course experiences. 2.2 DEVELOPING VISUAL LITERACY The broad ranges of disciplines typically represented in the course contribute diverse and exciting perspectives. However, very few have experience visualizing information. The author has defined visualization as “a process of mentally constructing, shaping and understanding information, and the ability to externally communicate it. This process extends beyond simply representing information visually – using activities such as drawing, imaging (photography, collages), or physical making. Rather it relies on these abilities as methods for thinking, conceiving, exploring, and proposing ideas. In essence visualization is the pathway for design”[1]. In order to engage students in the activity of design, visual strategies and methodologies for generating drawing and low-fidelity physical modeling, in an efficient and effective manner, are introduced. These tools are woven to build and sustain confidence while concurrently stimulating critical thinking and allowing ideas to emerge. Over the course duration, drawing and modeling skills evolve in conjunction with the needs as dictated by the project’s complexity. The value of design drawing Typically when one thinks of drawing it is thought of from either the artistic or technical approach. The images of beautifully illustrated works of art or highly specified documentations often come to mind. This is because most students are introduced to drawing from one of these perspectives. However, neither represents the outcome goals

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of most visual thinkers, nor responds well as a tool for thinking, managing or creating complex information. Design drawing is a third approach typically offered in programs of design, and in particular industrial design. It is an approach that better supports the broader visual thinker. Design drawing borrows from the art and technical domains to offer a balance of expression and structure. Its driving principle is form construction that enables cognition. By utilizing the design drawing approach, and placing drawing in the context of a tool for thinking and communication, the clarity of the idea becomes paramount enabling one to express information without overly critical assessment of artistic or technical merit. This allows inexperienced drawers to gain sufficient confidence and the ability to think, create, and express visually. As a foundation to drawing, basic form development is demonstrated using perspective and orthographic systems to stimulate holistic thinking during a single class period. After demonstrating the fundamentals, perspective grids (pre-established lines printed on paper that shape a virtual perspective space) used to introduced orientation, proportions, and spatial relationships. Grids have consistently proven to accelerate learning, build confidence and focus energies towards ideas rather than struggling with drawing systems. On average students become comfortable generating drawings of basic forms in about two classes. This evolving understanding and skill is immediately utilized in assignments and projects to realize ideas. The value of concurrent making Effective visual thinking begins with having tools that allow an uninhibited exchange between the mind and external world. Ideally, one negotiates between sketching and making to formulate, verify and modify representations of thought [2]. The activity helps in making a cognitive connection to both purposeful and discovered information. Realizing that students will vary in their natural preference of tools [3], making is also encouraged throughout the process as both an initial thinking tool and as a manifestation of concepts expressed through drawing. The goal of the model is to communicate physical and interaction intentions as clearly and efficiently as capable. Though an aesthetically accurate model is not the goal, quality of construction of the abstract representations are expected to improve over time. Drawing is used in the final stages as support to information that is not easily modeled. Between drawing and modeling the full story of concept is to be expressed. 3 PROJECTS AND STRATEGIES Each project experience is designed to provide a platform for constructing increasingly complex information. Students are challenged to identify problems and carefully explore solutions that consider user interactions, use of materials, and visual and verbal communication. Rectilinear forms play a deliberate role in the first two projects and an important structural role in the third. The simplification of form factors enables the construction of two-dimensional and three-dimensional data (drawing & modeling) as an immediate response to ideas and deadlines. Conceptualization strategies are shown to generate multiple ideas that evolve from thumbnail sketches to refined line drawings. The

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deliverables at the conclusion of each project include a series of sketch models together with one that is more refined to represent a final; a bound book of all drawings depicting the process of thought; and a refined perspective line drawing that communicates details. In addition, each student makes a short presentation to the class and responds to critiques of their work. The projects that follow outline the major course experiences. 3.1 DESIGNING FOR SELF (PERSONAL DESKTOP STORAGE UNIT) The challenge of the first project is to design a personal desktop storage organizer, based on a 9mm cube that addresses the following criteria: • It must be able to support four personal items used in a work/study environment (items must be meaningful and not generic). • Thoughtful consideration on how the user interacts with it is of high importance. • It will sold in major distribution centers and therefore must be stackable vertically and horizontally in at least one state. • The forms and features must maintain a sharp/rectangular language This project sets the stage for design inquiry. By designing a product where only the designer can know the answers, each student becomes their own expert. The initial challenge is to become sensitive to their own behaviors, both conscious and unconscious, in order to discover what questions should be asked of themselves to penetrate surface level solutions and discover meaningful opportunities. Concurrently they generate multiple concepts (beginning with 25 thumbnails) and through critical thinking, testing, and exploration evolve and distill their ideas down to a single proposal within two weeks. (Note: cardboard is used as an introductory material because it is informal and inexpensive) 3.2 DESIGNING FOR SELF + GENERAL USER (LARGE APPLIANCE INFORMATION AND CONTROLS) The second project challenges students to develop a new interaction that enhances the experience of using their kitchen stove. This involves analyzes and decoding the visual systems, and proposing a better interaction between the burner, indicators, and graphics. They begin by describing their stove through dimensioned orthographic drawings then translate that data into a perspective drawing and a ¼ scale form-core model. The model is detailed with graphic markings that indicate major features and presented during a class. The varied range of models enables conversations about visual, physical, interaction, and cultural differences, and how to approach these issues using design. This is the primary goal of the project. Secondary goals include the continued evolution of visual abilities and the broadening of creative solutions. In support of these goals the stove is selected because it extends the rectilinear form factors that began with the organizer. The addition of new forms, such as angles and simple radii to the appliance housing provide manageable complexity and contribute to building visual literacy. Further challenge is created by the requirement to design a control knob, which is centered on physical interaction and complicated in form.

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As students study the interaction opportunities of the control, and adjust to the significant changes in actual verses working scale, supporting human factors lectures and literature references are provided to aid their decisions. Additional visual and making strategies are also provided to respond to necessary tactile sensitivities. Non-hardening modeling clay is a helpful material in this pursuit. The final design requirement in this system is the iconic/symbol and text based information. Through researching past and present appliances, and other types of product interfaces, students develop awareness of the various systems and codes used to communicate and navigate users through product functions. They bring all aspects to completion with a full-scale partial section model and supporting drawings that describes the control and visual systems. 3.3 DESIGNING FOR A TARGET USER (ELECTRONIC DEVICES FOR ELDERS) The final project experience is to design an alarm clock for elder citizens. Using participants from an elder living facility located near the university, students visit and inquire about how this group understands, uses, and interacts with alarm clocks and related products. This is achieved in part by understanding their activities and routines together with their thoughts and desires. Research is an important driver for this final project. Various tools including questionnaires, interviews, observations, and engaging the user in making and storytelling are used to discover information. This data is then discussed and translated into concept proposals that are tested mid-way of the project with the same participants. Many students discover that elders have little need for an alarm clock. But through planned discussion they discover a chance to

Figures 1-3. Project examples. broaden the opportunity by rethinking its function and meaning. An example is to exchange the word alarm for reminder and use the same technologies to conceive of useful products that address unmet needs and desires. This is an underlying goal of the project. The objectives are to gain a higher level of product reasoning and problem solving for a real user. Students learn by working in teams to research and discuss issues and opportunities that will inspire individual concepts. They then explore independent

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directions incorporating more advanced modeling using foam and clay to convey ideas and offer a final proposal. A concluding visit is made to the elders so they can respond to the proposed solutions offered by the class. 4 CONCLUSIONS The three project areas of the Industrial Design Fundamentals course at Carnegie Mellon have consistently evolved student awareness and sensitivity to design issues. By empowering the students to be designers, and engaging them in critical thinking to solve real problems associated with themselves and others, they gain a more acute awareness, understanding, and appreciation. The varied challenges, discoveries, and discussions helps them to understand that design is a deep and complex construct that takes special knowledge, thinking and training to shape appropriate questions, explore creative solutions and solve real problems. Additionally, many students seem to see where design has connections to their own area of study. Others are taking design a step further and are enrolling in other design courses to extend their experiences. Many share their course experiences with friends and peers, which has contributed to making design more visible and valuable within the university. Such advocacy has strengthened already established ties between engineering and design by spurring new conversations about collaborative efforts and planted the seeds for others. It is hoped that many of these students will carry this experience-based education into their professions where they can continue to serve as advocates for design. REFERENCES [1] Anderson, E., Managing visual understanding through cognitive actions. Proceedings of The 10th International Conference on Design Management, Research, and Education, Frankfurt, Germany. November 18, 2000 [2] McKim, R., Experiences in visual thinking, Brooks/Cole Publishing Company; 2nd ed. 1980 [3] Gardner, H. Intelligence Reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century Basic Books, 2000

MULTIDISCIPLINARY DESIGN CURRICULA FROM PRIMARY TO UNIVERSITY LEVEL Liv Merete Nielsen* Professor, Art and Design Programme, Oslo University College, Norway. Dagfinn Aksnes** Senior Lecturer, Product Design Engineering, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. Janne Beate Reitan*** PhD Student, Oslo School of Architecture and Design Ingvild Digranes*** PhD Student, Oslo School of Architecture and Design Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Given the challenges facing the world and its people at the beginning of the 21st Century, it is seen as important and appropriate to question the current standing and performance of design education from Primary to University level. Design has the potential to play a leading role in meeting these challenges, but only if design education can adapt and perform in line with demand and expectations. Experiences from Norway and the UK will serve as a base for reflections on the development of design curricula. The Royal Society of Art (RSA) Manifesto underlines the human aspect and awareness of context. This will be of great value when Norwegian educators seek inspiration from Britain to develop the Norwegian curricula for design. Keywords: Design, Curriculum development, Design Education, RSA Manifesto

*Art and Design Programme, Oslo University College, Postboks 4 St. Olavs plass, 0130 Oslo, Norway Phone: +47 22 45 31 29 e-mail: [email protected] **Product Design Engineering, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland e-mail: [email protected] ***Oslo School of Architecture and Design, e-mail: [email protected] ***Oslo School of Architecture and Design, e-mail: [email protected]

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1 INTRODUCTION Both Norway and the UK have experienced a general reduction in student interest in Sciences and Engineering and an increased interest in the Arts and Design. This demographic shift is significant as it represents the aspirations of our young people and their hopes for the future. The two countries have various and differing experiences from their design education programmes at all levels. What can we learn from each other? Are these considerations of interest to other countries? When new design curricula are created, different epistemologies struggle for recognition. Design is a diverse and multidisciplinary practise and is recognized by its links with both the humanities and the sciences. Design can be an effective bridge between these epistemologies. The multidisciplinary nature of design also generates links with many knowledge based learning areas that participate in the design process. The design process is complex and diverse. It develops and applies new technology but at the same time it is firmly human centred. It is based on a deep understanding of human needs, human behaviour and of social and cultural processes. Norway and the UK have developed their curriculum within different traditions. The UK has two separate subjects; Art and Design and Design and Technology, in primary and secondary school [1]. Norway however, has one subject: Art and Crafts, encompassing both at this level [2]. Before adopting curricula from another country, awareness of the context and tradition is vital. The importance of this awareness can be illustrated by the following experience. 2 A NORWEGIAN IN THE UK One of the authors entered the Design and Technology (D&T) course at the University of Greenwich as an exchange student in 1998. The topic was mechanics. After being lectured on the wonders of car engines, cams, and pivots, she tackled the challenge of designing a mechanical toy. One of the main differences experienced, was how tradition and form are accentuated differently in the two countries. In Norwegian schools, wood has a long tradition, in design as well as in art and crafts, and it seemed the right choice for this project. The reasons were grounded in both function and aesthetics. The British students seemed to a greater extent to be mixing the materials. Some of the students based their choices on form or aesthetics, but to an outsider, it seemed as though the main group made choices of convenience where the technical seemed more of a focus than any link to tradition or form. Not to say that the results produced were not good or in some cases excellent, but the view on how the project should be solved differed from the Norwegian tradition, where the choice of material in the final design has to be both a question of form and function. Neither is more important than the other, and the result of the project is supposed to reflect that you master the technology and machinery to such an extent that it shows in the aesthetics of the design. Another experience in the UK was how to use drawing techniques in the design process. In Norway however, the design process in primary and secondary school

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traditionally has had the material as the point of departure. The more expressive tradition of drawing has made the use of grids and visual aids a taboo. The teachers’ role in the work process differed in the two countries. In the D & T course, teachers were available for only parts of the work period. They initiated the project, commented on ideas and received the final work for grading. In Norway the projects are always executed in an ongoing work dialogue with the teachers. Solutions, ideas, and choices are continuously discussed and reflected upon throughout the work period. 3 THE CONCEPT OF DESIGN Different cultures and professions define design differently and the definitions cover a broad spectrum from applied decoration to functional product development, some definitions are narrow, others broad [3]. There has been a tendency to define design in narrow terms to suit the epistemology of the host subject area. This is part of the fragmentation of design and is reducing the potential benefits from design. According to Schön the concept of design has broadened since the 1960s [4]. Herbert Simon introduces a wide definition of the concept when he says: ’the proper study of mankind is the science of design’ [5], and claims that ‘everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’ [6]. Practitioners and educators from different professions relevant to design jointly own the right to define the concept of design, and a common understanding is necessary in order to develop it into a multidisciplinary subject. To acknowledge the different uses of the word it is necessary to look beyond the surface to trace their history and the shifting play of meaning, especially when words have similar, but at the same time different meanings. This is also the case when primary meanings differ in different languages. Before Norway can learn from the UK or vice versa, such understanding has to be taken into account. 4 DESIGN IN NORWEGIAN EDUCATION The interest for design studies at secondary and university level has exploded in Norway. At the same time, the interest for science is declining. It is all too easy to argue for each individual subject to be the lead subject in any joint effort, however this is not a trivial choice since a struggle for position may have adverse effects on the quality and therefore the value of the education provided. The outcome sets the parameters for the value of the knowledge created by the future education process. At university level, one can ask if there are currently two main traditions for design education, one with a base in the technological tradition and the other rooted in the academies of art. Unfortunately, those institutions that take interest in the development of national curricula at lower levels do so with a focus on their own disciplinary tradition. Instead of promoting an inclusive design education, some groups strive to strengthen their own position. However, a national curriculum at primary and middle school level has a responsibility to be inclusive and promote diversity. This will very positively

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prepare today’s pupils to become the students of tomorrow and equip them with a stronger multidisciplinary understanding of design and its benefits. Before 1960, drawing and crafts, divided in textiles and wood, were separate subjects in primary and secondary schools in Norway. The other Scandinavian countries still have this separation, only Norway merged them into one subject, called forming, in 1960. To merge the powerful tradition of self-expression in art and drawing education with the strong tradition of handicraft and utility in crafts into forming, was complicated. The introduction of forming was pedagogically motivated and the philosophy of selfexpression had great influence on the educational practise [7]. This was frustrating the teachers within the crafts tradition. Some schools avoided conflict by neglecting the curriculum. They kept practising two different subjects, drawing and crafts, as before the merge. This was possible due to the vague formulation of the curriculum. The benefit of merging drawing and crafts into one subject is that pupils can use the best from both traditions in their work. When the curriculum was changed into a more detailed one in 1997- and given the name Art and Crafts, it also opened up new opportunities for design practise in school. The new focus on design would not have happened without some central persons active at the political arena. The Minister of Culture, Åse Kleveland, put architecture and design on the political agenda by creating the white paper Culture in Our Time [8], and by opening of The Norwegian Council of Design and Architecture. Together with the minister of Education, Gudmund Hernes, she set the scene for a new optimism and interest for design in primary and secondary schools. Art and Crafts is currently the fourth largest core subject in primary and middle school (age 6 to 16) in Norway. According to OECD[9], Finland, Italy and Norway give more core time to aesthetic education at this level than any other country in the world. 5 DESIGN IN BRITISH EDUCATION Design and Technology has a very strong position in British society, politics, industry and commerce and there is much support for the subject in education. Design and Technology has long been established as a principal subject in Britain and broadly similar and parallel curricula have evolved, although different interpretations exist in Scotland, England and Northern Ireland indicating a healthy diversity and regional variety. The subject has evolved and strengthened significantly over the past 10 years. The UK experience with Design and Technology has been positive and successful, both in Scotland and England. In higher education design led courses with engineering and technology content, have proven to be very popular with students, whereas engineering and technology courses without design tend to struggle to retain student numbers. In the UK the two traditions; Art & Design and Design & Technology are still separated in two subjects in primary [10] and secondary [11] education with separate teacher training. Design inhabits a number of subject areas: Art & Design, Design & Technology, and Graphic Communication etc. In some ways it is good that design receives input from many specialisms and this diversity is valuable and desirable. However it does mean that there are relatively few specialist teachers of design as a whole. Ultimately this is fragmenting and dissipating instead of holistic and value adding.

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In UK Higher Education, design in the context of product development is evolving in several directions and there is now a need to create a broad and coherent multidisciplinary epistemology to allow the design engineering curriculum to become more relevant and useful in design. This could mean a stronger focus on creativity and transferable skills, less theory, more application and access to relevant tools and technologies. [12] 6 ‘DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY’ – OR VICE VERSA. DOES IT MATTER? Education in primary and secondary school has two main objectives; preparation for further education and education for citizenship. Thus the question is; what best promotes desirable knowledge and abilities for coming generations? This question is more important for curriculum development than local considerations and subject based concerns, whether it is the art/design profession or the science/engineer/technology profession. The discussion has to be based on respect and insight and raised to a more epistemological level. If we propose to search for a holistic design learning experience which works in the best interests of the student and society, what questions need to be raised and dealt with? The RSA Fellowship represents an international multidisciplinary unity behind using Design, Art and Technology for the common good. In Britain, design has enjoyed a position of high regard for several hundred years and this has to a significant extent underpinned Britain’s reputation, financial position and its political power. Today design is central in uniting the multidisciplinary alliance of Fellows of the Royal Society for Art. In its 2004 Manifesto, the RSA states: ‘In 2004 the RSA celebrates its 250th Anniversary. To mark this occasion we have developed a new manifesto and programme of work for the 21st century consisting of five challenges to shape all our future work [13]: • Encouraging Enterprise • Moving Towards a Zero Waste Society • Fostering Resilient Communities • Developing a Capable Population • Advancing Global Citizenship The application of design in the context of the RSA Manifesto has a strong human basis and this is significant in terms of how design is seen vis-à-vis other subjects. This is admirable, but it is not yet implemented properly in either the British or the Norwegian curriculum. The UK still has a divided focus while in Norway there is currently a struggle between opposing groups. The Norwegian government has decided to introduce Technology and Design as a multidisciplinary theme. However by promoting the subject as Technology and Design some of the most valuable benefits which can be demonstrated from human centred and inclusive Design may be lost. This raises the question about the relative importance between design and creativity versus technology-knowledge. The following quotations from The National Centre for Contact with Working Life for the Promotion of the Natural Science and Technology (RENATE) in Norway illustrate some of the challenges in the Norwegian curriculum development [14]. RENATE defines

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the concept of design as a method, where: ‘Design is a conscious and creative activity that unites technology and / or materials with a social dimension with the purpose of aiding, satisfying or modifying human behaviour.’ [15] The aesthetic and cultural dimension is missing in this definition of design. On the other hand, the Art and Crafts community is focusing on the practice-aesthetic dimension of design in developing curricula for primary and secondary school in Norway. By comparing traditional design teaching in both Norway and the UK, it is evident that subject based rivalries and conflicts may have served to dissipate design education effort. Design is seen as belonging to many different subject areas rather than being recognized as a subject in its own right. This is fragmenting the student’s overall learning experience and preventing investment in training of specialist design teachers. If the full potential of design is to be realized and benefits from the synergy possible in multidisciplinary learning are to be captured, design need to be delivered as a coherent and diverse subject with a strong focus on human and environmental issues, not just technology. The human focus reflected in the Manifesto from RSA is mirrored in the British title; Design and Technology. The positive and inclusive effect of this should not be underestimated and therefore it does indeed matter that design and its potential benefits are fully understood and recognized. 7 CONCLUDING REMARKS AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS Design has a role in the coordination and management of creative effort from all areas of knowledge. The RSA Manifesto and its wide adoption powerfully demonstrate this role internationally and across boundaries and disciplines. Rather than focusing on the British curriculum it is of interest to also consider the RSA Manifesto in a debate on curriculum development. The RSA Manifesto is positive and highly relevant worldwide. This paper is just a beginning for comparative studies between Norway/Scandinavia and the UK or other European countries. Curriculum development as well as design practice and promotion is worthy of study. The authors propose to explore future research challenges in design education: • Is the student’s learning experience too fragmented? • Is design education delivered in a sufficiently broad and diverse context to ensure that design graduates are capable of tackling the challenges posed by the RSA Manifesto? • How can best practice from different cultures/professions be integrated in an effective epistemology for multidisciplinary design learning and teaching? • How can design education benefit from the synergy of teaching multidisciplinary subjects? Design and its potential benefits to society are too important to allow it to be subjected to fragmentation and rivalries at a time when our attention needs to focus on synergies between professions in order to meet the very considerable challenges which face us.

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REFERENCES [1] The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA). 2005. National Curriculum Online [cited 14.04.2005]. Available from http://www.nc.uk.net/webdav/servlet/XRM?Page/@id=6016. [2] Det kongelige kirke-, utdannings- og forskningsdepartementet. [The Ministry of Church Affairs, Education and Research] 1996. Læreplanverket for den 10-årige grunnskolen. [Core Curriculum for Primary, Secondary and Adult Education] [3] Reitan, Janne Beate. in progress. Improvisation in Tradition. The Vernacular Design of Inupiaq Clothing. PhD, Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Oslo. [4] Schön, Donald A. 1983. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books. [5] Simon, Herbert A. 1969. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. p. 83 [6] Simon, Herbert A. 1969. The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. p. 55 [7] Nielsen, Liv Merete. 2000. Drawing and Spatial Representations - Reflections on Purposes for Art Education in the Compulsory School. Oslo: Oslo School of Architecture. [8] Kulturdepartementet [The Ministry of Culture]. 1992. Kultur i tiden [Culture of our Time], St.meld. [Cultural White Paper] nr 61 (1991-92). Oslo: Kulturdepartementet [9] OECD, and Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. Education at a glance: OECD indicators. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. [10] The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), Department for Education and Skills, and Excellence in Schools. 2002. Key Stage 3. National Strategy. Designing the Key Stage 3 Curriculum, Guidance. Curriculum & Standards: The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. [11] The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. 2004. Changes to the key stage 4 curriculum. Guidance for implementation from September 2004, National Curriculum: The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. [12] Aksnes, Dagfinn. 2004. Developing a student-centred studio culture for effective learning and teaching in Product Design Engineering. Paper read at IE&PDE, Delft. [13] Royal Society for Art. 2005. RSA projects. Manifesto Challenges 2005 [cited 01.02. 2005]. Available from http://www.rsa.org.uk/projects/index.asp. [14] TeknologiForum. 2005. Teknologi og Design [cited 03.04. 2005]. Available from http://www.teknologiforum.no/forum.html. [15] RENATE. 2005. Proposal for curriculum in Technology and Design for Secondary School 2003 [cited 03.04. 2005]. Available from http://www.teknologiforum.no/BUskoler/Teknologiogdesign.pdf.

SUBVERTING THE MODULAR STRUCTURE: TEACHING DESIGN HOLISTICALLY IN A DISLOCATED AND ALIEN ENVIRONMENT Bjorn Rodnes* School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh. Duncan Hepburn* School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh. Will Titley* School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh. Jim Goodlet* School of Design and Media Arts, Napier University, Edinburgh. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT In 1997 Napier University adopted a semesterised, modular system to deliver all undergraduate programmes. Accordingly the three threedimensional design programmes (Interior Architecture; Design Futures; Consumer Product Design) were restructured to conform to that format. Subsequently, working strictly within that system has highlighted pedagogical dissonances not conducive for the effective teaching and learning of design theory and practice. This paper describes the attempt to work within an administrative modular format and provide a holistic and cohesive learning experience for undergraduate students. In order to address issues arising from student feedback and staff reflection/analysis, a pilot study was constructed which attempted to integrate the learning outcomes of three concurrent but discrete modules into a project based structure; the modules themselves becoming essentially transparent to the student cohort. Three undergraduate level 2 modules, Design Modelling, Design for Manufacture and Design for Business, were selected for the trial. This paper will illustrate the methods applied by the staff involved in this pilot study and its outcomes in terms of student satisfaction and teaching and learning experiences. *School of Design and Media Arts Napier University 10 Colinton Road Edinburgh EH10 5DT {b.rodnes d.hepburn w.titley j.goodlet}@napier.ac.uk

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Keywords: design education, modular structure, pedagogy 1. INTRODUCTION Teaching design within a modular structure presents challenges to both student and facilitator. Creative design practice is not a compartmentalised activity, rather it is a dynamic environment where multiple, often concurrent activities combine to effect an outcome which complies with a pre-determined specification or set of conditions. The modular structure isolates and separates activities, which would normally be integrated in practice. In contrast, a student centred project based learning experience enables flexibility in delivery and a dynamic interaction between the core material of the programme and the student’s aptitudes and proclivities. Differences in learning approach and experience manifest themselves and are allowed to be expressed within a project based structure far more freely than within a formalised modular structure. The perceived understanding of the interaction of what is usually closely related material in differing modules can also be difficult for some learners to comprehend. In a modular structure there is a tendency towards superficial learning where the depth of understanding, whilst demonstrably meeting the learning outcomes of a module at the point of assessment, is not subsequently demonstrated as expected in later work in the same academic session or subsequent sessions. Design is recognised as a trans-disciplinary activity which affords little opportunity to develop deep expertise in one subject; rather it demands an expertise in clearly identifying relevant information from a wide range of sources and synthesising it to resolve a context driven set of, often conflicting, circumstances. Design education is also recognised as an exemplar as an educational process. “Project centred learning: all design courses are arranged around a core series of design projects- exercises in which delivered knowledge can be tested and integrated with design speculation. This core of personal experimentation is vital in the assimilation of knowledge and developing personal ownership of any study. Moreover, professional life subsequent to study is – more often than not – concerned with projects, not subjects” [1]. Modular programmes were introduced for numerous reasons ranging from allowing wider access and student participation; establishing and maintaining recognisable academic standards within and across institutions, and providing a clear and economic management and administrative structure to cope with the dynamics of a rapidly evolving educational scene [2]. Educationalists have debated the merits or otherwise of a behaviourist approach to higher education, not least of all the attempts to define and assess higher cognitive skills through learning outcomes [3]. However the authors recognise that in any form of learning programme there has to be a rationale for content and structure which needs to be clearly communicated to the learner. However an over zealous application of a generic and rigid modular structure, ill described threshold learning outcomes and uncoordinated assessment patterns, negates much of what is seen as valuable in the creative design activity.

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Most modular design programmes theme subjects in a sequential format allowing students to progress from stage to stage as they accrue knowledge, understanding and practical skills and design projects provide opportunities for students to rehearse, perform and apply new knowledge and adjust their prior understanding to new circumstances [4]. Napier University’s Consumer Product Design programme encapsulates 4 themes: Design theory and practice: Business/management /entrepreneurship: Manufacturing technology: Material culture. These are currently delivered in discrete modules (some provided by other faculties; notably School of Engineering and the Business School) each with their own aims, objectives and learning outcomes leading to an accumulative outcome for a specific stage of the programme. Subsequent to annual programme appraisal by staff and review of student feedback, a number of issues were identified which appeared to inhibit the successful delivery of what, we believe, should be a naturally integrative, creative design activity and learning experience: 1.1 STUDENT PERCEPTIONS • most of our applicants apply for a specific programme with its particular entry requirements. In our case over and above the University academic requirements (200 + Universities and College Admission Service points), there is a specific skill set which is compulsory (evidence of practical design / imaging / drawing / creativity ability, demonstrated through the submission of a portfolio) • this programme perception leads to module focus. There is evidence from students that they have little interest in taking modules not seen as directly or immediately supportive of their own programme goal. Evidenced in their choice of elective in supporting design. • even within the core programme, students perceive some modules as more attractive than others – hence more commitment and effort is employed. 1.2 PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT • even with coordinating meetings there was evidence of an imbalance of demands within and between modules: typically between theoretical/written submissions and design practice. • Equally, through the choice of learning outcomes there was duplication, of project themes and topics. • logistics for support services were stretched to capacity at certain points within the semester – especially at the end when all modules have deliverables for assessment) 1.3 ACADEMIC ISSUES • In the early stages of the programme many students failed to integrate the disparate yet thematically related module outcomes in a manner that manifested itself in later modules as evidence of deep learning.

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2. ‘TRANSPARENT’ MODULES Given the above observations, we have attempted to overcome these issues by piloting a new system (to Napier School of Design and Media Arts) in providing a more equitable and integrated learning experience for students. We are developing the concept of ‘transparent modules’ at stage 2, semester 1, where shared sequential design projects encompass learning outcomes from 3 concurrent modules; Design Modelling, a 30-credit module, Design and Business and Design for Manufacture both 15-credit modules. These projects accrue and deliver the learning outcomes of each module by the end of the semester. Thus projects become the vehicle for allowing problem based experiential learning to take place, which increasingly encompasses the learning outcomes of all three modules. Our aim was to provide a clearly understandable integrated problem based learning experience for the students, more in keeping with the integrated nature of the professional design process. 2.1 APPLICATION The scheme was introduced to the students at the beginning of the semester when aims and objectives were openly discussed. The three modules comprise all the work undertaken by the 2nd stage Consumer Product Design and Design Futures students at semester one within a weekly attendance of four days. It was known that in order to acheive the learning outcomes a variety of methods of delivery would be necessary. These would include formal lecture, individual and group tutorials and skills acquisition workshops. Following the descriptors of each module, the types of assesment methods would also vary, involving staged formative assessment and formal summative assesment. Deliverables also varied across module descriptors and included physical and digital models, formal group presentations, verbal presentations, research, technical and management reports, In order to address these widely varying demands the semester was subdivided into 3 key stages : Stage 1- a short introductory project integrating the 3 module themes. Stage 2- a longer design-practice based project which was supported by lectures and excercises in the theoretical modules. Stage 3- a predominantly reflective element allowing the students the opportunity to quantify and review their accrued knowledge and learning experiences. 2.2 EXAMPLE –PROJECT 1 POLAROID I-ZONES CAMERA. This project introduces the students to the integrative nature of design by examining the priorities and outcomes of product use, product placement, market and business dynamics, technical development, product architecture, material properties and production processes. It was felt that the first project was critical for establishing the spirit of the project-based delivery and as such would have to include a carefully considered weighting for each module assesment. The programme team developed a

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project based on the Polaroid I-Zones instamatic camera. This budget fun camera was used as a vehicle for exploring the needs for primary user centered research and observational studies, The Polaroid Corporation was used as a case

Table 1. Module assessment weightings by project. Module

Project weighting (%) I-Zones ‘Space Saving Reflective practice/ objects’ Technical reports

Design for Manufacture Design For Business Design Modelling

30 0 0 70 40 0 0 60 30 30 40 0 20 60 20 Proportion of overall combined project

study re the introduction of strategic business management, and the camera proved the ideal cadaver for a product autopsy. 2.3 BALANCING ASSESSMENT Each stage involved a different assesment weighting for the separate modules according to the time devoted to them. For example, project 2 was weighted largely towards the learning outcomes and deliverables of Design Modelling whereas project 3 was weighted towards Design Management and Design For Manufacture. The overall marks for the combined projects added up to 100%, however this total was also sub-weighted according to the modules in order to provide the distinct marks for each module needed for formal entry at module and programme examination boards. (Table 1) 2.4 MAPPING OF INTEGRATED PROJECTS TO LEARNING OUTCOMES. Learning outcomes: Design for Manufacture: a. Describe the principles of major processes of component manufacture b. Describe the processes and relative merits of assembly methods c. Explain and present the concepts of manufacturing systems d. Participate constructively in in-formal / formal team organisations Design and Business: a. Define the business environment in which design operates b. Describe the social and demographic environment affecting design c. Describe the relationship between marketing and the designer d. Create and communicate design proposals illustrating business factors affecting design Design Modelling: a. Deploy the principles and methods of modelling ideas

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b. Demonstrate competence in selecting methods of physical, symbolic, computer and scenario modelling through design exercises c. Utilise interactive reconceptualisations of a given project d. Manage / contribute and assess individual contributions to team endeavours The projects addressed specific learning outcomes as illustrated in Table 2 and were supported by workshop/diagnostic exercises as illustrated in Table 3

Table 2. Learning outcomes addressed within projects. Project Learning outcomes addressed within projects Design Modelling Design for Manufacture Design and Business Project 1 a b d Project 2 a b c d Project 3 d

bd d abcd

abd d abc

Table 3. Learning outcomes addressed by supporting activity. Project period

Project 1 Project 2 Project 3

Learning outcomes addressed by supporting activity Design Modelling Physical Modelling workshops, Cad workshops, Scenario modelling workshops

Design for Manufacture Short theoretical challenges, Product Autopsies,

Design and Business TeamWorking Workshops,

abc ab

ab abc c

ab bc

3. FINDINGS FROM PILOT STUDY From analysing the student feedback obtained through on going tutorial sessions, a formal questionnaire and a reflective report at the end of the semester, staff perceived the following positive and negative outcomes. 3.1 STUDENT BENEFITS: • Student feedback indicated a clearer understanding of the relationship between the subject areas of the modules than previously experienced. • Student workload appeared to be more evenly controlled over the semester – sequential submissions did not create an apogee of submissions during, and at the end of the semester, as was the norm for 3 concurrently run modules.

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• The demands for technical support were more evenly spread within the timeframe and across the School (logistics for support services are stretched to capacity at certain points within the semester. – especially at the end of the semester when all modules have final submissions for assessment) • The normally separate Design and Business and Design for Manufacture modules now made direct reference to the current projects with on-going lectures and supportive tutorials. • Lectures illustrated specific project demands and considerations in a wider and deeper context across the content of the three modules – providing diverse perspectives on the concurrent design project. 3.2 STUDENT ISSUES: • Some students found it difficult to balance the diverse perspectives on the concurrent design project. 3.3 STAFF BENEFITS: • Transparent modules greatly assisted in overcoming academic isolation. • Provided an opportunity for individual academic growth (informal mentoring of staff) • Provided more robust teaching and learning solutions to be developed cooperatively. • The mapping of marks across the modules allowed the staff team to easily review the overall performance of a student during the course of the semester rather than having to wait for examination board results. This also speeded up feedback of a student’s performance as it allowed an indicative grade to be given before a formal academic transcript was issued. • Provided a more dynamic and stimulating teaching environment 3.4 STAFF ISSUES: • Required significant pre-planning. • Demanded time commitment for ongoing co-operative meetings. • Pedagogical coherence is needed to avoid conflicts potentially leading to an unsuccessful integration of content. • Highly demanding to create new project topics annually to integrate module outcomes.

4. CONCLUSION The findings appear to indicate that with further developments this pedagogical approach has the potential to become an established methodology for teaching design within a programme focussed modular structure. The programme team intend to implement these findings and carry forward the pilot study in an enhanced form to validate these initial results against differing cohorts. This implementation will take place within undergraduate cohorts and in a new ‘M’ level programme, the planned MDes in Interdisciplinary Design.

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REFERENCES [1] McDonald S. (ed) Design Issues In Europe Today, BEDA, Barcelona, 2004, pp 48-50 [2] Turner D., Designing and Delivering Modules. Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, 2002. Oxford, pp 74-86 [3] Toohey S. Designing Courses for Higher Education. The Society for Research into Higher Education & Open University Press, Buckingham 1999 [4] McAlpine L. Designing Learning as Well as Teaching, Active Learning in Higher Education Vol 5, no 2, July 2004. Sage Publications, pp 119-134

DESIGN & INNOVATION DEVELOPING A CURRICULUM FOR FUTURE DESIGN ENGINEERS AT THE TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF DENMARK Per Boelskifte* Professor Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, University of Denmark, Denmark Ulrik Jørgensen** Assoc.prof. Dept. of Manufacturing Engineering and Management, University of Denmark, Denmark Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The new design and innovation programme at DTU, its background, context and basic educational ideas are presented and discussed in this paper. To build competences that match the need for innovative and design oriented engineers in industry and society has turned out to challenge a number of the standard – and often taken for granted – concepts in engineering education still dominated by rather strict norms and concepts of learning that do not challenge the students creativity and innovative ideas. In this respect this new engineering education may point also to some of the more generally needed reforms of engineering education, of which traces and seeds already can be found in many engineering universities. Keywords: design engineering, curricula, project based learning, subject integration 1 INTRODUCTION September 2002 the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) greeted 60 enthusiastic *Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, Building 404 Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark Tel. +45 4525 6254 – email **Dept. of Manufacturing Engineering and Management, Building 424 Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark Tel. +45 4525 6075 – email

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students to a completely new design & innovation educational programme leading to a engineering masters degree based on five years of study. The new engineering education is planned to meet the demands from industry and society following the dynamic changes of technology and society. New structures of cooperation in product development and innovation following these changes also demands new competences from engineers whose traditional training in the natural sciences and technical disciplines have been prone to supplements from social sciences including ethical, social, economic and management issues. The design & innovation programme is therefore also a contribution to the renewal of the educational profile of DTU. An important motivation for the new education from the university management side has been to attract more and new types of students having good grades from high school but not being attracted by the traditional engineering education curricula. The new education has proven valuable for this purpose as almost 50% of the students recruited would not have chosen an engineering program and it has also attracted almost as many female as male students. The design & innovation education emphasises competences in carrying out engineering work in practice which in the specific case with focus on design engineering include a number of competences not paid so much attention to in the standard engineering curricula. Our graduate’s professional profile includes the technical- and social sciences and a heterogeneous engineering competence covering three important dimensions: • Reflective technological engineering competences, which refer to the reform of teaching and integration of the core engineering curriculum that has been an important part of the design engineering education. • Creative, synthesis oriented competences aimed at integrating technical and social components during the development of products, systems, processes and services. The education emphasise the development of students personal, creative potential, engagement and enthusiasm, professional insight and the mastery of methods. • Innovative, socio-technical competencies to be utilized in the creation and renewal of systems and situations where technical organizing and humans interact, and where complex, political decisions confronts the engineering field’s way of modelling and optimization. These goals are supported through a number of courses and projects covering a broad spectrum of professional disciplines that reflect aspects of design processes on individual, organizational, commercial and societal levels. The aim in planning the education has been to establish a comprehensive sequence in the syllabus including the master’s level specialization of the student’s competencies in knowledge from technical domains and in design and leadership in executing complex development assignments in realistic contexts. 1.1 A RENEWAL OF ENGINEERING EDUCATION Most engineering educations are emphasising disciplines and training in natural sciences and technical, analytical and instrumental competences. As a consequence the competence of synthesis seen as the creative, constructive and design oriented elements

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have been given a lover priority if at all present. This development may be considered rather strange, as the engineering ethos emphasise the constructive and innovative aspects of engineering and technology. But since WWII the science base of engineering disciplines has been more in focus than the practical and creative skills of engineers, which has lead to a change in the role that engineers play in industrial development and societal change [1]. Especially since the late 1980ies this has been recognised by industry and has lead to a demand for engineering educational reforms and has meant a change in the accreditation schemes like the new ABET 2000 criteria [2]. The response in engineering education to the enormous growth in the number of engineering disciplines and subjects given at the engineering universities has been to further emphasise the science base of engineering cutting down on practical skills and the closer contact to engineering practices. From having its base in the polytechnics understanding of the role of sciences, specialisation has lead to a situation that supports a mono-technical view of engineering competence. As technology has become an even more integral part of modern society there is a demand for understanding how technological artefacts and systems interact with the social of modern society. The aim of the design & innovation curriculum is adding new facets and aspects to DTU’s educational profile without compromising the fundamental elements in a combined bachelor and master’s of engineering program. This has lead to setting some normative demands when educating students to become responsible designers including that a design engineer – in cooperation with others – must take responsibility for future development and application of technology, as well as demands for sustainability, user-involvement and quality. A design engineer also must develop skills that aim at the integration of technical and social aspects of innovation setting the stage for development in industry and in society. The vision with respect to the education programme is to create enthusiasm for comprehensive solutions by challenging and developing the student’s creative competences - both individual creativity and an understanding of the value of teamwork. The student’s potential is developed through challenging, complex project assignments requiring and technical knowledge, teamwork skills, engagement, and knowledge of methods. The basic engineering subjects e.g. materials science, thermodynamics, mathematics, physics and chemistry will, to a large extent, be integrated in the basic subjects combined with engaging project work. 1.2 PROJECT ORIENTED WORK Project oriented work is the continuum of the education. A chain of projects with a progression of challenges in various dimensions constitutes the spine of the syllabus. The basic idea is to combine ‘learning by doing’ with a structured learning sequence emphasising elements of practice necessary to obtain specific competences in the three key areas. Understanding and mastering working with design synthesis requires elements of apprenticeship relations to the professional. The student must experience the professional in action to experience value based assessments and utilise this dialogue in connection with one’s own creations. The learning process is thus primarily based on interaction and experience.

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Design can be defined as applied technology. Neither subjects taught in basic sciences nor the technological subjects prioritize synthesis in content or means. Yet technology must be adapted to fit assignments or be part of innovation processes. This utilization of technology must be experienced if the student’s is to develop design competence. 1.3 INTEGRATION OF DISCIPLINS AND SUBJECTS The design engineering group developed integration of subjects as a didactic cornerstone in the learning of the very abstract but fundamental science curriculum. The model is based on a problem oriented – but educator planned and controlled - learning process. A complex product is chosen as a reference (a bicycle, a refrigerator, a PLC device etc). The product is analysed focusing on selected basic phenomena related to the properties in use: strength, energy transformations, stability, surface etc. Scientific (i.e. physics and chemistry) and technical principles suited to explain these phenomena are then introduced together with relevant mathematical models that can be utilised for a approximation of ideal relations between the phenomena. Through this, students will reach an understanding for the use of abstract models in their work and are trained to be able to analyse a complex set of relations and to identify relevant parameters and models. Simultaneously it gives the student an experience that leads to understanding the use of several analytical methods on the same phenomena and also the potential for identifying the problems to which the methods apply. In addition to using integration of subjects in conjunction to learning the basic science curriculum this concept serves as a key element for design & innovation related subjects and the semester projects. 2 BACHELOR PROGRAM AND SEMESTER THEMES The bachelor program covers the course topics shown in the following figure. The 1st semester theme is Meet the world of technology. The semester aims to focus the student awareness on the full bachelor package’s composition of themes, motivate and create identity, introducing the mode of studying connected to synthesis, reflection and awareness. The 2nd semester theme is The good product. Focus is on understanding the complexity of manufacturing is studied from various approaches: functionality, properties, construction, production methods and the socio-technical context (users, use, producer, sales, competition, culture etc.) The 3rd semester theme is Engineering construction. This semester students carry out a complex construction based on given specifications. The focus is on coupled construction assignments within the domains of mechanics, electronics and software, including the selecting of components and using them according to functional demands.

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Figure 1: The design & innovation bachelor curriculum matrix. The 4th semester theme is Workspace design. The semester focuses on the design of work processes and workspaces. The core of the semester is a project with a company or an organisation. The students themselves plan and execute an analysis of a given workspace and related work processes. The 5th semester theme is Innovation and sustainability. The semester focuses on environmental- and resource issues in the development, production and disposal of products based on methods to describe, assess and improve environmental- and resource issues in a life-cycle and product-chain perspective. The 6th semester project is the Bachelors project. This semester is the conclusion of the bachelor part of design & innovation. 3 SPECIALISATIONS WITHIN THE MASTER’S PROGRAM In the framework of design & innovation three specialisations are offered. They all share the common projects of the master’s program but offer a different focus: • Product design • Systems design • Design- & innovation management Each specialisation aims at competences where a lack of trained engineers [3] is documented in Denmark. 3.1 PRODUCT DESIGN The specialisation in Product design combines the engineers’ insights in construction and synthesis and the field of industrial design i.e. aesthetics and human factors.

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Product designers are capable of analysing needs, contexts and the human aspect of technologies and creating concepts that can become the basis for new innovations and commercial applications. This means that they are involved not only in the design and construction process, but also are competent in product planning and market creation. The human aspects of the designers’ competence will show in the creation of interaction between users including the domestication of products and systems in the use contexts. Also the industrial design component defined by the shaping, graphical design, colouring and semiotics of products will be included in the engineering designers approach in such measure that they are able to handle these aspects and work in close cooperation with professional industrial designers.

Fig 2: Product design specialisation. 3.2 SYSTEMS DESIGN The masters in systems design builds on the traditions from systems engineering, the handling of uncertainties and the combination of institutions building with the building of systems of products and interfaces as e.g. found in production systems, transport systems and other complex uses of machines and technologies. The handling of demand specifications, deconstruction of complex objectives into architectures of components and utilising technology platforms also are part of this specialisation. This specialisation include courses in ‘Technological systems’, ‘Technology platforms and architecture’ and ‘Systems development’ instead of ‘Design for interaction’, ‘Strategy, design and market’, ‘Knowledge and innovation in networks’ and Products and consumption’ as shown in the above product design specialisation figure. This specialisation will also combine the specific competences focussed upon in design and systems development subjects with insights from one or more of the technical domains included in the engineering programmes at DTU. 3.3 DESIGN- AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT The specialisation in design- and innovation management aims to produce engineers capable in planning and managing design- and innovation processes in a business oriented and societal context. Besides leading these processes in a traditional sense, they will also be able to understand and utilise the competences necessary to establish the

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staging of the design process enabling the participants to work in an innovative, focused and creative mode. This specialisation include courses in ‘Management concepts and change’ instead of ‘Design for interaction’ and Products and consumption’ as shown in the above product design specialisation figure. This specialisation also makes possible a combination of specific competences within managing and staging various forms of technological insight within one or more of DTU’s technical domains of knowledge. 4 CONCLUDING REMARKS Based on our monitoring and evaluation cycles and having come more than half way in the 5 year design & innovation program some patterns seem to emerge and some partial conclusions may be made: A recently released report [4] concludes that the students generally see the overall pattern of the education and its curriculum. They find that the subject integration generally functions well; their education enables them to relate theory to objects and their context. An example mentioned is the bicycle as a object case in both 41015 Mechanics and materials and SCOT-theory in connection with 42020 Products use and design. The students also find that project assignments/studio work functions well and this is the relation to which subject integration functions best The close connection to actual problems makes the projects very realistic and unique at the same time. Many report this learning form is the main reason for choosing this education. The students find that integration of scientific and technical subject still is a challenge. REFERENCES [1] Seely, Bruce: The Other Re-engineering of Engineering Education, 1900-1965. Journal of Engineering Education, July Issue, 1999, pp. 285-294. [2] ABET: Engineering Criteria 2000. Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology, 2000. [3] Jørgensen, Ulrik: Future profiles in engineering, Danish Engineers Association, 1999. [4] DTU: Evalueringsrapport nr. 4 om design & innovation: Merete Hende og Arne Jakobsen, 2005.

THE CONCEPT OF COMPETENCE IN ENGINEERING PRACTICE Birgitte Munch* researcher Industrial Design, TEKO The Institute of Fashion and Lifestyle, Denmark. Arne Jakobsen** Assoc.prof. Dept. of Manufacturing Engineering and Management, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The competence concept can function as a guideline for learning processes in its complex/hybrid form. In planning courses that aim to develop competences, it is not beneficial to split competence dimensions into competence elements such as the very divided-up competence concepts used by, for example, evaluation research. It seems obvious that there is a relationship between changes in the societal organization of knowledge production and the actual focus on ‘competence’ rather than ‘qualifications’. Society’s focus has shifted from a focus on reproducing ‘true knowledge’ to connecting knowledge elements into relevant and productive wholes in concrete situations. Tradition exists for connecting the competence concept to individual actions and thereby to evaluating persons. But with reference to the fact that competence production and evaluation especially focus on arguments and practical actions competence should be connected to projected (social) situationsin professional practice. Key word: design competence, practice, authentic, context, evaluation

*Industrial Design, TEKO The Institute of Fashion and Lifestyle, 7400 Herning, Denmark Tel. +45 8633 6616 – email **Dept. of Manufacturing Engineering and Management, Building 424 Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Lyngby, Denmark Tel. +45 4525 6078 – email

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1 INTRODUCTION This paper is one of three papers produced as first part of a project entitled ‘Evaluation of competence in engineering education’. The aim of the project is to improve conditions for evaluating engineering design competencies, and this paper summarizes some aspects of the general and theoretical dimension that forms the basis of the empirical investigations of the pre-project. The empirical part is based on observations of two courses at the ‘Design & Innovation’ specialization at the Technical University of Denmark. 2 UNDERSTANDING ‘COMPETENCE’ Competence has become a significant focus in educational policy as well as industrial policy during the last ten years. Formerly, discussions concerning evaluation of educational effectiveness have concentrated on such concepts as ‘qualifications’, ‘understanding’, or ‘abilities’. In evaluation research it is practical impossible to distinguish the concept of ‘qualification’ from the concept of ‘competence’, since the multiple actors involved in evaluation uses an accommodated everyday-language that produces widely diverging vocabularies; often using the terms ‘qualification’ and ‘competence’ interchangeably. For us, the focus on competence is a product of wider societal developments that can be described as the emergence of the ‘knowledge society’, ‘the reflexive modernity’ or ‘the network society’ (see e.g. Giddens [1]). ‘Competence’ emerges as actors’ experience a widening gab between what is valued by academic institutions, and the effects desired by users of academic labour. A discrepancy is developing, it seems, between what is honoured as good school performance and good business performance, and this is producing growing interest in the ability to understand the relations between educational practices and the actual usefulness of candidates in business, politics and industry. I.e. the perspectives and valuation of learning applied during formal engineeering education differ from the perspectives and valuation in business practice. These differing perspectives produce an interest in evaluating the one from the point of view of the other: If universities, in the process of producing knowledge and abilities, are to take a greater interest in the usability of knowledge and abilities, how should they go about it and how should they evaluate whether their efforts are successful or not. One reason for the interest for competence in engineering is the on-going proliferation of the practical arenas of engineering. Technology does not only become more complex in the sense that technological development comprises multiple strands of engineering specializations. Technology also tends to be ‘hyper complex’ as reflexivity inscribed in technological development transcends professional boundaries and creates a demand for new hybrids of knowledge, skills and abilities. It is definitively not adequate to design educations that cram the heads of engineering students with pieces of knowledge in the hope that they, on their own, will be able to find the right pieces on the shelves when needed in their professional practice [2]. Envisioning user contexts, situations, networks etc. – i.e. focussing on competencies - is taking over as the dynamics of curriculum planning.

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Focusing on competences rather than qualifications emphasizes differences between goals set within an educational practice and goals set in a professional practice. Hence, the concept of competence keeps focus on relations between production of knowledge, skills and abilities, and the practical usefulness of knowledge, skills and abilities. Concern for competence clarifies the fact that knowledge manifests itself differently depending on context, situation, and perspective. When evaluating competence, it is relations between knowledge (skills etc) and practical actions that comes into focus; it is not the elements of knowledge themselves, nor resources for action themselves. So we understand the concept of competence as essentially dealing with practice. The term ‘competence’ and ‘competencies’ are taken to mean the unfolding of knowledge, skills, and abilities in a concrete practical setting. Then competence is always competence-in-practice [3]. It then follows that – ideally – it only makes sense to assess competence in the specific user context and situations where it unfolds, hence inscribing cultural values, timehorizonts, communication, etc. Competence, then, has the following basic characteristics: • Competence is relational and contextual; i.e. it is a perspective on personal performance in a specific context. It involves a person, and and a context - an organization with norms, values, instruments, aims, intentions etc. • Competence involves the process of realization, and therefore the resources involved in realization: To create conditions and argue relevance, one must possess attitudes, motives, will power, drive, intuition, communicative skills etc. • Competence is knowledge, skills, and abilities in a form and structure that individuals use in practical problem solving. This implies that competence relates to an authentic practice (distinguished from a designed practice).

3 COMPETENCE: DIMENSIONS AND ELEMENTS Personal competence is a complex totality. To reach a statement of personal competences one must analytical deconstruct the concept of competence into respectively dimensions of competence and elements of competency. These two are interwoven, and you can visualise ‘competence’ as a matrix with two spheres; ‘dimensions’ and ‘elements’. We regard competence as total preparedness in action, and as contexts are in constant flux, and problems and solutions are continuously being reshaped, we argue that personal competence, as a whole cannot be assessed, no matter how many elements and dimensions we take into consideration. Society and our cultural patterns produce a series of focal points that businesses adopt as development dimensions that define the competences they desire. Dimensions of competence are produced in the mangle of practice of professional environments; they are hybrid and contingent. When professional practices evolve, new dimensions of competence come into focus. For example: environmental competence, modelling competence, cooperative competence, and communicative competence, all of which are enacted through a complex of knowledge, skills, and abilities. So no definitive list exists of the competences that are relevant for engineers. The various dimensions of competence can be decomposed into a variety of ’elements of competency’. These are theoryladden, analytical elements that are more stable and

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uniform than the dimensions of competence. Competence elements are thus elements with somewhat fixed limits, i.e. they are identifiable as being similar in different contexts. The specific set of elements of competency depends on the student’s specific specialization, task, and learning setting. Competence elements are units that can be evaluated. They can be defined relatively independent of the context or situation, and they can therefore be recognized (as being somewhat the same) in different kinds of practice (e.g. both in teaching practice and a concrete professional practice). 4 PRODUCTION OF COMPETENCE Some studies argue that theoretical knowledge that is taught in academic educations must be considerably restructured in order to be applicable in clinical practice [3;4;5;]. The studies indicate, that to produce a meaningful learning process of sufficient complexity, competence elements must not be purified but rather placed in a context; i.e. elements like ‘knowledge’ or ‘methodological competences’ cannot be developed independently of the object and context to which they are connected. To have a meaningful learning process, the elements of competence must be defined af positioned in relation to each other - to precise problems, professional routines, selected universes within the discipline, etc. When rectructuring learning processes – transforming goals from production of qualifications towards production of competence - the teachers understanding of the relevant professional practices will pose a more significant position in the learning process. Meaningful goals for a learning proces are produced from the whole educational context and history, and the elements of competence take form and relevance in relation to this. The dimension ‘environment competence’ is defined within the context of the specialization, with a given horizon and given roles envisioned for the group being taught (design engineers, mechanical engineers, etc). What means environmental competences for engineers, as distinguished from architects or economists? Courses in environment competence will reflect – explicitly or implicitly – the practice and the ideals concerning the profession’s actions as well as political and scientific goals and values. ‘Elements of competence’ are thus always characterized by being tied to a specific context that involves the field of study, as well as the type of learning process, and the envisioned professional context. Environmental competencies are not produced through separate learning processes with separates analytical and practical goals. The core aspect of the concept of competence seems to be that competence is a relational concept; that competence is a hybrid of different elements, and that it is the relations that designates competence. Although we often easily can identify the various ‘pure elements’ in a competence dimension (exact knowledge, a single skill, etc), it is mostly not meaningful to produce competence by purify performance within a single ‘element’ – because elements do not exist in ‘pure form’ within a professional context. Production of competence must balance between pure and hybrid elements of competence.

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5 PROFESSIONAL ROLES AND AUTHENTIC PRACTICE Some professions have tried for several years to improve learning processes by making assessments of practice in more authentic [professional] situations. Several examples exist within medicine of evaluations of clinical practice [6]. Competence is demonstrated through mastering authentic situations – concrete, practical, complex tasks that are often rarely defined. Therefore, it is considered appropriate to appraise competence in authentic situations as part of evaluations of learning processes in formal education, but then raising questions about whetherthe chosen context is valid as a basis for evaluation. Doubts can arise as to what extent a situation (the chosen authentic situation or the almost-authentic designed set-up) is representative for the professional work. Evaluation of competence in authentic practice questions evaluation, since the elements appraised must have the possibility to be generalized beyond the specific situation. Situations must be authentic as well as general. Studies refers to the fact that many evaluations of medical doctors personal competence are based on stipulated ‘roles’ that characterises the different functions doctors perform in a specific type of job. Examples of ‘roles’ are: ‘medical expert’, ‘communicator’, ‘manager’, and ‘professional’ [6]. For each role, series of competence (elements) are identified which are typically for the role. Examples of competence elements are: ‘to manage XX-instrument’, ‘to manage simple intensive functions’, ‘patient communication’, teamwork’, etc. Professions with high contingencies in problemsetting and problemsolving will have more to loose by evaluating competence in ‘authentic situations’. This will supposedly give a more valid evaluation of personal competencies when the professional practice is characterized by fixed routines, stable organization, typical problems, and stable objects. Engineers hold a wide variety of jobs, solutions must be innovative, situations are contingent, and many technical and social demands must meet in the design of solutions [3;4]. On the other hand, designing near-authentic situations amputates evaluation of complex competencies. If an evaluation is made on the basis of an edited authenticity, possibilities are immediately reduced for evaluating an individual’s abilities and skills to sort the relevant from the irrelevant in complex everyday situations. This is problematic since this is an essential part of the reason to wish to evaluate competence rather than qualifications. 6 EMPIRICAL RESULTS One of the courses we studied had set the goal of producing environmental competencies. The core competnec was defined ‘to understand that most environmental effects are produced by the actual use of a product’. Hence the ability to differentiate analytically between environmental effects caused by ‘the way the product is produced’, and effects caused by ‘the way the product is used’ is crucial in the learning process [7]. The teachers also argue that since environmental competence is heavily dependent on attitudes and motives of the practitioner developing environmental competences implies differentiated,

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detailed and well-argued elaboration of how to identify the specific content of the environmental effects for a specific product system. Environmental competence is thus connected to both object-specific (e.g. electricity consumption, heat loss) and field-specific vocabularies (e.g. environmental profiles and networks). This conception of ‘environmental competence’ emphasizes analyses of use practices as the essential aspect of competent actions. Then the evaluation focusses on use of theoretical elements, creativity in system design, and analytical precision in relation to a (positive) contribution to the environment [8]. Stipulation and description of ‘authentic practices’ of actors (users) plays a crucial role in the learning process. Our study of the learning process revealed that adopting the dimension ‘environmental competence’ as the goal of the course had produced a change in the relevant elements of competence. When focus is on competence, learning focuses in relations between model, context, and analytical perspective. Competence involves choosing relevant models, an analytical position, handling multiple actor perspectives, types of data, and reflecting relevance in terms of real-life situations. We found that teachers in their supervision focussed upon developing elements of competence that seemed adequate in professional practices of the engineers. These elements are: a) position competence, b) multiplicity competence, and c) virtual competence. A: Multiplicity: This element of competence, which seemed to be given priority by the advisors, involves identification and description of multiplicity in the product-user relation. This involves developing preparedness in relation to understanding phenomena’s limits and identity based on the multiplicity of relations that constitutes – collects in – the phenomenon. B: Positioning: Another of the prominent focal points for advisors’ directions to the groups was to get the students to consider or clarify the position from which they act and write when they make a brochure. The students should identify the sender and receiver of the material and thereby reflect on form, content, argumentation etc. The students do not need specific knowledge about different positions and their consequences, but they must be able to demonstrate that they understand the background, possibilities, and consequences of assuming a concrete position in the ‘game’. C: Virtuality: Competence in handling reality’s complexity involves many skills and knowledge elements. Handling ‘reality’s complexity’ does not only mean a reduction of a complex ‘real reality’ to an analytically handy size (coded knowledge) but rather competence to be able to make a persuasive reduction of complexity. Ability to choose between different analytical platforms demands the use of an analytical meta-systematic. This comprises an understanding of why and how making choices structures the context. This meta-analytical system is a significant part of the competence that the students will develop. It demands skills in constructing arguments from different positions, arguments that are compatible with the cultural rationale in the study context, even though they are mouthed by actors in the ‘real world’. REFERENCES [1] Giddens, Anthony (1992): The Consequences of Modernity; UK: Polity Press. [2] Beder, Sharon (1998): The New Engineer. South Yarra: University of Wollongong.

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[3] Boshuisen, Henny P.A.; Schmidt, Henk G. (1992): On the Role of Biomedical Knowledge in Clinical Reasoning by Experts, Intermediates and Novices. In Cognitive Science, vol.16, pp. 153-184. [4] Jakobsen, Arne (1994): What is known and what ought to be known about engineering work. Studies in Technology and Engineering. Lyngby: Center for Didaktik og Metodeudvikling, DTU. [5] Clemmesen, Thorkil; Rump, Camilla; Petersen, Stig Andur; Jørgensen, Ulrik; Jakobsen, Arne (1999) The Use of Basic Knowledge in Engineering Work. Project paper. Center for Didaktik og Metodeudvikling, Technical University of Denmark. [6] Ringsted, Charlotte (2004): In-training Assessment - in a work-based postgraduate medical education context. Datawyse; Holland: Maastricht Universitet. [7] Design & Innovation (2004): Drejebog for kurserne 42050 Produkt/service-systemer og 41051 Miljøforhold og produktliv (Compendium for courses 42050 Product/service systems, and 41051 Environmental conditions and product life). Internal papers, DTU. [8] Jensen, Bjarne Bruun and Jørgensen, Michael Søgaard (2003): ’Natur- og Miljøkompetence’, Det Nationale Kompetenceregnskab (Nature and environmental competence, The National Competence Accounts (www.DNK.dk/naturmiljokompetence).

Chapter Ten INDUSTRY LINKS

SME COLLABORATION AS A DRIVER OF DESIGN RESEARCH AND EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT Josep Tresserras Steven MacGregor* Centre CID, Univ. of Girona, Spain. Xavier Espinach Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Centre CID at the University of Girona is an active design projects and research centre closely linked with Catalan industry. This paper details some of the SME collaborations in which the centre has been involved since its inception in 1992. Best practice to overcome barriers common to collaboration is presented together with the effects of projects on research and education. The possibility of a strategic partnership should be investigated, particularly in light of the SME service gap – SMEs have knowledge needs that cannot be satisfied completely by government and in which private sector consultants are rarely interested. Awareness should be heightened regarding the breadth of interaction mechanisms, from student projects to contracted design services. Keywords: SME collaboration, design education, design research, University-Industry partnership 1 INTRODUCTION The proliferation and knowledge needs of SMEs offer opportunities for Universities which are not fully exploited. Given the scale of disposable revenues, most consultant companies are not interested in small business. SMEs are also less suited to single intervention improvement initiatives and generally need a range of support services, often addressed in part by local and national government. When one considers that 93% of all European enterprises have less than 10 employees [1] this represents a large market for Universities to exploit – with many SMEs initially open to collaboration possibilities. *Centre CID, Univ. of Girona, Avenida Lluís Santaló, s/n, 17071 Girona, Girona, Spain Tel: +34 972 41 98 17, Fax: +34 972 41 98 19, http://www.udg.es/cid/

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Often, they do not know where to turn regarding design and development challenges. Centre CID at the University of Girona is part of the Xarxa network of technological support centres formed by the Catalan autonomous government – the Generalitat. The centre is affiliated to the University’s department of Industrial Design Engineering – as such, it occupies a place between academia and industry and works with both on a continual basis. This paper details some of the SME collaboration projects in which the centre has been involved since its inception in 1992. Best practice to overcome some of the barriers common to University-Industry collaboration is presented together with the effects on the research and education activity of the centre. The paper is presented as follows. The following background section further details centre activities and the motivation for University-Industry collaboration. Section 3 then summarises the centres SME experiences and is followed by a section detailing a strategy for success. Section 5 discusses the effects of projects on research and education development while section 6 concludes the paper, discussing briefly current activities and future directions. 2 BACKGROUND The centre is involved in design education at the undergraduate and postgraduate level, offering a 3 or 4 year course in industrial design and product development engineering. Professional programs also exist to support the knowledge needs of local industry. The centre completes contracted projects for local SMEs and sometimes larger companies, normally focussing on the front end of the design process. Recent examples include the re-design of a hand-held heat application device for the beauty products market, the application of design methods to improve operations for a group of companies in the agricultural sector, and the re-design of a clothes iron handle for Braun. These types of activities are becoming more common and are in response to the pressure that Universities find themselves under regarding revenue generation. Business operations, including IP exploitation and ‘spin-offs’, increasingly complement core research and teaching missions. There is also growing reliance on the role of Universities to satisfy the high knowledge requirements of the innovation age. The ‘Triple Helix’ of university-industry-government relations is in ongoing development [2] with the mission of delivering a greater incidence of innovation. The value of University-Industry partnerships for the economy at large is recognised through strategic government interest. KTP programmes in the UK (Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, formerly known as TCS) are complemented at the European level by CRAFT (Co-operative research) projects. These form part of the €473 million budget for horizontal research activities involving SMEs in the current 6th (2002-2006) framework programme (6FP). In addition, at least 15% of the €12.5 billion budget for thematic areas in 6FP is reserved for SMEs. An increase in SME-centred funding is envisaged for the 7th framework programme starting in 2007. As well as the Xarxa network of technological support centres the Catalan government provides mechanisms including INNOCAT which supports early-stage ‘innovative’ ideas submitted by SMEs.

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3 CENTRE CID SME EXPERIENCES Projects can be categorised into 3 different types: • Funded: part/full – Catalan and Spanish governments, European Union (EU), • Contracted centre services, • Student projects (group and individual). Most of the centre’s experiences have naturally taken place with Catalan companies although collaboration with other countries, including the UK, Germany, Greece and Italy has taken place, mainly through EU CRAFT projects. A successful SME collaboration is shown in the following short case. A medium sized lighting company based in Catalonia was involved in strategic development with the centre in the period 1995-2001. This involved a range of different activities, implemented to improve overall product development. First, an initial evaluation of the company’s present situation and requirements was completed by a small group of company management and university professors. Design students from the University were then incorporated into company projects with some being offered employment after graduation. The next main activity involved EU funded CRAFT projects which addressed two main areas – value management and idea generation. Finally, two main contracted projects were completed, developing value management capability and a modular streetlight concept range. Results were impressive, although improvement has to be viewed against a background of overall strategic expansion and not just involvement of the centre. Annual turnover increased from €9 million to €24 million in the collaboration period. Product range grew from around 40 (including all platforms and derivatives) to 120 with a faster development cycle and response to customer orders. Moreover, these were facilitated, on the main, by modifications to the knowledge infrastructure – little relative change was made in terms of capital investment (including finance and equipment). This case represents best practice – many collaboration projects may not result in such improvement or indeed, involve such a wide ranging level of activities. However, it shows the possibilities of collaboration, with the range of activities representing an initial aim in new partnerships. Further examples are summarised in table 1 below. The projects detailed above in table 1 show the power of design. In many cases the companies were being introduced to design methods and expertise, while the projects show the diversity of application – from expansion strategy to design process management, in addition to more conventional re-design and development projects.

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Table 1. Examples of recent SME interventions. SME

Industry sector

REFISA (fibre composite cladding)

Gardening

INECSA (Fluorescent tube lighting)

ACMA (electric actuators)

GUILLOT (industrial vacuums) RETEVISION (telephone cabins)

Project details

Expansion into new sector. Expertise in composites for transport sector re-applied. Platform development. Electronics Development of a transformer, using DFMA to improve manufacture and assembly.

Fluid control Cost-reduction and added functionality across the product range, using other companies to facilitate knowledge transfer. Ventilation Optimisation of production processes and development of new industrial vacuum cleaner. Telecoms

ROBERLO Chemical (chemical solutions)

Management of tendering process for concept design and selection – redesign of cabins. Development of new packaging (bottle).

Development path Contracted project

Student group projectCRAFTcontracted project Student project employment— Catalan government funded project Xarxa contact/support – contracted project Contracted project Contracted project

4 A STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS 4.1 BEST PRACTICE As touched on previously, single-point interventions in SMEs often don’t do enough. They do not generate enough value, either for the SME or the University. Rather, a strategic involvement is often the best solution, resulting in the SME having a partner for continuous improvement and the University (if so desired) managing a portfolio of SME collaboration projects. Important aspects of the collaborative arrangement include: • Time commitment from company management, • Up-front clarity and realism regarding project expectations and limitations, • Joint construction of a specification that sets out these expectations and limitations, • Measurement of effects and benefits for all involved. In addition a number of different interaction mechanisms are possible, with varying levels of work intensity and cost. These are summarised in figure 1 below, which is representative of the breadth of activities which may underpin a strategic UniversityIndustry partnership.

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Figure 1. Range of SME collaboration activities. Low-cost (time and money) mechanisms are found at the lower levels, and support activities at levels 3 and 4. In many cases some of the mechanisms will not be possible as such the process may iterate and miss certain stages. However, an investigation of their feasibility should take place. Five levels are present as described below. Level 0: This stage will include agreement of IP issues and preferably involve a University team with previous SME experience. The question of whether both parties are open and suited to longer-term strategic collaboration should be raised. Level 1: Start-up funding may exist but an exhaustive search of other funding opportunities should take place. Regarding the company study this may often be completed free of charge by the University, who may find the knowledge gained itself valuable for operations. Level 2: The involvement of students is a common leverage point used in many collaboration projects. As well as providing the company with cost-effective skilled labour, students gain through the practical experience of working in industry. Another benefit, increased greatly if the students are employed, is the potential role of agent. That is, another point of contact is established with the company – one which has a deep understanding (with time in the company) of both collaboration partners, and may be in the best position to manage future projects. Student involvement may be complemented by involving industrialists in University teaching or education delivery. Level 3: Funding from different sources may be used for the same project or to support complementary activities over a period of time. Level 4: SMEs have to realise that the nature of deliverables may differ from typical consultancy contracts. Given commitment to research and teaching, a University offer

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will typically not be as competitive as other service providers committed to delivering quantitative based results as quickly as possible. However, competitiveness is high when regarding cost v benefit. 4.2 BARRIERS In general, one of the most important aspects is language. People who work in SMEs can be put off collaboration with Universities if the language used is overly academic. This may be exacerbated if the industrialist doesn’t have a university background. Many may also have preconceptions about Universities which can severely affect negotiation – even to the point where one brief yet unsatisfactory interaction with a department secretary or visiting researcher may bring a halt to discussions. As such the point of contact between university and industry must be consistent and available when agreed. The role of intermediary should be selected up front and remain consistent for the critical early stages. The project specification should then detail methods of contact once an agreement is in place. As with many companies, and usually more keenly felt by SME’s, problems of finance often prevent collaboration. This may be addressed (if not completely solved) in several ways. First, the involvement of students can provide a knowledgeable, cost-effective means of skilled labour. An awareness of applicable government funds can also facilitate valuable ‘start-up’ opportunities. Finance issues are generally more restrictive at the start of collaborations. Once the SME begins to realise rewards they may be disposed to re-investing some of these in continued collaboration – perhaps towards the conventional contract model. Further, it is clear that personal relationships still go a long way to determining the success of collaboration. A common history will often be able to surmount the certain problems that are part of any working partnership. This over reliance on personal relationships is one of the main issues noted by the European Observatory in University-Industry interaction. The key then is to try and apply best practice to get beyond the initial difficult stages. By gaining momentum through initial ‘low-cost’ interactions, trust may be developed leading to a relationship that will sustain effective collaboration in the longer term. 5 RESEARCH AND EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT IN UDG In addition to providing tangible benefits to the centre in the form of a separate revenue stream, SME collaboration has had a positive impact on research and education development. Input to research activities has ensured a practical value, which increases funding opportunities and, in turn, can be used within future SME collaboration. Education development maintains the reality of design programs, ensuring that course syllabi accurately reflect current industrial practice, therefore better preparing students for working life. The main mechanism for managing the knowledge output of SME interventions is the year-end report for the Catalan government. This justifies the annual grant and forces personnel to distil lessons learned and think about possible input to ongoing research and education programs. Industrial needs demonstrated through SME collaboration are viewed as possible research projects with a consideration of possible funding on the regional, national and European levels. These are also matched against the general research strategy of the

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Centre and its research network outside Catalonia. Recent research efforts have built on SME experiences regarding the ‘power of design’ for business success and SME development. Financial facts are now emerging [3] to support long-held beliefs of the design community. A recent centre study studied 70 SMEs in Catalonia, finding a positive correlation between design activity and business success [4]. A further finding was in response to today’s clamour for innovation. In many cases, companies do not have the necessary infrastructures to support innovation development and must first focus on continuous improvement and other best practice policies, including design. University degree content, in being accredited with the appropriate bodies, is harder to change. If there is a large disparity between current teaching practice and new knowledge gained in industrial projects proposals may be submitted to the relevant body for consideration. However, given that centre personnel are also University teachers, indirect course improvement is met through changes in teaching style, using real cases for class work. One example of large scale change was the European funded FIORES1 project, which involved collaboration with SAAB and BMW in the study of Computer Aided Styling techniques. This affected a wholesale change (syllabus and equipment) in the way CAD was taught to students, based on insights into current industrial practice. 6 CURRENT ACTIVITIES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS In summary, SME collaboration continues to be a strategic element of Centre activities, which supports the employment of staff and inputs directly into research and education activities. Simple, but often forgotten best practice forms the basis of SME collaboration success, including attention to language, finance options, industrialists’ preconceptions, points of contact and the building of personal relationships. An awareness of the breadth of possible collaboration mechanisms is important, taking into account ‘lower-cost’ interactions to support higher level collaboration. Some of the projects with which the centre is currently involved include QFD workshop delivery, review of innovation management capability in local SMEs and the conceptual development of a water sprinkler system. Future directions include the consolidation of European research projects and the extension of Centre activities, notably to provide a Master of Design course in South America. REFERENCES [1] Observatory of European SMEs 2002, SMEs in focus: Main results from the 2002 Observatory of European SMEs. http://europa.eu.int/comm/enterprise/%20enterprise_policy/analysis/observatory.htm [2] Etzkowitz, H. and Leydesdorff, L., (2000) The dynamics of innovation: from National Systems and “Mode 2” to a Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations, Research Policy 29, 109-123. [3] Design in Britain 2004 - Annual survey results, United Kingdom Publisher: Design Council. http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/dib2004 [4] Tresserras, J., Verdageur, N. and Espinach, X. (2005) Èxit de mercat i disseny, (in Catalan) CIDEM, Barcelona.

TRANSFER OF KNOWLEDGE AMONG DIFFERENT BRANCHES AT THE LEVEL OF MODULAR CONSTRUCTION Josef Formánek* Ph.D, Department of Machine Design, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The objective of knowledge transfer is, among others, transfer of ideas and information about technical products – technical object systems (TS) and their components among different technical branches. At present new possibilities based on Engineering Design Science have arised for knowledge transfer methodology when designing new TS, which has similar or the same required properties including functions as technical systems within the same or different ‘source’ branch or branches. Keywords: Transfer of knowledge, modular construction, minicamera, mechatronic. 1 INTRODUCTION The traditional transfer of knowledge related to machine components is a well known concept at present. A wide range of different catalogues, cards, databases etc. have been developed and used for this purpose. These support the selection of an appropriate machine component, e.g. selection of hydraulic or pneumatic components, for the TS to be designed. This selection depends mainly on the abilities of the engineering designer. However, the problem of knowledge transfer among different branches can be aimed not only to select a suitable component from catalogue but also to use and transfer the function of a certain component or to transfer functional principle from one TS to another. 2 GENERAL KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER The developed methodology of knowledge transfer [2] is based on general knowledge transfer among respective engineering design fields [1]. Model of such transfer with *University of West Bohemia, Department of Machine Design, Univerzitni 8, 30614 Pilsen, Czech Republic +420-37-7638256, +420-37-7638202, [email protected]

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support of the generalised Transfer Box (TrB) interface is based on fundamental structure of the level of Modular construction (Fig.1). Generally said the knowledge transfer of the relevant knowledge can be performed from branch X to branch Y or to another branches (including feedbacks to source branch X). Of course the transfer can be vice versa also executed from several branches to a single one. During the knowledge transfer it is necessary to include also human′s own knowledge and at the same time to enhance these knowledge using feedback or to use SW expert systems, to add new knowledge to these systems. Thus such enlarged knowledge transfer contributes more to the complex upgrading of all its involved elements.

Figure 1. Model of inter-branch knowledge transfer. 3 APPLIED KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER 3.1 MODEL OF TRANSFORMATION SYSTEM FOR KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER A model of Transfer Box (TrB) for knowledge transfer (based on the model of transformation process) has been introduced for this purpose. This Transfer Box can be understood as an information process interface between knowledge on TSi and TSo.

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3.2 HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURE OF THE TRANSFER PROCESSES However, the knowledge transfer can be performed not only at the level of constructional structure, but also on the level of organ or functional structures. The analyses of the ΣTSi can be then executed with use of the mentioned morphological matrix from the level of constructional structures (elements&organs), through the level of organ structures (organs&functions) to the level of their functional structures (functions&effects). The reverse procedure can be applied for synthesis from functional level through the organ level to the constructional level. The system of these morphologic matrices is depicted in Figure 2. After analysis and completion of morphological matrix at all these abstract levels for ΣTSi available, this matrices can be further improved by the next information items, which result from the following analyses of ΣTSi+j or from experience of designers in the source areas as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 2. Morphological matrices for different abstract levels of TS structures.

Figure 3. Principle of hypermorphologic matrix growth adding information about the known solution.

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4 CASE STUDY - APPLICATION As mentioned above the developed methodology of knowledge transfer has been piloted on the engineering design of the use of camera modules in working space of machine during its operation using the area of manufacturing manipulation devices and of another areas in Figure 4 (medical, security and etc.) as a source ones.

Figure 4. Case study - application of camera module.

Figure 5. Handling device with PC control.

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Figure 6. Camera module on the handling arm.

Figure 7. Detailed view of minicamera. 4.1 PROJECT – MONITORING OF THE PROCESS AND SPACE OF THE MACHINE The example of monitoring of the process and space of the machine by camera module connected to PC is demonstrated by functional handling equipment (Figure 5) where this minicamera will be used for the monitoring of working space of the machine (Figure 6) and or the identification of accurate location of the object to be handled. The first part of the project is similar as in the project aimed at the enhancement of utility value of high lift trucks (see 4.2.). The second part of the project is aimed at the monitoring of correct position of the object. Economic aspects have been taken into account in the design (“Design for cost”). Camera module which is located on the handling arm (Figure 12 and 13) is 15 × 15 × 15 mm in size. This module (Figure 7) contains optical part, scanning CCD chip, circuits for signal processing and output part connected directly to the monitoring screen or to the card of A/D converter in PC or in notebook.

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The camera scans the given object and the signal is digitalized via converter and then transferred to PC which evaluates the signal and determines correct position of the object or another required properties comparing them with installed program. If an error in location or in turning angle of the object is discovered, the handling device stops or is controlled in a way which provides its correct fixing by the jaws of handling device and then its transfer in accordance with the required values.

Figure 8. Camera on loading arm.

Figure 9. Camera view from the loading arm. 4.2 PROJECT – ENHANCEMENT OF UTILITY VALUE OF HIGH-LIFT TRUCKS Increased productivity of work, careful handling in logistic centres, ergonomics and increased safety of personnel are trends of nowadays. This trend can bring inspiration and

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motivation for companies to look for new innovative solutions by the application of industrial cameras for easier control of load handling, for automation of loading and unloading by the aid of detection of line codes, for increased ergonomics at the workplace where electrical industrial trucks are applied. The use of high-lift trucks with industrial cameras for transport at small and medium distances is new. The camera thanks to its small size can be installed almost at any place of the truck (Figs. 8 and 9). The monitoring screen is placed directly to the visual field of the driver. The main advantage of this solution is the fact that design changes which are otherwise necessary to provide for maximum visibility of the driver (seat position, changes on protective frame and loading arm) can be omitted. At the same time productivity and transport capacity can be increased. Handling can be also easier and simplified by the additional light source given to the camera, e.g. during unloading and loading of containers, trucks and similar transport means. It is also possible to use wireless transfer of signal from the camera. This allows operator to monitor the whole handling process from control panel, and thus to know where the truck is or what really happens during loading/unloading at one or more trucks at the same time. 5 CONCLUSION The objective of this paper is to present the developed methodology for knowledge transfer among different technical branches on levels of modular construction including those, which are apparently without any relations. Basic concept of the general methodology for transfer of entire engineering design knowledge among different technical branches has been outlined. The developed applied methodology can improve knowledge transfer in the course of engineering design of technical products. The methodology is suitable for computer and database processing. These projects are designed on the basis of knowledge from transfer of knowledge at the levels of modular construction. The application of these minicameras is intended not only for the monitoring of working space of a machine but also for the identification of object to be handled, to determine its correct position including the transfer of video signal to control PC or to control centre. The use of very cheap camera modules with their accessories is shown on examples “Design for cost” criteria have been taken into account during design. Systematic approach based on Engineering Design Science has been used to minimise possible mistakes and errors of designed technical systems (products) because even small matters neglected sometimes using intuitive design engineering can be punished by human health or life losses. Further development of the methodology is intended in upgrading and more detailed description of the respective steps and in development of active supporting SW and other tools for engineering designers. This should help them more to find out easier new solutions and thus to achieve effectively innovations of the current products, which should have better potential to be successful on the market.

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REFERENCES [1] Hubka, V., Eder, W.E.: Design Science. London: Springer-Verlag, 1996 [2] Formánek, J., Hosnedl, S.: Transfer of Knowledge among different Branches with use of the Theory of Technical Systems. DESIGN 2004 8th International Design Conference, Dubrovnik, 2004 [3] Formánek, J.: The Use of Camera Modules in Working Space of Machine During Its Operation. PHD2004 – 2nd International PhD Conference on Mechanical Engineering, Srní, Czech Republic, 2004, ISBN 80-7043-330-2 [4] Formánek, J.: One-chip Microcomputers Controlled Handling Appliances. ICEER 2004,International Conference on Engineering Education and Research “Progress Through Partnership” Olomouc 2004, Czech Republic, ISSN 1562-3580 [5] Roth, K.: Basic function structures, their variation of machines, their active and passive branch. Konstruktion 1/2, 2000 [6] Spal, P., Formánek, J.: Control and Diagnostic Unit with Microprocessor PIC. PHD2004 – 2nd International PhD Conference on Mechanical Engineering, Srní, Czech Republic, 2004, ISBN 80-7043-330-2

BRINGING A PRODUCT DESIGN PERSPECTIVE TO AN ENGINEERING DRIVEN ORGANIZATION Carolina Gill, Blaine Lilly, Roger Forsgren Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper describes our efforts to introduce engineers, technologists, and managers at NASA to product design methodology and to approach problem solving from outside their comfort zone. Here we present our experience in teaching a new course, “Innovative Design for Engineering Applications” to NASA engineers, analysts, and program managers. The course itself is an on–going exercise in design as we work to adapt it to the very specialized demands of a renowned agency that is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation. Keywords: Design curriculum development, teaching across disciplines 1 INTRODUCTION This paper describes our experiences over the past two years in introducing seasoned engineers, technologists, and managers at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration to design methodologies and techniques that are more commonly found in the realm of product design firms. Our efforts have been met with varying degrees of success, which are primarily a function of the open–mindedness and curiosity of the students, and their willingness to leave their comfort zone behind. Seniority in the organization and amount of experience seem to have little to do with the willingness of the individual students to participate: some of our most enthusiastic students have been twenty–five year veterans of the Agency who have positions of great responsibility, while others have been new–hire engineers a year or two out of college. Our experience in designing, re–designing, and teaching this class may be interesting to other design practitioners who face similar problems when confronting very technically oriented groups. While generalizations are often suspect, we believe it is possible to differentiate between the design activity as performed by engineers and by product designers. We see the “engineering approach” to design, particularly in highly technology–driven situations, as being characterized by a cursory search for a feasible solution, often based on proven designs and procedures that have been found to work in the past, followed by an extensive period of analysis and simulation, culminating in the construction of rather

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refined and expensive prototypes. Quite often, this approach leads to a less–than– optimal solution that is tweaked and massaged until it is judged to meet the design requirements. Product designers, on the other hand, tend to spend much more time in the early stages of the process generating a much wider array of possible solutions. There is a critical evaluation of the dimensions of the problem with a focus on how the product responds to the needs of users and how it meets the function in a specified context. Sketches and prototypes are done early and often, and the user is involved in the design and testing of the system. Initial feedback discards weak ideas allowing the strong ones to be further developed. 2 BACKGROUND The course we will discuss in this paper is called “Innovative Design for Engineering Applications”, or IDEA. It has been offered five times since the summer of 2003, at several NASA centers: Johnson, Marshall, Goddard, Langley, and Ames. IDEA evolved from an earlier course taught by two of the authors (Forsgren and Lilly) which dealt primarily with design for manufacturing issues. In teaching the previous course over a four year period, it became apparent that many practicing NASA design engineers had not been exposed to some of the new ideas and methods in design that were making waves in the consumer product world. Because of budgetary and program cuts after the successful moon landings and particularly due to general government cutbacks in civil service employment in the 1980s, NASA found itself with an aging workforce, many of whom were trained in more traditional design techniques of the past. Consider this: as of 2004 nearly 40% of the 18,146 people at NASA are age 50 and over and 22% of them are age 55 and older. NASA employees over age 60 outnumber those under age 30 by 3 to 1. A scant 4% of NASA’s workforce is under age 30 [1]. Over 60% of NASA’s workforce earned their engineering degrees before computers and PCs were commonplace tools for engineering design. Obviously, the design process at NASA has not evolved very far in the thirty years since the Apollo program. Originally, IDEA was conceived as a two or three day workshop that would be based around a “design for Mars” scenario. The idea was that engineers from a variety of disciplines and specialties would come together, be given a challenging problem having to do with the manned exploration of Mars, and then have two days in which to design a solution. Very quickly, several problems became apparent. First, none of the instructors had any particular expertise related to the planet Mars. Second, it was clear that unless the NASA personnel were taught new design methods and then forced to apply them to the design problem, what would result would most likely be a fairly typical NASA design, based on previous missions, and little would be gained by the participants. In fairness to the NASA engineers who attend these training courses, it should be noted that they work in a unique and very high pressure environment, in which their failures are both extremely costly and witnessed by the entire world. It is reasonable that NASA designers would instinctively turn to tried–and–true solutions, given the severe constraints of the space environment and the very high penalties for failure. Our task in teaching IDEA was to convince them to attempt “out of the box” thinking in the very early conceptual stages of their designs.

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These problems became apparent during a two–day “dry run” of the original course at NASA Headquarters in May, 2003. Several of the NASA reviewers felt that the course was not specific enough to NASA missions, failed to take account of NASA’s own internal design procedures and policies, and in general was not sufficiently “NASA focused”. As a result, the initial offering of the course was delayed for several months, and did not occur until late summer of 2003. The course was offered twice during the late summer and fall of 2003, at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, with one of the authors (Lilly) as the sole instructor. While the initial offering at Goddard was apparently successful, in retrospect it seems that this was likely due to the fact that the majority of attendees were members of an innovative design team at Goddard, and so were predisposed to react favorably to a course of this type. The following session, at JSC in Houston, was received far less favorably. Several of the attendees were program managers, not engineers, who did not have any particular interest in design and who were quite skeptical of the material presented. This experience resulted in the decision to seek out help from the design community, at which point author Gill became involved. 3 REVISION AND RELAUNCH 3.1 RETHINKING OUR APPROACH In early summer, 2004, the course was offered at Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Alabama. Author Lilly was the sole instructor, with author Gill in attendance to observe and comment on her impressions. In this iteration, the course consisted of three discrete parts, lasting one day each. The first day was almost entirely taken up with a set of lectures on creative thinking, visual communication, and verbal communication. The second day began with an exercise in which the students disassembled one–time–use cameras, looking closely at the system–level design issues. Following this exercise they developed system level diagrams applied to the design of the Mars mission. By this point, the mission itself had evolved into a robotic mission to land on Mars, scoop up dirt and rock samples, and bring them back to Earth. The primary constraint for this exercise is that it had to be done in a way that guaranteed no Martian microbial contamination would be inadvertently transported to Earth. On the third day, the students constructed prototypes of their designs for the sample return mission, and presented them to the class. Following this class, which again proved to be only marginally successful, we began to re–think and revise the entire structure of the course. Several aspects of the course clearly were not working, among them the model–building exercise and the concept generation methods. We asked the students to prototype various concepts for the sample return container, which had to be designed to ensure that no Martian microbes could survive on the surface of the container when it returned to Earth. Instead, the students used this exercise to prototype their overall mission design. This segment became an enjoyable team–building exercise, but because it occurred on the last day of the class, it was essentially useless in this role. The original intent, to persuade the students of the

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efficacy of building “quick and dirty” models early in the design process, was entirely lost. In a similar manner, the concept generation methods presented on the first day were also not applied by the students when generating ideas. While several techniques were introduced in the first day’s lectures, none of them were systematically put into practice during the team design activities. Rather, students reverted to their standard practice of recalling a design that one of the team members had seen or heard of from an earlier mission, and modifying it to meet the demands of the given task. In general, we felt that most of the lecture material of the first day was quickly filed away and not applied to the exercise in any meaningful way. On the other hand, one aspect of the course that was clearly a success was the camera exercise, in which the students were each given a “disposable” camera, and asked to disassemble it, understand how it functioned, and create a thorough system diagram of the device, mapping the flows of energy, mass, and information through the system [2]. Disassembling the camera invariably is successful with engineering– oriented students, because it plays so well to their innate interest in mechanical devices. The camera exercise also served as a leveler in the class hierarchy, because the engineers tended to lead the managers at this activity. Finally, we noted that the students’ regard for the instructor also tended to climb following this exercise, as we had, in effect, proven ourselves to be “real engineers” by leading the class through the process. 3.2 RELAUNCHING THE COURSE Several changes were put into place immediately following the Marshall experience. We decided to de– emphasize the lectures on conceptualization techniques, and place greater emphasis on practicing methods that we felt certain would work well with a technically oriented audience. We introduced the technique of generating non–linear idea diagrams, or “mind maps” early on the first day, as a method of recording and promoting rapid idea generation during brainstorming sessions. The design problem, i.e., the Mars Sample Return Mission, remained the same, but we made a concerted effort to focus the students’ attention on the processes they habitually used when they generated ideas. Once they became aware of their preferred methods, it was easier to convince them to try other approaches. While the NASA engineers were at first resistant to the idea of using mind maps and other visual brainstorming techniques such as storyboarding, by the end of the course they began to see their usefulness at different steps in the concept generation process. We encouraged them to explore using visualization techniques when the design constraints are well defined, as for example when brainstorming specific sample container concepts, and also when the constraints are fuzzy and ill–defined, as they were for the mission architecture in the initial definition stages. The students who bought into our approach came to see the mission maps (Figure 1) as cognitive tools which they then referred to later, when creating specific scenarios and designing the actual components (Figure 2).

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Figure 1. Mission architecture mindmap. We also made the decision to increase the amount of time given to the camera disassembly/system architecture segment on the beginning of the second day, expanding it to cover the entire morning session. While continuing to emphasize the importance of mapping flows of mass, information, and energy through the system, we also expanded the analysis to the sub–system level. This approach actually melds quite well with the systems design method outlined in the NASA Systems Engineering Handbook, with which

Figure 2. Sample collection diagram.

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the students were well acquainted [3]. Our “hidden agenda” in doing this was again to convince the students of the value of using graphical methods to rapidly convey design information. Although engineers constantly use informal sketches, charts, and graphs to communicate with each other, these tools are often overlooked as design aids, in favor of more elaborate, computer–based systems [4]. These changes were put into place during the two offerings of the course, at Langley Research Center and Ames Research Center, during late summer of 2004. For these courses, both authors Gill and Lilly participated throughout the three days. While both sessions began somewhat shakily, by the end of the second day the overwhelming majority of students at both locations were actively participating, and at the conclusion of the course the evaluations from the attendees were overwhelmingly positive. At both Langley and Ames, we noted that the senior staff in attendance were often the most willing to embrace the new ideas we were promoting. (The sketches shown in Figures 1 and 2 were done by a senior engineer at Langley.) The other segment of the class who responded enthusiastically were the younger attendees, many of whom were recent college graduates, and were not yet fully set in their established ways. 4. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE CHANGES Our work with this course continues to evolve as we write this. After two years of teaching IDEA, we feel that our basic premise, i.e., that engineers can benefit by incorporating product design methodologies into their own design activities, has been validated by the response we have received from experienced engineers at one of the world’s great engineering organizations. While the course continues to change as we seek to constantly improve it, we now feel confident that we have developed effective means of communicating our basic message to NASA technical staff. We have also concluded that it is a mistake for us, as outsiders to the Agency, to attempt to “build NASA into the course”, as we were earlier advised to do by senior NASA managers. We feel it is much more valuable for us to present ourselves as we are and bring an outsider’s perspective into the organization, rather than pretend to be experts in areas far beyond our ken. It is the responsibility of the students to translate what we teach them into the NASA context. Our best students have been willing to do that, and we have been gratified by the results of that effort. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors gratefully acknowledge the help and support of the following individuals at NASA: David Peters (Goddard Space Flight Center), Joyce Carpenter and John Connolly (Johnson Space Center), and Randall Foehner (Jet Propulsion Lab). Twyla Courtot (George Mason University), Moses Adoko (RGI), and Phuong Pham (OSU) have also been very helpful and we thank them. And of course we would also like to thank all of the NASA engineers, technicians, and managers who have taken IDEA since 2003 for their helpful suggestions and encouragement.

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REFERENCES [1] National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Code F, Workforce Data for the Third Quarter of FY 2004, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C. [2] Lilly, B., Fentiman, A., and Merrill, J., Learning Design from Artifacts: Single Use Cameras as Teaching Tools. Proceedings of ID+PDE Conference, Delft, 2004, pp.223–231. [3] National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA Systems Engineering Handbook, SP– 6105, June, 1995. [4] Ferguson, E., Engineering and the Mind’s Eye, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1994.

DESIGN PROCESS FOR IPERCOMPETITIVE MARKETS Francesco Zurlo* Phd, Researcher, INDACO (Industrial Design Art Communication) department, University Politecnico di Milano, Milano. Cabirio Cautela** Phd, INDACO (Industrial Design Art Communication) department, University Politecnico di Milano, Milano. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The paper aims to explain the existing relationship between design processes and design networks in ipercompetitive markets characterized by different industrial organizational structures and by a great exposure to changing trends of the demand patterns (furniture, fashion, textile, automotive,…). Specifically, the proposed framework analyses and describes how and in which way the “typical” activities and phases which form a design process influence the network of actors in terms of amplitude, centralization and relational density. Keywords: design process, organizational impacts, dynamic network, network amplitude, network centralization 1 INTRODUCTION The logical and functional relationship between strategy and organization has been the object of many studies and different thorough examinations in managerial studies [1]. Specifically, when the strategy was considered as a strongly deleberated, top-down and structured process, the organization configuration was intended as a dependent variable of the strategic pattern; within this framework, the organizational shape was analysed as an induced factor by the determinism of the strategic process. Today, the way and the pattern through which the analysis and reading of the relationship between strategy and organization has completely changed, up to denying the *University Politecnico di Milano, INDACO (Industrial Design Art Communication) department, Via Durando 38/A, Milano 20158, 02 2399 7260, [email protected] **University Politecnico di Milano, INDACO (Industrial Design Art Communication) department, Via Durando 38/A, Milano 20158, 02 2399 5833, [email protected]

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existence of a relation explaining the phenomenon through the pattern strategy as a structure, in which the strategy becomes an organizational statement, a collective behaviour that ‘emerges’ from a specific context [2]. A strategy is formed by actions, behaviours and emerging processes that tend to shape and to craft an identity, to settle an image and a value system inside and outside the company boundaries. According to this scenario, one of the processes that mainly contribute to shaping and crafting a company’s identity, an external image or the company interfaces, is represented by strategic design [3]. Strategic design, in fact, assumed as a process that through the handling of the product-system levers (product, service, retailing and communication), tends to shape the identity and the company strategy through governing the different project dimensions: • function; in which the potential “answers” in terms of functions of use are led by the satisfaction of a specific user need mix; • values; in which the brand is identified by attributes, values and features that match the lifestyles and the user value systems; • language; in which the semantic codes and the key-messages (associated to the brand, to the product, to the service, to the retailer) are set in the relationship user-company; This is the main framework through which we teach and manage research projects. In Italy, the design network is formed by a variable set of actors that govern, with different perspectives and contributions, the different project dimensions. Understanding the design process gives a partial picture of strategic design without considering the networking process. 2 FRAMEWORK The basic assumption that inspired this paper, verified in different cases of new product development in the Design System of Lombardy (region of the North of Italy), contemplates that the design process activities, even if with variable intensity in the different cases, tend to deeply influence the project organization. In other terms, the configuration and the project management logics have a strong influence on the shape and the relational dynamics within the network. The main activities, through which it is possible to describe a design process are represented below [4]: • briefing, in which a company proposes and frames a project “question” to a designer or to a design consulting company; • open minded analysis, in which the designer, alone or with the help of other actors (or “nodes”) of the network, start to “open” the different and possible project scenarios through “vertical” analysis or cross fertilization processes among different specific knowledge domains; • concept generation (conceptual design), in which the designer generates different propositions and meta-solutions; • engineering (embodiment design), in which one or more project propositions are selected and assume shape through testing and prototyping.

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During these phases, network architectures do not assume static forms [5]. On the contrary, network architectures tend to assume changing configurations in the different project stages, because of fundamental network feature changes. The fundamental network features influenced by design processes are represented below: • network amplitude; that indicates the number of actors participating in the different phases of the design processes; • network centralization; that indicates the degree of concentration of the exchanges that are focused on one specific actor; • network density; that indicates the number of exchanges developed among the different actors with regard to the number of potential exchanges existing within the network. Despite the design network can be formed by different actors depending on the sector, the project scope, the size of the actors involved, in general it can be represented by the presence of these recurrent actors: • design editor, which is the firm that manages part of the production and the assemblage process and searches for actors that can develop the innovation programme; • designer or design studio, which is represented by the person or the firm that receives the brief and has the commitment to generate concepts and solutions for the innovation programme; • material or component providers, which are the firms that produce parts and elements that have to be assembled with other parts; • knowledge provider, that can be represented by a consulting firm, a University, a Research center, that have the specific competences on the use of materials, the study of interfaces, the research on the context of use, user needs, etc…(in the Italian context this role is interpreted by the designer); • technology provider, that can be the same of the material provider but can also be another subject that provides a specific technological solution.

3 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DESIGN PROCESSES AND DESIGN NETWORKS: AN INTERPRETATIVE PATTERN The analysis on the relationship between design processes and design network architectures is based on an observation process through which some “recurrent phenomena” have been recognized in the Italian design landscape, translated as typical trends or “unofficial community rules” that support the new product development processes. From these trends, it is possible to find out within the different phases the fundamental relations that link design processes to organization architectures. 3.1 BRIEF The brief has always been considered as a project milestone either as a “first project trace”, or as a platform from which the problem setting comes out; the project field is bordered; the opportunities and the constraints are set. This vision is characterized by a

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high variance that places a kind of ‘geo-reference of the brief’ and the direct consequences in terms of networking. Specifically, in America the approaches of the marketing function with respect to the brief are mainly two [6]: a. totally “permissive” approach inside design-oriented companies, in which designers are completely free to experiment and give voice to their creativity; b. of rigorous compliance approach inside marketing-driven companies, in which the designer is continuously controlled by a “coherence check” with the assumptions contained in the brief; the Italian context is quite different from these two orientations assuming a great heterogeneity and contemplating also a situation which is absent in foreign countries: the Counter brief. In this situation the designer, acting in a proactive way, independently re-launches the company brief through a subjective reinterpretation of the project question formulated by the company. “The counter-brief reformulates, with respect to the single cases, in a more or less provocative way, the brief of the customer; it is useful also to verify the coherence, the ambitions and the real intentions of a specific project. Therefore, the counter-brief is very useful also because the exercise to reformulate a problem represents a way to penetrate inside possible new scenarios or solutions” [7]. Generally, some authors assert, that the new industrial design is “assuming a strategic orientation that rejects working on a brief completely defined to extend the influence on the corporate vision, permeating production and marketing decisions” [8]. According to this approach, the proposition, is an integrated vision of the paths and choices starting from the features of the company and the served market. This places not little consequences in terms of networking. While in America, market-driven companies, producing vertical, specified and “locked” briefs, networks are preestablished in number and identity of actors, in the roles of the different subjects, in the relational logics among the nodes of the network, in the focal element of the net; in Italy, examples of Counter brief tend to determine a significance also in terms of project organization. It is possible to think of counter-proposals that tend to make a “turn-around” that influence the product functions of use, the context of use, the materials to be used, the forms to privilege, the technology to implement. It is heavily evident that the project counter proposal moves the project axis on new coordinates making clear the need to include in the network new competences, new applicative skills, new technicalities useful to the development of the new project direction. Therefore to move the project axis implies to impact on how many and which actors have to contribute in the project experience. Over more, within the relation company-designer, in case of approval of the counter proposal, the designer will become the initial key player of the network taking on the project direction.

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Figure 1. Network configurations in the briefing session. 3.2 OPEN MINDED ANALYSIS This activity is considered as the central moment for the generation of new knowledge or for the re-edition of old knowledge in new applicative contexts, in new value propositions, in new exploitation models. The Italian context tends to be dissimilar with respect to the approaches and the practices exploited in Anglo-saxon contexts. Specifically, in Anglo-saxon contexts the main directions of the analysis and research, on which the innovative patterns are based, are represented by: • market analyses; in which analytic researches about the user are thoroughly developed; the socioeconomic features of the user; the benefit system that drive the purchase process; • technology researches, in which researches and experimentations on product and process technology are conduced with the objective to exceed the existing technological patterns and to optimize the performance of the product-system. The Italian industrial organization, characterized by a 90% of small and medium enterprises, does not have the managerial competences to organize and exploit the first; neither has the financial resources to invest in R&D processes, characterized by high resources and too much uncertain pay-back. In Italy, often, the process of open mind analysis: • is of an observational nature, based on heuristic techniques and tools; the designer, “diving” in domestic and extra-domestic contexts of use, observes, also in an unconscious way, the compensating behaviours placed by users to reduce the product miss-fitting; it is on this kind of flashes that the generation of visions and solutions for the project occur [9];

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• tends more to hybridize different cognitive fields (semiotics, material analysis, ethnographic analysis, context of use research, typological analysis, etc…) oriented to create “new visions” built up through consolidated knowledge; • is embedded in territorial context, in the sense that knowledge is generated throughout mechanisms of combination and socialization within the “communities of practice” and created knowledge seldom admits decoding processes to export it in foreign contexts [10]. This activity can influence the project organization through the following ways: • a network centralized on one actor (ex. components provider), which holds a particular technology/ material /know-how unknown by the other actors; in this case, the network’s relational density is particularly low;

Figure 2. Network Configurations in the open mind analysis session. • a balanced network, in which all the actors are actively involved in the exchanges of specialized knowledge chunks; the relational density, in this case, assumes the maximum level; • a small world network, because of the knowledge flows only in some network areas considered more absorptive in this phase; in this network, the density is placed in intermediate positions with respect to the previous two cases. 3.3 CONCEPT GENERATION (CONCEPTUAL DESIGN) The concept generation or conceptual design phase is a moment of synthesis and application of the know-how acquired and discussed/developed in the network in one or more solutions. The concept represents the strategic pathway, the main direction in which the project is oriented. Specifically, the concept generation phase, although in a simplified version, can be represented through two typical situations which are completely opposite from one another: • an isolated process;

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• a participated process. In the first case, the designer, mainly in the Italian reality, not being characterized by specialist competences but on the contrary by meta-capabilities linked to the project culture, is seen as a glocal broker of know-how. Therefore, as a glocal broker, the designer is capable to anticipate evolution trends and pathways at a global scale through the combination of context related know-how of a specific genius loci. In this case, the designer is an “isolated actor”; in this phase, the network only exists within the knowledge contribution it has given till this moment. On the contrary, in the second case, the process assumes the form of an “interactive game” among the different actors of the network. Usually this interactive dynamic does not involve the entire network but only part of it (ex. designer, component suppliers, project or marketing manager of the enterprise) giving birth to a high relation density inside a small world of the network. 3.4 ENGINEERING (EMBODIMENT DESIGN) In this phase selected concepts assume a form and are verified through tests and prototypes. During this phase, it is possible assume two main polarized ideal network configurations. In particular, the first network configuration assumes an high centralization degree, with one actor, usually an integrated design studio, which develops and leads all the processes of shaping, testing and prototyping. In this case, the design studio owns and handles all the competences and skills that are necessary to drive the activities associated to the so called “engineering phase”. In this network amplitude is very low and the relational density is high within the design studio which can be represented as an internal network. This situation is very

Figure 3. Network configurations in the Concept Generation session. developed in countries where the design studios are characterized by big structures and possess a large range of competencies.

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In the opposite case, in which design firms are very small or in which the designer is represented by a single person, the network configuration appears as a small world, in which some actors (technological provider, material provider, prototypist, designer) interact in the different stages providing specialist contributions to the different activities. This situation, in which there is no centralization, is characterized by a high density degree due to the continuous relational exchanges (of information, specifics, knowledge,…) that generally occur in the engineering phase. 4 KEY FINDINGS There are the some key-findings subsequent from what has been said above: • the interpretation of design processes, without considering networking and organizational implications, merely represents a partial picture of the understanding of innovation genesis and of project processes;

Figure 4. Network Configurations in the engineering session. • there is a mutual and reciprocal relationship influence between design processes and design networks: changing one activity has great impacts on the design network; changing a network node gives birth to consequences in terms of design processes activated; • according to the previous points, the Italian districts, cannot go through “de-structuring processes” (phenomenon through which nodes of the network move to countries characterized by a low labor cost) without identifying the consequences in terms of innovation and design processes and therefore in terms of the “made in Italy” productsystem.

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REFERENCES [1] Chandler A. D., Strategy and structure: Chapters in the history of the industrial enterprise. Cambridge MIT Press, 1962. [2] Mintzberg H., The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. Free Press, 1994. [3] Bruce M., Bessant J., Design in business. Prentice-Hall, 2002. [4] Pahl G., Beitz W., Engineering Design: A systematic approach. Ken Wallace, 1988. [5] Miles R.E., Snow C.C., Coleman H.J., Managing 21th century network organizations, Organizational Dynamics, Winter, 1992. [6] Kotler P., Rath A. G., Design: a powerful but neglected strategic tool, Journal of Business Strategy, pg. 16-21, 1984. [7] De Lucchi M., The Contra-Brief: A New Tool for Fostering Innovation and Beauty, Work paper “Managing Design for Strategic Innovation, 3rd European International Design Management Conference, Amsterdam, 14-16 march 1999. [8] DARC (Domus Academy Research Center), The New Industrial design, Domus, nº 807, p. 8491, sept. 1998. [9] Zurlo F., Cagliano R., Simonelli G., Verganti R., Innovare con il design. Il caso del settore dell’illuminazione in Italia. edizioni Il Sole24 Ore, Milano, 2002. [10] Becattini G., Mercato e forze locali. Il distretto. Il Mulino, 1987.

RED PATH, BLUE PEACH: DISCOVERING THE CORE MARKET VALUES OF THE SMALL BUSINESS Deborah Cumming* Faculty of Design & Technology, The Robert Gordon University, Scotland. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Any graphic designer will tell you that coming up with the “right” name for a company only works when the company is fully behind the process. Medium and large companies have a general understanding of how the process works in terms of management, marketing, communication and graphic design. However the small business sector, having reached the first rung on the ladder of design maturity [1], are generally unfamiliar with the graphic design process and how design can improve market competitiveness. One of the challenges graphic designers encounter when dealing with the small business client is discovering what makes the small business tick. Given that this may be the company’s first attempt at using a professional graphic designer, existing information on the company may not be available. Initial discussion with the client generally provides the main source of information on core market values [2]. The process of formalising this “soft” information is not normal practice. The graphic designer relies on intuition to uncover sufficient information to enable an understanding of what the company is about in terms of what they do, their ethos, aims and aspirations. Often based on insufficient understanding of the market values of the business, the graphic designer offers solutions, which may or may not meet their client’s needs. It is within this small business sector that the process of making market values explicit is generally untapped within the business, resulting in inadequate information to pass on to a graphic designer. Where an unsatisfactory design solution occurs, the result is time consuming, frustrating, counter productive and has cost implications for both client and designer. Retracing decisions made during the process is therefore difficult to identify. *The Robert Gordon University, Gray’s School of Art, Faculty of Design & Technology, Garthdee Road, Aberdeen AB10 7QD, Scotland Tel: 01224 263646, Fax: 01224 263636, E-mail: [email protected]

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These soft issues are the focus of a current PhD programme of research. The aim of the research is to inform both small businesses and graphic designers by developing a tool, which will facilitate an analysis of small business market values, aligned to graphic design preferences. The facilitation analysis tool involves the client at an early stage in the design process and thereafter will empower the client to update relevant information to the tool as the business evolves. The purpose of this tool is to provide a pre-brief methodology to better inform the graphic designer’s understanding of market values and visual synergy when serving the small business client. Accurate communication of small business market values can impact on market competitiveness, growth potential, employment possibilities and economic development for this substantial UK market sector. Keywords: Graphic design, small business, market values 1 INTRODUCTION A great deal has been written about corporate identity, corporate communication and branding. It is widely acknowledged that all companies require some form of visual communication. Visual communication practices incorporate marketing, communication and design management expertise. However, methods of delivering graphic design solutions to medium and large companies are not generally applicable to the small business client in terms of marketing, communication and design management support provided to the medium and large enterprise [3]. These support mechanisms are not factored into the already tight budgetary constraints of the small business graphic design project. Financial constraints and a lack of understanding of how graphic design can improve competitiveness are two main factors which influence the role of the graphic designer in small businesses. Graphic design processes apply to either a new corporate identity project or implementation of an existing corporate identity profile over a number of projects. The scope of this research focuses on the small business enterprise, employing between 10–20 people. The small business is not a newcomer to the market sector and therefore will have an existing logo, stationery and perhaps other initial forms of visual communication. The creation of these graphic design solutions within the small business will have been generated in-house or outsourced. It will generally have been the work of a “nondesigner”. The initial point of departure in this research is where the small business client contracts graphic design services to deliver a specific solution. The core focus of enquiry is during the communication process between the small business client and graphic designer where the graphic designer is trying to understand what makes the business tick. Often, graphic designers must educate clients, not only in the processes involved in taking a concept through to fruition, but also in the time consuming necessity of understanding the key drivers and specific nuances of the business and where it sits

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within its particular market sector. This journey of discovery involves “teasing out” core information intuitively known to the client but not easily communicated to the designer. Although the small business recognizes the need for a visual presence in the market place it does not always understand the time and ultimate cost implications involved in generating concepts through research and development work undertaken by the graphic designer. It is not surprising therefore, that when the graphic designer fails to deliver a satisfactory solution; it could be due to a lack of understanding of the core values of its client’s business [4]. David Walker’s “Ladder of design maturity” [5] proposes that as the business develops on each rung of the ladder of design maturity, it incorporates additional areas of design. The level of design maturity within the small business sector, according to Walker, indicates that the support of marketing, communication and management expertise is not provided alongside early graphic design solutions. It is therefore the lone graphic designer who attempts to bridge this gap for the small business client. This situation becomes problematic considering that generally the graphic designer is not trained or educated in marketing, management or communication and is working within the parameters of tight budget constraints. With little or no support mechanism to offer the small business client and often “working on guesswork and intuition” [6], we can begin to understand the complexities surrounding the role of the graphic designer in small business enterprises. This paper will discuss the multidisciplinary nature of the skills required by the graphic designer engaging with the small business client. A review of existing graphic design practices, emerging findings and initial benefits of the research will be reported. Development of a facilitation analysis tool will be discussed. The significance of this research is that it will better inform the graphic designer through a pre-brief analysis of core market values and graphic design preferences carried out by the small business client. 2 EXISTING GRAPHIC DESIGN PRACTICES The role of the graphic designer can vary from client to client. A great deal of ambiguity surrounds the identification of a graphic designers’ role in business. In some cases the designer takes a project through from concept to delivery, others are given a specific design function to perform. Design input is driven by the perceived needs of an organisation. Borja de Mozota (1990) states: “All companies are designed but only some are designed by designers” [7]. She identifies with design as a strategic management tool, explaining various design strategies adopted within organizations [8]. Bernstien (1988), concerned with the way design works and with what lies behind the creative impulse, explains that often the designer is called in too late in the design process. He states that: “the designer’s role is that of a stylist to give some sort of surface appeal to another’s design” [9]. The problem has been solved and executed and the designer, according to Bernstien is a “prettifier” [10]. The designer as a stylist has historically failed to add value to industry. Blaich (1988) describes design at Philips, before a design strategy was put in place as: “regarded as a styling operation” [11]. Cooper and Press (2003) elaborate

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by stating that companies do not use design effectively: “…calling in the designer at the end of the project to “tart up” the product or provide some packaging and sales literature is not using design effectively [12]. Another approach by organisations is to hire designers with a specific “design fingerprint” where a designer is sought out for their particular style, which can result in successful solutions. (Palshoj, Bang and Olufson 1990) [13]. The term Silent Design (Gorb & Dumas, 1987) explains a situation where design is carried out by non-designers i.e. other staff members of an organisation who contribute to design decisions but are not employed as designers [14]. Without a more educated market place, the expertise of the graphic designer will not be fully utilized. There remain a large number of small and medium sized companies that do not understand the role of design, and do not incorporate it effectively in setting project objectives. 3 CASE STUDIES The author as graphic designer/participant observer undertook an initial study during a merger situation between two SMEs. The author’s role as graphic designer was to ensure that the visual integrity of the two merging SME identities was upheld during the merger process. Over a four-month period, launch literature was prepared in line with the mutual approval of both parties. This challenging process revealed that specific areas emerged as key in the development of aligning core values with visual communication solutions. These were: • The businesses did not have a clear understanding of core market values. • Communication of core values from client to graphic designer was unclear. • Design by committee negated initial decisions made during the briefing process. Another subsequent study focused the author working with a breakaway company who wanted advice on a design strategy. It emerged that through action research, the author as graphic designer piloted an early analysis tool for the purpose of eliciting and clarifying core values in collaboration with the company. This was carried out over a number of discussions with the key members of the breakaway company as an information gathering process. The resulting information was then filtered and categorized by the author and fed back to the company for clarification and approval. One leading decision maker within this business stated that the information fed back to the company was: “…exactly right. There is nothing that I or anyone would change”. 4 DEVELOPMENT OF TOOL The tool has been developed in collaboration with local small businesses and graphic designers through numerous iterations. The development of the tool began after the initial study when the emerging findings clarified the need for a method to facilitate a more informed understanding of key drivers of the business, communicated between client and graphic designer. Within the second study the early versions of the tool were “tested”

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through action research with the breakaway company, as previously stated. During this time it was necessary to include not only a “market value” section to address the market values of the small business client but a complete package which would address core market values, graphic design preferences, basic information on the business and visual language of the specific market sector. These four areas were further refined, informed by existing methods and models from marketing, communication, management, design management and education. Models reviewed include: • Bernstien’s Cobweb method (1986) - Communication • Lux’s Star method (1986) - Communication • SWOT (Strength, weakness opportunity and threat) Analysis (1993) - Management • PEST (Political, environmental, social and technical) Analysis (1993) - Management • Porter’s Five Forces (1993) - Management • 4 × P’s (Product, price, promotion and place) in the Marketing Mix (1995) - Marketing • Fishbein and Ajzen model (1995) - Marketing • Design Mix (1990) - Environment, communication material, product or service - Design Management • Honey and Mumford (1982) - Activist, reflector, theorist and pragmatist - Education The tool was then again “tested” by a further breakaway company and two existing small businesses. Two graphic designers, who each had a great deal of experience in working with small business clients, also reviewed the tool. The graphic designers who reviewed the tool stated that the tool as an information gathering process prior to any brief would be well received by graphic designers, specifically within the small business client sector. One designer commented that: “It’s every designer’s dream to get such valid and structured information out of their clients”. Suggestions offered to further develop the tool have been implemented and after numerous iterations the tool has been “tested” by a further four small businesses. 5 DESCRIPTION OF TOOL The tool incorporates a diagnostic process of information gathering and analysis. Information is provided individually from all key members of the business and ideally several customers. The four key areas of information involve: a) the nature of the business; b) visual language of key competitors; c) core market values and d) graphic design preferences. The information provided is then collated, filtered and the results fed back to the business for clarification and discussion. Once approved, the small business provides the graphic designer with the results of this information, as design projects arise. 6 INITIAL BENEFITS The initial benefits that are emerging from this research apply to both the graphic design industry and the small business enterprise.

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• The aim of the tool is to better inform the graphic design process. The client gathers all the required information to pass on to the graphic designer through the tool. Therefore the graphic designer can focus on conceptual development, rather than gathering information that may or may not be pertinent. This has a cost benefit implication for the work that will improve time/cost efficiency for both the graphic designer and the small business. • The small business is empowered to provide information regarding graphic design preferences. Most respondents found that this approach was enlightening and provided greater autonomy for the otherwise impotent small business when dealing with visual communication. • Through this empowerment a sense of subliminal education of graphic design processes for the small business client is evident. A greater awareness of the visual language of the clients’ specific market sector brought an understanding of semiotics to the small business client. • The tool is seen as a pre-brief analysis of market value and graphic design preferences carried out by the client. The tool can be updated and implemented in preparation for any upcoming project. All members of the business require to complete the tool. In this respect it also serves as an indication of the general consensus of the state of play of the businesses preferred corporate identity [15]. • Gathering information on what drives the business; competitors’ visual language and an understanding of graphic design theories influenced by semiotics can benefit the internal and external communication processes of the business through a greater level of involvement in the process. • The information provided to the graphic designer is not prescriptive. It is simply a more informed process of information gathering and analysis, in order to better understand what makes the small business client tick. The graphic designer requires to acknowledge this information within the context of existing graphic design processes. Whether or not the designer chooses to incorporate the information is subjective. The main point is that the process provides a more informed choice.

7 CONCLUSION The small business enterprise represents a significant percentage of the UK market. An estimated 3.7m people are employed in UK businesses, 99.8% of these businesses are SMEs with less than 0.2% defined as large. SMEs provide 57% of all jobs in the UK private sector [16]. Nurturing early graphic design collaboration experiences through increased client involvement and a greater understanding of graphic design processes, prepares the client for a more rewarding and informed graphic design experience. This experience has wider implications for the design industry as a whole regarding the long-term relationship between client and future designers. This perspective, involving the client from an early stage of information gathering and analysis to make core market values explicit, is a new approach to graphic design. A tool or mechanism developed to facilitate an understanding of core market values aligned to

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graphic design preferences for use within the small business sector is offered as one method of discovering the core market values of the small business. REFERENCES [1] Walker D., Design Maturity: The Ladder and the Wall in Design Management, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1990. [2] The definition of the term “market value” within the context of this paper represents the perceived aspirations of a business in the market place, in relation to reputation. [3] Curran J. and Blackburn R. A., Researching the Small Enterprise, Sage, London, 2001. [4] Cooper R. and Press M., The Design Agenda, Wiley, England, 1997. [5] Walker D., Design Maturity: The Ladder and the Wall in Design Management, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1990. [6] Cooper R. and Press M., The Design Agenda, Wiley, England, 1997. [7] Borja de Mozota B., Design as a Strategic management Tool, in London Business School, Design Talks! The Design Council, London, 1988. [8] ibid [9] Bernstein D., The Design Mind, in London Business School Design Talks! The Design Council, London, 1988. [10] ibid [11] Blaich R., Design as a Corporate Strategy, in London Business School Design Talks! The Design Council, London, 1988. [12] Cooper R. and Press M., The Design Experience, Ashgate, England, 2003. [13] Palshoj J., Design Management at Bang and Olufson, in Design Management, Basel Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1990. [14] Gorb P. and Dumas A., Design Studies, Silent Design, Vol. 8, No. 3, pp.150-6 [15] van Reil C. B. M., Principles of Corporate Communication, Prentice Hall, England, 1995. [16] Curran J. and Blackburn R. A., Researching the Small Enterprise, Sage, London, 2001. Storey D., Understanding the Small Business Sector, Thomson Learning, London, 2002.

ORGANIZATION OF THE ACTIONS OF A UNIVERSITY WORK TEAM IN A COLLABORATION AGREEMENT WITH A COMPANY TO OBTAIN CONCEPTUAL DESIGNS OF A PRODUCT Joaquim Lloveras* Department of Engineering Design, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona (Spain). Jairo Chaur Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT A university-company collaboration agreement was signed to find a new proposal for one of the products manufactured by this company. The company gave complete freedom to the project team for the development of new design solutions for the product. The goal was to obtain as many conceptual designs as possible in the initial phase. Each design was developed in three main stages of approximately one month of duration each. The work carried out by the task force was organized as follows: search of the state of the technique; individual development of ideas; sharing and smoothing of ideas; fulfilment of new ideas; and finally drawings of the suggested ideation and writing of the report. The company, with its wider experience in the field, will choose the best solutions for further development. The result of the agreement is considered good and the experience gained in this agreement will also be very useful when teaching subjects on the development of product conceptual design. Keywords: research organization, university-company agreement, ideation

*School of Industrial Engineering of Barcelona (ETSEIB), Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Department of Engineering Design, Av. Diagonal, 647. 08028 Barcelona (Spain) Phone: +34 3 401 66 42 / 7, Fax: +34 3 334 02 55, E-mail: [email protected]

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1 INTRODUCTION A long-established Spanish company, leader in its market sector, needed new ideas for one of its product lines, namely measuring tapes. These products are simple and made with a mature mechanical technology. The company looked for an external technical team that provided a different vision, offering new ideas, in the style of the product line. Technicians in the Technology Transfer Centre (CTT) [1] of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) visited the company and detected the need. Subsequently our research group was contacted. Because of the group’s area of interest, i.e. innovation projects, some special knowledge and skills in subjects of product design and creativity are necessary. The group is based on a PhD program: Technological Innovation Design in Product Engineering and Process of the UPC. This group also offers an undergraduate course, Creative Training through the Fundació UPC, a postgraduate centre of the UPC [2]. The company’s needs were found to fit the potentials of our group. After several meetings a university-company collaboration agreement was signed (reference CTT-UPC: C-05597) for the conceptual design of measuring tapes. The final goal was the innovation, possible manufacture and introduction of these products in the market. Once the characteristics of agreement were known, a small technical invention university team [3] was assigned for the task. The members were the authors of paper: a senior engineer and a PhD student with some experience in the field. 2 ADDED VALUE One of the main current challenges for a company situated in our industrial environment is to be able to offer a product that has an added value. Added value in a product is taken here as a concept that means that the product has a particular feature or function that distinguishes it from other similar products. The added value in a product can be implemented in many different ways, with or without material components [4], for example by modifying the principal or secondary functions of the product, by slightly changing the arrangement for an easier use of the product, or by adding some special aesthetic feature, or by redesigning the product to make it more environment-friendly, or by using new materials, etc. The aim is to have the future customer to appreciate the new product with these new values. In this way, because of its performance and appearance, the customer will choose the product, even if there is a similar product without these extra values, which is more economical because it is produced in countries with cheap manpower. One of the problems of our industrial network is that the company transfers its operations to other countries with cheaper manpower, since although at the first this practice is highly profitable, in the long run the country with cheap manpower offers similar products of its own production at lower prices, which are sold in the global market. In those cases, the damage to our local industry can be irreversible because the structures of the productive processes must be dismantled.

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The trend in the developed countries seems to be to intensify the design processes instead of the manufacturing processes, if the economy allows these changes. Inspired by the philosophy of being able to compete by offering an added value to the product, this collaboration agreement was carried out. 3 THE AGREEMENT In this frame of big industrial competence, the agreement was carried out with the formal title of: Study of Technical Improvements in Measuring Tapes. Its goal was to conduct a study of technological innovation of this product, providing new solutions in the creative phase of the project. The conceptual designs would be made without detailed specifications so that some specific results could be obtained, but its main purpose was to look for technological improvements to make the product more attractive to the costumer. The company gave complete freedom of innovation, without imposing subjects related to development; the technical university team had to show the company a series of inventions where quantity and originality were a priority. Then the company would assess the proposals for their possible introduction in their product. The agreement lasted three months and our work was carried out in three stages of similar duration, which are described below. The deliveries of the work to the company were fixed at the end of the first stage and the deadline for the project within the last term of 2004. The economic compensation was established in three invoices: 25% when signing the agreement, another 25% when the documentation of the state of the technique was delivered and the remaining 50% when the final work was delivered. The university team signed some clauses of confidentiality too. 3.1 STAGES OF THE AGREEMENT 3.1.1 The first stage of the agreement The first stage corresponding to the first month of the work started with some meetings where the directors and technical members of the company highlighted some of the issues or subjects to improve about the measuring tapes. Some samples of their product line were dismantled and analyzed in depth. The technical team compiled and classified the supplied information, and looked for further information. In this stage every member of the team wrote down his own ideas or questions that come up while using the product and in its mechanical parts. These personal observations were put in common by the team at several meetings. The delivery to the company of a pack of documentation with all the processed information, especially related patents found in the bases of patents and technical publications by other manufacturers found on the Internet was considered the end of the first stage.

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A state-of-the-art study, arranged by categories was delivered in a database to enable the company to extend this information. Moreover, the managerial and technical team of the company commented in depth on different issues of the product. 3.1.2 The second stage of the agreement The second stage, corresponding to the second month, was dedicated to the inventions of the university technical team. Each member of the team, in view of the compiled information, kept thinking individually about new solutions for the product. This individual working period had the aim of stimulating a certain competition inside the team in the elaboration of solutions. Another advantage of the individual creative work was the non-interference of other points of view, which makes it possible to obtain a wider variety of solutions. The members of the team used the classic thought and different techniques of creativity to foster the production of ideas such brainstorming, mental maps, sleep writing, and some software of creativity. The work of the agreement was a part-time job because the team had other tasks to do. The periods of incubation or rest of the ideas to improve the quality were important. When this period finished, the members of the team exposed their creative work in writing and the presented documents were signed. When this phase was over, the total number of exposed ideas was one hundred. 3.1.3 The third stage of the agreement Finally, the third stage, which corresponded to the third month of the agreement, consisted in smoothing the creativity work that had been done, accomplishing the new ideation and elaborating the final solutions. First, repeated or similar ideas and those that were too similar to known patented inventions were discarded. Other ideas were also discarded because they deviated from the planned frame of the product, or because they were not considered good enough. At this point, the team elaborated a first filtered list of ideation that was arranged by categories. Next the team of inventions worked together in periodic meetings, in which the already filtered ideas were discussed and optimized when possible. Also some new solutions were added to the initial list to a final amount of thirty-five new ideas. The resultant inventive solutions were represented in quality technical drawings with the help of computing programs, with their corresponding explanatory texts. The university team signed the solutions, without mentioning the author of the initial idea. On the set date, the technical invention university team, showed its work to the company’s board and group of technicians. The presentation was given a generic title: Ideas Presentation. In this presentation the operation and advantages of each of the new proposals grouped together in categories, which corresponded to the principal elements of product, were explained.

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3.2 SUMMARY OF ORGANIZATION OF THE WORK OF THE AGREEMENT The main work carried out by the team in the three stages of the agreement is summarized as follows: First stage: 1. Collection and classification of the information supplied by the company, and of the information about patents and other manufacturers’ catalogues. Second stage: 2. Individual work of ideation of every member of the team based on the obtained information. Third stage: 3. Sharing of the designs carried out individually and first filtering. Optimization of these inventions. 4. Addition of new ideations by the whole team and final listing. 5. Elaboration the final documentation and drawings.

4 RESULTS At this time the work developed by the university has already been completed and from its proposals the company will decide which of the presented solutions can be implemented. The company will also foster some patent applications with the result of the presented ideations, and the members of the team will appear as inventors. The subject was very interesting for the technical team and the work was sometimes hard and demanding but, in general, it was regarded as a pleasure by the team. The company congratulated this team at the time of its presentation mainly because of the originality of its solutions. The invention team only offered different ideas so that the company, with its wider experience in the field, could choose the sight solutions. This agreement has recently been extended with an extra one-month study to turn one of the solutions previously given to into a more detailed solution. Finally some of these solutions are expected to be protected and implemented by the company. This would help them to offer a new product to the market with added value. 5 CONCLUSIONS The work gave a lot of freedom to the technical invention team whose initial intention was to give ideas to innovate the product. This is not common at all in agreements, because the company usually sets some specific guidelines or specifications for the project. This frame of freedom surely increased the team’s creative production.

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The final result was focused exclusively on the generation of new ideas for the product and their expression in quality drawings, which adapted perfectly to the university team’s desires and capacities. The granted time was sufficient although a little scarce for a work of quality. For the final result, the division in to three corresponding main stages, each lasting approximately a month, proved to be effective. The work was presented as a list of well-expressed solutions, a large list with some ideation forms or beginnings of conceptual design, with one or a few solutions preferred, forgetting expressly this phase for the company, being chosen. In view of the results, the company regarded the conceptual designs of the product made by an external team as interesting. The combination of creative work of individual and subsequent way put in common in a joint work of team of the ideation, appeared very extremely positive. The motivation, the harmony and the continuous work were also important. This experience will have an indirect influence on the flow in the way of teaching design, especially in its conceptual phase. REFERENCES [1] The Technology Transfer Centre (CTT) of the Technical University of Catalonia. http://www.upc.edu/ctt/%20eng/index.html [2] Fundació UPC: www.fundacio.upc.edu/ > english > Industrial Engineering > postgraduate courses > Formación Creativa en la Inovación de Producto o Servicio. [3] Lloveras, J., Inventions team for the earlier product design definition. Proceedings Computerbased Design, Engineering Design Conference 2002, King's College, London, Ed. T.M.M. Shahin. Professional Engineering Publishing Limited, London, 2002, pp 151-157. [4] Roberston, A., 4D Product Design, Mechatronics and Multimedia technologies: Some conceptual challenges. 4th National Conference on Product Design Education (PDE), Brunel University, 7-8 July 1997.

THE REALITY OF WORKING WITH LOCAL SME’S, DESIGN AGENCIES AND AN RDA IN THE LIGHT OF THE LAMBERT REVIEW Peter Ford* Department of Product and Spatial Design, DeMontfort University, Leicester. Michael Marsden** Department of Product and Spatial Design, DeMontfort University, Leicester. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT In April 2003, the department of Industrial Design at De Montfort University commenced a yearlong study entitled ‘Improving Business by Design’. The aim of the study was to actively identify where Industrial Design methods and expertise could make a valid contribution to the competitiveness of SME’s in the Leicester sub-region by using design to innovate new products and product ranges or improve existing ones. Funded and very positively supported by the Leicestershire Economic Partnership (LSEP), this proactive approach has proven highly successful. Over 50 projects for over 50 different SME’s have been identified so far. The East Midland Regional Development Agency (EMDA) and LSEP have recently approved a further £350,000-00 to undertake a number of these projects; £200,000-00 of HEIF 2 (Higher Education Innovation Fund) and £100,000-00 of private sector funding has subsequently matched this. It is hoped that this £650,000-00 of funding will be used to support up to 20 projects over the next 2 years. To this end a number of Industrial design agencies are being involved with the initiative. Co-incidentally this initiative coincided with the release of the Lambert Review.

*Principal Lecturer and Consultant in Industrial Design, Department of Product and Spatial Design, Faculty of Art and Design, DeMontfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH **Programme Leader Product and Furniture Design, Department of Product and Spatial Design, Faculty of Art and Design, DeMontfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH

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This paper maps the progress of Improving Business by Design in the light of the Lambert Review; in particular it discusses the relationship between the university, a wide range of SME’s, sub-regional institutions such as LSEP, the Regional Development Agency EMDA and local Industrial design agencies. In addition the paper discusses ‘third stream funding’, ‘proof of concept funding’ and the issue of knowledge transfer and Knowledge Transfer Partnerships in general as they relate to an initiative such as this one and the university. Keywords: Industrial design, Lambert Review, collaboration, LSEP, EMDA, RDA, consultancy, SME 1 YEAR 1 OVERVIEW (FEBRUARY 2003 TO MAY 2004) Year 1 of the project was, by way of a feasibility study to actively identify Leicester based product manufacturers who may not be aware of the benefits of Industrial design in New Product Development and in collaboration with these manufacturers utilise Industrial design techniques to develop new or improved products and to establish a method of identifying, monitoring and developing new projects/products in a manner that will enable the initiative to be self sustaining after three years A major target for this initiative as a whole was to make a contribution to the RDA’s Tier 3 core and supplementary targets in terms of creating and safeguarding/securing jobs, developing educational and knowledge transfer opportunities, new business creation and engaging with SME’s A unique feature of the initiative was to actively seek companies who could benefit from Industrial design input, rather than just advertise a funding scheme and waiting for applications. WHY DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY The Department of Industrial Design at De Montfort University has considerable experience in both the delivery of Product design degree courses in addition to providing Industrial design consultancy (the Design Unit) for example having undertaken design work for the BBC Innovation Nation program in 2003. The University is therefore inextricably linked to SME’s and manufacturing both in providing appropriately qualified graduates to industry and design consultancy. This blend of skills, experience and neutrality was seen as being quite unique, placing De Montfort University in and ideal position to undertake the exercise.

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YEAR 1 RESULTS A database of over 1000 companies was established and between October 2003 and March 2004; 130 of these companies were visited with the purpose of identifying product opportunities against the following criteria: • the client company should have an appropriate infra structure to manufacture and market the product • where possible the product should have identifiable Intellectual Property (IP) or clear innovation • it should be clear that the project will improve the economic competitiveness of the client company and contribute to maintaining or increasing employment within the company Of these 130 visits over 50 potentially viable projects were identified; the original project target being 7 to 10. It is hoped to undertake 15 to 20 of these projects in years 2 and 3. A summary of the findings is as follows: • There is a significant shortfall in lower scale project funding, particularly for the smaller company.. • Provision of time and space for a manufacturing company to diversify and generate new product ranges appears to be a significant issue. • It is certain that a significant number of small companies in Leicestershire are capable of developing innovating products for niche markets. • Companies who do not supplying to a niche market sector are the ones that seem to be suffering in the face of competition from the Far East or countries that can offer low labour rates. Innovation through design is therefore vital if products are to compete in a cost based competitive market. • There is still great passion in the sub-region for design and new product development; and support for this initiative by the regions design groups has been considerable. • The original underpinning philosophy of the proposal to: “actively seek companies who could benefit from Industrial design input’’ has been highly successful. Potential ‘client’ companies have responded extremely positively to the personal approach of staff and their detailed knowledge of design and manufacturing. The general consensus is that the study has been a great success and should pave the way for further success in years 2, 3 and 4 of the initiative. The neutral, informed approach in undertaking the study has proved a significant factor in this success.

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Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3 2 YEARS 2, 3 AND 4 (FEBRUARY 2005 TO MARCH 2006) The generous LSEP contribution is being used to directly find the project consultants in years 2 and 3, with some of the Universities HEIF 2 (third stream funding) funding being used to enable an infra structure to manage the initiative. Private funding is in the form of a time and resource contribution form the client companies in addition to specific capital investment for product manufacturing itself. 8 Leicester based Industrial Product Design Consultancies (in addition to the DMU Design Unit) were identified as part of the year 1 feasibility study as willing and able to undertake the required project work in years 2 and 3. These groups include, Renfrew

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Creative, Hodges & Drake Limited, Lewis Associates, Canard Design Ltd, Blue Frog Ltd, Atkinson Associates, Prime Function Design Services, Bramley Design. This structure in itself is bringing about relationships and networks between De Montfort University, local design professionals and local companies, with concrete practical outcomes in terms of tangible products and the enhancement of local employment opportunities. In terms of meeting Tier 3 targets client companies will derive increased revenue through new and improved products, sub-contract manufacturers should benefit from an increased manufacturing demand and the consultancies will derive income through this increased demand (which they are helping to enable); the involvement of the University being significant in providing educational and potential KTP provision. 3 CASE STUDIES CASE STUDY 1. BROMAKIN WHEELCHAIRS LTD Bromakin are a Loughborough based manufacturer of specialist wheelchairs for the disabled. The company had identified a need for a training roller system to be used both at home and in gymnasiums that would allow wheelchair users to undertake aerobic exercise, particularly in the winter months (figure 1). CASE STUDY 2. SILKJET (LEICESTER) LTD Silkjet are a Leicester based trade-moulding company, who also manufacture and distribute their own range motorway maintenance lighting products under the ‘Tildawn’ brand. They now wish to expand their product range into the leisure market (figure 2). CASE STUDY 3. AW TECHNOLOGY LTD Based near Hinckley, AW Technology are world experts in fire detection. AWT have developed patented technology in the area of beam detection for fires; this technology needs to be packaged as a complete product (figure 3) 4 CONCLUSUIONS AND OBSERVATIONS Improving Business by Design is proving to be a fascinating experience. It has thrown De Montfort University into fundamental working relationships with SME’s and design consultancies within the region. As such it is now playing a pivotal role with the regions RDA (EMDA) and LSEP in promoting Industrial design as a tool to help in achieving Tier 3 targets. Improving Business by Design is about establishing and managing a number of industrial design projects within the sub-region. It is about networking and establishing appropriate resources and collaborations in the undertaking of these projects and managing the effective delivery of well-designed products. It is about working with

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SME’s, regional funding bodies and consultancies and making a valuable contribution as a University with significant expertise in design, to the economy of the region. Much of the Lambert Review centres on relationships with SME’s in the context of research and applied research, so in many ways a direct comparison between Improving Business by Design and the Lambert Review is not straightforward. For example Lambert frequently refers to conflicts of interest. ‘‘When academic consultancy or contract research is carried out on behalf of industry, universities must adopt clear policies to avoid conflicts of interest….. Publicly funded research must not be compromised in a bid to secure a consultancy agreement or contract research. Unfavourable research results must not be suppressed in return for future contract or consultancy income. Even the perception of possible conflicts of interest could prove to be extremely damaging to the reputation of the university and company concerned’’. [1] Very little, if any, conflict of interest has been apparent in the Improving Business by Design projects so far. Consultancy is usually initiated in response to a solving a problem. Client companies bring IP to the projects themselves, further IP will evolve mutually between client and consultant during project development, as one would expect from consultancy. The above reference to ‘unfavourable’ research is not applicable to Improving Business by Design. Within its own terms of reference, Improving Business by Design is proving to be very successful and although only moderate references can be made to elements of the Lambert Review there is still significant opportunity to discuss good practice and there are areas that can be improved. From the outset the relative neutrality of the University has placed it in a good position to act as an ‘honest broker’ between SME and consultancy. Additionally the appropriate experience of design staff from the University has made for effective dialogue between all parties involved. An active ‘hands on’ approach in communicating with SME’s has been very effective in helping to establish projects; from September 2003 to March 2004 alone, over 50 were identified. To date all dialogue between the University, the SME’s and the consultancies has been extremely positive. Consultancies have welcomed the initiative and have made significant contributions to its effectiveness so far. Consultancies and SME’s alike are not only benefiting from the projects themselves but also from the resource both in terms of the facilities and staff the University can offer. However there have been significant delays in the planned start of both the feasibility study and the main design phases of the initiative. The Lambert review talks in terms of ‘highly proficient approaches to areas like financial control’ and ‘new mechanisms will need to be established for setting institutional priorities’. These systems are certainly needed but ‘highly proficient’ and ‘new mechanisms’ should not lead to cumbersome and institutionally bound ones, as has sometimes been the case with this initiative. Many of the SME’s taking part in Improving Business by Design are relatively small, highly efficient and fleet of foot. Their decision-making is usually quick, communication is close and effective. Many have been amazed at the amount of time it has taken to progress the initiative, almost to the point of embarrassment. To compound this, the amount of paper work and form filling to be undertaken during the initiatives life is considerable, only serving to exacerbate the situation.

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Lambert is not wrong in his comments, but insufficient recommendation is made on how these mechanisms should be practically achieved. Culturally, Universities and RDA’s are very different from the SME’s they are endeavouring to support. Government should be aware of this and seek to streamline systems where possible. For example in the most recent JCPSG (Review of the Effectiveness of the Joint Costing and Pricing Steering Group) report, not one reference is made to SME’s, with only the following inference in the Appendix 2 revised strategy: ‘‘Promoting the development of management information systems to support the costing and pricing of activities, which meet both internal and external information and reporting requirements…….. Promoting an approach to pricing products and services, with complete knowledge of the full cost of those activities, which seeks to maximise net contributions wherever possible’’ [2]. In addition it was originally hoped that De Montfort Universities’ Design Unit would play its part in undertaking a number of the projects itself, that is earn some revenue. However in the interest of transparency, an EMDA condition was that this should not be the case. As such the University is only acting in an advisory, administrative and supervisory role. Research grants, HEIF 2 funding and other similar schemes are all enabling funds, they do not in themselves provide extra revenue; yet Universities are being asked repeatedly to develop additional sources of funding, funding which hopefully will benefit the student body. Grant funding has to be accounted for, apart from overhead costs on staffing; the only financial gain will be if the research venture itself yields a positive result, which is not guaranteed. However financial benefit from consultancy is expected. Improving Business by Design is yielding many benefits and there is potential for many of them to be directed toward students; but is the disruption caused in managing such a large initiative within a teaching organisation too great a price to pay given the limited financial benefits? Lambert alludes to this himself. ‘‘The Review believes it is important that third stream funding enables a broad range of activities – from reach-out to SME’s through to contract research, licensing and spinouts. Third stream activities are not likely to generate large sources of funding for universities. For some activities, such as collaborating with SME’s, many of the benefits go to the outside world rather than to the university. There is a particularly strong case for continued support of these activities from third stream funding……. There are many excellent examples of collaborations involving the creative industries and universities or colleges of art and design. Policymakers must ensure that policies aimed at promoting knowledge transfer are broad enough to allow initiatives such as these to grow and flourish, and that the focus is not entirely on science and engineering’’ [3] Derek Bok in his book Universities in the Marketplace states: ‘’The prospect of new revenue is a powerful temptation that can easily lead to decent people in unwise compromises, especially when they are under pressure to accomplish more than they can readily achieve by conventional means. Unless the system of governance has safeguards and methods of accountability, the lure of making money will gradually erode the institution’s standards and draw it into more and more questionable practices.’’ [4] However failure to establish efficient management systems and worthwhile incentives can be equally negative. For all the right reasons the Lambert review is very positive about encouraging links with SME’s, but based on the experience of Improving Business

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by Design it can be argued that the is potential in the system to ‘disincentivise’ Universities; in particular with regard to consultancy activity. There must be scope for a system that provides worthwhile incentive within the framework of a streamlined, efficient management structure with appropriate safeguards. Having spent over 18 months forging relationships with Leicester based SME’s and having come to the conclusion that there is very little funding for small ventures, it was with great interest that there are 15 references in the Lambert review to ‘proof of concept’ funding. ‘’Proof of concept funding is used to establish whether a new technology is commercially viable or not. It is the first stage in transferring IP to the market, and is needed for both licensing and spinning out. The level of investment is normally up to £50,000 per invention’’. [5] The above quotation is one of Lamberts recommendations to the Government. Proof of concept funding does not appear to be very evident at regional SME level yet, but any improvement in access to such funding has got to be of great value to British Industry REFERENCES [1] Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration. Final Report December 2003, pp.37 [2] Review of the Effectiveness of the Joint Costing and Pricing Steering Group Appendix 2. www.hefce.ac.uk/finance/costing/, pp.18 [3] Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration. Final Report December 2003, pp.45 [4] Bok. Derek. Universities in the Market Place. Princeton University Press. pp.185 [5] Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration. Final Report December 2003, pp.61

KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS: COLLABORATION BETWEEN INDUSTRY AND ACADEMIA IN DESIGN M. Evans* School of Art and Design, University of Salford, Salford. J. Spruce** School of Art and Design, University of Salford, Salford. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Design education and industry can benefit greatly from collaboration. This paper discusses mechanisms of knowledge transfer through collaborative research, between academia and industry. It focuses upon the area of product and industrial design, detailing approaches to open innovation where industry and academia collaborate and form successful partnerships. Through case studies, it identifies how academia can facilitate knowledge transfer between numerous industries and across disparate market sectors. It concludes with an overview of the potential benefits to collaborators. Keywords: university/industry collaboration, design education, product design, knowledge transfer, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, KTP, live project. 1 INTRODUCTION This paper addresses industry and university collaboration within design. It considers the broad context and drivers behind this collaboration, and mechanisms by which it can be facilitated. The authors provide examples from both institutional and national perspectives. Collaboration models are presented demonstrating the central role of the university in the facilitation of knowledge transfer between stakeholders. *University of Salford, School of Art and Design, Peru Street, Salford, M3 6EQ E: [email protected], T: +44 (0)161 295 6159 **University of Salford, School of Art and Design, Peru Street, Salford, M3 6EQ E: [email protected], T: +44 (0)161 295 6086

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2 THE CONTEXT OF UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY COLLABORATION The relationship between academia and industry, and ways in which the two can work together effectively to boost competitiveness, has attracted much attention over the last 20 years. More recently in the UK, universities have moved to actively seek to play a broader role in the regional and national economy. More and more, academics are sharing ideas and best practices with their industrial counterparts. UK academic institutions are well placed to engage with industry as they operate in international networks and thus are aware of the innovative work that is going on globally in their field [1]. 2.1 UNIVERSITY-INDUSTRY KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER During the last two decades, many countries have implemented policies that facilitate the transfer of knowledge from universities to industry. [2]. These mechanisms have assisted the increase of knowledge transfer activity. This said, over 80% of businesses have no relationship with universities [3]. This is obviously an area for further development. The link between R&D and innovation, productivity and competitiveness is well established [4], [5]. There is evidence that the relative weakness of the UK’s R&D spending over the last twenty years has played a measurable part in the UK’s disappointing productivity performance. The development of numerous UK regional and national government funded initiatives, aimed at promoting and increasing the level of innovation in industry, has sought to address this. 3 INDUSTRY COLLABORATION WITHIN DESIGN EDUCATION The value of industrial collaboration in an applied subject such as design has long been noted by academia. This takes various forms, including: student placements; staff placements; collaborative projects. In the design domain, collaborative projects are often referred to as live projects due to the real world or focus of the activities. 3.1 THE LIVE PROJECT In industrial/product design, live projects are usually evident within the curriculum and as such form an important aspect of the student experience. Live projects can be initiated by either party and provide an excellent opportunity for both to draw benefit. The financial cost to industry of taking part in live projects with academia varies depending on the nature of the project. Typically a company can hope to gain information in the form of: market research analysis, user profiling and trends forecasting; insight’s into technological developments such as materials or components; or design concepts generated for new products or services. From an academic perspective, live projects with industry offer the opportunity for an extremely valuable and often unique student learning experience. The reality of commercial constraints and ‘opinions’ an industrial partner brings to a project is difficult to replicate in the everyday academic environment.

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3.2 SALFORD’S APPROACH Salford University’s Product Design course has undertaken a number of live industry projects that have provided excellent learning experiences for students and forged links with local industries. This has led to ongoing relationships in the form of graduate employment and knowledge transfer schemes (KTP) that have then provided further projects and collaborative opportunities to be developed within the course structure. 3.2.1 Unilever, April – June 2002, 18 Level 2 Product Design students This project focused on the generation of new product innovations under the theme of ‘The Future of Personal Hygiene’. Market categories were defined and investigated as part of the project and a number of product concepts were presented. Much of the projects findings independently mirrored research findings conducted at the time within the organisation, but more significantly identified further potential for innovations that had not previously been identified in the organisations own study. This project was presented at Unilever’s Design Directions Seminar in Milan, July 2002. 3.2.2 Kirton Playworks, April – June 2003, 15 Level 2 Product Design students This project was conducted with a local manufacturer and installer of children’s adventure playgrounds. It demonstrated a common scenario. SME often develop components or technologies but then lack the resources or in-house capability to investigate markets or generate potential solutions of commercial value. In this instance a basic level of research was conducted focusing on costs, manufacturing capabilities, safety requirements, and market and user issues. Following the research investigation design concepts were generated, the solutions providing a number of functional and viable alternatives that enabled the company to then prototype and test. 3.2.3 Cannon Hygiene, April – June 2002, 8 Level 2 Product Design students Cannon Hygiene Ltd, a manufacturer and service provider of washroom facilities, engaged in a live project with product design students. Cannon Hygiene were interested in the expansion of their existing product range that was felt to require replacement. At the time of this project there was no in-house design facility. All previous products being developed with the use of outside design consultants. The aim of the project was to research current trends within the market sector, generating ideas for new products from this. The project prompted the company to consider developing a structured approach to integrating design within their overall strategy. This led to the establishment of an formal relationship. 3.3 POTENTIAL BENEFITS The examples presented demonstrate potential short and long term benefits of industry collaboration. In the immediate short term, they enrich the academic curriculum and

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student learning experience. Long term benefits include: appropriate curriculum content, employment opportunities and staff development. In this climate of open collaboration, industry can access university resources and utilise them as an external source of information. This can make valuable information available to industry that, without engaging academia, would not be possible. It has also been recognised that the best forms of knowledge transfer involve human interaction, be it through structured network events or chance conversations. Academics and industrialists often have more in common than either realise, this meeting of minds can produce rich pools of knowledge transfer opportunities that both can benefit from [6]. A number of structured initiatives have been established to increase the level of innovation in the UK through collaboration with industry. Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) are one such mechanism that have become prevalent in design. 4 KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER PARTNERSHIP Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) are a government funded initiative that enables UK businesses to access and benefit from the wide range of expertise available in the UK’s ‘Knowledge Base’ - higher education institutions, further education colleges, and private and public sector research organisations and institutes. University expertise is applied to a project that is central to the development of the Company Partner. In the process, academic staff are able to enhance the business relevance of their teaching and research. At the heart of each KTP are one or more associates. An associate is a high-calibre graduate (that is to say a student who has achieved a degree mark over 60% or commonly referred to as a 2.1 award) who is recruited to work in industry on a project that is central to its strategic development. The associate is supported by members of academic staff and carries out a programme of work designed to facilitate transfer of knowledge, skills and technology central to the company’s business. 4.1 DESIGN LED KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER PARTNERSHIPS KTP have provided a suitable framework for the School of Art & Design to support organisations in new product development: from user, market and sector research, through concept, design and manufacturing development, to product launch. The acquisition of knowledge by academic institutions is clearly important. Knowledge feeds the institution: academics, practitioners, researchers and students. Commercial organisations involved in KTP have access to academic knowledge, support and supervision that reaches further than their immediate academic supervisor. Collaboration between university departments and cross discipline areas creates knowledge transfer that commercial organisations then have the opportunity to access.

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5 KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS In this section the authors discuss (i) models of knowledge networks within academia, and (ii) how these internal models interface in a broader context with external organisations. 5.1 ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE IN ACADEMIA AND INDUSTRY There is a difference in the way that access to knowledge is dealt with in academia and industry. Academic institutions allow free access to knowledge that in turn can be used in the development of further knowledge creation. Within commercial organisations, knowledge is traditionally retained internally due to

Figure 1. Micro-cycle of knowledge management.

Figure 2. Industry (I) interacting with Academic (A) domains.

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commercial sensitivity. This can present a barrier to understanding innovative approaches and elements of best practice being employed within specific organisations. 5.2 COLLABORATION FRAMEWORKS In academic institutions, knowledge moves through a number of key stages. These are: identification: knowledge is acquired from a context (a); decoding: knowledge from context (a) is deconstructed and generalised; adaptation; deconstructed knowledge from context (a) is transformed and applied to context (b); application: the application of knowledge from context (a) to context (b). Fig.1 describes the micro-cycle of knowledge management within specific academic domains, e.g. design, engineering, chemistry, etc. This process usually occurs independently at subject level. 5.3 COLLABORATION MODES The channels used to access knowledge from universities by industry are diverse and vary greatly across industry sectors. As already identified, there are numerous forms of academic/industry collaboration. These approaches support engagement with stakeholders in an extended network. This includes members of academic staff and also members of other commercial organisations often from other market sectors. These models support a multiplicity of collaborative arrangements ranging from start up companies to national and multi-national organisations. 5.4 INTERACTION WITH KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS Fig.2 visualises the academic institution as part of a knowledge transfer network in which industrial partners interact independently with different academic departments. This model can be further developed to generate greater knowledge transfer when a number of organisations feed into the academic institution at the same time. The model now moves the academic institution into the role of a central ‘hub’ linking organisations through it. This concurrent interaction of industry from a broad base of market sectors provides the potential for knowledge transfer to flow not only from commerce to academia, but also from commerce to commerce on multiple levels. Examples of strategic knowledge transfer from organisation to organisation can be evidenced where KTP have been used as a vehicle to audit and evaluate organisational strategy as part of its measurable outcomes. For example, at the University of Salford best practice in design management theory has been identified, adapted and implemented across market sectors. The convergence of different organisations tacit knowledge can prove of great benefit as a shared resource. In design led KTP where experience of commercial design organisations or the suppliers of new technologies are often limited, utilizing pooled resources of others practical experience can be greatly beneficial.

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Figure 3. Industry (I) interacting with The Knowledge Network (KN). The exposure of disparate industries to each other’s practice enables relationships and non-structured dialogue to be generated between staff and associates from different organisations. Within the academic hub these relationships are open and non-competitive. Discussion of common professional practice issues and problem solving debate can be facilitated. The models and structure of academic institutions makes such unlikely relationships possible. 6 CONCLUDING REMARKS It is clear that collaboration between industry and academia plays a vital role in supporting R&D within the UK. If we are to rival our European counterpart’s and increase productivity levels, collaboration must be fully supported. This will provide a stable platform for this relationship to mature and yield greater benefits. Universities themselves increasingly employ a ‘real world’ focus to their activities encouraging students to be more commercially aware and developing academics commercial potential output through enterprise departments. All this strives to make universities more approachable and send a relevant message to industry. Benefits to universities who engage in collaboration include: real world inputs from the commercial world; confirms relevance of curriculum content; enhanced students learning experience; professional practice opportunities for university staff; financial remuneration; career opportunities for graduates; research outputs; status benchmarking for course, department, university. Benefits to industry who engage in collaboration include: access to facilities; access to existing knowledge across institution; opportunities to direct research activities; alternative perspectives not limited by organisation cultures; access to graduates; access to academic concepts and approaches; staff development opportunities. As collaboration continues to increase, it is important for industry to engage more visibly with academia and vice versa. Commercial organisations taking an active role in academic research undertakings may be aspirational, but it would clearly provide an indication of the benefits of collaboration to a wider audience. Universities must continue

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to provide and develop accessible channels for industry to tap into the wealth of knowledge evident within academia REFERENCES [1] Fontana, R., Geuna, A. & Matt, M., Firm Size and Openness: The Driving Forces of UniversityIndustry Collaboration. In: Caloghirou, Y., Constantelou, A. & Vonortas, N. (eds.), Knowledge Flows in European Industry: Mechanisms and Policy Implications, London, 2004 [2] Fontana, R., et al., ibid [3] Engineering Employers Report, Bridging The Continental Divide, Engineering Employers Federation, 2003 [4] Cooper, R. & Press, M., The Design Agenda. John Wiley & Sons, 1995 [5] Kotler, P., Marketing Management. Prentice-Hill Inc. London, 2002 [6] Lambert, R., Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration. HMSO, 2003

SUPPORTING STUDENT ENTERPRISE AND PRODUCT COMMERCIALISATION – A CASE STUDY Mr G.Hudson* Senior Lecturer in Product Design, Department of Architecture and Product Design, University of Wolverhampton, Shropshire. Mr M.Eason Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Taking a product from prototype to commercial production requires an enormous amount of effort in a multitude of skills areas. A 2003 graduate from the University of Wolverhampton BSc Computer Aided Product Design degree has succeeded in just such an enterprise, and the nature of the multi-faceted activities that have been undertaken will be explained in this paper. The original product idea was generated to satisfy part of the requirements for the final year of the degree course, but the commercial potential of the product was recognised at an early stage and the Intellectual Property Rights protected. At the end of the 2003 academic year the prototype product had won several prizes at local and regional level, and was recognised both by creative initiatives, and in the local media. The University of Wolverhampton’s Innovative Product Development Centre at Telford provided technical and marketing expertise to assist in the development of the product, and part of the company’s initial funding was obtained from central government ‘spin-off’ initiatives. All the stages necessary to start a trading company then had to be undertaken and these included; • Identifying a suitable manufacturing company; • Researching, locating and leasing suitable company premises;

*Department of Architecture and Product Design, School of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Wolverhampton, Priorslee Campus, Telford, Shropshire. TF2 9NT. Tel (01902) 321717 international code (+44 1902) Email: - [email protected]

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• Creating and presenting a business plan to obtain funding from financial institutions; • Ensuring that the product met all existing applicable standards; • Investigating import requirements into the European Union; • Establishing the company as a limited liability entity; • Creating a marketing strategy to ensure maximum sales potential; • Initiating the start of financial trading for Inland Revenue purposes. The company has had to ensure strict financial control, and the development of further products in the range to generate a broad customer appeal. This has resulted in the company being on the threshold of a launch into several other European countries, and arrangements being made to sell in other parts of the world.

Figure 1. 3D CAD model of the inflatable cot. 1 INTRODUCTION During the final year of study on the BSc (Hons) Computer Aided Product Design course the students have to undertake a major design project. This requires every student to identify an area of need where either existing products do not function to an acceptable level, or a suitable product does not exist. The design of the product that is produced to satisfy the assessment criteria for the final year project occasionally has commercial potential, and the ethos of enterprise and entrepreneurship are actively encouraged. In the case of Jo Bradford, and her inflatable travel cot, the final year project has been taken through all the stages necessary from conception, manufacture, and sales to bring it to full commercial realisation.

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2 INSPIRATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRODUCT Identifying a need for a product is a difficult problem for the majority of final year students, but as a mature student, and a mother of three children, Jo Bradford had a broad experience of life to call upon. Jo observed a mother of a young baby struggling to load all the luggage required into the boot of a car, and recalling her own experiences of trying to go on holiday with small children, the idea of a lightweight travel cot was born. A major problem with existing metal and fabric travel cots is the weight of approximately 10 to 12 kilogramme. Jo’s idea for a design solution to overcome these problems was an inflatable cot to solve the weight problem, combined with a smaller volume to carry when deflated. The final concept of a cot that would provide the solution was generated on a 3D solid modelling package as shown in Figure 1. 2.1 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS To provide initial legal protection a description of the idea was recorded onto sheets of paper, and in Nov. 2002 posted to herself so that the postmark recorded the date. The letter remains unopened as proof of her IPR. A search on the Patent Web site provided a means to ensure that the idea had not already been thought of, and also enabled the idea to be recorded by the application for a patent in late Nov. 2002. This is a free service for the first twelve months, and by Aug. 2003 a patent agent was engaged to ensure the appropriate degree of protection for the idea had been addressed. 2.2 ESTABLISHING THE PRODUCT MARKET POTENTIAL By using the on-line ‘Mintel’ marketing database, via the University learning centre, the size of market sector that includes travel cots in the UK was found to be in excess of £100 million in 2001. Having identified such a financially buoyant sector the potential for the commercial success of the product was realised.

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Figure 2. The first inflatable cot prototype manufactured in China. 2.3 BIZCOM A government funded competition, called ‘Bizom’, created to encourage innovation and enterprise in Universities was running for the first time in 2002/3, and the inflatable travel cot was the winner of the £1000 first prize at local University level in February 2003. The product was then automatically entered for the regional West Midlands finals held at Warwick University and succeeded in winning the first prize of £4000, in May 2003, as well as the prestigious Lord Stafford Award for excellence in innovation. 2.4 PROTOTYPE PRODUCTION PVC was considered the most suitable material with over forty years of use in products, and the technique of high frequency welded sheets was needed to manufacture the inflatable structure. As the University of Wolverhampton does not have this capability, outside companies in the UK were sourced in December 2002 to undertake the prototype manufacture. The production of the 3D shape was quite complicated with its finished chambers and welded panels and therefore a considerable amount of time was envisaged to facilitate its build. Although two UK based companies stated they would undertake the work, as the project submission of the end of May 2003 approached, both companies withdrew their offer due to the time involved. With only four weeks left the Internet was used to locate a company in China that was willing to produce the prototype and airfreight it to the UK by the end of May. Despite the distance and the communication problems the first prototype was able to form part of the project display assessment requirement within the deadline. The University student hardship fund provided support by funding the cost of the £500 prototype. Figure 2 shows the first inflatable cot prototype.

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3.0 FORMING THE COMPANY With the spur of recognition from the local press, and regional television exposure, the decision was made to progress to full commercial realization. This required a limited company to be formed, and so ‘Holidoze’ was selected as the name to trade under. The ‘Company House’ Web site provided a clear step-by-step guide on the stages necessary to register the company, along with the appropriate forms, fees to be paid, etc., and all the administration required to bring the company into existence. In November 2003 Holidoze Ltd. became a legal entity. 3.1 SUPPORT FROM ‘BUSINESS START UP INITIATIVES’ The University has the Innovative Product Development Centre (IPDC) located on its Telford campus and so Holidoze Ltd were in a position to take advantage of the various business support mechanisms that IPDC are able to provide.

Figure 3. An improved version of the inflatable cot. Some outside business support bodies were only able to offer theoretical advice, but IPDC gave appropriate advice on critical aspects of starting the business, such as marketing and material testing. Support from IPDC could only be obtained after Holidoze became a company, as their funding mechanisms are restricted to support only this form of business entity. As capital was needed ‘Holidoze’ applied to the ‘Mercia Spinner’ project. This is funded through Advantage West Midlands and the Higher Education Innovation Fund and Holidoze received £27 000. The funding was used to pay for; • PVC material testing by Rubber and Plastics Research Association, (RAPRA) • Product testing by SGS in Bradford • Legal fees for the company to start up

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• Continued patent protection • Production of a batch of twenty inflatable cots, complete with carrying bag, electric pump and packaging box for Point of Sale (POS). The British Standards online database at the University was utilised to check all the relevant standards for travel cots, and so the product testing ensured that the British and ISO standards were adhered to. Aspects of the design/development of the cot continued to be improved via email and telephone communication with China, and an example of the Mark III prototype cot is shown in Figure 3 3.2 COMPANY PREMISES After extensive research into the most appropriate premises an industrial unit on the Halesfield Industrial Park in Telford was identified as having all the attributes required by ‘Holidoze’. As the cots were going to be completely manufactured in China the premises needed substantial storage facilities to cope with the large numbers of products in each container. The legal contracts were duly completed and ‘Holidoze’ started trading from its Halesfield unit in March 2004. 3.3 ESTABLISHING GOOD BUSINESS LINKS WITH CHINA To promote a good working relationship with the manufacturers in China the now directors of ‘Holidoze’, Paul and Jo Bradford, flew to China in May 2004. This enabled them to meet with the production managers personally, and inspect the production process being used to manufacture the cots. The importance of good personal contact to cement a harmonious working relationship became clear to Paul and Jo on the trip, and they now have a much better understanding of the cultural differences that apply when trading in China. Part of establishing a good personal relationship was not to be shy when it was your turn to take the microphone on the karaoke evenings as shown in Figure 4.

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Figure 4. Establishing good business links in China. Jo Bradford with Mr Wong. 3.4 IMPORTING INTO EUROPE The HM Customs Web site proved to be very useful in explaining what paperwork was required to import the finished cot from China. A decision was made by ‘Holidoze’ to use a shipping agent, and the Internet provided details on a variety of candidates. After comparing several agents ‘Cargo Gateway’ were selected as they offered the best combination of services. The shipping agents now handle all the necessary customs paperwork in addition to transporting the containers. 3.5 STARTING TO SELL The gestation period between the company being formed and finally having products to sell was protracted. The progression through four stages of prototype development, and the lead-time of six weeks for the delivery of the first production batch, took a long time. In July 2004 another critical stage was reached when the first container arrived at Holidoze premises in Telford and the first completed consignment of 1400 cots was unloaded and stored, ready for distribution. 3.6 MARKETING THE PRODUCT Many different ways of advertising the cot have been undertaken. Initially it was felt that using existing trade sector channels would be best, but advertising in the ‘Nursery Industry’ magazine produced a poor response from retail outlets. Attending the Baby Products Association trade show at the NEC in October 2004 proved to be far more successful. Telephone sales direct to the individual retail outlets has also been more successful.

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The ability of customers to buy the product straight from the ‘Holidoze’ Web site has proved to be the most successful channel for sales, and a further use of the Internet to generate sales through a drop shipper on ‘eBay’ has also been very effective. Marketing the product has been the part of the business that requires the most effort, and ‘Holidoze’ estimate that it takes approximately seventy percent of the overall company activities. Experience has shown that marketing directly to customers via selected consumer shows, and through the Internet, is the most effective way to generate sales. 3.7 FINANCIAL CONTROL Before returning to higher education Jo had several years experience of book keeping, and so the importance of good financial control was firmly established in Holidoze Ltd. This aspect of the company’s business is attended to virtually on a daily basis, and the constant monitoring of the cash flow is one of the strengths of the operation.

Figure 5. Slumber inflatable bumper. 3.8 INCREASING THE PRODUCT RANGE Part of the business advice provided through the University, via IPDC, was for ‘Holidoze’ not to rely on only one product, but develop a succession of other products. To extend the range of products on offer the company now sells inflatable bed bumpers. These prevent small children falling out of bed when they make the transition from a cot to a full size bed as shown in Figure 5. 3.9 EXPANDING THE PRODUCTS INTO THE REST OF EUROPE AND BEYOND ‘Holidoze’ is presently active in expanding the distribution and sale of its products into the rest of Europe, and through contacts made at various trade shows, it is establishing the most viable distribution network. UK Trade and Investment is a government initiative that aims to encourage Small and Medium Size Enterprises (SMEs) to export. Using the passport scheme, Holidoze will be attending three trade shows in the USA before the end of 2005.

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4.0 CONCLUSIONS The paper demonstrates that supporting student enterprise to product commercialization can be successful with drive and commitment by the initiator, and assistance from various sources available. Advantage West Midlands (AWM) are encouraging enterprise and innovation through support for local companies, and hence employment opportunities. ‘Holidoze’ has benefited from funding through the Spinner initiative, which is financed from AWM, and the Higher Education Innovation Fund. IPDC have provided expertise to ‘Holidoze’ in several areas and have assisted the company in product development. The success of Jo Bradford and ‘Holidoze’ has generated a much greater awareness of innovation and enterprise amongst subsequent undergraduate student cohorts and project ideas that have commercial potential are now encouraged to initiative activities to protect the IPR at a very early stage.

COLLABORATION BETWEEN PRODUCT DESIGN ENGINEERING AT GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART AND THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE SCOTLAND Dagfinn Aksnes* Senior Lecturer, Product Design Engineering, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. Anthea Dickson** Commercial Research Manager, Greater Glasgow Health Board, Yorkhill Division. Cathy Dowling*** Business Development Manager, Glasgow School of Art. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The authors describe the development of a multidisciplinary collaboration which has joined the educational activities of Product Design Engineering at Glasgow School of Art with the healthcare activities of the NHS and produced valuable Intellectual Property and Patents for commercial exploitation and benefit to healthcare. The collaboration has also created opportunities for enterprise, employment and added value to the Scottish economy. New knowledge and processes have been created with positive implications for new product development in the health sector as well as a potential good practice model for other sectors. The collaboration has helped to develop an enhanced multidisciplinary learning process which synthesises experience and knowledge with creativity and innovation, producing strong synergy and added value. Keywords: Collaboration, multidisciplinary, synergy, creativity and innovation, partnerships, product design, design processes, technology application, patents, commercialisation, enterprise *Product Design Engineering, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ, Scotland Phone +44 141 353 4717, Fax +44 141 353 4655, e-mail: [email protected] **Commercial Research Manager, Greater Glasgow Health Board, Yorkhill Division e-mail: [email protected] ***Business Development Manager, Glasgow School of Art e-mail: [email protected]

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1 INTRODUCTION Product Design Engineering (PDE) at Glasgow School of Art (GSA) has collaborated extensively with industry on major projects for year 4&5 students, providing a positive learning process for the students through a realistic project experience and interaction with practicing professionals. The companies involved have also benefited from these collaborations by the injection of fresh creative input to their projects. Historically design has had strong links with health care and Brunel’s design for a portable and modular field hospital during the war in Crimea is a worthy example of how health care has benefited from the inputs of a designer. Some of the GSA teaching staff have product development experience from the medical equipment sector and have actively encouraged students to undertake projects in the medical sector over the years. PDE Students have been involved in medical projects on an individual basis since 1997 and in order to provide a source of such projects for students, Dagfinn Aksnes established contact in 2000 with Dr. Una MacFadyen a Paediatric Consultant at Stirling Royal Infirmary. Dr. MacFadyen provided observations and insights of issues and problems experienced at her hospital for the students to work with. She then collaborated with the students over time in their design process providing input and advice. This proved very positive and enhanced the student’s learning process significantly. As a result, a number of good projects were developed over several years. These have included: Child nebuliser, digital mammography unit, transfer ventilator, wound healing oxygenator, ozone endoscope disinfector, epilepsy protective headgear, GP’s on call bag, balance test and therapy device, hospital bed for children, walking support for diabetics suffering from foot ulcers, medication dispenser, child’s portable oxygen supply, mobile feeding pump etc. Evidence of the benefits from collaborations between PDE and the NHS was on display at the PDE Degree Show in Glasgow School of Art in June 2003 and the publicity resulting from this exhibition spread awareness of the benefits to Scottish Enterprise and the NHS. The evidence pointed clearly at significant mutual benefits through bringing together the NHS understanding of problems and issues with the product development expertise in PDE and an agreement was reached to initiate the collaboration. 2 THE PDE STUDIO PROCESS AND DEEP LEARNING The students work individually on their own projects for 8 months and they are also encouraged to form project teams to critique and mentor each other. In particular year 5 students mentor year 4 students. The choice of project is to a large extent open to the student, supported by tutors. The investigation and selection process starts before Easter and concludes at project start in October. The individual project choice provides a very high degree of academic freedom and inspiration for learning throughout the project. The PDE Studio aims to give the students a realistic professional and multidisciplinary working style experience, mimicking a range of working environments found in Industry [1]. The creative processes deployed in the studio include brainstorming sessions arranged among students, role playing, and a large number of creativity enhancing practices like

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opposites, associations, Osborn’s list etc [1]. The students are taught Fuzzy Front End techniques in Project Management and encouraged to become aware of the powerful contributions to creativity from the subconscious mind. The students are encouraged to learn through practice, including best existing practices as well as experimentation, trial and error and to reflect on the results and what they imply for further progress. [2], [3] The aim is to provide an appropriate education for Product Design Engineers through Deep Learning and Reflective Practice. This is integrated into the Year 4&5 Major Projects and the students respond very positively to the challenges they encounter and mature in the process, both professionally and personally. The PDE Studio is a rich educational environment where academic freedom and opportunity is balanced with responsibility. The Studio is inspirational and supportive of student taking ownership of their learning whilst working in partnership with staff and collaborators, creating communities of practice. [1], [4] 3 COLLABORATION, PEOPLE AND PARTNERSHIPS The studio programme and learning and teaching/design processes are managed and supervised by Dagfinn Aksnes. The management of the IP processes is the responsibility of Cathy Dowling who also seeks out funding for patents etc. The Yorkhill/NHS management is carried out by Anthea Dickson. All three collaborators liaise closely with the students and staff as needed to support the projects. The NHS members of staff are motivated to identify projects and collaborate with the students. The students are of a very high calibre and exhibit an excellent mix of technical expertise, creativity, visualisation and have very high inter-personal and communication skills. The detailed knowledge and professionalism of the NHS staff involved is of great value to the students projects. Acting together these factors reach the critical mass needed to create synergy and ensure the success of the collaboration. In addition to the projects listed for Yorkhill, 9 students (04-05) are working on projects in collaboration with other NHS hospitals all over Scotland. PDE graduates have established 4 Design Consultancies in Scotland since 2000. Two of these, Lightweight Medical and Core Design are also involved in collaboration with the NHS through contacts at Yorkhill and SHIL. Lightweight Medical was established to exploit the IP relating to a lightweight transport incubator resulting from a collaborative project between PDE and Glasgow Royal Infirmary. 4 THE NHS PRACTICES AND PROJECT GENERATION The NHS is a very innovative environment, constantly seeking ways to improve patient care, however product innovation and development has traditionally been left to industry. However intellectual property (IP) management has been of increasing interest within the NHS in recent years [5], [6] and NHS R&D offices in NHSScotland are charged with handling the IP created by their staff in an effort to accelerate the introduction of product innovations into patient care. R&D officers, to whom this responsibility was given, were reluctant at first to get too involved encouraging IP development as there was little or no funding within the NHS to carry forward this speculative activity. This situation changed

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in October 2002 when Scottish Health Innovations Ltd (SHIL), NHS Scotland‘s technology transfer office, commenced operations. This organisation received funding from DTI, the Scottish Executive, Chief Scientist’s Office and Scottish Enterprise to commercialise NHS IP in Scotland. The NHS R&D office have since been taking time to raise awareness about IP issues with staff to utilise this valuable resource. In July and August 2003, in an effort to stimulate involvement in the exploitation process, the Yorkhill R&D Commercial Office led by Anthea Dickson, ran a poster, email and intranet campaign inviting staff to come forward and report problems they thought might be solved through a design process. Those who responded to the appeal were asked to prepare a short description of the issues/problems as a starting point for the students projects. In the academic session 2003/4, 5 possible projects were identified from the appeal to staff. All 5 were jointly assessed as being suitable and 3 were selected by students. 4 further projects were arranged directly by students with members of staff. At the end of the year 8 patents were filed, and 1 of them is currently undergoing post-patent development supported by Scottish Health Innovations Limited. In session 2004/5, 11 project ideas were identified and of those, 10 were selected and 8 are currently being developed by PDE. 2 further projects were conceived by students. The project identification process yielded 17 projects in 2003-04 and 2004-05, including: Baby heel blood sampling simulator, non invasive tonometer, well plate evaporator, umbilical catheter insertion aid for neonates, intuss delicate inflation device, upside down work/play station, and safe transport restraint for neonates. Other projects originated from the students own contacts external to Yorkhill include: Teno Approximator, a tendon repair surgery product, Lancitor a diabetes bloodmonitoring product for visually impaired users (RSA Award Winner) and a Visual aid for Macular Degeneration (RSA Award Winner)

Table 1. Table of PDE/NHS Collaborative Projects. 2003-4 2004-5 Projects proposed by Yorkhill staff 5 Yorkhill projects selected by students (formal process) 3 Yorkhill projects proposed by students (informal process) 4 Total number involving Yorkhill staff 7 Healthcare projects from other NHS units/ industry based 15 22 Total number of PDE/NHS projects Total number of patents applied for 8

11 8 2 10 10 20 ~7

5 CASE STUDIES TENO APPROXIMATOR Student: Sam Richards. Collaborator: Mr Finlayson, Surgical Consultant Raigmore Hospital. A surgical product which holds and aligns the ends of a severed tendon to facilitate the suturing and repair process. The Teno Approximator achieves a significantly

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improved and cleaner repair and reduction of lesions to the tendon caused by current surgical practice. Commercialisation is in progress. BABY HEEL BLOOD SAMPLING TRAINER Student: Esther Johnson. Collaborator: Dr Vincent Choudery, Specialist Registrar, Queen Mother’s Hospital. A training simulator product used as a teaching aid for trainee doctors, nurses and midwives to practice the technique (pressure, position and rate of squeeze) required to prick and squeeze a baby’s heel to obtain a blood sample. The product simulates/mimics the texture, flexibility and appearance of a baby’s heel in order for the trainee to practice and develop their technique and be provided with feedback on their performance. This eliminates the risk of injury and pain to the patient and ensures that the trainees are able to carry out the procedure to a very high standard. NON CONTACT TONOMETER Student: Geoff Bland. Collaborator: Professor Gordon Sutton, Consultant Ophthalmologist , Gartnavel General Hospital & Royal Hospital for Sick Children. A hand held product capable of measuring the internal ocular pressure (IOP) through the eyelid. The measurement is taken by a controlled contact with the surface of the closed eyelid, using the eyebrow as a reference point. The process avoids direct contact with the eye which most patients find painful and distressing. Children routinely have to have a general anaesthetic for the current procedure. The non contact tonometer would significantly reduce the number of general anaesthetics given to children by reducing the pain and discomfort experienced during the procedure. 6 INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND COMMERCIALISATION The innovation in the projects is monitored by PDE staff. Cathy Dowling, GSA, helps the students to find the most appropriate support for protecting their IP. This may be either to seek enterprise funding where the product may form the basis of a new business, or it may be to introduce the product to a company who can develop it and take it to market. Many require patent protection prior to the end of the academic year. The NHS too is keen to protect any IP generated on a healthcare product in which staff have been involved during the product development phase. The originators ownership of IP is a basic right in law and to facilitate commercialisation, the IP originator can choose to trade their IP in return for commercial development and a share of the potential profits from commercialisation. A standard agreement has been developed to protect the originators interests and allow commercial development. 7 BENEFITS DERIVED FROM COLLABORATION Significant benefits are generated from these collaborations for the NHS, GSA and the students. From the standpoint of PDE we observe excellent practise through the

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interaction between students and NHS staff. There is real synergy by jointly creating product innovations in a multidisciplinary collaboration which would have been impossible if the people involved were to work in isolation. The students’ learning experience is both inspirational and beneficial in preparing the students for professional working styles after graduation. This learning experience significantly contributes to the creative processes during the project. The NHS benefits are that: • The projects act as a catalyst to move NHS staff concerns, lists of problems and ideas towards product solutions promising real benefits to all • Creative young minds taking a fresh look at specific issues experienced by hospital staff. • It is a boost to NHS staff morale through participation in the Design Process and external interest in their concerns through discussion with students and staff. • Cathy Dowling has ensured that a number of the students’ innovations in these projects have beenpatented and are being pursued for commercialisation • Potential for service improvements and cost savings for the NHS. • Potential for patients to benefit from new equipment design • Satisfaction and enjoyment derived from helping students • One off or low volume products can be developed which would otherwise not be attractive commercially. The GSA and students benefits are: • A realistic basis for their major project, based on real situations and issues with a strong context for the student’s work which stimulates dialogue and reflection in the student’s practise. • Interaction with hospital staff who are enthusiastic, highly trained, articulate and used to working in a technology rich environment. It is inspirational to work with professionals from different disciplines and experience a truly multidisciplinary collaboration where the combined insights contribute to a high level of synergy and holistic achievement in the projects. • Application of universal design, inclusive design, designing for disability and an ageing population. • Experiential and deep learning.

8 CONCLUSION, REFLECTION AND FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS Many strands of achievement and reflection emerge from this collaboration and four areas of mutual interest have been enriched by the collaboration: 1. Project opportunities generated, providing excellent learning processes. 2. Collaborative processes have been established where the multidisciplinarity has yielded benefits to individuals and organisations involved. 3. Commercialisation processes have been established with the protection of IP and involvement of SHIL resulting in projects moving towards application in the NHS.

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4. Creation of potential for development of new enterprises and benefit to the Scottish economy. The collaboration has yielded substantial new knowledge through the high rate of patents secured. This valuable new intellectual property has been made available for commercialisation which promises to benefit patients through provision of improved services and save the NHS money, time and effort. There is strong evidence that the collaborations have established new processes which enable the collaboration partners to achieve their visions, aims and objectives. Valuable goodwill has also been generated between the collaboration partners in support of continuing collaboration. From the achievements reached so far, three factors emerge for future development: 1. Strengthening the collaboration and ensuring continuity in the process 2. The establishment of an incubator facility to take the products into commercial realisation in partnership between the existing collaborators including SHIL, the Scottish Executive, Scottish Enterprise and Industry 3. Potential for other application outside the health sector of the processes established between GSA and the NHS to use as a model of best practice for other collaborations outwith the NHS sector. The experience of these collaborations have been wholly positive and provided all those involved with inspirational challenges, achievement and learning attainment. For the students, the collaboration has been a valuable learning experience of working in a multidisciplinary professional environment with all the processes and demands of enterprising endeavour and new product development ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of PDE students, colleagues at Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow University, staff at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, the Queen Mother’s Hospital, Stirling Royal Infirmary, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Gartnavel General Hospital, Raigmore Hospital and Scottish Health Innovations Limited. REFERENCES [1] Aksnes D. Developing a student-centred studio culture for effective learning and teaching in Product Design Engineering. Proceedings, IE&PDE04, pp383-390 [2] Kolb D. A. and Fry, R. (1975) ‘Toward an applied theory of experiential learning; in C. Cooper (ed.) Theories of Group Process, London: John Wiley. [3] Moon, Jennifer ‘Reflection in learning and professional development, theory and practice’ Coogan Page Ltd ISBN 0 7494 3452 X [4] Wenger E. ‘Communities of practice’ ‘Situated learning, legitimate peripheral participation’ [5] HMSO, NHS Intellectual Property Management, MEL (1998) 23 [6] HMSO, NHS Intellectual Property Management, HDL (2004) 9

DYNAMICS OF COLLABORATION WITH INDUSTRY IN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN EDUCATION: THE CASE OF A GRADUATION PROJECT COURSE Assist. Prof. Dr. Fatma Korkut* Department of Industrial Design, Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Assist. Prof. Dr. Naz A.G.Z. Evyapan** Department of Industrial Design, Middle East Technical University, Turkey. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The paper discusses the issue of collaboration with industry in the specific case of the graduation project course conducted at the Middle East Technical University (METU) Department of Industrial Design in the spring semester of 2003. The course involved 38 students and 22 firms, and was directed by four full-time departmental staff and one part-time instructor. The paper focuses on the key factors that influence the collaboration experience, and based on these factors, identifies and critically evaluates collaboration types with industry. The paper concludes with implications of the case for industrial design education in general and the graduation project course in particular. Keywords: University-industry collaboration, industrial design education 1 INTRODUCTION The higher education programs in industrial design in Turkey started in the beginning of the 1970s, much earlier than the level of industrial development reached and the economic policies adopted required the services of professional designers [1]. The development of industrial design education and profession in Turkey has suffered from the lack of governmental policies for design promotion and weak relations with local industry for decades. Educational institutions started to develop real ties with industry in *Department of Industrial Design, Faculty of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, Inönü Bulvari 06531 Ankara, Turkey, http://www.id.metu.edu.tr/ E-mail: [email protected] **Department of Industrial Design, Faculty of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, Inönü Bulvari 06531 Ankara, Turkey, http://www.id.metu.edu.tr/ E-mail: [email protected]

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the 1990s. The Department of Industrial Design at METU has 25 years of experience in undergraduate education. Although the four-year program includes compulsory summer internships in production facilities and design offices, and the department has had sporadic collaboration experiences with industry, strengthening the department’s relations with industry and the professional design community in Turkey has become a critical educational objective in the last decade. In 1995 the department reevaluated the objectives of design studio courses and adopted a proactive policy for collaborating with industry in the junior and senior years of the program in particular [2]. Other industrial design departments in Turkey have made similar efforts particularly at the undergraduate level [3], [4]. The literature on university-industry collaboration emphasizes research and development [5], whereas collaboration with industry at the undergraduate level presents different challenges and focuses more on educational objectives and professional training. The paper discusses the issue of collaboration with industry in the specific case of the graduation project course conducted at METU Department of Industrial Design in the spring semester of 2003. The study is based on an extensive review of the reports, documents and project work prepared by the students during the course, and on the review of the instructional material and observation notes prepared by the tutors during the same period. The paper discusses the key factors that influence the collaboration experience, and based on these key factors, identifies and critically evaluates collaboration types with industry. 2 THE GRADUATION PROJECT COURSE AND THE INITIAL PHASES OF COLLABORATION The final semester of the department’s program is characterized by the graduation project course, and a graduation projects exhibition open to the public. In this course the students work on a single project throughout their final semester. All student projects are supported by industrial firms or design consultancy companies. A main objective of the course is to provide students with the experience of working together with a firm acting as a client. The graduation project course in the spring semester of 2003 followed a detailed time and task plan prepared by the tutors. The course was a total of 17 weeks. At the beginning of the semester the students were asked to formulate an initial project statement and indicate potential clients. The placement process was realized mainly through the initiative of the tutors, the firms, or the students, and was completed in 20 days. The 22 firms involved were a mixture of large, medium and small-scale companies from various sectors such as ceramics sanitary ware, white goods, electrical household appliances, home electronics, automotive industry, office furniture and lighting. Tutors’ initiative: The tutors contacted firms with which the department had previous collaboration experience, 12 of which accepted to support graduation projects. 23 students were placed through this process. Firms’ initiative: In the previous semester the students had carried out a series of projects with a client who decided to continue to collaborate with the department. Seven students were placed through this process.

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Students’ initiative: Some students preferred firms with which the department had no previous collaboration experience. The students either knew these firms through internship, or had become aware of them as they searched for firms within their area of interest. In this way eight students were placed in eight different firms. 3 FACTORS INFLUENCING THE TYPE, QUALITY AND OUTCOME OF COLLABORATION We define collaboration in terms of the level and quality of interaction among all the parties concerned – the department, the students and the firms– towards a common end. Our experience with the graduation project course revealed five key factors that affected the type, quality and outcome of collaboration to a great extent. 3.1 PREVIOUS COLLABORATION EXPERIENCE There were fewer uncertainties about the quality of collaboration in cases where the parties had previous collaboration experience, and the tutors were able to better inform the students on the quality and level of support they were to expect to receive. The collaboration process was eased as to the time allocated to the placement process and to the formulation of the project statement. 3.2 STUDENTS’ SKILLS AND BACKGROUND Whether the students had previous experience in their project area through internship or exposure to a specific user group, or whether there was a match between their skills and knowledge and the project area, affected the quality and outcome of the design process. Other factors were design skills, motivation and organizational skills of students. 3.3 FORMULATION OF PROJECT STATEMENTS As the students started getting in touch with their assigned firms, project statements were revised, radically altered, or changed totally. Out of 38 students, only 10 remained within the scope of their initial project statements. The negotiation of the project statements was mainly motivated by the firms’ expectations from the collaboration, which could be based on the firms’ immediate design needs, their long-term research and development interests, or merely their motivation for supporting design education. Formulating a wellarticulated project statement based on mutual expectations at the early stages of the process played a positive role in the performance of the student. In cases where the project statement reflected mainly the student’s personal interests or where the firm could not provide real design drivers, the student delayed the decision making process and altered the statement as obstacles were encountered.

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3.4 FIRMS’ SCALE AND LEVEL OF COMMITMENT The large-scale firms usually had high level of design awareness and could afford a budget for collaboration. However, some large-scale firms were reluctant to share technical know-how, market research results, or human resources. Medium and smallscale firms were less familiar or had little experience with the services provided by industrial designers, had limited facilities and financial resources, and human resources were less diverse. In some cases, these factors affected the firm’s level of motivation and commitment to the collaboration. However, for those small-scale firms with a real commitment to, and interest in the project, the results were much satisfactory. Regardless of the scale of the firm, in some cases the commitment was limited to a single person who was willing to support design education, and the whole initiative depended on the person and his position in the firm. In these cases the support the student received from the firm was either limited to design advice only, or included support for model making as well. Even in some large-scale firms with no institutional commitment or interest, the level of motivation was low and support was limited. 3.5 GUIDANCE AND RESOURCES PROVIDED BY THE DEPARTMENT The most important role the department played in collaboration was organizational. This mainly included management of the placement process, management of guidance, tutorials and time-task plan, organization of the graduation exhibition, management of communication between parties and management of intellectual property. The department had no source of funding allocated to the course, process expenses or the graduation projects exhibition, but provided human resources and facilities such as work environment, computer labs, workshops and exhibition space. The quality of resources provided by the department was especially critical to compensate for the inequalities created by the diverse collaboration types. Except for three large-scale firms, there were no written agreements or protocols between the firms and the department. The lack of an established institutional intellectual property policy delayed the agreement process considerably with those three firms. 4 TYPES OF COLLABORATION WITH INDUSTRY The key factors discussed above indicated patterns of collaboration with industry that can be categorized into three main types: structured, semi-structured and unstructured. Structured collaboration: The structured collaboration cases were characterized by an institutional commitment to, and a real interest in the project. All the firms in this group were large-scale companies with research and development facilities. The project statements were formulated according to the firm’s short or long-term design needs. Firms were responsive to students’ request for assistance, and committed to participate in departmental evaluation sessions. The expectations from the design outcome were high, and ownership of intellectual property was an important issue. The firms had a trade

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secret policy, and followed certain procedures for releasing technical information. Another characteristic was the level at which the collaborating institutions were represented. The department and the firms had both low and high level institutional contact. The level of communication among parties was high. Semi-structured collaboration: The cases of semi-structured collaboration can be divided into two sub-categories. One sub-category was characterized by medium to largescale companies with in-house facilities whose institutional motivation for collaboration was primarily support for design education. Design guidance, technical information and model making characterized the type of support they offered. In the collaboration process a design champion in the company represented the firms. A major concern regarding the cases in this sub-category was the lack of institutional interest in the projects. The formulation of project statements were not motivated by a real need. The second subcategory was characterized by firms whose main motivation for collaboration was immediate design needs. These firms were small-scale production companies with whom the department had no previous collaboration experience. There were no design champions in these firms. These firms provided specialized technical information and assisted the model making process. The firms were responsive to students’ requests for assistance, but since the level of commitment of institutional resources was low, the success of collaboration depended primarily on the students’ initiative. With both subcategories, communication with the department was not high, but the representatives did participate in departmental evaluation sessions regularly. Unstructured collaboration: The unstructured collaboration cases were characterized by a lack of institutional commitment regardless of the firm scale. The firms had no real interests concerning the project outcome, and the motivation for collaboration was either based on personal drivers such as acquaintance with staff or the student, or on institutional concerns such as keeping up relations with the department. All contact persons in this category were designers. The success of collaboration was highly dependent on the motivation of the contact persons and the students. The level of communication between the department and the firms was low. The project statements were not formulated on the basis of the firms’ interests or needs. The support was mainly limited to design critiques. Therefore the management of time and task planning was a major issue for the students in these collaboration cases. 5 CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR DESIGN EDUCATION The future implications of the collaboration types and the critical factors involved for the role that the educational institution can play are as follows: Structured collaboration: Since structured collaboration involves high level of institutional commitment, and thus the expectations from the design outcome are high, an agreement concerning mutual responsibilities and intellectual property rights should be reached before the parties commit resources. In the formulation of project statements, a balance between the firms’ interests and educational objectives should be attained. Semi-structured collaboration: In semi-structured collaboration where the main motivation is support for design education, it is important to encourage the formulation of

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a project statement on the basis of real interests and needs of the firm, so that the student benefits from technical know-how and in-house facilities, and the firm’s level of commitment is enhanced. In semi-structured collaboration where the main motivation is the firms’ immediate design needs and where there is no design champion in the firm, the educational institution has to provide enough design guidance to students. It is also important to ensure that the project statements formulated on the firms’ immediate needs meet educational objectives. In order to increase design awareness in these firms and to facilitate the collaboration process, the educational institution ought to provide information on design services and the benefits of collaboration. These efforts will facilitate communication and prepare parties for future collaboration. Unstructured collaboration: The lack of institutional commitment is a major drawback in unstructured collaboration. For large-scale firms with which the educational institution has previous experience, a strategy to revitalize the relations would be to diversify access channels to the firm, especially at the executive level. The educational institution should give special emphasis on building up of institutional commitment through postcollaboration activities such as exhibitions, publications or events for promoting efforts of collaborating parties. Project statements not formulated in accordance with firms’ real interests appear to be a drawback in unstructured collaboration with small-scale firms. In such cases the strengths of firms should be the basis for formulating project statements, so that the students can benefit from the expertise and network that these firms can provide. Since quality human resources in these firms may not be able to dedicate enough time to observe student progress systematically, the educational institution should be more alert about progress follow-up. For firms with which the educational institution has no previous experience, information about the firm’s activities and resources should be obtained to better structure the collaboration process. A match between the human resources and facilities available to the student and the ambitions of the project statement has to be observed. Finally, for students with less competent design skills, whether the student has previous experience in an area may be used as a factor in the placement process. The student may be guided towards formulating a project statement where previous experience can be utilized. In cases where the student has no previous experience in the problem area, other skills, which may compensate must be inquired, such as analytical skills, user research skills, etc. For cases where the collaborating firm fails to respond to a student’s request for assistance, or where the negotiation of project statement seems not to resolve, the educational institution should provide methodological support for design guidance such as scenario building or user research, to help formulate a more grounded project statement and to support the student’s decision making process. In some cases the collaboration process may need to be supported by the knowledge and expertise of other parties; for instance, the student may need to conduct field research on a specific user group, or use simulation or testing facilities. The educational institution should be prepared to initiate contacts with additional parties early in the process. For cases where the firm cannot provide facilities or financial resources to support the student’s model making, travel or design development expenses, the educational institution has to find ways of securing a financial pool, or find additional sponsors for funding.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to thank our colleagues Dr. Gülay Hasdogan, Gün Acar and Akanay Akata of METU Department of Industrial Design with whom we shared the challenges of the graduation project course. We would like to extend special thanks to the senior year students of 2003 and to all collaborating firms. REFERENCES [1] Er, H.A., Er, Ö. and Korkut, F., The Development Pattern of Industrial Design in Turkey –An Attempt for a Conceptual Framework. Paper presented at Mind the Map, 3rd International Conference on Design History and Design Studies, Istanbul Technical University and Kent Institute of Art & Design, Istanbul, 9-12 July 2002. [2] Günöven, A., Hasdogan, G., Korkut, F. and Mutaf, G., Tasarim Egitiminde Stüdyolarin Hedeflerinin Yillara Göre Degisimi (The Grade Objectives of Studio Courses in Design Education). Fakülte’de E itim (Education in the Faculty), eds. Educational Board of the Faculty of Architecture and N. Teymur, METU Faculty of Architecture Publications, Ankara, 1997, pp.25-27. [3] Er, H.A. and Er, Ö., Two Birds with One Stone: A Joint Project of Industrial Design Education and Design Promotion for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in Turkey. ICSID 2nd Educational Conference: Critical Motivations and New Dimensions, Hannover, 5-7 September 2003. [4] Mimar Sinan University Faculty of Architecture Department of Industrial Design. Otomobil Koltugu icin Arastirma ve Tasarim Projesi 2001 (Research and Design Project for Automobile Seats 2001). Istanbul, 2002. [5] Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable, Overcoming Barriers to Collaborative Research: Report of a Workshop. National Academies Press, Washington D.C., 1999.

DESIGN SUPPORT FOR SMES M.A.C. Evatt* School of Engineering, Coventry University, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Coventry University is a major player in the West Midlands Regional Technology Network (WRTN). This is a European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) sponsored project with a total value of £9.1M: it has a total of nine partner institutions and Coventry University’s share is £2.1M. The lead managing partner is the University of Wolverhampton. The project at Coventry is operated within the University’s ‘Design Institute’ which is a virtual, cross-school, organisation set up to coordinate research and external activities between the Schools of Engineering, Art & Design, and Mathematical and Information Sciences. Coventry University’s Design Institute SME Support Programme provides a free-of-charge, comprehensive, package of product design and innovation services that offers businesses a real opportunity for improvement. The free service is available to qualifying Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the West Midlands area. This paper will explore the benefits, other than the purely financial, that can accrue to the University and the constituent Schools of the Design Institute from engaging in this work. The profile of the University with industrial entrepreneurs is raised, bringing enhanced links with industry and a development of expertise within the University which should enable collaboration beyond the life of the ERDF funding. Especially important to both parties i.e. University and recipient SMEs, is the generation of Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs). From the point of view of students the enhanced links are enabling placement opportunities for under-graduate and post graduate students both within the project team and in the client companies. The paper will also provide a small number of case studies outlining some of the work carried out to date under the auspices of the project. Keywords: Design Education, Links with industry, Design Projects, Industrial collaboration *School of Engineering, Coventry University, Priory Street, Coventry UK, CV1 5FB E-Mail [email protected], Telephone 024 7688 8363

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1 INTRODUCTION Coventry University is a major player in the West Midlands Regional Technology Network (WRTN). This is a European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) sponsored project with a total value of £9.1M: it has a total of nine partner institutions and Coventry University’s share is £2.1M. The lead managing partner is the University of Wolverhampton. The project at Coventry is operated within the University’s ‘Design Institute’ which is a virtual, cross-school, organisation set up to coordinate research and external activities between the Schools of Engineering, Art & Design, and Mathematical and Information Sciences. Coventry University’s Design Institute SME Support Programme provides a free-ofcharge, comprehensive package of product design and innovation services that offers businesses a real opportunity for improvement. The free service is available to qualifying Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the West Midlands area. Activities for the programme are focussed on the following:• Company analysis and design business management • Product/process review and market research • Concept and aesthetic development • Product design, engineering and analysis • Computer aided design (CAD) and solid modelling utilising Catia V5, Solidworks, AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max • Knowledge based engineering (KBE) and systems strategies • Rapid prototype development and production • Marketing, PR and product promotion strategies • Advice on financial management for new product introduction • Website development and design Other partners offer similar yet complementary services including support from disciplines as diverse as electronics and jewellery design. The project was intended to start on the back of a previous EU-funded project but a gap of in excess of two years meant that the original project teams had been dispersed. The project bid allowed for little capital expenditure as it was anticipated the existing computer equipment and software would be used. This was not the case however but ultimately sufficient monies were made available to purchase new computer hardware and software. The existing fused deposition rapid prototyping equipment was also recommissioned. 2 GETTING STARTED The project team was to have been made up of five 0.5 post academics as Principal Associates working under a Project Director and a Project Manager with full time Advisors and Placement students. However at early stage it was realised that it would not be possible to recruit sufficient academics to the project and it was decided to employ full time staff instead.

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Under the terms of the project each SME assist was to be approximately 30 hours work with a similar ‘in kind’ contribution in terms of hours from the client company. In the early stages of the project was found that projects were taking too long and that it was difficult both to effect closure and to capture the ‘in kind’ contribution. The project start date was set at 1st September 2003. However getting things moving proved to be a slow process with the reluctance of academics to participate due to pressure of work and unwillingness on the part of the institution to begin the recruitment process or to start spending money. The team was not fully functioning until June 2004 by which time it comprised of: - Project Director (0.15fte), Project Manager, 2.5 Principal Associates, a Knowledge Engineer, 4 Design Advisors with 4 Placement Students as assistants all recruited via personnel department with relevant qualifications and experience. In addition the University provided some administration and resource management support. 3 RE-PROFILING THE PROJECT Initial problems were not only centred around building the delivery team, but also involved difficulty in recruiting clients to the project. Inaccurate database and postcode data resulted in many blind alleys, also unfocussed mail-shots by the central WRTN marketing team resulted in few clients. It was not until local business support agencies were involved together with strategic use of our own targeted mailings and advertisements, that clients began to be recruited. As a result of the late start of the project and the predicted consequential under-spend it was necessary to re-profile the financial and output structure in November 2004. It had become apparent that the overall spend on salaries would be low and that the consequence could be a reduced number of company assists. It could be argued that increasing the number of staff would have brought the project back on track. However with the uncertainty of recruiting sufficient clients it was considered that this course of action was not prudent. This re-profiling did also allow a small amount of capital to be released. This was used to purchase a Z Corporation 3D printer which is proving invaluable. The revised profile still meant that Coventry University had the largest contribution of all the partners with a financial target of £1.5M (down from £2.1M) and a target for completed assists of 120 businesses. 4 PROGRESS TO DATE The target rate for in-kind contribution per client was £2,300, whilst the current average contribution is £2,770 – well above target. The number of completed assists to date (31st March 2005) is 46 with a further 50 already in progress. This is effectively at the half way point in the delivery schedule and the project is now on target to complete at least 120 assists by its end date.

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5 CASE STUDIES One of the first projects undertaken was the design of an aid to enable young children to learn to play the violin. The aid is to teach students the required angle to hold the bow in order to play correctly. The aid is to be used for short periods of time and removed easily so that the student does not become reliant on it. The client, ZeroGalaxy Ltd had produced a prototype of the basic concept, which needed developing. Durabuild design, manufacture and install luxury conservatories. The company’s method of producing timber and aluminium clad window frames is very traditional and time-consuming, with everything being made by hand. Durabuild wanted to investigate producing composite aluminium and timber windows as a test piece for upgrading its design and manufacturing methods. However, it did not have the knowledge base for designing these types of windows so the company approached the SME Support Programme for assistance. The Coventry Team was able to assist in a variety of ways, including researching other companies’ production methods and substantial materials research and testing to find suitable timber and aluminium. 3D designs of the new window and door system were created in conjunction with Durabuild, and 3 and 5 axis Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines were evaluated so that the most suitable one could be selected. Paul Martin, Managing Director at Durabuild comments: “The service I have received so far from the Design Institute has been excellent. Our objective was to introduce a new product to our range that would be more efficient to manufacture and cheaper to produce. The team at Coventry has allowed us to optimise and reduce the cost of our manufacture and assembly times, and given us confidence that we have invested in the correct CNC machining solution.” Woodway Engineering are a small company that specialise in the design and manufacture of special equipment for emergency services vehicles and also convert vehicles for this purpose. These vehicles are typically used by the police, fire-fighting and ambulance services. One of the products that they install in these vehicles is the Optilink keypad that controls auxiliary lighting and sirens. The brief given to the Design Institute - SME Support Programme was to redesign the control pad in order to improve the ergonomics, whilst retaining the existing printed circuit board to help keep cost down. The new design also needed to incorporate a quick change method for the interchanging of function key pads. The client was presented with a number of concepts to select the most aesthetically pleasing design. Following this a 3D solid model of the favoured design was constructed. After several modification stages a rapid prototype model was constructed using fused deposition modelling (FDM) technology. This model was used to establish how the final product would feel in use and to gauge the fit of the internal components. In addition to producing the new design the team also performed a design for manufacture and assembly (DFMA) analysis on the product to ensure that it could be manufactured using the minimum number of parts at the lowest cost. The final result was enthusiastically accepted by the client, who is now going through the process of having moulds made for the new product.

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Violin aid from ZeroGalaxy

Woodway Engineering Optilink keypad

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A new lighting product for Hydrogarden Sidekick Enterprises are a small start-up company that intends to manufacture a foot operated device to turn the pages of sheet music during a performance. Although a design did exist it was not in a recognised engineering format and lacked styling finesse. The Design Institute – SME Support Programme produced a number of styling concepts for the client’s selection and approval. Following approval the team set about the production of 3D solid models using Solidworks. Realistic renderings of the design were also produced to allow the client to show his product to potential investors. Hydrogarden manufacture and wholesale products used in the hydroponics field of agriculture. They currently offer a range of lighting products that utilise a unique, highly reflective, glass-coated aluminium sheet material which is only produced in the UK. The material is shipped to Australia where it is incorporated into a patented light fitting manufactured by a third party that also holds the patent rights. The brief given to the Design Institute – SME Support Programme was to produce a new design of light that would be as efficient in terms of light output, be cheaper to manufacture and would not infringe the patent of their existing product. A design was created that utilised a new, yet ingeniously simple, method of supporting the sheet material in the desired parabolic shape. A range of new lighting products is now being developed by Hydrogarden from the design produced by the team. 6 EXIT STRATEGIES A global exit strategy for the partners is being formulated by the WRTN management team although there are severe reservations as to whether a viable continuation proposal can be put in place by the end of 2005. It is known that the Objective 2 EDRF funding for the region will not continue after the end of 2005 and although continuation funding through a Framework 6 bid could be an option this requires a change of emphasis as the

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bid must be research based and have European Partners. In view of this a local exit strategy for the Coventry team members is being constructed. 7 CONCLUDING REMARKS The project is proving successful in raising the profile of the University and providing an excellent opportunity for both undergraduate and post graduate placement students to experience real life consultancy. Currently around 40% of the companies for which assists have been completed have expressed an interest is being involved in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP). This level of interest was unexpected. Although it was initially anticipated that the majority of the project work would be concerned with artefact design, increasingly companies are requiring business support and support with marketing materials and website design. The project has been a rather steep learning curve for those concerned with the major problem being the inertia in the Coventry University administrative and personnel systems which hampered rapid initial progress.

CONNECTING TECHNOLOGY TO THE MARKETPLACE Lesley Morris* Design Council Jacki Wielkopolska* Design Council Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Too often, the UK fails to turn world-leading scientific knowledge into world-beating products and services. It’s not the technology that is flawed, but our ability to connect it to market opportunity. That means technology businesses risk falling behind more market-driven rivals in Japan, Germany and the USA. For the UK to be competitive, that has to change. The UK government has committed to bridging the innovation gap. Between now and 2008, the science budget will increase in real terms by 5.8 per cent. But investing more in the science base is only part of the answer. To succeed, technology businesses must combine entrepreneurial skills with design to show how technology can meet consumers’ needs with products and services which fit into present and future markets. To achieve this in the longer term, appropriate design skills must be encouraged and developed in students during their education so that the future designers, managers and scientists are better able to make the best use of design. Keywords: Design skills, technology companies 1 INTRODUCTION The UK possesses world-class capability in science and in design. Britain’s scientists are renowned for the depth and breadth of their expertise, while UK designers are admired for their applied creativity. Too often however, the UK fails to turn our scientific knowhow into world-class products and services. What is missing is not the quality of UK research and technology, nor the originality of the ideas generated, but the ability to connect the two effectively and turn the result into commercial opportunities. *Contact Lesley or Jacki on [email protected] or +44 (0) 20 7420 5200.

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There are 77,000 technology companies in the UK today, of which 15,000 are new ventures between pre-seed and second round funding stages and which have been founded to commercialise emerging technologies. These cover a range of areas from biotechnology to ICT; smart materials to semiconductors; photonics to optics; and nanotechnology to fuel cells. Both public policy and private sector market analysts predict sharp growth for this sector over the next ten years, with significant impact in areas such as healthcare, security, energy and the environment. The journey to market for emerging technology ventures however is fraught with risk as it can be several years from idea to launching a product that sells. Many ventures fail before they achieve the second stage of funding. Too often important decisions about the purpose of new technology are based on untested assumptions. If an idea isn’t based on convincing evidence from the market an investor will not unlock the investment funds necessary for rapid growth.

Figure 1. Interaction of technology, business and users. Design helps emerging technology ventures connect with changing social beliefs, behaviour and needs, translating them into products and services that add value to existing and emerging markets. Design knowledge and skills of this type are rarely encouraged or integrated within science, engineering and technology (SET) education. Research and development, enterprise teaching and technology transfer environments are key to developing and delivering these design skills. 2 MAKING THE CONNECTION Often in a new venture creation process a new technology is married to a business strategy, so what is feasible connects with what is viable and an opportunity to create a product or service then exists. But a further consideration of what is desirable for the users of the product or service is crucial if the opportunity is to succeed. Innovative

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technology and a convincing business case must be complemented with a compelling offer linked to user needs so that the user experience and interaction with the technology is designed and the company’s communication and identity with its users, the brand, is developed. Where technology, business and users meet, (where what is technologically feasible, what is commercially viable and what is desirable for users) is where design can make a difference, see Figure 1. The design process operates in the space where these fields interact, taking account of the requirements of each to find an optimal solution that satisfies the demands of each sphere, and by doing so can significantly boost the chances of a successful outcome for the venture. 3 THE SITUATION SO FAR Recent research provides evidence that the use of design in businesses affects company performance and strategy. The Design Council tracked the performance of UK Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) quoted companies over ten years, between 1994 and 2003. The key finding of the study is that a group of 63 companies identified to be effective users of design outperformed the FTSE 100 index over the full period by 200%, see Figure 2. [1] Rapidly growing businesses rate design as the second most important factor for business success. Companies as a whole only rank design as the seventh most important overall. In addition, 45% of companies that don’t use design compete mainly on price. Where design is significant, only 21% have to compete on price. [2]

Figure 2. Performance of design portfolio against FTSE 100. The Department of Trade and Industry’s Innovation Review emphasises the central role of design skills in enabling innovation, and it gives the Design Council the remit to

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demonstrate the value of design for technology businesses and establish design learning for science, engineering and management students. 4 DESIGN COUNCIL ACTIVITY 4.1 DESIGN CAMPAIGN: TECHNOLOGY ‘To have a successful product, you not only have to be able to achieve the required performance but you also have to satisfy the desires of the end user, hence the need for design’ David Hawksworth, Managing Director, Oxford Biosensors Through the Technology Campaign the Design Council has worked with early-stage technology businesses who are seeing real gains from using design strategically. In the businesses design has had the most impact on business planning, creating brands and user experience, carrying out user centred iterative prototyping as they develop new products and services, ensuring that appropriate skills are used in the business and by encouraging an open and collaborative organisational culture. An example of how design has been used and benefited these companies is given below. Oxford Biosensors is a spin-out of University of Oxford that develops medical devices. These devices quickly and accurately test patients for a variety of illnesses by reading a small drop of blood placed onto specially designed, electronic test strips. Once the team built a working prototype, they needed to test it with potential users. They decided to invest in research methods that gain feedback from everyday contexts rather than the formalised approach of focus groups. The team spent time in hospital accident and emergency departments where they observed real-life situations in which their new product would need to work. Feeding insights back into the laboratory stages, they rapidly prototyped basic concepts to test with a wide range of people who might use the product. This changed the original concept and improved the later development and design process. After two years of exposure to design thinking and methods, Oxford Biosensors have made fundamental changes to their original product-to-market process. They have made the design investment decisions that have helped them launch a highly successful first generation product – ‘Multisense’ - in 2004. In the same year, they secured a development partnership with Pfizer. 4.2 DESIGN CAMPAIGN: DESIGN SKILLS The Design Skills Campaign is working with a number of leading universities and Science Enterprise Centres to include design skills and methods in SET enterprise teaching programmes and business plan competitions. Benefits of the design inputs are evident in the students’ ability to generate, develop and communicate new business ideas, improving their assessed work and performance in business plan competitions:

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4.2.1 University of Cambridge – Enterprisers workshop A half-day ‘creativity and design’ workshop forms part of Cambridge-MIT Institute’s ‘Enterprisers’, a 5-day residential programme for students aimed at increasing their confidence and entrepreneurial intent. Through the workshop students learn about the design process and practise skills in generating ideas, opportunity identification, scenario building, iteration, team working and communicating ideas through prototyping and pitching. Students comment on their increased ability to identify and develop ideas, think creatively, visualise goals and work effectively within a team as a result of this workshop. 4.2.2 University of Bath – Integration to departmental project After hearing about the Design Council’s work with Science Enterprise Centres the University of Bath has funded a new project from their HEIF allocation to introduce Mechanical Engineering students, along with some business students, to the role of design in business and entrepreneurship by engaging local designers to deliver lectures and workshops. These build an understanding of design and design process and develop skills in ideation, creating personas, market needs analysis, user benefit specifications, creating brand identities, competitor analysis and brand positioning. Students apply their learning directly to their group design and business project. 5 DEVELOPING DESIGN EXPERTISE “We cannot compete on the basis of low cost, low skill, low margin goods, and we should not want to. That means business must now more than ever rely on innovative, design-led thinking, and create well-designed, consumer focused products and services.” Patricia Hewitt, Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, 14 April 2003 Design skills are essential to equip tomorrow’s designers, leaders and managers for an entrepreneurial culture and a knowledge based economy. Design skills help unlock the creativity and innovation essential in achieving commercial, useable and desirable outcomes. Design understanding and skills are vital to business innovation and the commercialisation of technology but many organisations do not have this awareness or capability. For most organisations resolving when and how to use design is a decision that is generally made by non-designers. Management, science, engineering and technology (SET) students need design understanding and skills in order to use design as a core organisational discipline. The scope for design is increasing and designers’ capabilities need to increase. Design students need business and consultancy skills and a greater understanding of a strategic use of design. Design skills are beneficial to designers and those who will interact with design (e.g. scientists and managers) but different design skills are needed for each party. It translates then that design skills are beneficial for students who will go on to be the designers, scientists and managers of tomorrow but that these parties will need to be taught different skills.

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5.1 SKILLS FOR DESIGNERS The spectrum of skills that designers need is expanding. In addition to traditional core ‘designing’ skills - such as problem solving, modelling and layout. - new skills need to be developed by students to carry out work ‘upstream’ of the brief. It is becoming accepted that good design work needs to go beyond fulfilling the brief’s requirements and needs to address business and user needs. In order to do this, designers need to develop the ability to: • Analyse business and market contexts • Carry out user research • Understand the potential of design as a strategic business tool • Be able to consult to managers about an innovation process • Be entrepreneurial Design schools need to produce graduates who are better planners and communicators, who can go beyond executing a brief and add real value to the decision making process. To do this they must break down disciplinary barriers and expose students to real work practices. 5.2 SKILLS FOR ‘NON-DESIGNERS’ The following skills help those using and managing design: • Understanding of the design process and the ability to manage design • Using some design tools and techniques in their work to enhance their ability to: – apply creative thinking – solve problems – communicate – carry out user research Evidence from the Design Council’s work with Technology businesses and SET students supports the proposition that those interacting with design can develop design skills and that design skills are beneficial to them. 5.2.1 Evidence from managers in technology companies Managers within the companies working with the Technology Campaign have been exposed to design by working with their mentors and engaging designers within their businesses. The managers report that learning design skills earlier on in their careers or education would have been useful to them. Managing directors consider that key design skills to be taught should include skills in design management, user research and branding. The impact of including design within their business processes is that they now see design as an essential ingredient in the overall processes of their businesses. In particular the impact has been seeking perspective from others and taking outside-in approach; learning how to visualise themselves and their companies from an outside perspective; focusing on users e.g. by profiling users and carrying out user research;

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uncovering assumptions; communicating more clearly and more convincingly; planning using design thinking; and thinking about brand and product development strategically. 5.2.1 Evidence from SET students Evaluation of the Design in Science and Technology Education project has also shown how design skills benefit those that are not necessarily designers but are likely to manage or benefit from using design in their organisation. “Getting [SET] students to appreciate the role of design in taking a product to market is absolutely fundamental, and it’s not something that really features through the ordinary course of their education.” Simon Stockley, Lecturer in Entrepreneurship, University of Cambridge. As a result of students being taught about design, the students became better at generating and developing ideas, connecting ideas to market needs and communicating them. They developed a better understanding of how products are developed and a broader view of what design is and its importance. The presentation skills of the students were improved and they adopted some of the language of designers. These findings show that students can see the relevance of design to their work and can develop skills that enhance their ability to develop products and services. 6 CONCLUSION Connecting technology to the marketplace requires that designers and those managing design within technology businesses develop appropriate design expertise. Developing these can and should take place within higher education so that students learn the context of design, its role in developing user focused products and services and how to manage it effectively. To help more of the UK’s 370,000 science and technology students develop the skills to use design, design needs to be included in all science enterprise teaching. The Design Council is continuing to work with UK Science Enterprise Centres to support their design teaching by developing learning materials in universities, training for lecturers to integrate design into teaching and connecting universities with designers. The Design Council enhances prosperity and well-being in the UK by demonstrating and promoting the vital role of design within a modern economy. It is committed to driving business growth, renewing public services and building an enhanced design capacity. For more information, please visit: http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/ REFERENCES [1] The Impact of Design on Stock Market Performance , Design Council, 2004 [2] Design Council National Survey of Firms, PACEC, 2004

Chapter Eleven TOOLS AND CAD

A HYPERMEDIA-BASED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT IN SUPPORT OF LEARNING AND TEACHING IN ELECTRONIC PRODUCT DESIGN Tom Page* Department of Design & Technology, Loughborough University, United Kingdom. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The work outlined here provides a comprehensive report and formative observations of the development and implementation of hypermedia resources for learning and teaching used in conjunction with a managed learning environment (MLE). These resources are used to enhance teaching and learning of an electronics module in product design at final year undergraduate level in Loughborough University. This research has taken place over a two year period when such resources were developed and implemented. Such hypermedia-based learning resources were developed by the author and include text, graphical, video and sound based media. The managed learning environment referred to in this paper as ‘Learn’ is a university wide file-server system which is used to facilitate distance learning as well as provide support to many aspects of teaching, learning and assessment at Loughborough University. The work reported here focusses on the use of the MLE in support face to face learning as this module is not undertaken on a distance learning basis. The author has uploaded all relevant teaching and learning resources onto the MLE for accessibility by the students on this module. Moreover, internet-based learning resources and assessments, in the form of pre-written computer programs and circuit building projects, were developed by the author, to enable the students to gauge their knowledge and understanding at staged points through the tutorial and laboratory sessions within the module.

*Lecturer (Electronic Product Design), Room ZZ.O.O3 Matthew Arnold Building, Department of Design & Technology, Loughborough University, Loughborough Leics., LE11 3TU, United Kingdom. Phone: +44 (0) 1509 228320 Fax: +44 (0) 1509 223999 Email: [email protected]

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In addition, this paper presents through case study the way in which this module is delivered and received illustrating how such resources are used by both teacher and learner. As such this proffers an exemplar for effective deployment of such supportive technologies and resources in learning, teaching and assessment of a product design and technology module at undergraduate level. Keywords: Hypermedia-based learning resources, electronic product design 1 INTRODUCTION The aim of the work reported here is to provide an evaluation of the observed outcomes of the development and implementation of a managed learning environment (MLE). It was used in conjunction with hypermedia-based learning resources for the delivery of a microcontroller interfacing module in the final year of an undergraduate industrial design and technology course. The objective of which is to find out how this can be used to enhance the learning and teaching experience of the students. This was conducted through discussions with students, feedback through assessment, and course evaluation. Such outcomes enabled the module development team to expand the scope of the module content to encompass more advanced applications of microcontroller interfacing and control. The MLE was developed to supplement and enhance the existing learning and teaching experience and not merely replace lectures, tutorials and laboratories. Students could elect not to use the managed learning environment and still participate in learning as paper-based handouts and resources were also given to the students. 1.1 MANAGED LEARNING AND WEB-BASED INSTRUCTION Managed learning environments implemented using hypermedia and instructional-based systems have been developed and used extensively in support of modules and courses in higher education [1]. Web-based instruction (WBI) is broadly defined as: “…a hypermedia-based instructional program which utilises the attributes and resources of the world-wide-web to create a meaningful learning environment where learning is fostered and supported.” A more acute definition of web-based instruction is: “…the application of a repertoire of cognitively oriented instructional strategies within a constructivist and collaborative learning environment, utilising the attributes and resources of the world wide web” [2]. Web-based instruction, also referred to as web-based training, is defined by [3] as: “Individualised instruction delivered over public or private computer networks and displayed by a Web browser. Web-based training is not downloaded computer-based training, but rather on-demand training stored in a server and accessed across a network. Web-based training can be updated very rapidly, and access to training controlled by the training provider. Consequently, in design education there has been significant development of instructional based teaching and learning technologies for the delivery of distance learning courses specifically in computer-aided design and manufacturing [4]. The managed learning resources as described and implemented in this work have been

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designed in accordance with effective teaching and learning practice [5]. Furthermore, much of the development and testing of such resources have been aligned with current research aimed at the evaluation of learning technologies for the support of distance learning. Furthermore, it is predicted that: the potential benefit from formulating evaluation methodologies for the Web (for instructional materials) depends on whether or not the Web will become a permanent medium or a passing fad? In fact, the “Web will likely soon become the most popular medium for the delivery of distance education type materials.” [6]. Such literature supports the assertion that web-based instruction is a growing trend. In addition, it indicates that a critical factor to the success of web-based instruction is the incorporation of usability design into the development process. The design issues gleaned from related literature include: transfer of existing course material, as is, to WBI, without considering using the medium’s capabilities such as graphics or communications, like listservers; ignore the forms and styles required by the medium, such as using the structure of a traditional lecture course as the structure for a WBI course and use existing course material and while ignoring features without restructuring existing material to fit the features, which can lead to the student learning less. Moreover, research into evaluation of such implementations has focussed on the development of methodologies for evaluation rather than the processes and techniques for the evaluation of such learning technologies from a user perspective. The Managed Learning Environment utilises hypermedia-based instructional resources along with selfassessment tutorials. It was designed initially to facilitate blended learning in as much as it supports face-to-face teaching and provide learning resources that were accessible outwith the timetabled teaching sessions. 2 LEARNING RESOURCES USED IN THIS STUDY The learning resources used in this work comprised tutor-generated resources, student generated resources and a strategy for assessment. The tutor-generated resources consisted of lecture notes with corresponding slideshows, supplementary notes, simulations, video-based media, links to relevant websites and scanned versions of articles (with copyright permission). Such student-generated resources comprised: electronic schematic designs, assembly code programs, analysis of circuit function and detailed explanation of microcontroller program execution. There were two groups of students in this study named cohort 03 and cohort 04. Cohort 03 undertook this module in 2003 and cohort 04 did so in 2004. Both groups experienced the learning and teaching resources and assessments through the use of the managed learning environment. With the exception that the tutor initially gave cohort 3 tasks to write the microcontroller programs from printed handouts. This proved to be unproductive and inefficient as the students in the main had no prior experience of computer programming. The tutor therefore issued prewritten programs along with circuit construction exercises – ‘reverse engineering’ of existing programs in order to overcome this hindrance to learning. Therefore cohort 04 did not have this experience of attempting to write such programs from printed handout.

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2.1 THE MANAGED LEARNING ENVIRONMENT (MLE) – LEARN@LBORO The MLE is a virtual space where learning, assessment and interaction can take place in a structured and managed way fully integrated into and linking university wide information systems. It provides student-level information comprising university-wide information on university procedures and regulations and support services. More importantly the MLE provides links to modules, tutors, lecture materials and course related news alerts. Course and module information is provided through portal news and bulletins. Each module has its own dedicated website which is structured such that staff can: provide news; create, upload & link to teaching materials; host on-line discussions; set and receive assignments; upload reading lists; obtain class lists and organise as well as set online group work. The MLE provides a mechanism toward joined up systems or systems integration by creating links “seamlessly” to other systems such as web servers (departmental and central), ‘Learn’ and the university library resources system. 2.2 THE HYPERMEDIA-BASED TUTORIALS & SELF ASSESSMENT LABORATORIES The hypermedia-based tutorials accessible from the MLE provide a valuable learning resource in as much as they clearly provide instruction to the student in the use of the PIC programming environment MPLab® IDE. The class learning time was divided between a lecture and laboratory upon the use of the tutorials in the design of microcontroller programs and subsequent circuit interfacing exercises. The students were given lectures in the architecture of the microcontroller device. They were taught programming techniques and formal methods for representation of such code. These hypermedia-based tutorials enabled students to draw upon the theoretical foundations in microcontroller interfacing and logic representation the students follow and refer to the tutorial instructions whilst using the package. Figure 1 illustrates a screen shot of the index to managed learning resources on microcontroller interfacing. As can be seen from Figure 1, the resources are shown in terms of lecture notes, lecture slideshows, laboratories, tutorials and downloadable learning resources. The students are also provided with paperbased lecture notes and MPLab® IDE tutorials for this module. The laboratories and downloadable resources are solely accessible from the MLE. The emphasis here is to enable the use of the MLE as much as possible in the delivery of this module. The selfassessment laboratories, developed by the author, provided the students with the ability of performing a series of staged checks within the teaching and learning of microcontroller interfacing. This enabled the students to assess themselves with respect to the theoretical background to the subject. These self-assessment tutorials were essentially a series of self-assessment tutorials and circuit construction exercises that were accessible from the MLE. From week seven onwards on within the module the students were grouped into pairs and worked on a design project which required designing and making a small two wheeled buggy to follow a black line on a white background. This required designing electronic interfacing for light detection inputs to and motor control and speed outputs from the microcontroller. The design project emphasised the approach of learning technology through designing which is an vital aspect of this work.

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Through repeated circuit construction exercises with prewritten PIC programs, of which there are approximately thirty, the students readily learn the semantics of programming at assembly (low) level. It is therefore asserted by the author, that by learning programming at assembly language level the student can extrapolate such skills more easily at higher-level. Such as in using other languages for example C or C++. In essence, it is learning by doing tasks and undertaking such tasks repetitively [7].

Figure 1. Sample Screen shot from Managed Learning Environment. 3 DISCUSSION OF OBSERVATIONS Through observation and module evaluation it was found that these resources enabled students to work at their own pace through such tutorials without the fear that they may be falling behind the scheduled milestones and learning outcomes each week within the module. This provided for differences in learning rates and styles among the group of students. The design project played a significant role in putting into practice what had been learned in the laboratories using the circuit construction exercises. This approach enables the students to manage their learning in an organised and structured manner, the hypermedia-based approach tends to appeal to students as they have become quite accustomed with using the internet as a research and learning resource. The managed learning environment contains all the lecture slides and notes for the students to relate the theoretical foundations of microcontroller interfacing with the pragmatic emphasis of digital and analogue circuit design and construction. It was also found that students tended to explore the subject further than was done before the

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implementation of this approach to teaching and learning. There have been advantages in utilising these approaches to the delivery of this module.

Table 1. Questionnaire responses (cohort 03 n=11) Question numbers 123456 Cohort 03 Strongly Agree - - 2 5 - Agree 485387 Neutral 333334 Disagree 4- 1- - Strongly Disagree - - - - - -

Evaluation of this module was undertaken by administering a questionnaire to both year groups. This questionnaire sought to elicit learners’ views and responses with regard to a number of issues relating to the use of the learn server, the approach to teaching and learning on this module and the quality as well as the quantity of work required in the module. The questionnaire provided a five-point Likert scale of responses ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ statements. Tables 1 and 2 show the responses to these questions. The following questions were answered by students at the end of the module: 1 Do you believe that the quantity of work was within your capabilities? 2 Do you believe that the quality of work was within your capabilities? 3 Were the learning resources appropriate in fulfilling your approach to learning on this module? 4 Was the approach of ‘reverse engineering’ existing programs found to be a more productive way of learning programming than inputting instructions by typing? 5 Did the delivery of this module encourage independent learning (albeit much of the assessment was done in groups of two)?. 6 Were the laboratories within (or properly stretched) your capabilities? As can be seen by comparing responses in Tables 1 and 2 above it is evident that for questions 1, 2, 5 and 6 there is a notable shift in responses towards ‘agree’ and ‘strongly agree’. Nevertheless, for question 1, two respondent’s in cohort 04 disagreed that the quantity of work was within their capability. Similarly, two respondents from cohort 04 disagreed with the statement that ‘reverse engineering’ of existing programs proved to be more productive that inputting programs by typing. The reason for this is that in cohort 3, the students were initially directed to learn programming by typing instructions into the text editor which proved to be very time consuming, prone to errors and non-productive. The method of ‘reverse engineering’ was deployed to overcome such drawbacks and as such, cohort 04 learned programming using reverse engineering without inputting instructions in the editor. It is of interest to note that for question 3 eight respondent in cohort 04 provided a neutral response. Possibly for this question they could neither agree nor disagree with their responses. The self-assessment problems enabled students to find their own level of skill and efficiency in undertaking the learning tasks. Nevertheless, there were some problems encountered in issuing assignment-based problems too early during the module. For

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example, many students attempted the assignment before completing the electronics laboratories and circuit construction exercises. 4 CONCLUSION This case study provided an insight into the observed outcomes of using a managed learning environment in tandem with using hypermedia-based learning resources for the delivery of a microcontroller interfacing material in a final year module of an Industrial Design and Technology undergraduate degree course. A series of assessment tutorials, accessible from the managed learning environment, provided the students with selfassessment of the theoretical and practical foundations of computer and microcontroller device interfacing. The observations were made with respect to how things were done before and comparing this to what is being done now. Through discussions with students, feedback through assessment, and course

Table 2. Questionnaire responses (cohort 04 n=14) Question numbers 1 2 345 6 Cohort 04 Strongly Agree 1 2 2 2 2 3 Agree 11 12 4 7 11 11 Neutral - - 831 Disagree 2 - - 2- Strongly Disagree - - - - - -

evaluation such comparative observations led the course development to expand the scope of this module in order to provide for focus in more varied aspects of interfacing i.e. through visual display and interaction devices such as keypads and other human interfaces. It has been found, since its introduction, the MLE has been greatly appreciated and widely used by students in general. It almost seems that when given a task their first point of reference is the internet and by utilising the MLE in the teaching of this module it has become proven and useful tool for the teacher and student alike. REFERENCES [1] Narum, J. & Conover, K.: Building Robust Learning Environments in Undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, New Directions for Higher Education 2002, no. 119 (2002): ISSN 0271-0560, Wiley. ISSN 0361-1434. [2] Lee, M. & Paulus, T.: An Instructional Design Theory for Interactions in Web-Based Learning Environments; Annual Proceedings of Selected Research and Development [and] Practice Papers Presented at the National Convention of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (24th, Atlanta, GA, November 8-12, 2001). Volumes 1-2. [3] Boger, S.(Ed).: Instructional Design; Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (12th, Orlando, Florida, March 5-10, 2001).

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[4] Chang, C-C.: A study on the evaluation and effectiveness analysis of Web-based learning portfolio (WBLP); Educational Administration Abstracts 38, no. 1 (2003): 3-139, (2003); ISSN 0013-1601 Sage Publications. [5] Jones, C.M. & Liu, M.: Web-Based Instruction: The Effect of Design Considerations on Learner Perceptions and Achievement; ED-Media 2001 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications. Proceedings (13th, Tampere, Finland, June 25-30, 2001). [6] MacDonald, C.J., Breithaupt, K., Stodel, E.J., Farres, L.G. & Gabriel, M. A.; Evaluation of Web-Based Educational Programs Via the Demand-Driven Learning Model: A Measure of Web-Based Learning; International Journal of Testing 2, no. 1 (2002): 35-61; ISSN 1530-5058. [7] Yang, R. & Abdelwahab, A. (2001): An Empirical Study on Teaching and Learning Computer Languages, Proceedings of the ISCA 10th International Conference Intelligent Systems, Arlington, VA, USA, 13-15 June 2001.

CAD/CAM INTEGRATION IN COMBINED CRAFT COURSES: A CASE STUDY Richard Hooper* Fine Art and Design, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper will report on the integration of CAD/CAM methodologies in a combined craft/product design course at Liverpool Hope University College. This paper argues that the advances in the use of CAD/CAM in automotive, product, architecture and sculpture are exerting an irresistible pull on the traditional making disciplines of furniture, jewellery and silversmithing. It will show how traditional methodologies are being augmented by the use of digital processes giving rise to alternative aesthetics and structural possibilities. It will argue that a concomitant shift in emphasis from making to industrial collaboration can lead to alternative but complimentary didactic and curricular values. Keywords: Craft Courses, CAD/CAM, Curriculum, Digital, Industry 1 THE DIGITAL IMPERATIVE Course developers in the creative arts, as with many other disciplines, are increasingly feeling the need to consider the substance of their courses in the light of developments in the digital realm. Music courses, for example, have faced the opportunity or threat, depending on their perspective, of the digital synthesiser and new music production technologies. Fine art has similarly variously ignored, accommodated or championed digital art, and has witnessed the ascendancy of multi-media art in some areas of curatorial appreciation. Craft too, to a greater or lesser extent, has taken on board these developments as testified to by a plethora of conferences such as ‘Pixel Raiders’, ‘Challengingcraft’, ‘Digital Experience: Design, Aesthetics, Practice’, CHArt, Siggraph, Creativity and Cognition etc. The upcoming and indeed inaugural World Design Congress ‘IASDR2005’ at the Yunlin University in Taiwan declares in its main theme; *Liverpool Hope University, Fine Art and Design, Haigh St., Liverpool, L3 8QB. Tel. - 0151 291 3670 Fax. - 0151 291 3191 email - [email protected]

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‘The development of digital technology and the information spread has already had a tremendous impact on human life and thinking. It also has had an influence on design and has let people experience the importance and trend of combining digital technology with design. Digital technology has come into the main stream through both theory and practice of design. With the coming of the Knowledge Economy Age, digital creative design is an efficient instrument for the development of many industries. A crucial issue in the design field is how to embed creativity and culture into industries via digital technology and design in order to improve the living environment. The tendency toward change in the field of design might lead to a conversion of design paradigm. Therefore, ‘New Design Paradigms’ is proposed to be the theme of International Design Congress IASDR 2005’. [1] Indeed, the conference ‘Objective’ is to ‘…promote the academic level of design study and design education’. [2] ‘To prove the seriousness with which the conference is being taken in Taiwan the following list of bodies promoting the conference should serve to demonstrate; ‘Organisers: Chinese Institute of Design (CID), National Yunlin University of Science and Technology (NYUST). Co-organisers: International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) Sponsors: National Science Council, Ministry of Education, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Council for Cultural Affairs, Yunlin County Government, Taiwan Design Center, National Taiwan Craft Research Institute. Co-sponsors: Asian Society for the Science of Design (ASSD), Japanese Society for the Science of Design (JSSD), Korean Society of Design Science (KSDS), Design Research Society (DRS) [3] The conferences ‘Expected Outcomes’ includes a didactic aim declaring that: ‘…through discussing the theses of culture, digitalization, creativity and design, new design paradigm is to be proposed, which can be the referral criterion of design study, design education and design practice in the 21st century’. [4] The expected outcome to propose a ‘new design paradigm’ may seem to some a little ‘after the event’ given that for example Stanley Lechtzin, Head of Metals/Jewelry/CAD Area-CAM at Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA records on the school website in his Artists Statement that; ‘…I have been devoting much of my time to an exploration of the microcomputer as a tool for the studio artist’ [5], which he wrote as early as 1980. Furthermore, in respect to the deployment of CAD/CAM in his undergraduate jewellery curriculum, he was awarded the Mellon Foundation Faculty Incentive Fund to establish computer graphics at Tyler in 1983, some twenty two years ago. The Tyler School website in similar vein asserts that ‘Computer-Aided-Design has been a part of the Metals/Jewelry/CAD-CAM curriculum (at Tyler) for nearly two

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decades’. [6] adding topically that in view of Tyler’s commitment to CAD/CAM, the course ‘…provides our students access to faculty with exceptional experience in this very important and rapidly developing addition to the discipline’. [7] Similarly, in the cradle of the digital revolution in Silicon Valley, John Marx, a lecturer in the Architecture Department at the University of California at Berkeley contends, in now familiar terms, that, ‘The 3D nature of these tools invites the designer to think and act in the third dimension to a greater degree than previously imagined’. [8] Resulting in; ‘…an explosion of creative energy in the three-dimensional quality of the forms the students have studied and in the quality of their results. The majority of students in the course report that they were able to study architectural forms which they would never have attempted without the computer as the primary design tool’. [9] (and leading to), ‘substantially better designs’. [10] Software developers too are seeing the market for low end 3D CAD packages to initiate the next generation of designers. On November 3rd 2004, Dessault Systèmes (creator of CATIA high end 3D software) released the ‘Cosmic Blobs’ software for children. Children learning this software and progressing onto mid-range CAD packages will soon hit higher education with an intuitive grasp of complex digital imaging. 2 INSTITUTIONAL CURRICULAR RESPONSES In the light of the proceeding, many institutions in the UK and elsewhere have added (or are adding) to their portfolios 3D courses with a specified digital content often in response to student and industrial demand. The following give a flavour; Salford University’s ‘Digital 3D Design’ degree course; Hertfordshire University’s ‘Digital Modelling’ degree course; University of Central Lancashire’s ‘3D Design with Digital Modelling’ degree course; Coventry

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Figure 1. Bench CAD drawing using 3D Max by Alan Powell. University’s ‘Crafts and Multimedia’, Arts Institute at Bournemouth’s 2 year foundation degree in ‘3D Digital Design’. Some have a more multimedia, graphic and animation bias, for example Greenwich University’s ‘3D-Digital Design’ degree, while others are more technologically biased offerings such as Coventry University’s new ‘Creative Computing’ course which aims to bring together ‘web, multimedia, video, audio technologies, mobility, wearable devices and interactive digital broadcasting as well as robotics and automation’. Post-graduate courses exist too such as Huddersfield University’s ‘3D Digital Design’ MA/MSc. exploring, ‘…the impact of emerging technologies on the design process and the production of objects or spaces’, Norwich School of Art’s MA, ‘Digital Practices’, Coventry University’s MA, ‘Design and Digital Media’ along with University College Falmouth, Robert Gordon University and the Royal College of Art amongst others, which have significant digital 3D provision accessible from a variety of traditional, hybrid and emergent material and conceptual starting points. 3 LIVERPOOL HOPE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE MODEL Liverpool Hope University College’s Bachelor of Design course, has, like others, sought to integrate such developments into our course via 2D and 3D projects. Students have benefited by visiting industrial collaborators both in pursuance of their own designs and in relation to staff research projects. Software ranging from Coreldraw and Adobe Photoshop to 3D Studio Max is employed and conventional stl files exported for manufacture. Due to limited technical support, fully 3D machining is not undertaken in-house, so machining is limited to 22.5D work which may be post-formed to enable greater three-dimensionality. No Rapid Prototyping facilities are employed. Smaller designs up to 1 metre can be accommodated in-house, larger ones are sub-contracted out.

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Figure 2. Light by Robert Hodgeson machined on departmental AXYZ CAM router. 4 OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES OF THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION It is clear that manufacturing methodologies are shifting, at least with those able, willing or needing to grasp the digital nettle. Climbing the learning curve of complex 3D software packages is not demanded by all craft courses as many were set up as designer/maker courses. The designer/maker rationale still has strength as there continue to be those whose work has no need of digital manufacturing methodologies. Often a student’s work relies on the idiosyncratic interpretation and exploitation of source material or concepts for which the use of traditional hand techniques is a positive, and considered benefit; notwithstanding the digitisation some of these hand processes have undergone recently. One might compare the situation with the Swiss watch market where there is still a market for some, albeit high priced, hand made watches despite the digital revolution. Courses that have recognised this include Coventry University’s ‘Fine Product’ degree pathway which positions itself parallel with Fine Art and refers specifically to ‘luxury’ products; a far cry from the ‘crafts for all’ of the seventies. Nonetheless, increasingly, many makers are working with batch and mass production industries as fewer and fewer can make a living with traditional craft skills. The situation now exists in the crafts where much of the cutting edge work is being done at postgraduate level and by those who have positioned themselves in places, educational or industrial, where they have access to the increasingly sophisticated equipment needed to produce such work. Paradoxically, some of the most sophisticated equipment is now in countries where there has traditionally been a folk rather than an ‘art smart’ demand for craft. The ‘art smart’ crafts maker may well now have to deal with high tech industries in so called third world countries to get first world technology at third world prices they can afford to sell to first world customers! Eight hours labour at £10/hour in the UK costs £80 whereas in the third world, £80 is often a good wage for a worker per month. The shift in skill from the acquisition of hand processes to the mastering of software packages and

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advanced manufacturing methodologies is certainly increasingly upon us in the craft world and, with falling prices in hardware and software giving access to wider usage, this will surely continue. Furthermore, the increasing sophistication of computer software gives rise to the challenge of discriminating between the real and the virtual/synthetic as the classic film ‘Bladerunner’ postulated. Computer generated images are now capable of giving convincingly lifelike renderings of proposed concepts. In an attempt to address this problem Tyler School of Art have instituted what one might call a ‘scale of virtuosity/reality’ to provide a way of differentiating between levels of virtuality. The three point scale is as follows; ‘1. Virtual is an object created in 3-D computer space, which is meant to exist and can only exist in the digital environment. 2. Actual is a complete 3-D object, created in computer space, that currently exists in digital form, which if processed via computer controlled fabrication, will result in a physical object. 3. Tangible is an ‘actual’ that now has a physical existence’ [11]. Indeed this classification has spawned the exhibition in June and July 2005 entitled ‘Virtual/Tangible’ demonstrating how developments in science/industry, taken up by educationalists are making a significant contribution to curricula currency which in turn can lead to cutting edge work in the applied arts. The exhibition showcases digital works by jewellers and metalsmiths in North America curated by Douglas Bucci and Matthew Hollern who, not surprisingly, were themselves Tyler students from 1998 and 1999 respectively. The exhibition, it is claimed, will: ‘…present a new generation of artists and educators in addition to the established members of the community who have adopted and pioneered the digital as a means of reinterpreting, designing, and making the tangible objects of our discipline’. [12]

5 PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS AND CHALLENGES Pursuant from this, work involving the use of digital technologies can give an added dimension to the educational experience since the work more often requires the assistance of industrial collaborators and a concomitantly greater firsthand understanding of industrial capability, working methods and production limitations as well as the obvious CAD capability. One problem can be the over reliance on staff time to undertake such work, either because a student lacks the requisite CAD ability and so becomes reliant on staff input, or due to the programming/setting up time required for what may be quite a complex series of shapes. Such technology often requires dedicated technical support and I am aware of universities where such technologies have been mothballed or sold off for the lack of resources of this kind despite attempts to provide income generating subcontract services to industry. Pressure on staff resources make concentrated individual attention increasingly difficult to achieve. One way forward is to undertake competitive group or individual projects where only the best are produced which will encourage those with a genuine interest but can serve as a disincentive to those less able or less interested. Many would argue that that is as it should be. A further approach is to have students generate files and have them prototyped or put in production by supportive industrial collaborators. Students and collaborators may also benefit from recruitment

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opportunities. Courses like Middlesex University’s Product Design and Engineering are already addressing the integration of CAD/CAM in practical curricular measures as evidenced by their live design brief project with digital manufacturers ‘Unto this Last’. Alternatively, CAD/CAM can be offered as an option. This may mean that those opting for this area are seen as ‘special’ in some way and so be the source of resentment among those who prefer for one reason or another (good or bad) to steer clear of the digital domain. Again work in this mode can be seen as an easy option particularly if significant technical support is at hand. A further difficulty is of course that just because digital means have been employed doesn’t necessarily mean the work is of any greater functional or aesthetic merit and there are those who hide behind advanced technology for want of, rather than because of, creative imagination. 6 CONCLUSION It seems clear that in crafts education, many political and educational opportunities and challenges exist in the integration of digital technologies. As a final reflection, while the digital world races inexorably onward, I recall that I gave my old slide rule away to a jeweller friend of mine. He fell upon it, as I knew he would, with childlike glee and a hacksaw, seeing it as a wonderfully inspiring technological relic and appropriated it for a contemporary piece in a post-modern ironic idiom. I’m confident therefore that there will always be a place for, indeed quite possibly an even greater need for, the non-digital maker too. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank colleagues Pete Cummings, Frank Egerton and Mike Doyle for their contribution with the work shown. Thanks to the students for providing the imagination, hard work and images of the work especially Rob Hodgeson and Alan Powell. Thanks to Liverpool Hope University for supporting this research through the University staff research fund. REFERENCES [1] http://www.2005idc.yuntech.edu.tw/ accessed on 21.2.05. [2] ibid [3] ibid [4] ibid [5] Lechzin, S., http://www.temple.edu/crafts/public_html/mission.html accessed on 21.2.05. [6] http://www.temple.edu/tyler/bfametals.html accessed on 20.2.05. [7] ibid [8] Marx, J., Design Course Does Digital, August 2000. http://www.architectureweek.com/2000/0830/tools_2-1.html accessed on 31.3.05. [9] ibid [10] ibid

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[11] http://www.temple.edu/crafts/public_html/mjcc/local/gallery/student/Cad_gal_stu.htm accessed on 2.3.05.

DESIGNING GAMES TO TEACH ETHICS Peter Lloyd* Design and Innovation, The Open Unviersity, UK. Ibo van de Poel** Technology, Policy, and Management, TU Delft, The Netherlands. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Over the past three years the authors have developed a new course in ethics for industrial design engineers at the TU Delft. The course looks at the ethical aspects related to a number of areas of designing: design process, interaction, sustainability, responsibility, and marketing. This paper gives an overview of the course and shows how the concept of ‘responsibility’ is taught using the design game Delta Design. Playing a design game helps students to reflect on the consequences of their own actions rather than the actions of others as is traditionally taught with case studies. Keywords: Ethics, Responsibility, Design games 1 ETHICS IN DESIGN EDUCATION Design is a subject that is, arguably, all about ethics. Whether we think in Utilitarian terms—benefiting people by providing them with better things—in terms of our duties towards the environment, or our responsibilities towards each other we are talking about ethical subjects deriving from design. Teaching ethics to designers however has to date proved rather a patchy affair. Subjects like engineering now generally teach ethics as part of the curriculum, but disciplines such as industrial design and architecture have been slow to follow. Industrial Design Education is primarily a practiced-based education supplemented by theoretical courses. Students learn to design by doing—primarily in a studio-based environment—and having their personal work considered and criticised by design tutors. *Design and Innovation, The Open Unviersity, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, [email protected] **Technology, Policy, and Management, TU Delft, The Netherlands, [email protected]

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The range of problems that a student is set for their studio work will expose them to many different aspects of designing: technology, form, materials, product use, etc.. Ethics, if it is explicitly taught at all, finds its way into the curriculum via subjects such as ergonomics (safety) and sustainability (concern for the environment). Being a practicedbased education it is reasonable to assume that ethics is taught implicitly through the advice given by design tutors, themselves often practicing designers. In contrast to Industrial Design, and despite recent developments towards problembased learning [1] engineering education is still primarily a theoretical, applied scientific, lecture-based education. Practical work is often limited to laboratory experiment, and project work although available during later years of study, is often supervised by staff with no direct experience of design practice. Ethics, however, is increasingly being taught in the engineering curriculum through tailored lecture-based courses, often given by departments outside of engineering and using case-studies of ethical decision-making in engineering to illustrate theory [2]. There are problems with both approaches to ethical teaching in these fields. On the one hand the implicit approach to ethical teaching in industrial design relies on at least some of the concerns of the tutor being ethical concerns and not, for example, stylistic or technical concerns. On the other hand the case-study approach to ethics of many engineering courses removes ethics from the realm of practical action (so much a feature of design activity) and places it in a somewhat arid theoretical world where disasters are both common and preventable by the responsible action of individuals. We are assuming here that ethics involves a balance between practical action and theoretical reflection. 2 A COURSE IN ETHICS FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGN ENGINEERS To meet the problems of teaching ethics to product designers as we saw them we set out to develop a new course on ethics for Industrial Design Engineers at the TU Delft. In this course, rather than try to teach ethics as a distinct subject, we tried to focus on a range of existing subjects in design education from an ethical point of view. The idea was to keep the ethical focus very much on the everyday experience of products – something that students are used to talking about – as well as any cases coming up in the media as the course progressed. The subjects we chose to focus on were: • Design process – how the act of designing might also be considered an ethical act; • Interaction and the form of use – how products shape our behaviour; • Sustainability – looking at the arguments for and against sustainable design; • Responsibility – how far the individual is responsible for work that is done for clients or in organisations; • Marketing – how design can be used, for example, to seduce people into buying things they wouldn’t normally buy. For all of these subject areas we were able to find meaningful articles and book sections relating to ethics which, together with a basic introduction to philosophical ethics, forms the reader for the course [3]. With the course reader we also produced a weekly

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worksheet containing questions about the reader articles and asking students to produce their own examples for the subjects they were studying in a weekly exercise. The course consists of one lecture a week introducing each new subject area, weekly student exercises from the workbook, and a final 3000 word essay on a course-related subject of the student’s own choosing. The purpose of the present paper is to describe one particular section of the course, that of ethical responsibility. We have done this because it illustrates one of the comments made in section 1; that ethics is as much about ‘knowing in practice’ what to do as about knowing in theory. We will firstly give an overview of the concept of ethical responsibility in design. Secondly, we will describe the development of a game to teach this idea. Thirdly, we will show some data illustrating the results we have had from using the game in an educational context. Finally, we will make some recommendations for further developments in the game situation. 2.1 THE CONCEPT OF ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY Ethical responsibility is perhaps the most important concept currently taught in courses on engineering ethics. The idea centres around how responsibility is apportioned within organisations, and particularly how responsibility is worked out when large design and engineering projects go wrong. The prime example here is the Space Shuttle Challenger which exploded soon after take off in 1986 and has generated a large amount of literature [4]. Such a case study analysis can provide useful insight into why the accident happened, who was to blame, and how future accidents might be prevented. However useful case-study analyses may be for educational purposes they remain ‘after the fact’ and a long way removed from the average engineering design student’s experience. One could even argue that the average engineering designer would never face such an apparently clear-cut ethical choice situation. In the chronologically ‘neat’ way that evidence is presented, a case-study analysis can also give the impression that, with all the evidence laid out, making a decision on an ethical basis can be relatively easy. The implication here is that the actual ethical problem is located, not so much in a choice situation, but in the ‘messiness’ of social reality, in the ‘smaller’ ethical decisions that the process of design throws up and that results from the conflicting requirements that make a claim on individual designers [5]. By cleaning up this messy reality case study analysis can remove the very element of uncertainty that characterises unfolding ethical situations. 3 THE DELTA DESIGN GAME To simulate the ‘messiness’ of reality in engineering design for students Bucciarelli [6] developed the design game Delta Design to illustrate his theory of object worlds, the idea that different participants in a design process, while dealing with a common object, remain locked within perceptual worlds relating to their own sub-discipline [7]. Delta Design takes place on a two-dimensional fictional planet – DeltaP – with distinct physical and social laws. Figure 1 shows a typical game-play situation. The idea of the game is that a multi-disciplinary group of designers (structural engineers, thermal engineers, project managers, and architects) work together in

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designing and constructing a building suitable for, and attractive to, the inhabitants of DeltaP. For each discipline there is detailed information about how to make calculations and rule of thumb judgements. Deadlines and budgets can also be imposed to more closely simulate a real design process. The object of the game is to understand how multidisciplinary design works and as such there are no winners or losers. Game play consists in coming up with a building form of red (hot) and blue (cold) triangles meeting all formal, thermal, structural, and project management requirements. 3.1 AN ETHICAL SCENARIO In Bucciarelli’s original game there is one unpredictable constraint for the designers to consider and that is a ‘gravity wave’ whereby the gravitational axis of the planet shifts orthogonally for a period of time and then returns to normal. The structure demanded is required to withstand a gravity wave although the magnitude of such a wave is unpredictable. The waves only occur very rarely however.

Figure 1. Students playing the Delta Design game. The triangles represent the basic building blocks of the game, details of individual roles are given in handouts. In the exercise students complete the game as normal, but are then given a further scenario. They are told that some years after the construction of their design there has been a gravity wave that has destroyed their building and caused a loss of life. They are also told that theirs was one of only a few buildings affected and that questions are being

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asked about the quality of the design. They are asked to consider their design process, in the light of these events, to see what might have been overlooked and make a short statement to the Deltan press. They are also told that a critical public would like to see resignations from the designers originally involved in the project. This (admittedly Kafkaesque) scenario forces the designers to consider the decisions they made during the design process and consider what was discussed, agreed and calculated. Were any ethical issues considered during the design process? How were they resolved? And most importantly is there any evidence to back the designers up? 4 METHOD The course has now been given on three separate occasions in the last three years, with the game being played by seven groups of between 4 and 6 students. For purposes of familiarisation students receive game instructions several days before the game itself is played. The game takes around three hours after which there is a short review, the ethical scenario is then handed out. Students are given several days to reflect on and discuss the scenario together before composing a statement to the Deltan press. 5 THE GAME-PLAYING PROCESS Game play typically starts off relatively slowly, with tentative moves and solution proposals made by the students who have prepared well for the exercise while those who haven’t try to make sense of their roles. To some degree each person is given too much information and has to make a judgment about whether to trust the ‘rules of thumb’ given, or whether to look in detail at calculation methods. About half way through the game there is generally a workable solution on the table, and quiet calculation as students try to work out the implications of the proposed structure. As with all design tasks there is a great deal of learning that goes on during the design process. As the game play reaches its conclusion the players gain more confidence in making analyses and predictions about the effects that changes to the structure will have. Nevertheless, the structure usually changes very little in the latter part of the game. Instead small changes are made as the deadline approaches. As proper calculation for the structure takes some time this would seem a rather limiting strategy making several assumptions about the nature of the structure (for example that small alterations won’t alter the nature of the whole). At several points during the game the subject of gravity waves usually comes up. Even though these are suggested as worse-case scenarios they are often only superficially considered as little information is given about their magnitude. The structural engineer will usually have go at making allowance for gravity wave strikes. At the end of game play there is always interest in what kind of structure other groups have arrived at and groups are asked to make a short presentation of their design process. After this the ethical scenario described in section 3.1 is given to them: Initial reactions on being presented with this scenario tend to be vociferous, with students pointing the finger at other group members and trying to apportion blame. After

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some time, the realisation slowly dawns that they will have to meet as a group to review their design process and discuss what course of action to take. In the feedback exercise the groups read a ‘press statement’ to describe their reaction to the disaster. Following is an example of a press statement (translated from the Dutch): “The whole team is responsible for this disaster. We are thus resigning as a team. The optimal structural solution could not be verified because of the conflicting interests of team members and the assignment itself. The eventual design was a compromise between all design criteria. ” Our thoughts are with the families of the victims at this time.” The discussion that is generated from the press statements is the most valuable, because it is a theoretical discussion based on personal experience. A number of important issues usually come up. A good example is the idea of ‘remorse’, closely related to the concept of responsibility. Although the ethical scenario calls for resignations from the designers, this does not mean that quick resignations will necessarily be acceptable. For simply to assume responsibility and resign could then be seen as an easy way of avoiding talking publicly about what went wrong. Clearly that is not what is wanted from a public demanding explanations. There must be a proper process of investigation together with a fitting response; responsibility shouldn’t be assumed too quickly. 6 DISCUSSION The strength of the exercise is that it allows students to reflect on their own experience rather than on the experience of others. In this way the link between cause and effect is reinforced, and students can understand that ethical situations are the result of (normal) practical action and not ‘special’ – in the sense that case studies promote a feeling that the case is a special situation. For this to work the activity of the game must be a reasonably convincing approximation of ‘design reality’ and this was indeed the initial purpose of the game. The game also includes a whole design process, from requirements to product, which demands a wide range of decision-making (not just the ‘big’ decisions prevalent in case-study analyses). The role-play of the game shows another important aspect of ethical concepts in general and responsibility in particular. This is the idea that ethics must in some way be ‘felt’. Learning about the concept of responsibility in theory is a lot different from feeling responsible for something happening. With the Delta Design exercise we have tried to use the latter approach, while in the lectures we emphasise the former. Alternating between theory and practice is highly suitable for teaching ethics in design, we feel. It is interesting to contrast the ethics displayed by students while playing the game with those expressed when the game is finished and the ethical scenario is presented. Although the game is played within the context of a course on ethics, we are often surprised at how little explicit discussion about ethics there is during the game. The gravity wave scenario is explicitly considered by most groups, but there is no sense that the purpose of the game might turn on the ethical seriousness of this scenario becoming true. This, we would argue, is the situation in most design processes. There is usually a

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vague sense of what could happen without an explicit discussion of how such a possible situation might be avoided. There is also no discussion about how bad it would be for such a situation to occur. There is a sense of designers riding their luck here and the idea that external factors usually cause ethical scenarios, not factors resulting from the process of design. This contrasts greatly with the discussion after the scenario is presented, which is explicitly ethical, and often quite sophisticated. Designers clearly have the ability to talk in ethical terms, they just don’t seem to do it during the average design process. In summary the Delta Design game contrives an ethical situation but it does so in a manner as realistic as possible. It was mentioned before that the exercise is somewhat Kafka-esque—the accused looking for reasons for their guilt—but it has proved effective in communicating and illustrating the ethical concept of responsibility. The close coupling of practical action with theoretical discussion demanded by the game has proved highly suitable for a course on design ethics. REFERENCES [1] Lloyd, P., Roozenburg, N.F.M., McMahon, C. and Brodhurst, L. The Changing Face of Design Education: Proceedings of the 2nd International Engineering and Product Design Education Conference, TU Delft, 2004. [2] Van de Poel, I. Ethics and Engineering Courses at Delft University of Technology: Contents, Educational Setup and Experiences. Science and Engineering Ethics, Vol. 7, 2001, pp.267-282. [3] Lloyd, P. and van de Poel, I. Ethics for Industrial Design Engineers: ID5471 Course Reader, TU Delft, 2004. [4] Biosjoly, R. The Challenger Disaster: Moral Responsibility and the Working Engineer in Johnson, D. (ed.) Ethical Issues in Engineering, Prentice-Hall, 1987, pp.6-14. [5] Lloyd, P. and J. Busby ‘Things That Went Well - No Serious Injuries or Deaths’: Ethical Reasoning in a Normal Engineering Design Process. Science and Engineering Ethics, Vol. 9, 2003, pp.503-516. [6] Bucciarelli, L.L. Design Delta Design: Seeing/Seeing as. in Goldschmidt, G. and Porter, W. Proceedings of Design Thinking Research Symposium 5 (DTRS 5), MIT, Boston, 1999. [7] Bucciarelli, L.L. Designing Engineers. MIT Press, 1994.

ITHINK-UTHINK: AN INDUSTRIAL DESIGN TOOL TO ENCOURAGE INTEGRATED AND USER CENTRED DESIGN THINKING Dr. K. Bull* Senior Lecturer of Industrial Design, Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry University, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Industrial design education within university is often based on teaching design within modules organised as individual subject packets (e.g. visual identity, ergonomics, engineering) which can make it difficult for students to develop an integrated and sensitive understanding of how products fit within their user context. It is especially significant during the design of advanced personal telecommunication devices, for example, which have increasing functions and features that may be centred around the user but are often inappropriate to their context of use (e.g. intrusive phone conversations in public places). This paper proposes a design tool to help students to explore and look at product development from a user- and context- driven perspective to clarify design opportunity. It is anticipated that this will help students develop performance specifications that have a greater empathy with users and their situations. The tool is a matrix of prompts organised around three knowledge levels (functions; user factors; and wider issues) which are considered in relation to four themes (capability; ease of use; experience; responsibility) to encourage wider design thinking. A prototype tool was used by twelve second level transport and product design students at Coventry School of Art and Design at the start of an assignment that required the development of a design brief and performance specification. A questionnaire was used to gather feedback about the students’ experiences whilst using the tool. The results were that students used it to broaden design thinking, order information, and to

*Coventry School of Art and Design, Coventry University, Priory Street, CV1 5FB Tel: 02476 88 8248, [email protected]

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centre questions around the user. Some participants did find that information overlapped on the tool making it difficult to organise data. They used a range of methods to record data ranging from computer input and sketchbooks, to wall mounted sheets. From the analysis it was concluded that developing a web-based version of the tool would offer flexibility that is free from the constraints of time and location and aid a collaborative approach (e.g. between engineering, and industrial design students) to the management, generation and transformation of data. Keywords: design tool, collaborative, brief, context, user-centred design, product design, education. 1 FREEDOM FROM ‘PLACE’ OR A NEW ‘VIRTUALITY’ Many products in the 21st century offer people freedom from ‘place’. The mobile phone, for example, allows people to roam from their offices and homes whilst remaining connected via mobile communication devices. This freedom is changing the way people live because there is less need to plan ahead and travel can be more spontaneous. The devices to achieve this are however becoming less tangible and disappearing into the fabric of our daily environment. The resulting ‘ambient intelligence’ helps push technology into to the background of use [1]. The challenge of physically identifying such products by their functional characteristics is leading to new forms of design language and expression that are paralleled by changes in behaviour, individual expression, and socio-cultural conditions (e.g. the use of picture phones to photograph while paying last respects to the recently deceased Pope). Industrial designers such as Dunne continue to explore how electronic products shape our experiences. He has looked beyond the quality of peoples’ relationships with objects to consider the aesthetics of the social, psychological and cultural experiences that they support [2]. A key objective must, therefore, be to create pleasurable user experiences that are sensitive to their context of use, not centred on the artifact, and focused on the relationship between the user, technology and the environment. This requires a more holistic and collaborative approach to product development by industrial designers and development teams to enhance appreciation of design opportunity and its wider consequences. The tool proposed in this paper was primarily developed to explore design opportunity in relation to advanced telecommunication products but, as demonstrated in this paper, it can be applied broadly to new product development. 2 CRAFT AND THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF DESIGN Industrial design should be recognised as an activity that can extend beyond the development of the artifact. It has traditionally manifested itself in the conscious development of mass-manufactured ‘forms’ that link physical design characteristics to the practical, social and emotional expectations of users. Design theorists such as Heskett help to reinforce the social role of designers and he suggests that industrial design should

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be concerned with thinking about product form in terms of the relationship created between technology and users. He defines industrial design as the human capacity to shape and make the environment, to serve needs, and give meaning to lives [3]. Coates also reinforces the deeper values of product design and suggests that it is a social enterprise, that through its embodiment ‘both reflects and affects its surrounding culture’ [4]. To help designers appreciate the deeper relationship that users can develop with products it is useful to observe the qualities of hand-crafted objects. Cross for example, suggested that pre-industrial craftsmen seemed able to produce objects that exhibited a ‘remarkable subtlety within an apparent simplicity’ [5] that is supported by the intuitive craftsperson and flexible production techniques. As Kälviäinen suggests, the craft practitioner originated as a skilled maker living in a local community, providing individual objects for known functions [6]. These are likely to be more closely fitted to the consumer and environments of use. In contrast, Kaufmann suggests that machine made products could not show ‘individuality and a warm human touch’ [7] because of the separation of the designer from making [8]. This was emphasised by mass-production techniques that supported large product volumes and standardised markets and resulted in the user’s reconciliation with mass-manufactured goods. Today the computerisation of manufacturing processes supports mass-customisation and makes it feasible to produce highly individualised products that embody a stronger human-empathy, reflecting a characteristic of the craft-era. Now computerisation can support individuality in design, specialists and those in design education need to explore opportunity using a human-and context-centred approach. This is advocated by Findeli who suggests that design students should be encouraged to question design briefs to develop interest in the human context, rather than a product description [9]. To encourage this approach, design education should strengthen collaboration across specialist environments and between different faculties, departments, national and international institutions, and within industry itself. As network technologies such as the Internet become more implicit within design education and industry, the potential for their use to support integrated approaches and collaboration grows. For example, The Centre of Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Transport and Product Design within the Coventry School of Art and Design has proposed Digital Interaction Studios that enable trans-national approaches to design problems and their solutions and offers opportunities for cross-cultural dialogue. However, within an educational setting, often based on distinct subjects and modular teaching and learning structures, this is not always easy to achieve. It is clear from this discussion that opportunity exists for developing design tools which help industrial design students more fully appreciate the diversity of issues that may influence or affect their ideas from a range of design perspectives. This would also be more reflective of the more integrated and collaborative approach often implemented by multi-disciplinary design consultancies such as IDEO [10]. In support of this, the paper introduces a simple paper-based tool called iThink-uThink that aims to broaden the perceived boundaries of design problem exploration in order to appreciate the wider contextual issues of design such as: social and environmental responsibility; the experience of product use within a user context; the fundamental goals for good user interaction; and the interpretation of product capability through the analysis of user needs

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and desires. This will encourage a more holistic view of design opportunity at the brief defining stage of a project and result in products that are less likely to be technology, manufacture, or feature-led. Whilst the tool in its simplest format is not centred upon collaboration, it is anticipated that its future development will utilise the World-WideWeb to reinforce the potential of interdisciplinary and international collaboration by teams of students. 4 ‘ITHINK – UTHINK’ INTEGRATED AND USER CENTRED THINKING The proposed tool aims to help students explore and identify factors and possible endconsequences associated with a design opportunity. Tatum suggests that design students spend little time thinking about these hard to predict ends that are to be served by the products they design because there is no clear approach for doing so [11]. The iThinkuThink tool offers a technique to support this, and is based on the analogy of looking into, and being informed by, a series of collected objects (see fig. 1). By looking into the box it is possible to: get an overall impression of the content; shuffle the contents or dig deeper; add new content; and, make observations, judgments and connections. The tool is presented as a matrix which incorporates a series of headers that prompt the students to explore, develop questions, and map issues for consideration (see example completed by a second level student in fig. 2). In terms of the analogy, the headers provide a framework that encourages the observer to look at all corners of the box. The tool can be implemented individually or within group activity and requires drafting out questions and comments in the relevant boxes on the matrix. Further exploration and redrafting helps to build data and makes it possible to develop an overview and identify data connections. The final stage involves organising and prioritising the collected data to generate an initial performance specification or design brief. The tool was implemented in 2004 at the brief defining stages of a design assignment with four level one and twelve level two transport and product design students from the Coventry School of Art and Design. It was an urban design project and was selected to demonstrate the wider applicability of the tool. The students were asked to complete a short questionnaire survey which used a scale to gain feedback about their experience of using the tool. The results were positive showing the tool was helpful and well structured with clear instructions. All participants felt the tool encouraged broader thinking about design problems and opportunities, with over 80% offering a four out of five rating on a scale (five being positive). Similarly, 100% believed that the tool made them think about different design perspectives

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Figure 1. The box analogy.

Figure 2. Example of a Matrix completed to an urban design opportunity. e.g. functionality, usability and the environment. In addition, the majority (75% of students) felt that the tool helped them to generate previously unconsidered information in support of their problem/opportunity areas. Although the tool was expected to help clarify the initial performance specification and objectives, participants provided a more even spread of responses (ranging from three [37.5%], four [37.5%] and five [25%] in relation to this). In total 63% of the responses were placed at positive end of the scale. The reason for this slightly weaker response could be connected with the challenge of prioritising and organising the often interdependent data that is generated. The development of techniques to support this is necessary. The more inexperienced first

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level students were less likely to offer a five on the scale which might be because emphasis at that level is about skills and knowledge acquisition and less on depth of analysis. The students were also asked how they practically managed the tool (see fig. 3). Four of them drew the matrix on the wall, while six worked in sketchbooks or notebooks. Two stated that they drew data out rough first and then transferred it to a provided, PowerPoint version. Individual feedback about use of the tool was requested. One student suggested it offered a versatile means of putting information into sections, helped to create useful arguments and to write design journals. Another felt it was a time saver which enabled him to think more about design issues and produce a ‘foolproof’ specification. A couple of students suggested that it might control thinking too much if followed very closely, and possibly result in similar specifications to others. Two students commented on the difficulties of placing information on the tool because the categories overlapped, but one still felt it was simple and effective. 5 ITHINK-UTHINK: THE NEXT STEP In conclusion, the tool proved beneficial when mapping out design goals for a brief. It helped the students to consider the broader picture of design opportunity and productively shifted initial focus away from the ‘artifact’. Aspects that students found more complicated included the organisation and translation of data towards a performance specification. The tool does not, however, focus on the collaborative nature of design and depends on a structured framework. To encourage a more explorative and collaborative approach a web-based design tool is proposed which would enable students to build ideas and data collectively. A web tool would allow a team of people to flexibly (e.g. at different times and locations) set out core design parameters against the headings explored in the iThink - uThink tool. They would then

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Figure 3. Example of tool in a usable form. be able to question, contribute, and reflect upon data as it is presented on the tool by individual users (by dragging, dropping and replying to data on the tool). Data would be presented as nodes on an overview map and be paralleled as a sequential ‘thread’ (see fig. 4) to accommodate both intuitive and systematic approaches. It would allow the team to track emerging data, return to earlier discussion, or more randomly pick up on developing or highlighted issues. It is anticipated that within an educational setting the tool could be used independently to explore and refine data. Within group work it would enable students to contribute during their own independent study time. The tool would more closely resemble multi-disciplinary discussion and help students to experience crossfunctional communication before entering industry.

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Figure 4. Example of web-based design tool. It is hoped that the tool will help to conceptually reduce the separation of the designer, user and maker and capture some qualities of the craft-era by exploring more widely the human-context of designed artifacts. It is expected that it would be widely applicable within the design field and has potential to be introduced to the industry by students experienced in its benefits and use, who go on to be employed in the field. It also has potential as a web-based tool in the design industry that can advantageously transcend the constraints of time and location often found within development teams today. REFERENCES [1] Aarts, E., and Marzano, S., The New Everyday Views on Ambient Intelligence, Koninklijke Philips, Electronics N.V., 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2003 pp.14 [2] Dunne, A., Hertzian Tales, RCA CRD Research Publications, London, 1999, pp.12 [3] Heskett, J., Toothpicks and Logos: Design in Everyday Life: Oxford Press, Oxford, 1980, pp.7 [4] Coates, D., Watches Tell More Than Time: Product Design, Information, and the Quest for Elegance, McGraw Hill, New York, 2003, pp.4 [5] Cross, N., The Changing Design Process. In Roy, R and Wields, D., Product Design and Technological Innovation, Open Press, Milton Keynes, 1992 pp.36-47 [6] Kälviäinen, M., The Significance of ‘Craft’ Qualities in creating Experiential Design Products, The Design Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp.4 - 15 [7] Kaufmann (Jr), E., What is Modern Design? In Gorman, C., The Industrial Design Reader, Allworth Press, New York, 2003, pp.146 - 151.

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[8] Heskett, J., Industrial Design, Thames and Hudson, London, 1980, pp.7 [9] Findeli A., Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Discussion, Design Issues, MIT Press, Volume 17, Number 1, Winter 2001, pp.5 - 17. [10] Kelley, T., and Littman, J., The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, London, Harper Collins Business, 2001, pp. 70 - 71 [11] Tatum, J, The Challenge of Responsible Design, Design Issues, MIT Press, Vol 20, No. 3, Summer, 2004, pp. 66 - 81.

A VISUAL INCLUSIVE DESIGN TOOL FOR BRIDGING ERAS, TECHNOLOGIES AND GENERATIONS Christopher S C Lim* Glasgow School of Art, Product Design Engineering, UK. Alastair S Macdonald Glasgow School of Art 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ, Scotland, UK [email protected] [email protected] Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The paper describes the evolution and use of the ‘Generation Timeline Tool’ (GTT) as a research and development aid for the inclusive designer or students working with different age sectors in the population. It describes how this tool is used to discuss the apparent ‘generation effect’, that is, the increasing difficulty that people experience in adapting to new generations of products with their associated technologies and interfaces as they age. Keywords: Inclusive design, Generational Effect, Generation Timeline Tool 1 INTRODUCTION Although different types of individual (such as ‘early adopters, early majority pragmatists, late minority conservatives and laggards and skeptics’) react to technological innovations in different ways [1], it is a generalization that each generation develops a familiarity with the technologies of their own era, and at a particular stage of their lives, and that this familiarity can tend to become both a preferred and enduring basis for choosing technology and way of interacting with products throughout their lives. In the C20th, for example, products have utilized mechanical, electro-mechanical, electronic, and increasingly - into the C21st - software technologies [2], each of which brings its own set of interfaces, modes of interaction, protocols and degrees of acceptability with users of different generations [3] [4]. For instance, consumer products from the *Glasgow School of Art, Product Design Engineering, 167 Renfrew Street , Glasgow, G3 6RQ, UK Phone/Fax: 0141 353 4442 Email: [email protected] URL: http://www.gsa.ac.uk/

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‘mechanical’ era had simple direct interfaces with buttons, knobs, switches and dials, whereas in the age of the mobile phone and iPod, interfaces have involved sophisticated layers of menus using a limited numbers of buttons, further compounded by convergence of technologies (e.g. cameras, global positioning devices and phones all in the one ‘feature rich’ product). Problems in adjusting from one mode of interfacing to a newer one create ‘the generation effect’. New technologies and products have the potential to improve the quality of life (in all sectors of the population, but particularly for an ageing one) and it is imperative that a user-centred approach is adopted to ensure successful technology uptake [5]. In the design of future products and services, not to acknowledge this generation effect in the design of new products and services would be equivalent to excluding important sectors of the population.

Figure 1. The Generation Timeline Tool (GTT). 2 THE AIMS OF THE RESEARCH The aims of the research were 1) to develop an in-depth understanding of why people, as they age, appear to have difficulties in accommodating new technologies, 2) to analyse a group of selected product types found in different decades in the C20th together with their modes of interaction, to evaluate how this has changed over the years, and 3) to develop a ‘generation effects tool’ – the Generation Timeline Tool (GTT) -to help designers working with different age groups in the population, and to provide them with guidance in recognising the generation effects as well as understanding the user’s needs and capabilities.

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3 THE DEVELOPMENT OF GTT The designer, as the one who provides a bridge between technology and people through design, is faced with the challenge of embodying ever-new technologies and features in products and services.To design a successful product that is inclusive, designers need to be aware of the broader impact of technology. However, there appears to be a lack of tools to help the designer understand the way an ageing population copes with potentially ever more complex and alien technologies and their associated interaction protocols. To explore this issue a timeline was constructed from visual and museum archives showing a variety of everyday domestic consumer products such as radios, cameras, telephones, vacuum cleaners and TVs from 1930 to 2004. The following were then added as a series of overlays throughout the research process. Figure 1 below illustrates the various overlays forming the GTT: 1) the changing nature of products and the emergence and embodiment of different types of technologies in these products; 2) references to theoretical models that describe different technological eras – for our purposes these are defined as mechanical, electro-mechanical and digital-software; 3) generation profiles that reveal the span of technological eras experienced by different sectors of the population which allows a correlation between age and likely prior usage of different product types; and 4) the changing profiles of the population (i.e. the proportion of young to old and how this changes as the timeline progresses); The GTT aims to provide a rich taxonomy and imagery of changing demographics, generational profiles as well as aesthetics, interaction style and embodied technologies in past and present products. This allows the designer to use the tool to critically reflect on the social and technological context in which people from different age sectors encountered products in their lives. 2.1 ISSUES ARISING FROM GTT One becomes familiar with modes of interaction determined by particular technologies embodied in consumer products at a particular stage or age in our lives. This could form both an enduring basis for choosing technology and a preferred way of interacting with products throughout our lives. The issues that arose from developing the GTT were as follows: 1. How important is the stage in a person’s life when a particular technology is learnt? 2. Do we have problems in adapting to or learning new technologies as we grow older, and if so, what are the particular problems associated with adapting? 3. Are there any differences between the way we used to interact with technological products, the way the associated interfaces were designed, and the way we use them now?

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3 USER RESEARCH To pursue these questions, the research was designed to include two sets of subjects. Firstly, a set of subjects was interviewed in their own homes with the technological products of their daily lives around them. It was thought this would reveal what choices people made and their opinions about the domestic technological products they chose for their own home lives. Secondly, a set of subjects will be interviewed with technological products from the archive collections of Glasgow Museums. The ambition here is that these subjects may provide information on responses to products that were no longer commercially available but which the subjects are likely to have encountered at an earlier period in their lives. The results from these two sets of research activities will help develop a discussion about the differences between contemporary and previously owned products. The first set of interviews has been completed and the second is undergoing trialling at the time of publishing. 3.1 HOME INTERVIEWS Ten subjects ranging in age from under 25 to above 66 were interviewed with the aid of the GTT together with a survey that identified what type of products they possessed at home. To further complement the use of the GTT, subjects under research were also shown a set of Visual Prompt boards (see Figure 2) illustrating products from each decade to which they belonged, starting from 1930, and extending up to the year 2004. To stimulate discussion, the set of Visual Prompt boards described was used together with the survey and the GTT to reveal and compare types of products subjects used at home at an earlier stage in their lives with what they used now. These interviews resulted in a number of interesting observations:

Figure 2. A Visual Prompt board products from the 1930s and 1940s. 1) Pleasant in use: Products that use more mechanical input devices (i.e. knobs, turning dials etc.) found in mechanical and electro-mechanical products seemed to elicit a more pleasurable response from users.

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2) Reliability: The subjects’ perceived that mechanical and electromechanical products to be more reliable, predictable and serviceable compared to digital-software products. 3) Usability: The miniaturization of technology caused obvious usability problems (e.g. some buttons are too small for older users). 4) Single mode vs. multi mode: Because of the proliferation of features in modern products either through the convergence of technologies (example: camera-phone) or marketing, input devices such as buttons on these products often have many different usages or functions unlike products in the mechanical age where one button corresponded to a single function. Consequently, subjects reported that they could interact with products from the mechanical era directly, whereas in digital products one often has to go through a host of menus to get to what one wants. Digital products often have multi-function buttons, creating multi-layers. The many layers and lack of transparency in modern interface menu hierarchies (e.g. in mobile phones) can confuse older users, or more specifically those who did not learn this mode of interaction when younger. Issues relating to ‘layers’ have been reported by Do-campo Rama M et al [6]. 5) Social Dimension 1: Older subjects interviewed all had an interest in learning new technologies although they were more selective in what they were willing to learn. In cases where they encounter difficulties or couldn’t be bothered with learning a new technology, they would often ask close friends, relatives or product specialist to assist them. This social aspect is an important but overlooked consideration. They also mentioned that they could still live rich lives without technologies such as mobile phones and televisions, as it was not integral to their lifestyle. For the younger set of subjects (under the age of 35) this was not the case. 6) Social Dimension 2: Older subjects, for instance, remarked that television used to stop broadcasting for two hours in the early evenings to allow them to have supper. This reveals a relationship between the product and the socio-cultural values and context of that time. The basic function of the products (particularly in the area of televisions and phones) remains the same, however the mode of use and interaction with products and their social use is now very different for older users from that which they experienced in their younger days. 7) Instructions for use: Both older and younger subjects commented that many user instruction manuals are not user-friendly which causes frustration when trying to use them. 8) Technical Proficiency: Older subjects who are technically proficient (i.e. who can use the internet and professional softwares like Adobe photoshop, Microsoft excel) commented that learning to use the computer was the critical point, which led them to a whole new technological age. One elderly subject remarked that although he learns how to use the computer (without going through proper lessons), he is not as good as his grandchildren who often told him that he need not go through certain steps to get to the end result. His view was that they are brought up in the computer age and hence was fluent with the computer. He added that he is still learning and though he is not familiar with it, what he learned, he can do quite well.

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3.2 INTERVIEWS AND USABILITY TRIALS AT GLASGOW MUSEUMS Using the preliminary results from the home interviews as the basis for further probing, subjects ranging from those under 25 to those above 66 ages will be asked to participate in usability trials involving actual TVs, cameras, radios and telephones from three different ‘interaction eras’ (i.e. from the mechanical, electro-mechanical and digitalsoftware style eras) at the Glasgow Museums. Figure 3 illustrates an example of a pilot usability trial with an elderly subject using a 1950s Philips radio. Subjects will be observed completing a number of set tasks. Interaction problems and timings will be taken into account, as this will indicate the extent of familiarity subjects have with products from different eras. This will then be followed by retrospective interviews to elicit a richer understanding of how people used products belonging to

Figure 3. Pilot usability trial involving elderly subjects. different eras. The results will be used to supplement those from the home interviews and be used to further develop the GTT. 4 CONCLUSION In design education, the GTT could potentially be used to bring about an awareness of inclusive design issues faced by students in their projects. Although still under development, the GTT has already proved a useful resource for the designer / researcher as a visual aide memoire and visual tool to facilitate discourse with groups of diverse age spans. Subjects are able to quickly identify and recall their experiences in using consumer products and technologies from their past. This reminiscence helps open up dialogue in the subjects’ experiences thus helping designers elicit, as well as better understand, their latent needs and capabilities. Only through understanding these needs and the very human considerations of familiarity, confidence and prior knowledge can it then be successfully translated into product design specifications that would lead to inclusive products. Through the GTT, instead of a pre-occupation with incorporating only the latest features and technologies into new products and services, the GTT can provide a means

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of profiling or anticipating, in general terms, familiar levels of technological acceptability and usability in different age sectors of the population. It also provides the designer with – or reminds them of - a great range of interface options than current market preoccupations. One question which emerges concerning younger users currently accustomed to multi-layered interfaces is, will this preferred mode of interfacing be one that they will carry with them into the future? How difficult would it be for them to adapt to future technological products where multi-layered interfaces may not even be defacto? It is hoped that the further development of the GTT will help in anticipating this type of issue by extrapolating trends. REFERENCES [1] Rogers E.M., Diffusion of Innovation, The Free Press, New York, 1995 [2] Molenbroek, J., Website: http://www.gerontechnology.info/genie/map/intro/intro_technology.html [3] Brickfield C.F., Attitudes and Perceptions of Older People towards Technology. In Ageing and Technological Advances. Robinson I.P.K, Livingston J and Birren J.E. (Eds), Plenum, New York, 1984, pp. 32. [4] Goodman J., Syme A. and Eisma R., Age-old Question(naire)s. Proceedings of Include Conference 2003, London, 2003, pp.7:276 - 7:285. [5] Macdonald A., Humanising Technology. In Inclusive Design: Design for the whole population. Clarkson J., Coleman R., Keates S. and Lebbon C. (Eds), Springer, London, 2003, pp. 183 201. [6] Docampo Rama M., Ridder D.H. and Bouma. H., Technology generation and age in using layered user interfaces, Gerontechnology, Vol 1, No 1, 2001, pp. 24 - 40.

ETHNOGRAPHY’S GIFT TO DESIGN Meg Armstrong* Chair, Design and Management, Parsons School of Design, New York. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Artifacts and methods from ethnography – or, rather, traces of ethnographic method and productive (mis)readings of anthropological texts – have [humanized?] the process of design for designers and design managers by allowing them to construct the products of design as “gifts” rather than commodities. In the first half of my paper, I discuss an essay that mis-reads an anthropological text in order to transform the product of design from a commodity to a gift. This misreading reflects the anxieties alive in a design practice that suffers from the contradictory alliances of art/design-as-social-action and design as agent of product innovation/differentiation in the service of market competition. The second half deals with the circulation of ethnographic objects and methods in design practice and instances where ethnographers and ethnographic artifacts are asked to serve transformative or innovative purposes in the design industry. Throughout, I will be using the term “design” primarily to refer to the activities of designers working in industry. Keywords: design management, commodities, ethnography 1. THE MAGIC OF DESIGN: FROM COMMODITIES TO GIFTS In his short essay on “The Gift,” design historian Clive Dilnot ascribes the ‘giftlike’ quality a ‘designer/ maker” bestows on the products of design to “the quantum of the designer’s creative apperception of the conditions of human subjectivity, together with his or her ability to translate and embody this apperception into the form of the object and to offer it again to the potential user, that marks the designer/maker’s “gift” to the user.” [1] I bring this passage to light because it starts us out thinking about references to canonical texts in anthropology within design history, and the use of anthropological texts for inspiration in the re-imagination of design - rather than the use of ethnographic methods in consultative design practice. This is instructive to the extent that it helps to *Design and Management, Parsons School of Design, 66 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10011, [email protected] .

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raise a wider theoretical and practical concern about productive mis-readings of anthropological or ethnographic work, and the variety of reasons why anthropology and ethnography have become important to design. I will spend some time on it here. Proceeding through a dizzying array of references to texts that provide (diverging) critical frameworks from several (differently constituted) discursive practices, Dilnot calls for a re-imagining of design activity and of the “product” of design. While this gesture may be loosely construed as offered in the spirit of the “moral conclusions” to Mauss’s The Gift, it does not really address the complexities of gift exchange in any significant manner, does not (or cannot) situate this discussion of the gift within the wider discourse of which it is a part, and appears to perpetuate an oversimplified opposition between commodities (the bad gift articles in the Hallmark store) and gifts (those which recognize a ‘real human need’).[2] All of which raises the curious aspects of this essay as less a contribution to exchange theory than a sort of heavily footnoted manifesto intended to give design a grand mission: design activity is given the ability to locate “real human need” (versus a false human need? versus the needs created by the necessities of corporate marketing or competitive product differentiation?) and then, perhaps, to transform design production itself. The impetus for Dilnot’s references to The Gift - and other essays related to the morality of the gift and the reimagination of relationships governed by commodity exchange - may be read as part of a twofold problem. The first problem - and this is articulated by Dilnot in a separate essay on “The State of Design History, Part II” - is that design is in need of a proper context which shifts the understanding (and design historical construction) of design from an orientation toward aesthetics (and toward the “great designers” whose styles have achieved significance) to design as part of “world-making” or, as Victor Papanek articulates, as “the conscious attempt to impose meaningful order … the planning and patterning of any act toward a desired foreseeable end.” [3] When Dilnot writes of the transformation of the designed object from commodity to gift, he is asking that we conceive of designers as both shaped by the cultural, historical, economic conditions which give rise to their activity and as possessing the agency to shape the value of what they produce. But to understand design in this way is also to look beyond the discipline of design for the critical theory that might support such an understanding. The second problem, which arises from the first, is that some practitioners of the design disciplines conceive themselves as now very much in crisis. [I write “now” but in many ways this crisis is constitutive of design as an industrial art form.] This construction of design/the designer/maker as the harbinger of gifts – gifts which are useful, usable, meaningful, desirable – has precedent in the manifestos of social change that are part and parcel of the construction of design as a transformative art form and creator of social change (as well as a handmaiden to commodity production). One could understand the use of ethnography/anthropology, then, as part of design’s wish to heal the dis-ease produced by the discipline’s contradictory alliances. Design suffers from an anxiety that it has no independent basis from which to create and, in so doing, to effect its own form of social change. The first “First Things First Manifesto,” written in 1963 by the British graphic design Ken Garland, calls upon designers to balance for-profit business with social responsibility. This gesture was revisited in the “First Things First Manifesto 2000”

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which calls upon designers to question the application of their “skill and imagination” in the service of selling “dog biscuits, designer coffee, diamonds, detergents, hair gel…butt toners, light beer, and heavy-duty recreational vehicles.” [4] The Manifesto proposes “a reversal of priorities in favor of more useful, lasting, and democratic forms of communication – a mind shift away from product marketing and toward the exploration of a new kind of meaning.” [5] A very different sort of anxiety is voiced two years earlier in the “Nantucket Manifesto” produced by organizers at AIGA, the American Institute for Graphic Arts: “The revolution is over. We are faced with the task of building a new approach to design, which yields useful, useable, and desirable products for people. We seek to provide a structure in which new design practitioners can work with confidence, modesty, and wisdom. If design is art with consequences, we have a responsibility to respect our power to delight or confuse, facilitate or impede, corrupt or purify. Together, we commit to our fellows-colleagues, clients, and community of use to define the goals of new design, the roles and responsibilities of new designers, the organizations in which new design can flourish, and the process through which new design can reach and reward our world.”[6] This piece was written as design was gaining momentum as a key component of new business creation in the New Economy. Clement Mok, and members of AIGA, wrote the manifesto as part of an attempt to position design to make an effective contribution in a world in which designers “are challenged to design for a world that is increasingly digital and connected.”[7] The call to modesty prefigures the heights to which design would be inflated during the bubble years; the reference to reward now reads like both a reference to social relevance as well as to the need to understand design as providing a return on investment -for designers and companies alike. 2. ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE LOCATION OF NEED And yet, these manifestos and anxieties, and even Dilnot’s very thoughtful essay, still beg the question: how can design overcome its uncomfortable alliance to industry? How can designers/makers ‘anticipate real human needs’? Where do these ‘real’ needs live and how are they made accessible? What are the means/tools at hand? Increasingly, design managers have turned to an array of “human-centered” research methodologies derived from human-computer interaction design, and have embraced the potential of anthropological or ethnographic research methods to enhance these approaches.[8] One obvious and long-standing driver for this interest is that, unlike much traditional, survey-based market research, ethnography done in the service of design is highly qualitative, small-scale and offers up the sorts of detailed observations and analysis of interactions with products, services, and tools that can shape design direction. As Christina Wasson puts it in her essay on the adoption of ethnographic methods in design firms in the late 1980s, “[e]thnography appeals to designers because it provides a window onto the ways consumers interact with products in their everyday lives.” [9] Designers have recognized a need not only to do research that informs design but also to study the social lives of the things they produce. I want now to turn to a brief example of how ethnographic representations of the ‘other’ or ‘user’ or ‘receiver’ of design objects circulate between researchers and

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designers in design practice. It will demonstrate the extent to which the ethnographic artifact itself reveals ‘real human need’ and thereby becomes a ‘gift’ to design. 2.1 CIRCULATION OF ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH (ARTIFACTS) IN DESIGN PROCESSES While working for a consulting firm specializing in ethnographic research for product and interactive design, I had the privilege of working with designers who were part of the design teams for an international electronics manufacturer. Our team was small: a researcher, a designer, and a project manager. The assignment was to conduct ethnographic research about the uses of home media in families with teens, and to use the results of the research to inform ideation sessions at the design centers. The research would be done with 2 of the designers present for roughly one third of the home visits. Our team would analyze the data and present models of behaviors, home media domains, user types and roles in ideation sessions with the design teams. Our research overlapped with the last presentation of research by the company’s previous research provider. For several years, the company had been using a trends analyst to provide them with information about dominant style trends. During the presentation, the trends analyst presented images of people who embodied what Raymond Williams has called “dominant”, “emerging” and “residual” trends. The images had been gathered entirely from magazines - no photographs, no film footage - and were presented as collages with no reference to their original context. The collages were matted and framed in plane pine frames. Beneath each collage was a series of found objects associated with the style trend - matchbox car pick-up trucks for the retro style; shiny metal objects for urban modern - and swatches of fabrics. Each style collage was given a name. The presenter walked the designers through each collage, invoking a series of adjectives that would describe the visual, auditory, olfactory and gustatory associations each style trend was meant to conjure up. As he finished each collage, he would show the designers where the style fit in a genealogical chart that contained the style names for the past three years of styles. Each year, there were roughly 6 styles which then either produced style descendents or petered out. As the presenter unveiled each new style, the designers gave signs of recognition or, in the case of previously popular style trends who had managed to survive and evolve, expressed sighs of appreciation or relief. A tour around the center revealed that the style trends were emblems for particular design projects. Designers would design for “X Girl” or her antagonist. The collage would hang next to concepts being developed for her. Notes and amendments to the concepts would be tacked around her image. [Unless this seems bizarre, it is important to note that the use of imaginary or fictional characters or “personae” is not uncommon in many design practices. Indeed, it is arguably more common than the use (or abuse) of ethnographic models or artifacts. Such personas may be popular, in part, because they represent the demographic “types” created by marketing professionals and because they tend to be iconographic, often presented through data bites and accompanied by visual images that are meant to stand for entire groups of people (e.g., the ubiquitous “road warriors” and “soccer moms” of much recent design).] The trends analyst’s presentation occurred after the design group had participated in or seen reports of our ethnographic research. The designers were ready to hear more about

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the real-life others for whom they were designing and, although they appreciated the aesthetic guidance provided by the style collages, challenged the presenter to connect the collages to observations or explorations of real-life beliefs and practices. At some point, when questioned about the activities of real people associated with the style trend represented by the pick-up truck, the presenter taunted the design team: “do you really want to design for the Average Joe in the trailer park?!” This would seem to be an auspicious setting in which to present ethnographic data. When our team presented their models to the design teams, however, interesting things occurred. Despite our highly visual presentations of what you’d expect (descriptions of activity domains, family paradigms, typical behaviors related to and not related to home media, and typical roles), the documentation of their products in the living rooms of middle class Americans living in Schaumberg, Illinois. In the photographs, videotape and user profiles, the designers could trace the circulation of their goods through different hands and through different rooms of the house, onto the street, into the car, into a friend’s home. They could see the ways in which their products impacted relationships between family members and see evidence of attempts to re-make their products to meet the aesthetic and ideological values of their owners (e.g., the conversion of home theater speakers camouflaged by homemade felt angels). While the conversation would sometimes turn to the larger implications of the impact of home media on social relationships, family dynamics or paradigms and selfrepresentation, the primary concern of the design team (not surprisingly) was to learn where new design opportunities - for new electronics products -were located, and to define these opportunities in order to seek patents and venture. Reflection on the reception of the product (as commodity or as gift, in Dilnot’s sense) did not lead to a critique of electronic media in the home but rather to an exploration of how to support, optimize or extend current usage. And this in itself - the activity of supporting, optimizing and extending - was the critical moment for the team. In ideation sessions, the designers referred to the models of human behavior and recommendations for design direction - these had been presented as posters tacked to the walls and in workbooks for each designer - and proceeded to ‘brainstorm’ on the basis of the models, representative user profiles and, it appeared, on the basis of individual photographs and data bites. When they would run out of ideas, they would turn to the researchers and ask for more “nuggets” of inspiration to drive the brainstorming session another anecdote from the field, another photograph of their products in their indigenous settings, another suggestion about how to better meet the real human need of their recipients/consumers. As with the style trend collages, our research was used a catalyst to remember/conjure the other for whom they were designing and to define a particular state of need. Indeed, artifacts of our projects continued to circulate in the company long after we left, and were used as a basis from which to argue for the new design ventures emerging from the ideation sessions. In this sense, the ethnographic venture itself produced several items for circulation and exchange, and these were used to negotiate new design directions in the firm. The screening criteria for concepts were based on how well they addressed the human needs described in our models but also, quite obviously, on the extent to which they enabled the design team to establish itself as a source of product innovation and, therefore, a source of future potential revenue.

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3. CONCLUSION I will conclude with two observations about the circulation of ethnography in design and the constraints the rules of circulation place on ethnography’s potential to ‘give’ its more critical (liberatory?) frameworks to design. First, ethnography, in the instances described in this paper, risks being reduced to “participant observation” or the gathering of data rather than its analysis. [10] Or, often, reduced only to observation, as in video ethnographies produced when cameras are hung and left to capture moments of consumption that would otherwise remain hidden from view; such moments are then represented as objects of study for design. It is this re-presentation that constitutes the consumption as something worthy of contemplation. The ethnographer’s job, then, is to capture and re-present - to “point out” significant moments in the activities observed. And yet, such ethnography is successful by most design standards. In this instance, the design team proceeded to use the research to develop new product lines and applied for two patents as a result. While there are forms of research, such as participatory design, that take as their end something more than “technical quality, efficiency, and high productivity,” there must always be a return on investment for research that emphasizes, as participatory design does or as most ethnographic research might, “[h]elping customers and consumers shape the process and express their needs.” [11] Second, while the ethnographer may herself understand (and construct frameworks that utilize) the larger systems of reference in which the consumer’s statements or acts have meaning, ethnographer’s job is to render interpretation in actionable models or even just statements (“data bites” or “nuggets”) which themselves bracket such consideration. In a sense, then, the relationship between ethnographer and designer may demand that they stop short of an explicit critique of those larger systems. To sum up, to the extent that it is unable to entertain the importance of these larger social and cultural systems, much that passes for ethnography in design has not progressed very far from its human factors precursor. [12] Instead, the use of ethnography in design is focused primarily on its ability to generate concepts or opportunities for new products and services rather than as a form of critique of production and consumption, or of commodities, or of gifts. The circulation of ethnography in design practice itself obstructs the transformative power anthropological frameworks might provide to design and designers. The potential of ethnography’s ‘gift’ to design remains unrecognized and, perhaps, unrecognizable in the current market for design. REFERENCES [1] Dilnot, Clive, “The Gift,” in Margolin, Victor, and Buchanan, Richard, eds., The Idea of Design, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002, page 154. [2] For a detailed review of the literature on commodity and gift exchange, and the potential for rethinking the concept of value and social action, see Graeber, David, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Palgrave, New York, 2001. [3] Papanek, Victor, Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, Paladin, London, 1974, page 17; cited in Clive Dilnot, “The State of Design History, Part II,” in

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Margolin, Victor, ed., Design Discourse: History, Theory, Criticism, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989. [4] “First Things First Manifesto 2000,” in Bierut, Michael, Drentrel, William and Heller, Stephen, eds., Looking Closer Four: Critical Writings in Graphic Design, Allworth Press, New York, 2002), page 5. [5] ibid. [6] http://advance.aiga.org/timeline/santafe.html. [7] ibid. [8] See Reese, William, “Behavioral Scientists Enter Design: Seven Critical Histories,” in Squires, Susan and Byrne, Bryan eds., Creating Breakthrough Ideas: The Collaboration of Anthropologists and Designs in the Product Development Industry, Bergin & Garvey, Westport, CT, 2002, pages 17-43. [9] Christina Wasson, “Ethnography in the Field of Design,” unpublished manuscript version, page 2. Wasson’s essays has been published as “Ethnography in the Field of Design,” Human Organization (2000), 59 (4): 377-388. [10] See Wasson, “Ethnography in the Field of Design,” page 26 for a similar critique of this phenomenon. [11] Reese, William “Behavioral Scientists Enter Design,” page 33, citing Lucy Suchman, Forward to Participatory Design, edited by Schuler, D. and Namiok, A. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, NJ 1993, page viii. [12] For a critical discussion of human factors research, see Robinson, Rick E., ‘What to do with a Human Factor: A Manifesto of Sorts,”American Center for Design Journal 7: 63-73.

ASSESSMENT FEEDBACK QUALITY IN STUDIO-BASED DESIGN PROJECTS: CAN STATEMENT BANKS HELP? M. Sharp* Lecturer, Product Design Engineering, Glasgow School of Art, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to elevate discussion about a technique which appears to offer help, where time and teaching resources are limited, with maintaining quality in the feedback given to students. It explores the issues surrounding the use of ‘statement banks’ in assessing studio-based design projects in a multidisciplinary design education environment. The study discusses the nature of feedback quality, the feasibility of using the technique, potential benefits & disadvantages, modus operandi, etc., prior to the author’s embarking on a full-scale pilot to assess its usefulness within a Product Design Engineering course. The discussion considers experience reported in teaching environments very different from engineering or product design – from accounting & finance to pharmaceutics. Keywords: Statement Banks, Teaching and Learning Tools, Studio-based Design Projects, Interdisciplinarity 1 THE PROBLEM Feedback is recognized to be an essential element of the learning experience – one of the ‘principal factors underpinning successful learning’ according to Phil Race [1]. Certainly it is the author’s observation that feedback is normally welcomed – if not eagerly sought – by students. And while they may often be anxious to know their grade for any piece of

*Product Design Engineering Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ, Scotland, UK Tel: +44 (0)141 353 4415 Fax: +44 (0)141 353 4655 Email: [email protected]

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work, possibly even reducing matters to simplistic dimensions (“have I passed or failed?”) – simple grades can give them only minimal indication of real performance. They therefore make a very limited contribution to learning. It is extended feedback – comments in written or verbal form – which contributes real formative value. This must especially be true of design project work, which typically has a high qualitative and discursive content. But feedback, whether written or verbal, involves using language – the common means of communication in all walks of life. Even in the area under study – that of design, with its high visual and practical content – words are required, even if they may sometimes be accompanied by diagrammatic explanation. However, to be useful and therefore effective, feedback must be: • Accurate or valid: it must be to-the-point, focused precisely on the issue in question. • Thorough: it should be compiled with due consideration for the issue at hand, not overbrief or cursory. • Fair: if the same point is to be made to different students, it should be made in the same language. • Consistent or reliable: feedback language should be the same when used by different assessors, and when used by one assessor on different occasions. If the quality of written feedback is dependent on the thought and thoroughness behind it, compiling it must take significant staff resource (‘person-hours’). Time is the essential ingredient, but all-too-familiar pressures on staff can erode available time. Clearly, what is being argued here is that the efficiency with which feedback can be compiled is likely to have significant impact on its overall quality. Essentially, this means that speed of compilation should be optimized. This is scarcely a very novel thought, and the need for efficiency is a point echoed by Phil Race [2], but, from the author’s experience at any rate, would appear to be a continuing challenge. It is this issue which is at the heart of the current discussion. 2 THE CONTEXT FOR THE CURRENT INVESTIGATION The BEng/MEng Product Design Engineering (PDE) undergraduate programme on which the author teaches is bi-institutional. Engineering science, taught within the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Glasgow, is embodied, along with teaching on further product design issues and practice, in studio projects in the creatively-intense environment of the School of Design at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA). It is within this context that the current investigation has been undertaken. The School of Design (SofD) is partnered by the School of Fine Art and the Mackintosh School of Architecture. Each of the three Schools employs a Learning and Teaching Coordinator, and this study has considered comments from each of them on the subject of providing feedback in studio projects. Within PDE, studio design projects take a number of forms, including individuallyselected year-long projects of considerable complexity. At all levels, however, normal assessment practice is that each student’s work is marked collectively by the teaching team for the level, who allocate grades and compile feedback comments. These are

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written-up, recorded on standardized individual forms, and delivered to each student, along with a verbal explanation. A similar process is in use throughout the SofD. 3 WHY CONSIDER ‘STATEMENT BANKS’? In compiling written feedback on design projects for a number of years, it has been the author’s experience that, even when project topics are of students’ own choosing (and therefore different in content), the process appears to involve considerable repetition, i.e. making the same (or very similar) remarks to different students – and frequently working hard to use different wording. This raised a number of questions: If the comment to be made was the same, why struggle to use different wording? Wouldn’t it actually be fairer to say the same thing to different students in the same language? If this happened a lot, could there perhaps be some way of ‘saving’ much-used statements for re-use on other occasions? It was at this point that the author came across the LTSN Generic Centre’s series of booklets on assessment, and in particular Chris Rust’s ‘A Briefing on Assessment of Large Groups’ [3], which outlines ideas for ‘mechanizing’ assessment, one of which involves using so-called ‘statement banks’. Simplistically put, the concept entails assembling frequently-used feedback comments into a ‘bank’, from which they may be drawn (with or without amendment) for use on subsequent occasions. Stated as baldly as this, the idea raises a considerable number of questions – and frankly the author’s initial reaction was to recoil slightly at what appeared to be an impersonal and mechanical method of giving feedback. Searches revealed however that the method was quite frequently employed across the higher education sector – although with no examples discovered of use in design project work – as well as for the compilation of school reports, for instance. On more mature reflection, the idea began to commend itself, and possible methods and benefits of using the technique emerged. With no specific examples readily available, the question remains as to whether it is appropriate to the detail and subtlety of feedback needed in frequently complex project work, especially where topics are self-selected by students – hence the impetus for conducting the current investigation. It quickly became apparent that, if statement banks are to be successful, how they are compiled and the exact technique by which they are employed are probably critical. These points are discussed below. 4 HOW MIGHT STATEMENT BANKS BE COMPILED? 4.1 COMMENTS GARNERED FROM PAST RECORDS Any course which has been running for any length of time will have accumulated a considerable history of assessment practice and therefore terminology, as well as records of actual comments made to students about their work. This appears to be the compilation method in the use of statement banks advocated by Yvonne Perrie [4].

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4.2 COMMENTS GENERATED BY STAFF Any group of lecturers reasonably familiar with a course would be able to sit down and (from memory or imagination) assemble a list of representative statements about student performance, especially if prompted by the criteria or categories used for assessment. This, and also method 4.1, appear to have been the basis for the examples quoted in Chris Rust’s booklet [3], and also by Win Hornby [5]. 4.3 METHODICAL COMPILATION Methods 4.1 & 4.2 could be utilized, probably prompted by assessment headings or categories, in a systematic pulling together of a very comprehensive (and probably performance graded) bank of statements to suit all eventualities within a course or level. 4.4 ‘FREEFORM’ COMMENTS This is really about ‘style’ of statement, and in contrast to method 4.3. Examples given by Chris Rust [3] and Win Hornby [5] appear to feature quite ‘personalized’ statements, which presumably have been written by a particular lecturer for a particular purpose or event, but have nevertheless obviously been found very appropriate for re-use on other occasions. This method would seem to suit feedback in fairly restricted work scope situations, perhaps where a group of students were all pursuing the same activity. It might be difficult to make it work where students were pursuing different design projects (as at some levels of the PDE course) or for generic use across different courses. What is notable about the examples given is that some of the statements are quite long, offering a considerable amount of advice to the student. 4.5 GRADED STATEMENTS Given that feedback should be accurate, a valid suspicion of statement banks could be that they might not offer sufficiently refined or focused wording for a particular situation. It might be possible to address this shortcoming by constructing carefully-worded and graded ‘echelons’ of comments. For example, one of PDE’s assessment forms looks at the students’ ability to define requirements clearly. The following illustration is simplistic in the extreme (one would hope to offer rather less terse and rather more comprehensive help!) but shows how a bank might offer a graded list of comments to choose from.

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CLEAR DEFINITION OF REQUIREMENTS Your definition of requirements is extremely clear. Your definition of requirements is very clear. Your definition of requirements is clear. Your definition of requirements is fairly clear. Your definition of requirements needs to be clearer. Your definition of requirements needs to be much clearer.

The methodical compilation system (4.3) would obviously lend itself as a basis for this, but Sucha Sandhu [6] shows examples of statements which are graded by level of performance within each category, but use distinctive and ‘freeform’ language. 4.6 ‘ON THE FLY’ COMPILATION One might speculate whether statements could be constructed during the process of marking work. Markers might deal with, say, anticipated high, medium and low performers, and record the feedback remarks used. These would then be used for the remainder of the group, but with other remarks added as required. It is suspected that, as the process continued, fewer new comments would have to be added. For consistency in use of language, it might be necessary to revisit the first work marked (but conversely this might be seen as unfair, even if the work was not actually re-marked). 4.7 ORGANIZATION OF STATEMENTS Design projects of any complexity could require a large number of feedback comments, and for rapid selection they would need to be well-organized. It is assumed that most marking schemes will consider student activity under criteria or categories. These can then form a ready basis for cataloguing existing statements, or as a prompt for compiling them from scratch. There would seem to be two primary structures for categorizing comments: • By assessment grades. For example, statements giving feedback on all the different project activities at ‘Very Good’ grade would be grouped together. • By work activities. This would take each particular activity and group together statements covering the full range of performance levels.

5 HOW MIGHT STATEMENT BANKS BE USED? As already noted, if time to compile feedback is to be minimized, how statement banks are used will be critical. The following list offers some possible alternatives.

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• The simplest technique is to give students a copy of the complete bank, with the relevant comments ticked (it is assumed comments would be organized under headings). This is the technique used by Sucha Sandhu [6]. • An alternative is to number each comment, and record relevant numbers on the students’ feedback sheets. They then use their own copy of the full bank to ‘decode’ the numbers. This is described by Chris Rust [3]. • Where assessment forms are compiled on computer, statements can be copied from a ‘bank’ document and ‘pasted’ in to relevant space on the form. This could be slightly cumbersome (requires a good-sized monitor screen if two detailed documents are to open side-by-side). No doubt a higher-tech system could insert comments automatically from a database. • An appealing system, delivering feedback which appears much more personalized, is described by Win Hornby [5]. Here, the marker starts with a full statement bank for each student and deletes irrelevant statements. What then appears to happen (although not specifically described) is that the spaces between the remaining comments are deleted, closing them up to form continuous text. Statements are also ‘tailored’ where appropriate.

6 ANTICIPATED BENEFITS OF STATEMENT BANKS • By far the most obvious advantage is the increased speed with which appropriate feedback wording could be arrived at. • Increased speed is not only experienced in the recording of feedback, but in devising what to say. Because feedback can be drawn from a collection of pre-considered, carefully-worded and graded comments, the all-to-familiar (and time-consuming) experience of cudgeling the brain for the appropriate statement could largely be eliminated. • Increased accuracy, because statements have been carefully considered and worded beforehand. • Comments can be quite long, giving the opportunity for comprehensive feedback with no increase in writing activity. • Fairness: identical performance between students will be indentically-described. This eliminates the possibility of individual interpretation of slightly different remarks which are intended to say the same thing. • Making the full bank available to students would show them the range of possible remarks which could be made about them, and permit them a better understanding of their individual performance level against a graded scale. • Increased transparency in the marking process. • A ready introduction to feedback language for non-regular staff. • Consistency of language between different markers, and the same marker on different occasions. • Overall, statement banks appear to allow for considered thinking once only, writing once only, but delivery many times, with potential productivity gains. • It is suspected that the structure which statement banks could introduce to feedback might also inform and assist the efficiency of the marking process.

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7 POTENTIAL DRAWBACKS OF STATEMENT BANKS • Suspicion that they may not be able to accurately convey a message without considerable ‘tailoring’ (it is assumed that there is always the option to tailor existing statements or to add further ‘non-bank’ statements). • A perception that feedback is insufficiently personal. • Students will compare notes, and any similarity between statements will be picked up. This could lead to a disregard for feedback because it is perceived as somehow ‘cheaply’and ‘mechanically’ compiled. • Possibility of students working ‘strategically’ if too much of how they should operate is summarized in words (e.g. by providing them with a full copy of the bank). • Difficulty in making a generic bank work where students’ projects are very individual (e.g. when self-selected) – requiring at least part of the feedback to be compiled in traditional written form. However, it is never envisaged that a statement bank would be the sole method of marking all work, and additional individual remarks would bring back the personal touch. It is suspected that successful introduction of a statement bank system might take some explanation to students about how it works – i.e. that it is to their benefit because it can allow markers to spend more time per student actually marking (as opposed to recording); also that it helps to reinforce fairness. 8 CONCLUSION This study has increased the author’s optimism that, despite initial reservations, carefullyconstructed statement banks can provide quality in compiling feedback while offering real productivity gains. While studio-based design projects may require a greater diversity of language and expression than some of the fields in which the technique is already proving useful, the qualitative aspect of marking design work may mean that careful, pre-considered comments are to be welcomed. While there are undoubtedly some drawbacks to be considered, mainly the perception of loss of personalization, with care in construction and use, the technique appears to have many advantages which make it worth pursuing. The question remains as to how generic statement banks can be – how usable across different levels within a design course or across different courses. It is suspected that they will always be easier to use for feedback on process (i.e. how students do their work) then project content (which could be very individual). The author is enthusiastic about embarking on the next step – the compilation of a working statement bank and its trial in a pilot study within Product Design Engineering at GSA. REFERENCES [1] Race P., The Lecturer’s Toolkit (2nd Edition). Routledge Falmer, London, 2001. [2] Race P. (ed.), 2000 Tips for Lecturers. Kogan Page, London, 1999.

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[3] Rust C., LTSN Generic Centre Assessment Series, No.12, A Briefing on Assessment of Large Groups, Learning and Teaching Support Network, York, 2001, p.16. [4] Perrie Y., Effective Use of Assessment Methods. Continual Professional Development section of The Pharmaceutical Journal, Vol. 271, 2003, pp.86-88. [5] Hornby W., Enhancing Effectiveness and Efficiency in Student Feedback. Case study in download publication ASS096, Enhancing Student Learning Through Effective Formative Feedback, Higher Education Academy, 2004. [6] Sandhu S., The Use of Statement Banks as a Means of Assessing Large Groups in Accounting. London Metropolitan University, Investigations in university teaching and learning, Vol. 2 (1), 2004, pp.49-55.

OTHER GEOMETRIES_OBJECTS_SPACES Henriette Bier* Departments of Design Methods and Public Building, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT An experimental approach to Digital Design has been implemented in an international workshop at the University of Studies Roma Tre. The workshop explored the influence of computer programs and their intrinsic morphogenetic features on designs based on non-Euclidean geometries. Keywords: Digital design and manufacturing, non-Euclidean and NURBS geometries, design methodologies and education 1 INTRODUCTION As a field of studies in architecture Digital Design introduces the use of computer to students not only pragmatic, but also conceptual, as an instrument to explore more complex systems of organization. A case study - N. Denari’s project The Wall - serves as a framework for a 3D modelling survey with emphasis on implementation of 3D constructions and editing operations as well as examination, interpretation and evaluation of 3D modelling tools and their intrinsic morphogenetic features. These refer to features and characteristics based on the geometry of continuous curves and surfaces, mathematically described as NURBS: Non-Uniform Rational BSplines. The ability to control effortlessly their shape by manipulating control points implies rigorousity in understanding and applying rules to generate space, rules to subdivision, manipulate and transform space. 2 STRUCTURE AND METHODOLOGY The workshop developed within the Delft University of Technology has been structured in three parts: [2.1] Other Geometries, [2.2] Objects and [2.3] Spaces. *Delft University of Technology, Departments of Design Methods and Public Building, Berlageweg 1, 2628 CR Delft, The Netherlands, Phone: 0031 1527 84 184, Fax: 0031 15 278 727, Email: [email protected]

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2.1 OTHER GEOMETRIES The workshop started with the analysis of the N. Denari-project, which has been designed to separate a big space in two: the studio and the shop area. Serving simultaneously as SEPARATRIX and storage The Wall [Figure 1] represents a space within a space. In contrast to modernism, contemporary architecture employs non-Euclidean geometries, which are different from Euclidean geometries describing both hyperbolic and elliptic geometries. Although validated since the 19th century, non-Euclidean geometries can be effectively used in design only since computer power allows their modelling. The workshop focuses in its first part on the development of design skills by using 3D modelling tools based on non-Euclidean namely NURBS geometries, whereas the computer is employed not as a

Figure 1. N. Denari: The Wall. representation but as a design tool. Even though N. Denari did not use NURBS and developed the curvilinear shape from circles meaning that every time the curvature changes, every single circle centre, radius, tangent has to be redesigned and repositioned [Figure 2] the workshop focuses on NURBS, specifically emphasizing the difference between curves from circles and NURBS. 2.2 OBJECTS The second part of the workshop introduces specific methodologies of digital design: while Denari’s object represents a template to study curvilinear geometries in architecture, its decomposition into a hierarchy of sub-shapes allows for any parts of the shape to be transformed within a system of rules, which pre-defines a design strategy. From analysis of the original to development of a replica [Figure 3] and a mutant, the process is based on the exploration of NURBS geometries and development of alternative designs through trans-FORMATIONS of the digitally modelled object into so called MUTANTS. A mutant is an organism, or new genetic character arising or resulting from an instance of mutation, which is a sudden structural change within a gene or chromosome of an organism resulting in the creation of a new character or trait not found

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in the [parental] type. The gene or chromosome of the Denari-object can be seen as the curve. The transformation of the curve-based-geometry implies operations such as repetition, segmentation, differentiation, diversification, more important deformation and rules such as symmetry-asymmetry, regular-irregular, repetitive-nonrepetitive. If in this context can be talked about a paradigm shift based on the influence of digital technologies, than this shift can be described in the methodology of NURBS manipulation: in opposition to modular, repetitive architecture developed by using grids and proportions based on functional and formal rules, curvilinear architecture is being developed by generating space through following the movement of the body in space based on ergonomic principles. The workshop [implemented] this methodology rather intuitively generating/moulding the double-curved skin in accordance to the allocated function and the proposed program. Basic idea is to generate space by tracing the

Figure 2. Curves from circle segments.

Figure 3. TransFormations. movement of the human body whereas, the motion map defines the boundaries of the volume within which architecture can emerge. The volumetrical outlines of the body in motion establish an initial framework to develop spaces employing movement studies based on ergonomics. NURBS geometries introduce the curvilinear-smooth in architecture allowing not only for design but also for fabrication changing fundamentally our understanding for architecture. Architecture is not anymore about planar elements developed in a repetitive,

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modular way but it is rather about complex, digitally designed and fabricated free-form geometries. Therefore, the third part of the workshop introduces students to implementation of the digital into physical model: 2.3 SPACES The third part focuses on the development of a coherent architectural space and generation of physical models by means of contouring. Contouring is a process in which supporting primary and secondary structure is generated by sectioning the digital object. This process, basically, emulates the real fabrication process and informs students about the implementation of complex non-Euclidean geometries in architecture. While the physical model [Figure 4] has been considered a working not a representation model, which means that input coming from the model has been taken in consideration to eventually change the design, the digital model contains all data confirming the conception that architects do not produce merely drawings but produce digital data, which becomes single source of design and fabrication [Kolarevic, 2003] Furthermore, digital systems not only inform the design process but also the fabrication process, challenging the MODERNIST concept of standardization, introducing the concept of mass-customisation, which implies, as Slessor [1997] put it, that uniqueness is now as easy as economic to achieve as repetition

Figure 4. Physical model. 3 CONCLUSION The workshop demonstrates that computer programs and their intrinsic morphogenetic features are determining and influencing not only the design but also the design process. While experiments in digital design offer clues to HOW software influences design and design processes, new design strategies can be established by gaining expertise in the creative use of software. Digital design requires appropriate teaching concepts to introduce students to digital techniques and design methodologies, offering them clues to

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evaluate, to compare and to consciously decide about the use of software in the design process. The workshop employs a two-phase procedure: [1] DESIGN: 3D modelling, rendering, visualizing, [2] FABRICATION: contouring, which implies building a physical model by extracting sections from the digital model. Based on the premises that [1] the students had no preliminary knowledge of the employed 3D modelling computer program and [2] the design task was restricted to the transformation of an object designed by Denari, the workshop established a link between design and software on the geometrical-formal level and explored how function shapes form. Students implemented 3D modelling experiments revealing intrinsic morphogenetic features of computer programs and their influence on design. The experiments implied generation and control of complex double-curved geometries, whereas deformation has been the major focus. Control of deformation and manipulation of the NURBS geometry has been achieved by establishing a methodology in which the volumetrical outlines of the body in motion generate functional spaces. Even though applied intuitively this methodology established rules to generate and transform space. Therefore, the workshop not only assessed 3D modelling tools and their intrinsic morphogenetic features but redefined strategies of design and proposed their implementation in education. Furthermore, the use of a case study, such as N. Denari’s design has been supporting the development of an initial understanding not only for design based on curvilinear shapes but also for the difference between curves based on circles and NURBS geometries. It further set a standard offering inspiration and support in regard of designing double-curved surfaces. Nevertheless, it offered a primitive to start the 3D modelling with, connecting the learning of the software with the development of the replica, reinforcing the idea, that software taught from within a design task is beneficial for the associative learning process. The absence of a CNC [Computer Numerically Controlled] machine, which would have enabled direct generation of a physical model from the digital model, has not been detrimental. On the contrary, it allowed insight in the transfer process from digital to material. It, furthermore, informed about structural characteristics such as stable-instable, since the physical model required a specific amount of contours in vertical and horizontal position [Figure 5] in order to achieve a certain structural stability. The manufacturing process consisted of three distinct parts: [1] generation of contours from the digital model, [2] printing of contours at scale, and [3] cutting out contours from cardboard and assembling them. It emulated the real fabrication process and offered insight and expertise in the design and fabrication of double-curved surfaces in architecture.

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Figure 5. Contours. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research has benefited from the contribution of M. Gulyas, K. Orehounig and E.-M. Streit from the University of Vienna and B. Rupp from the University of Innsbruck. REFERENCES [1] Denari N., Gyroscopic Horizons: Prototypical Buildings and Other Works, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999. [2] Kolarevic B., Architecture in the Digital Age – Design and Manufacturing, Spon Press, New York, 2003. [3] Slessor C., Atlantic Star, Architectural Review: Museums, 1210, Emap, London, 1997, pp. 3042.

CRAFTS PRAXIS AS A DESIGN RESOURCE Sarah Kettley* Human-Computer Interaction Research Group, Napier University, UK. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Much of the recent, and indeed historical discourse in the applied arts has been focused on the nature of craft as a process, and the modification of this process through the appropriation of new technologies. Little has been said, however, on the subject of the alternative values and experiences which craft may be able to contribute to the design of technological products. This paper seeks to analyze contemporary craft for its potential as a design resource with especial relevance to the field of HumanComputer Interaction. Contemporary craft is differentiated from the more traditional craft, and the importance of its consideration is underlined with reference to Actor Network Theory. The goal of creating artifacts for agentive meaning making is proposed, and what it means to apply a crafts approach to design is elucidated, based on a series of semi-structured interviews with practitioners at Edinburgh College of Art. Finally, a preliminary set of design principles is presented for further discussion. Keywords: craft, embodied design, experiential design 1 INTRODUCTION The range of inter-related issues facing the Human-Computer Interaction community include a shift from primarily visual to increasingly multi-modal paradigms, as well as a need to design for ‘the everyday’ as demographic segmentation begins to appear inadequate. Consumer trends towards the ‘authentic’ echo HCI’s current expansion to take account of emotional and experiential design research, and challenge the ‘seamless’ framework of new systems and technologies design [1], [2], [3], [4]. As such, the dispersion of computing systems from the desktop into the world around us offers designers the opportunity to deliver more, rather than less tangible artefacts, which may become more richly present rather than invisible and abstracted from us. Similarly, as unsustainable patterns of consumption become an area of concern to all communities of *Napier University, Human-Computer Interaction Research Group, 10 Colinton Road, Edinburgh, UK, Tel: +44 131 455 2790 [email protected], http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/~cs179

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design, empathic design would also seem to offer a useful approach to embedding values, which may extend a product’s lifespan [5]. HCI and interactive product design highlight the issue of the relationship between form and function, simply because computers do things. The ideal form of the Bauhaus appears logical when a user centred design methodology is used, and the goal of good fit through affordances is central, but quickly becomes insufficient when computers may do almost anything [6], [7]. However, if the product is recast as a ‘context for experience’ [8], then it becomes possible to treat computation as a medium rather than a means to a functional end, allowing ‘a meaningful relationship between physical from and computation’ to emerge [9]. This has also been described as designing an ‘expressional’, rather than a functional artefact [10], and expression and potential for meaning are of particular interest to wearable technologies. Actor Network Theory holds that artefacts, as well as humans, act as agents in the creation of meaning - in other words, everything we use, wear, do and say defines us, creating a dynamic system of social meaning [11]. It is not the job of these artifacts to disappear, rather they play an integral role in the experience of the socially active human, and we cannot attribute meaning to something that cannot be engaged with. For consumers to be able to engage with new technologies it is important that design makes them somehow accessible; instead of closing off avenues for appropriation through rigorous user-centred design, the artefact must come closer to being an artwork, open for subjective reading and agentive meaning making [12]. With its roots in the functional, and its process in the expressional, then, contemporary craft may become a design resource for the production of meaningful interactive products, and the next section deals with the process of the contemporary craftsperson, in an attempt to draw out more generalisable principles for design. 2 UNPACKING CRAFT Historically, of course, craft has played different roles in relation to both design and art; now analyses deal with the porosity of borders between these fields of practice, and close attention is being paid to both the experiences of production, and the cultural constructs surrounding products [13], [14], [15], [16]. Crucially, craft is no longer an unconscious activity borne of necessity, but a “form of practice” uniquely “situated between art and life” [14]. To attempt a more detailed description of contemporary craft practice, semi structured interviews were conducted with five practitioners around the following core questions: • Please describe your working process? • What kind of values do you feel is embodied in these processes? • How do the objects produced convey these values? These interviews have been deliberately confined to the craft genre of contemporary jewellery. The participants have all graduated within the last three years, and are currently involved in post-graduate diplomas, masters or artist’s residencies. Four are graduates of Edinburgh College of Art, the other from Birmingham. The resulting protocols were combined with transcripts and papers resulting from presentations by more established makers [17], [18], [19].

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As Malcolm McCullough wrote: “there remains a realm where scientific production cannot go, where mechanized industry finds too little demand to go, and where artistic discourses dare not go… there we find craft.” [20]. If, as suggested in the introduction, the demand for the ‘authentic’ and the experiential is rising significantly [3], [5], mechanized production may now find motivation to go there (‘mechanized production’ being any pre-deterministic design discipline, including HCI and interactive product design). The question is how the values of craft may be preserved in the process? 2.1 PROCESS: VISUAL RESEARCH AND MATERIAL Craft design can be described simplistically as a three-step process: a period of visual research, the development of that material into a final design, followed by the realization of that design. Successful contemporary craft achieves something more than this, though, and it is this element that distinguishes it from good design. The respondents sought to articulate this in their way of working, and related it to wider frameworks of consumption and economic structure. There was an acknowledgement that drawing as a primary source of information was important, but more significantly, these practitioners do not take the step between the visual research and the finished design literally. Instead, drawing is seen as a way of engaging deeply with source material, source objects being kept around the workspace for their ‘essence’. Those who had tried explicitly to develop drawings found that they sacrificed spontaneity, introducing distance between themselves and the source material, and between themselves and the material being manipulated. In this situation, existing visual language instead of growing personal expression became predominant and all were happier allowing source material to permeate their thinking, emerging later “through their hands”. This can be described as a process of internalization in contrast to a “copying of surface strategies”, in which the drawing as an object is not the important outcome. Instead, drawing is a technique for entering into an embodied ontological relationship, or synthesis, with the world [16]. 2.2 MATERIAL For some, this research stage was spent almost entirely with the material being manipulated to form the final object (raising interesting questions as to the practice of modeling with alternative materials). This was seen to impart a particular tacit spatial awareness only to be gained in “playing about with things three dimensionally”. For one respondent, the work was explicitly about “keeping things in the finished piece that normally people make an effort to get rid of”. She described this as “like having the sketchbook and the finished product all in one”, and the “honesty” of making the process accessible in this way can be found in other important contemporary work [21], [22]. Material was also seen to be the source of what has been described as the metaphor and myth of transformation [23], where the agentive power felt by the maker is mirrored in the experience of the owner through the knowledge of the transformation of “a useless lump of metal, or a piece of plastic” into “something beautiful, wearable, useful…”. Further, the potential for change is generalisable by the owner to other areas of life, and thus choosing to buy craft objects may not only be perceived as political, but also as personally empowering.

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2.3 VALUE The challenge embodied by the craftsperson engaged in making a new work was seen by all respondents as the “strongest point of craft’, its “greatest benefit”, essential both for successful idiomatic expression, and for a metaphorical value related to that of transformation. Market forces and the need to supply many similar items were felt to erode this, as the need to identify and solve successive problems was diminished, to the extent that one practitioner said she would “rather make my money some other way”, than make what is known by galleries as “production jewellery”. Finally, the ability to challenge thinking, and to take risks, was felt to be almost a responsibility of the craftsperson. This is again a metaphorical element from which the cultural construction of craft as essentially economically marginal and thus political in nature, has emerged. In the literature the domestic nature of craft is also raised, as an historical factor which allows critical work to take part in ‘real life’ and so to be a kind of ‘intervention’, in the fine art meaning of the word, closing that gap between how a thing is first seen, and how it is imagined in use [14], [24]. To be able to do this, though, the work needs to encompass the familiar and the provocative through the skilful manipulation of medium with an ‘aboutness’ which often differentiates art from design [25], and at odds with the ideal of cognitive ‘seamlessness’. 3 TECHNOLOGY There were two main concerns with technology: commitment to the original expression, and a loss of the explorative process. Technology may destroy expression found by other means, but it simultaneously affords new ranges of expression. This remained an unknown for the younger respondents, yet formed a central part of the discourse for the more mature makers. Although not an understanding reserved solely for new technologies, it has historically been their sudden appearance that typically results in a reappraisal of craft values and processes [26]. Dehumanization was felt to be due to the removal of the work from the immediate realm of the maker, for example, one of the younger makers forges small components which could be cast, but this was seen as something which someone else would do, and not just someone, but “somewhere”, outside of the workshop environment, whereas, of course, this process may also be appropriated by the maker for their own ends. When this happens, the “something in the putting the hammer to the metal” may be equally present in the control of the centrifugal casting process, or in the pouring of the molten material into the mould. Silversmith Gilbert Riedelbauch sees a more positive alliance between craft and technology, one that stretches from craft’s origins into its future. He holds that craft lies in the control of the artist “over the whole digital making process, from design to production” [27]. Similarly, Janne Kyttanen of Freedom of Creation Design sees their work as provoking the Rapid Prototyping industry, in using the process to manufacture finished pieces rather than prototypes, and Helen Rees wrote in 1997 that “even the most ardent champions of craft would agree that manufacturing is not necessarily a dehumanizing process” [28]. What these concerns did find resonance with was Pye’s analysis of ‘diversity’, that is, the levels of effective range of the formal elements within a design: “every little incident of form

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and surface and every departure from regularity however minute will begin to tell as a formal element at some particular range” [29]. 4 DESIGN PRINCIPLES Craft is “without design” [16], and yet is essential to design in finding “quality in matter” [30], but what can be taken from this rich and subjective information? Is it possible to abstract something from contemporary craft, into another culturally constituted domain, without losing any of these qualities? The set of principles here lays out the key features that emerged from this work. It is quite probable that elements of these can be identified in interactive product design as it stands, and it should be stressed that this list is merely intended as a spur for further discussion and practice based research. • the risky non-predetermined process results in original visual language, seen to embody particular political and metaphorical values • internalization of material – both source material and the material being worked – is essential for the development of original visual language • this internalization is achieved through action – techniques include drawing, direct manipulation of material, and repeated exposure to the material • ‘material’ may include traditional materials, technologies, processes and methods, each having their own affordances and constraints • control over formal expressive elements at diverse effective ranges is dependant on an embodied understanding of the process of production • signifiers of craft are not to be confused with the original visual language which emerges only from the internalization of material • the embodied nature of the design and making process results in an embodied relationship for the consumer with the artifact (that is, both are exploratory and both create meaning through action)

5 CONCLUSION ‘Craft’ as a cultural construction produces objects perceived as ‘authentic’ by consumers, and elements of authenticity are understood to be implicit in the production processes, materials, workmanship, exclusivity and authorship of these objects [23]: each is a strand in the embodied experience in the consumption of craft artifacts, informing narratives of social value. Which of these then leads to extended product lifespans, or to a more intimate experience of ownership, remains an interesting research question. In the meantime, the increasing availability of flexible manufacturing techniques means that craft and design are becoming more closely related, as craftspeople are able to produce beyond the human scale, and designers are able to economically justify producing unique pieces. By outlining the principles of current contemporary craft practice above, it is hoped that any designer or craftsperson will be able to assess more fully the manner in which they work, with a view to being able to produce socially meaningful interactive artifacts.

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REFERENCES [1] Norman, D., Emotional Design. Basic Books, New York, 2004. [2] Baurley, S., Interactive and experiential design in smart textile products and applications. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Vol. 8, Issue 3-4, 2004, pp.274-281. [3] Lewis, D. & Bridger, D., Authenticity; The Soul of the New Consumer. Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London, 2000. [4] Weiser, M., The World is not a Desktop. Interactions; January 1994, pp. 7-8. [5] van Hinte, E., Eternally Yours – Visions on Product Endurance. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1997. [6] Norman, D., The Design of Everyday Things. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000. [7] Dourish, P., The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2001. [8] Hummels, C., Gestural Design Tools: prototypes, experiments and scenarios. Doctoral thesis, Delft University of Technology, 2000. Accessed at http://studiolab.io.tudelft.nl/hummels/publications on 05/04/05. [9] Orth, M., Sculpted Computational Objects with Smart and Active Computing Materials. PhD Thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. Accessed at http://%20web.media.mit.edu/~morth/thesis/thesis.html on 28/08/02. [10] Hallnäs, L. & Redström, J., From Use to Presence; On the Expressions and Aesthetics of Everyday Computational Things. ACM Transactions of Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI), Vol. 9, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 106 - 124. [11] Ihde, D., Bodies in Technology. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002. [12] Smith, D., Tradition and Identity. Reproduced in Harrison, C. & Wood, P. (Eds). Art in Theory 1900-2000; An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, 2003, pp.766-767. [13] Greenhalgh, P., The Persistence of Craft. A & C Black, London, 2003. [14] Mazanti, L., Re-reading the Functional. Proceedings of Challenging Craft, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, 8-10 September 2004. [15] Veiteberg, J., A Craft Intervention in a Contemporary Art Arena. Proceedings of Challenging Craft, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, 8-10 September 2004. [16] Wilson, S., Craft Not Design! Proceedings of Challenging Craft, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, 8-10 September 2004. [17] Cousens, C., A Sense of Place. Craft in Dialogue, IASPIS, September 4th 2004, Konstepidemin, Goteborg, Sweden. URL: http://www.iaspis.com/craft/filer/cousen.rtf [18] Maker, Wearer, Viewer: talks by Hannah Gordon, Jack Cunningham and x. 12th April 2005, Glasgow School of Art. [19] Fools Gold: presentation given by Ruudt Peters. 23rd March 2005, Edinburgh College of Art. [20] McCullough, M., Abstracting Craft – The Practiced Digital Hand. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998. [21] Cross, S., In 100% Proof exhibition catalogue.Flow Gallery, London, 2001. [22] ten Hompel, S., In Fabian, A. & ten Hompel, S., A Field of Silver: Silver in a Field. London Guildhall University, London, 2002. [23] Kälviäinen, M., The Significance of ‘Craft’ Qualities in Creating Experiential Design Products. The Design Journal, Vol. 3, Issue 3, 2000, pp.4-15. [24] Dunne, A., Hertzian Tales. RCA CRD Publications, London, 1999. [25] Eldridge, R., An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2003. [26] Hughes, P., A History of Engagement: The Troubled Relationship Between Craft and Technology. Proceedings of Challenging Craft, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, 8-10 September 2004. [27] Riedelbauch, G., A Match Made in Heaven. Proceedings of Challenging Craft, Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, 8-10 September 2004.

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[28] Rees, H., Patterns of Making: Thinking and Making in Industrial Design. In Dormer, P., (ed.) The Culture of Craft: Status and Future, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997, pp.116-136. [29] Pye, D., The Nature and Art of Workmanship. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968. [30] Press, M., Crafting a Sustainable Future from Today’s Waste. The Interdisciplinary Journal of Design and Contextual Studies. Issues 5 & 6, 1996. URL: http://www.codesign.co.uk/mpress.htm.

SUPPORTING REFLECTION AND PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING THROUGH THE USE OF LAULIMA Hilary Grierson* Research Fellow, DIDET Project, Centre for Academic Practice (CAP), University of Strathclyde, UK. Andrew Wodehouse, William Ion, Neal Juster Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Over the past two years LauLima, a web-based groupware product [1] has been developed to assist engineering design students in the storing, organizing, sharing and using of information in a way which is tailored to the demands of the product design process. In the context of a problembased learning (PBL) [2] collaborative project student teams are expected to solve real life open-ended problems with academic and industry partners’ support. This paper will discuss how the use of LauLima’s tools can support reflection at the various stages of problem-based learning during planning (reflection-for-action), while gathering and discussing resources (reflection-in-action) and when evaluating progress (reflectionon-action). These reflective activities are defined in terms of John Cowan’s model [3] where reflection can occur before action, during action and after action. Keywords: design education, reflection, problem-based learning, industry-based projects, shared workspaces, digital repositories 1. INTRODUCTION One way to improve problem-based learning is to engage students in reflective processes. The work of Schon has been widely recognized in design research [4] as he identifies the importance of reflection for those working in professional practice [5]. Researchers such as Kolb [6] and Cowan have shown that learning can be enhanced when it is organised

*Centre for Academic Practice (CAP), University of Strathclyde, 50 George Street, Glasgow, G1 1QE. tel : 0141-548-4573 email : [email protected]

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around cycles of learning activity and reflection. Cowan distinguishes between 3 types of reflective processes that can contribute to learning and development – reflection-onaction, reflection-in-action and reflection-for-action [3]. Despite the range of VLE systems available, few are being widely used to support PBL [7]. Oliver [8], however, suggests that online technologies can improve students’ critical thinking skills when solving complex problems. He identified three major issues related to Cowan’s reflective model. Students evinced weaknesses in their initial planning and in workflow management - reflection-for-action. It was found that students place too much emphasis on finding information and resources rather than critically evaluating and interpreting these resources in terms of the problem under investigation - reflection-inaction. And, it was identified that students are not good at reflecting back, leading to poor evaluation of progress towards the problem solution - reflection-on-action. In this paper we examine the use of LauLima’s tools in supporting PBL and reflection through Cowan’s reflective processes. 2. CLASS DESIGN Each year, the Department of Design Manufacturing and Engineering Management (DMEM) runs the Strathclyde Product Development Partnership (SPDP) scheme, which enables industry companies to realize projects through collaboration with teams of 4th year product design engineering students and teams of 5th year students made up from the product design engineering, manufacturing and management streams. Each team consists of 3 to 4 students. The class runs from November to May with 2 milestones and a final review. One of its main objectives is to encourage professional, independent thinking in a project context. It is designed to give students opportunities throughout the design process to reflect, e.g. on weekly progress at meetings with supervisors; feedback from industry partners; at crucial points in the design process (milestones); and on their learning through reflective blogs (a new element this year). The purpose of reflection is to raise students’awareness and skills in solving complex problems. Class design aims to improve reflection and support the processes of PBL in SPDP through technological intervention. The system designed to support this activity is a customized version of open-source groupware TikiWiki, now called LauLima (Polynesian for ‘group of people working together’). This provides standard document management facilities including hierarchical file gallery storage; wiki pages (web pages that can be linked together and edited by multiple users); and communication tools (not being examined in this paper). Previous studies have successfully used TikiWiki as a repository for storing, organizing and sharing information & resources at the conceptual stage of design [10] and since then, LauLima has been developed to support more effective shared working and document storage. Groupware has been shown to provide a supportive environment for collaborative learning [11]. The SPDP class encourages students to take ownership and management of all parts of a project and requires them to maintain a presence on the web using LauLima, creating a team site, a project log (diary), online minutes of meetings and a project file (of project-related documents).

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Table 1. Tools in LauLima to support reflection in problem-based learning Types of Stages of Problem-Based Reflection (based Learning/Activities in SPDP on Cowan’s reflective model)

Tools in LauLima

1. Complex industry-based problems presented. Students formed into teams.

Shared Workspace - Class wiki pages (homepage) Class resources 2. Problem discussed. Goal setting. Share Workflow Management Reflection-forcommon understanding of problem. tools - Team site, (wikis), action Organizing teams. Meet with company. Project log, Gantt chart, Project planning. Meetings/Minutes template 3. Research issues - gathering project data Digital repository tools – Reflection-inand resources relating to problem. Building Project file Hierarchical file action project knowledge. galleries Wikis 4. Resources evaluated in teams in relation Discussion tools – Instant Reflection-onto problem and evaluation of progress. messaging Wikis (as notes action pages) Reflective Blog 5. Possible actions, recommendations and Discussion tools Wiki pages solutions generated. Online presentations The above cycle is repeated (stages 2-4) until each ‘problem’ has been framed adequately and all issues have been addressed at all stages of the project: market, specification, concept design, detail design and manufacture [9].

The implementation of LauLima in the SPDP class to improve reflection and support the various stages of problem-based learning and SPDP activities has been summarized in Table 1. The middle column of Table 1 depicts the problem-based learning activities which occur at all design stages in SPDP. The left hand column shows where in the problem-based process reflective activities occur defined in terms of Cowan’s reflective model [3] and the right hand column notes the tools used in LauLima to support reflection and PBL. 3. EVALUATION METHODS 78 students took the SPDP class; 42 students in 4th year and 36 students in 5th year. Teams were formed of 3 or 4 students; 12 teams in 4th year and 9 teams in 5th year. Evaluation was conducted through analysis of team wiki sites, project logs, polls, student reflective blogs and observation in class. 4. FINDINGS Below we report the main use of LauLima’s tools to support reflection and help address the issues of PBL in industry-based projects.

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4.1 TEAM WIKI SITES Students noted that through the use of team wiki sites they were able to organize and manage their project work; were more aware of events in the project’s development; could share project development more easily; and were more able to reflect on stored information and learn from their experiences. However, several teams found the sites can be time consuming to maintain and the information difficult to navigate, and suggested spending more time at the beginning of the project planning and organizing the site and storage to best support project management during the design process. Supervisors could monitor teams’ progress via the wiki sites and intervene where necessary. Unfortunately few industry partners used the sites blaming time constraints, busy working schedules, difficulty in finding information and limited access to computers or outdated computer systems. 4.2 PROJECT LOGS Students were required to keep a week-by-week wiki page log. Examination of the project logs showed each week student teams had recorded topics for investigation; allocated tasks to team members; recorded decisions made and tasks completed; and progress against their project plan and goals. Many students reported that preparing the logs was time consuming but that the benefits in maintaining it and its use outweighed the additional time spent. Viewing of the logs kept students and supervisors informed of team project progress and promoted reflection through interaction and discussion around the log’s content at meetings. Actions were highlighted and were less likely to be repeated or forgotten about. In some cases the project logs linked to information in the project file creating a dynamic project record. 4.3 PROJECT FILE - DIGITAL REPOSITORY AND SHARED WORKSPACE Students were encouraged to keep project information in the digital domain. Students confirmed previous findings using digital repositories and shared workspaces [12] that having all project information in one central location allows more flexible working patterns, suiting team work; reduces document loss; offers a secure store; reduces need for hard copies; and saves time in subsequently searching for information. We found that some teams used LauLima reactively rather than proactively. This was attributed to a number of factors: time; varied levels of computer experience within teams; and long upload and download times particularly from home. Initially students had found LauLima difficult to use, in particular the permissions assignments in the file galleries, but admitted through continued project use the functions became more familiar and easy to use. Students reported that they still found organizing information hard and this is an ongoing issue highlighted by the DIDET project [13] that is currently being addressed in all years of DMEM at Strathclyde University.

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4.4 MINUTE TEMPLATES Students found online minutes of meetings (e.g. supervisor’s, industry partner’s and team meetings, etc.) not only provided a permanent record of project happenings but allowed teams to reflect on what they had done and plan for action. Minute taking, a common occurrence in industry, is not a practice students necessarily engage in. Most teams used a standard template e.g. uploaded Word documents or Wiki pages for easy access and viewing. 4.5 REFLECTIVE BLOGS A reflective blog was distributed through the LauLima system to each student following the 1st milestone to make students reflect on their use of the system and identify what had been learnt to that point in the project. Additionally, by identifying negative learning experiences and suggesting how these might be overcome students were evaluating their experiences and putting in place actions to improve learning. A 2nd reflective blog, after the 2nd milestone, required students to describe 1 or 2 key learning experiences in relation to professional practice. Sharing of these experiences exposed the students to numerous real-life industry situations and can be used in subsequent classes. The blogs revealed that students found good communication to be vital and that information had to be well managed, organized and flow freely in order to be shared. Supervisors’ access to the reflective blogs offered a ‘better picture’ of their understanding and what was being learnt and interventions could more readily happen to facilitate these difficulties during the project. 5. DISCUSSION Students are weak at initial planning and workflow management stages, e.g. they often begin their investigation of the problem without effective goal setting and strategy planning [14]. Through the use of the team wiki sites and project logs, students could plan various stages of the project, e.g. making the project brief explicit and sharing an understanding of the design specification (early PBL stages). A common issue in PBL is managing the project workflow, documenting progress in terms of problem goals and making sure that all students share a common understanding of those goals and the subgoals that define the problem domain (reflection-for action). This requires that students record goals, reflect on progress, receive feedback from the tutor and reset goals, plans and strategies based on that feedback etc. This kind of workflow management is quite difficult to achieve using paper based systems especially given that students often cannot attend project meetings and access to project resources may be unequal. An aspect of PBL crucial to the steady progress of a project is the gathering and discussing of resources (stage 3) where students are required to source, create and manage useful materials and reflect upon the relevance of these resources to the problem domain (reflection-in-action). Students were required to use the digital repository to store and share project resources. Some resources were generated by students themselves e.g.

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concept sketches, minutes of meetings, actions, design decisions, etc. while others were sourced externally (usually more formal), e.g. standards, specifications, manufacturer’s product data, etc. and uploaded or hyper-linked into the wiki pages. The value to students of a well managed central access point for resources was that those within project teams could find information relatively easily - particularly useful where resources are derived from a variety of sources. The repository also supported learning by providing tools that enabled students to collaborate in the building of a shared representation of the design problem. During the project, students created linked wiki pages that illustrated their conceptual thinking. This knowledge structuring is important because the more opportunities students have to actively interrelate concepts, ideas, facts and rules with each other and with prior knowledge, the deeper the understanding and learning [15]. In practice, however, students tend to focus on finding content materials, rather than on evaluating their significance relative to the problem in hand and project progress [12]. This reflection-on-action, relating to stage 4 of PBL, can be aided by a digital repository allowing resources to be shared and viewed from a central location. This meant teams could view the information they had gathered, created and organised at various stages of the project to provide milestone solutions (stage 5) e.g. a final product design specification or a set of concept proposals. This made it easier for teams to assess how well they had met set goals and agreed on future direction. From the supervisor’s perspective, this makes it easy to identify teams and students in particular difficulty and to take action to facilitate their progress. The internal communication systems of LauLima also proved useful for teams to discuss progress: they could communicate using the shout box facility to make instant decisions, use the internal messaging system to leave asynchronous messages and use wiki pages as shared dynamic documents to be updated when required. Again, supervisors were included in these communication loops to help provide support when required. 6. CONCLUSION One of the main objectives of the SPDP class is to encourage professional independent thinking in a project context. With varying degrees of success in each team, students have reported that LauLima’s tools have enabled them to achieve this; share a common understanding of the project problem; reflect on project goals and progress; and, manage workflow and operate as an efficient team. There can be limitations with systems such as LauLima, for example time taken to upload/download documents; some students still resist sharing information and ideas even within teams; and, the danger of having an overly prescriptive design process which could be problematic for innovative thinking. Further work with LauLima in classes should go someway to solving these issues and other studies are also planned for example re-use of design resources (product and process-related) within project contexts.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to colleagues Dr. David Nicol (University of Strathclyde) and Professor Allison Littlejohn (University of Dundee) for contributions relating to reflection and PBL. This work is part of a larger investigation funded by JISC/NSF entitled ‘Distributed Innovative Design, Education and Teamworking’ (DIDET) and has partners at the Universities of Strathclyde (UK) and Stanford (US). REFERENCES [1] http://onlinelearning.dmem.strath.ac.uk/laulima/tiki-index.php [2] Savin-Baden, M., Problem-based learning in Higher Education: Untold Stories. London: SRHE/ Open University Press, 2000 [3] Cowan, J., On becoming an innovative university teacher: reflection in action. London: SRHE & Open University Press, 1998 [4] Valkenburgh, R. & Dorst, K. The Reflective Practice of Design Teams, Design Studies, Vol. 19, Issue 2, 1998, pp 249-271. [5] Schon, D., The Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1983 [6] Kolb, D., Experiential Learning: on the science of learning and development. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984 [7] Britain, S. and Liber, O, A framework for pedagogical evaluation of virtual learning environments, JISC commissioned report, 2004 [8] Oliver, R., Exploring the development of critical thinking skills through a web-supported problem-based learning environment, Chapter 8, Teaching and Learning Online (Ed Stephenson, J.) pp98-111, Kogan Page, London, 2001 [9] Pugh S., Total Design, Addison-Wesley, 1991 [10] Wodehouse, A., Grierson, H., Ion W.J., Juster, N.P., Lynn, A., Stone, A., TikiWiki: a tool to support engineering design students in concept generation. Proceedings of E&PDE ’04, Delft, 2004, pp449-456 [11] Nicol, D.J. and MacLeod I., Using a Shared Workspace and Wireless Laptops to Improve Collaborative Project Learning in an Engineering Design Course. Computers and Education, Vol. 44(4), 2005, pp.459-475 [12] Nicol, D., Littlejohn, A. and Grierson, H., The importance of structuring information and resources within shared workspaces during collaborative design learning, Open Learning 2(1), 2005, pp31-49 [13] http://dmem1.ds.strath.ac.uk/didet/ [14] De Corte, E., New perspectives on learning and teaching in higher education, (Ed. Burgen, A.) Goals and purposes of higher education in the twenty-first century, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, London, 1999 [15] Jonassen, D.H. and Carr, C.S., Mindtools: Affording multiple knowledge representations for learning. Computers as Cognitive Tools, S.P. Lajoie (ed), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ, 2000, pp.165-196

Chapter Twelve COMMUNICATION

AMBIGUOUS REPRESENTATIONAL SYSTEMS IN VISUALIZATION ASSESSMENT Carolina Gill* Department of Industrial, Interior and Visual Communication Design, The Ohio State University, U.S.A. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT The ability to visualize complex assemblies in the mind’s eye is an important skill for both designers and engineers. The visualization skills of beginning students in both fields are typically tested using standardized tests that use paraline projections (parallel projections or axonometric projections) to represent real objects in space. The assumption is that these representational systems have no effect on student’s performance. Here we challenge that assumption, and offer arguments why this question bears re–visiting. Keywords: Visualization, Visualization Assessment, Representational Systems 1 INTRODUCTION While sophisticated CAD systems have revolutionized the way designers and engineers work, students who are entering either profession still need to develop an ability to see and process visual information in their minds. The need to visualize how physical objects will appear in different orientations, or how mechanisms and parts will move in three– dimensional space, is not eliminated by the application of computer graphics. Spatial visualization skills are typically taught in standard engineering graphics courses. A student’s skill level is often evaluated through the use of standardized tests, such as the Purdue Visualization Test and the Mental Rotation Test, that measure the ability to conceptualize how an object will appear after it is moved or transformed “mentally”. Many students have difficulty manipulating concepts in engineering graphics, but even those who become proficient in this language have difficulty connecting the abstract representations presented in class with the physical reality that surrounds them. *

Assistant Professor, Carolina Gill, Department of Industrial, Interior and Visual Communication Design, The Ohio State University, 375b Hopkins Hall, 128 N. Oval Mall, Columbus, OH. 43210 U.S.A. Email: [email protected].

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One factor that hinders the development of visualization skills is the pedagogical approach to the subject. Engineering graphics is a language that is understood by its practitioners, but it relies primarily on parallel projections (isometric, oblique and orthographic views) to describe objects because the lines can be measured. The object’s description is reduced to its quantitative qualities. However, paraline or parallel drawings are high–level abstractions in which the position of the observer cannot be measured. In the physical world, no object actually “looks” like its isometric representation. Instructors and practitioners rarely address this assumption. 2 BBACKGROUND Literature in spatial cognition ranges from studies on the way people process simple 2D shapes to studies on how people orient themselves in a 3D environment. Several authors [1] suggest that spatial ability can

Figure 1. Sample question from MRT. be structured into two major factors: spatial orientation and spatial visualization. Spatial orientation is described as a measure of the ability to understand the changes in orientation of visual stimuli, and involves a mental rotation of configuration. The spatial visualization factor measures the ability to restructure and manipulate the components of the visual stimuli. There is also general agreement [2] that two major processing strategies are used to solve spatial tasks: Gestalt processing and analytical processing. Gestalt or Holistic processing occurs when an individual understands and transforms an image as an organized whole. Analytical processing occurs when the whole is broken into individual components, reducing the problem’s complexity to one-to-one relationships. These processes are not mutually exclusive, but when compared, the analytical strategies are more time-consuming while gestalt processing has been accepted as the key component to spatial ability [1,2,3] It is recognized that spatial ability can be acquired through proper instruction and training. Sorby’s [4] study suggest that through practice (specifically engineering graphics) there is significant improvement in an individual’s performance. There are several standardized tests that have been developed to measure a person’s spatial ability. Tasks involving mental rotations of 3D objects present characteristics from both spatial ability factors: spatial orientation and spatial visualization. Two of the most widely used tests that measure a person’s ability to perform “mental rotations” are the Mental Rotation Test, (MRT), based on S-M tasks developed by Shepard and Metzler, and the

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Purdue Spatial Visualization Test: Rotations, (PSVT:R, also known as ROT). Both tests were developed to maximize gestalt processing. The Mental Rotation Test (MRT) consists of 20 items where students are shown an example (on the left) and asked to identify which two of the four choices represent the same object after rotation in space. Figure 1 One of the major conclusions derived from Shepard and Metzler’s research is that the process by which individuals solve this task resembles and is consistent with how the subject would perform this task with solid physical objects. In other words, the person mentally manipulates and rotates the object until it is aligned with the original example, and then compares the mental images. The Purdue Spatial Visualization Test (ROT) consists of 20 questions. The individual is instructed to study how the two illustrations at the top are representations of the same object rotated about a particular axis and axes. Then they have to subject the image in the middle to the same kind of rotation in their mind and finally select from five drawings at the bottom the one that represents the same object rotated in the same manner as the two examples at the top. (Figure 2) To restrict analytical processing a time limit of 20 minutes is enforced. ROT resembles MTR in that both tests require cognitive operations on the mental representations of the object that are analogous to manipulations of the solid object. The differences are on the axis of rotation, complexity of the object, and projection system used on the 2D representation. MTR is restricted to rotations on the vertical axis through the drawing, while in the ROT test the object can be rotated in the x, y, and z axis or axes. ROT uses isometric projections while MTR uses converging perspective. 3. INCONSISTENCIES There is evidence that supports the hypothesis that these two tests are valid measures of cognitive abilities commonly described as spatial abilities [5]. Both tests have shown to be the least likely to be confounded by analytical strategies and the results strongly suggest the analogous relationship between the mental rotation process and the physical process of rotating the object. However, little has been studied regarding the relationship between the physical object and its planar representation and how the choice of the representational system can affect the results of visualization tests.

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Figure 2. Sample question from ROT. One reason for the lack of analysis on the planar representational system could stem from Shepard’s conclusions in his original experiments. He stated that the surface features of the 2D pictures are unimportant. “The subjects were performing the mental operations upon internal representations that were more analogous to the 3D object portrayed in 2D pictures than to the 2D pictures actually presented. The subjects indicated that they interpreted the 2D drawings as objects in 3D space, and, having done so, could as easily image the objects rotated about whichever axis was required” [6] This statement can be supported only if the subject clearly understood the relationship between the 3D object and its planar representation. There is a process of translation that occurs before the internal image of the object is created. To be able to mentally rotate a 3D solid in the mind’s eye, the internal representation of the whole object has to be completely defined. The visual concept of anything that has volume can only be accurately represented through a 3D medium, such as a sculpture. If the concept is represented through a 2D medium the product is a translation or abstraction that can convey structural essentials but relinquishes specific characteristics that help define and clarify the 3D form. The Gestalt or Holistic strategy of solving mental rotation problems is based on Gestalt perception theory that explains how our minds tend to group, organize and make patterns out of stimuli that we experience. This phenomenon was taken into account in developing the two tests previously described, but the authors focused on the internal images created after the reading and interpretation of the 2D drawing. There seems to be an assumption that the 2D representations accurately portray the 3D form. There are many different solutions to the representational problem, but each solution whether it is a linear representation, a photograph or a computer rendering, reduces the object to a limited number of characteristics. If we consider the ability to measure the distance between the object and the observer, we can describe linear representations by dividing them in two main categories, paraline or parallel projections and perspective projections. Paralines are abstractions that place the object at an unmeasurable distance from the observer. Even though we are accustomed since childhood to interpret this type of

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projection, it is really not a good choice when trying to understand the all-around concept of a 3D form because of its level of distortion. Paraline drawings include orthographic, oblique projections, isometric projections, diametric projections and trimetric projections (Figure 3). Perspective projections include one, two or three point perspective. Each one of these systems favors specific characteristics of the form: oblique projections favor the front or top face of a 3D object. The hierarchy of the visual information is placed on the face that is not fore-shortened, allowing dimensions and true to shape representations. When using this type of projection the

Figure 3. Projections systems.

Figure 4. Isometric projection vs. photograph. clarity of the information on the two other faces is being relinquished in favor of one. Isometric projections on the other hand (Figure 3c), do not favor any particular side of the object. All sides are equally fore-shortened, all three axes can be measured but at the expense of visual clarity because many lines of projection coincide with edges of the object. This leads to visual ambiguity, the 2D pattern produced create misleading associations; it becomes difficult to distinguish between background and foreground. For an object to actually look close to its isometric representation it has to be at an exact angle in relationship to the observer who is placed at an infinite distance from it. Trimetric projections are more complex representations that do not favor any specific side of the object; there is no symmetry or equivalence in distortion. Trimetric projections are difficult to draw, but perhaps the clearest representational system of all paraline drawings. Perspective projections occur when the observer is placed on the scene. The drawings become more realistic but all sides are foreshortened and converging to a point, and therefore, are not appropriate for measuring purposes.

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Another alternative to the representational problem are photographs of the object. Photographs can add information such as texture, light and context to the form, clarifying its 3D shape. Figure 4 illustrates one object drawn from two different isometric angles, compared with photographs of the object drawn from similar angles. The object’s form is easier to understand from the photographs than from the linear representation. But the problem with photographs is that unlike our visual perception, they operate mechanically, recording everything impartially. The shadows clarify the form on one side of the image while blurring the edges of the form on the other side. When we look at an object in the physical world we can focus our attention to one specific aspect at a time. The use of renderings to alleviate some of the problems with the photograph is also a possibility, but ultimately “the all-around visual concept of an object cannot be produced directly in a single plane. It is the result of a dynamic experience and it is based on the totality of observations from multiple angles” [7], where context, materials, light and movement play a critical role in understanding and remembering what is seen. 4. CCONCLUSIONS AND RESEARCH OPPORTUNITES The discussion on visual perception of a 3D object and the relinquished qualities during its translation on a planar surface is largely missing from this field of study. This is evident when we look at the material given for spatial ability assessment. Standardized tests seem to measure the individual’s ability to manipulate cognitive representations, not their ability to visualize how the 3D object in question looks and behaves in a dynamic environment. The commonly used representational systems often times hide characteristic aspects of the object from view and thus the evaluation relies on the individual’s ability to reconcile the distorted planar representation with their knowledge of the physical world. Their ability to visualize transformations on the object represented is measured under the assumption that the drawing is always accurately interpreted. There is an opportunity to further investigate if in fact this issue affects student’s performance. Alternative methods of representation may have an effect on the individual’s ability to orient, compare and manipulate 3D form mentally, to place himself as the observer in an environment and relate the mental image with its graphical representation. Visualization tests can be delivered through alternative methods of planar representations, computer models or 3D models. More complex views such as trimetric projections, perspective projections or even animations can be used instead of isometric views to reduce ambiguity. Photographs or renderings of the object can be introduced allowing additional information such as light and texture. 3D models can be given to the student to observe and manipulate before the test takes place. Another artificial constraint imposed by the tests described here involves the angles and types of rotations used. In the ROT test, for example, the object is constrained to rotations about the principal axes in increments of 90°. This is of course highly artificial, and probably confusing to the student. One question we wish to investigate is the effect of rotating objects about random axes, with varying angles of rotation. Finally, the role of motion in the visualization process opens an entirely new set of questions that we hope to investigate further in the future, in collaboration with

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colleagues in the Mechanical Engineering department at The Ohio State University. Devising methods for assessing students’ abilities to visualize motions in three dimensions is an exciting area for future work. REFERENCES [1] Guilford, J. P., Fruchter, B., & Zimmerman, W. S. (1952). Factor analysis of the Army Air Forces, Sheppard field battery of experimental aptitude tests. Psychometrika, 16, 45-68. [2] Spearman, C., & Jones, L, Human Abilities. Macmillan, London, 1950. [3] Bock, R., & Kolakowski, D. (1973). Further evidence of sex-linked major-gene influencing on human spatial visualizing ability. American Journal of Human Genetics, 25, 1-13. [4] Sorby S. and Baartmans B. The Development and Assessment of a Course for Enhancing the 3D Spatial Visualization Skills of First Year Engineering Students. Journal of Engineering Education, July 2000, 301 [5] Bodner G. and Guay R, The Purdue Visualization of Rotation Test, The Chemical Educator, 1997, 2, 4. [6] Shepard R and Cooper L., Mental Images and Their Transformations. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1982. [7] Arnheim R., Art and Visual Perception, Psychology of the Creative Art. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984

COMBINATORY METHODS FOR DEVELOPING STUDENT INTERACTION DESIGN PROJECTS Marilyn Lennon* Dept. of CSIS, University of Limerick. Liam Bannon Luigina Ciolfi Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT This paper provides a brief overview of a project-based graduate course on the Design of Interactive Media for Public Spaces. The project groups utilized a variety of design methods over the 14-week course Students work through a complete design life-cycle using a combination of methods from observational studies through to concept design, prototyping, testing and evaluation. This paper outlines the structure of the course and gives an example of one of the projects completed during the course. The paper shows how it is possible in such a short time-frame to have students accomplish a real-world based design project, at least to the stage of preliminary prototype design. Keywords: Interaction Design, Public Spaces, Interdisciplinarity, Collaboration, Design Curriculum Development. 1 INTRODUCTION On the one year taught Masters programme for Interactive Media at the University of Limerick students come from different backgrounds, such as art and design, material science, education, business, computer science, engineering and communications. On this module of the programme, project teams are formed consisting of three members, each with different primary disciplines. This mix of backgrounds has been found to be quite

*

Interaction Design Centre, Dept. of CSIS, Engineering Research Building, University of Limerick. tel: +353-61-202699 fax : +353-61-202734. e-mail: [email protected]

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valuable during the design process. The module runs over a single semester - 14 weeks, with only two hours per week formal team/tutor contact. During this time an appropriate public space has to be identified and thoroughly studied, design scenarios and concepts developed and tested, and finally, a presentation made to a critical audience. The module was designed to teach the students to implement methodologies that, in a limited timeframe, allows teams to: – Survey the physical space and quickly highlight its major features and elements; – Gather an understanding of the practices and activities within the site; – Collect a body of ideas, suggestions, and possibilities that would guide the later scenario and concept design phase; – Produce a working prototype of the envisioned design – Test the design with users, in situ where possible. – Produce an evaluation of the design. The techniques used by the teams included: brainstorming, worksheets, group critique sessions, field observations, informal interviews, cultural probes, participatory design sessions, scenario-based design, rapid prototyping, and a variety of mainly informal evaluation methods. After outlining the structure of the course, and giving a brief account of the different methods used, we illustrate features of the course through an outline description of one project solution for an interactive media installation designed for a specific public space - an interactive litterbin installation for a city train station. 2 MODULE BACKGROUND Within the Masters in Interactive Media programme, the students are introduced to theoretical and methodological foundations of Human-Computer Interaction and Interaction Design, which place the user at the heart of Design. Notions of “activity” and “interaction” are explored from different theoretical perspectives arising within psychology, philosophy and the social sciences. The emphasis is particularly on situated approaches to understanding human activity in context [1][2], the relationship between users/ participants and the cultural and social environment [3], and the role that the physical environment plays in shaping and supporting activities [4][5] 3 MODULE STRUCTURE AND DESIGN From the outset the module design was influenced by the varying expertise of the tutors who taught the module and this was reflected in the design of the 14-week module structure. Elements from practice in Art, Design, Craft, and Human Computer Interaction were adapted within an Interaction Design framework to facilitate the process of designing interactivity for a public space. As noted earlier, participating students came from diverse disciplines, and so we arranged that each team comprise three students with differing backgrounds. We chose three members as a team size because we believed that the dynamic of a three-person team encouraged close teamwork, without splinter groups forming. We held that, firstly this encouraged interdisciplinary collaboration and

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secondly it ensured that all team members involved themselves in the entire design process, adding to the educational value of the exercise. Each team of students used worksheets, journals, notebooks, drawings, inspirational materials, photography and digital recordings gathered during field studies for demonstration at the in-group critique sessions. Using a toolkit of methods mentioned earlier, students choose different approaches and modified them according to the needs of the project. The success of the project depended on the combination and modification of the methods used. Group critique sessions helped to rationalize the choice of method and design the modifications necessary for the enquiry. The following briefly describes the methods the students were introduced to, and subsequently used. Method 1. Worksheets Worksheets are a version of the ‘mood board’ often used in industrial design. Guy Julier [6] notes that mood boards “involve the arrangements and presentation of images of related products, logotypes, environments or other design material onto blank sheets in order to construct an artefactual and associational context for the thing being designed. The designer’s own drawings and photographs or samples of materials may also be introduced”. Our revision stipulated that the material gathered relate directly to the public space under study. Method 2. Brainstorming Brainstorming is used at an early stage in the design process for the rapid generation of ideas in a specific domain, with the emphasis on idea creation and a withholding of comment or critique at this stage. [7] Method 3. Informal Field Studies Informal field studies involve the team observing users on-site as they use the space and taking note of the forms of activity that take place. Field study methods included were informal interviews, shadowing, storytelling, video recording, sound recording, sketching and observing movement patterns. [8][9] Method 4. Cultural Probes The use of probes is geared towards design generation. Users are given tasks with an aim to provoke or gain inspirational responses as stimulation for concept design. [10]

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Figure 1. Outline Of Course Schedule. Method 5. Scenario Based Design Scenarios are short written narratives of users and their tasks in a specific context. [11] Method 6. Storyboarding A storyboard is a prototype consisting of a series of screen sketches in sequence. Designers use them to illustrate and organize their ideas and obtain feedback from users. Method 7. Informal Participatory Design Participatory Design is a design method, which facilitates the design team and users to work together to design a solution. The tutors are members of a design research group with a long tradition in taking issues of participation in design seriously.1 [12] Method 8. Low and Medium Fidelity Prototyping. Teams use a variety of prototyping methods as appropriate - including paper prototypes, scenarios, video prototyping, or “Wizard of Oz” prototypes to test their design concepts. [13] An example is described in more detail later in this paper.

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The Interaction Design Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland

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Method 9. Evaluation User testing and evaluations take place in-situ when possible, as well as in the studio. Students are familiar with certain forms of “think-aloud” evaluations from their earlier course on Human-Computer Interaction. Other more general user reactions to the prototype are also gathered. [14] The 14-week course was roughly divided into two sections; the first half was concerned primarily with methods to gather information on the physical space, its features and major elements and in developing an understanding of the practices and activities that occurred on site. The students were supported in this phase with five formal lectures in Contextual Enquiry, Ethnography, Participatory Design, Scenarios Based Design and Design-Form. We discouraged the students from thinking about implementation of technology during this period. The second half of the module was occupied with scenario and concept design, prototyping and evaluation – within at least two or three iterations of the design in this time period. It was interesting to note that some students who were technology-driven earlier in the design process became quite cautious during the second phase, as the observational work had made them more aware of the requirements of the space and its occupants.

Figure 2. Concourse at Colbert Train Station. 4 A PROJECT EXEMPLAR – THE BIN-IT PROJECT In the following section we exemplify the design process put into practice by illustrating a design produced during the module by one of the student teams – Bin-IT.2 The Bin-IT team chose the concourse area of Colbert Train Station in Limerick City (Ireland) as their location. This station is small, with only four platforms, so the entire space could be studied without difficulty. Mainly passengers, people waiting for passengers, and occasional staff members use the concourse area. It is approx. 1400sq ft. in area, and is bounded by a ticket office, a left luggage depot, a small newspaper shop, an ATM, a café kiosk, and a bar/restaurant. (Fig.2) 2

The Bin_IT team participants were Sinead Dinneen, Mary Gannon and Donnacha Toomey

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The team began the study by making twenty-five A2 sized worksheets over the first seven weeks of the module. These worksheets helped to concretize the visual impact of the concourse and created a focal point for discussion among the team and the tutors when in critique sessions. Train station staff gave access to all areas of the station including the administration offices, which had large windows overlooking the entire concourse. Video of movement throughout the day was captured from this location. Informal methods were used to gather opinions and anecdotes from staff and station users - this included shadowing, video and sound capture, storytelling etc. The team also found that given the short time they could spend on the research, it was best to try to draw out the tacit knowledge of the station staff by employing informal participatory design sessions on-site. The fieldwork continued throughout the entire fourteen weeks of the course, initially in developing requirements, and subsequently in evaluating the prototypes. Some of the important observations made in the initial phase of the study are listed below: Key observations • Members of the public considered the place to be boring and cold. • While staff spent a lot of energy cleaning, they felt they were waging a losing battle against the public who continually littered the space. • There was no entertainment available in the concourse. • Occupancy of the space fluctuated between being crowded and being almost empty, at differing times of day. • The first impression made on visitors when arriving at the concourse was perceived to be important, as the station was considered a portal to the city. 4.1 CREATING A SCENARIO The Bin-IT scenario consisted of a set of litterbins that traveled from their normal position in the station during quieter periods, onto the center of the concourse to move in a choreographed dance. The bins would also move about the station at other times asking people to feed them. From the outset the team built a strong informal relationship with the station staff. When this concept was discussed in informal participatory design sessions with them, several issues concerning the design of the existing litterbins in general emerged, for example, the difficulty staff had in moving and emptying them.

Figure 3. Prototype sketch and Stills from footage of Prototype in situ.

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Also, they wanted the safety of people rushing through the station to be addressed and questioned security about possible theft of the bins. During design sessions one cleaning staff member suggested that the robotic bins could be ‘rounded up’ with a whistle at the end of the day to be emptied and move off back to their position in the station afterwards. In a later iteration of the design, the stationmaster offered the design team a number of real litterbins for the construction of realistic prototypes. The shell of each bin was removed and a wooden disk with wheels placed at the base as demonstrated in Figure 3. The wheels served to make the bin move in a fluid manner, and a remote control car and a walkie-talkie were used. This set of prototypes realistically simulated the design, as they were augmented station litterbins. This prototyping style was thought out on the basis of the Wizard-of-Oz technique. The prototype bins were videoed for periods over several days moving around the station asking to be fed litter. They were tested at different times of the day in varying crowd conditions. (Fig.3) 4.2 RESULTS The interactive bins worked effectively to change the overall impression of coldness and boredom associated with the station; the installation proved to be entertaining, to provoke reactions and to trigger episodes of social interaction among individuals and small groups in the space. The interactive bins could be made to flexibly adapt to the different crowd conditions occurring in Colbert Station at different times of the day. The station staff felt that the Bin-IT installation could provide an excellent solution to the litter problem in the station and to the daily difficulties they encounter in emptying and cleaning the existing bins. The members of staff believed the design team had carefully considered their suggestions for design proposed during the participatory design sessions. 5 CONCLUSIONS In this paper we have provided a brief account of a design course, which combines a number of different design techniques over a single semester. While the course is ambitious in intent, we have been heartened by the ability of our students to learn, adapt and use a variety of methods and techniques to address a specific topic, and develop reasonable prototypes within this time frame. Indeed, almost all our student projects have also managed to perform quite interesting evaluations of their prototypes. What was very evident was that the mix of tutors, early field work and use of worksheets, group critique sessions, story-boarding, scenario sessions, etc., combined surprisingly well, and resulted in interesting projects. Of course, facilitation by the tutors was a key element, but we believe that the mix of methods and the general framework structure that we provided to help integrate them within the course, resulted in very positive feedback, and impressive results. Having students move through a complete design cycle from choosing a site, through observational studies, interviews, scenario generation, storyboarding, prototyping, and evaluation was a powerful reinforcement for the students themselves, who could see their own progression. Accomplishing all of this within the space of 14 weeks, with only a couple of hours formally-scheduled contact time has been a revelation to us, the tutors, and is a testament to the huge energy and enthusiasm of the students for

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this kind of course, where the they themselves can choose their project site, and are given the means to work through a complete design cycle. REFERENCES 1. Winograd T, “From Computing Machinery to Interaction Design”, in Denning P. and Metcalfe R. (eds.), Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing, Springer-Verlag, 1997, 149162. 2. Bannon L.J. “A Human-Centred Perspective in Interaction Design”, in Antti, P. and Isomaki H. (eds.) “Future Interaction Design”, Springer 2005 3. Suchman L. “Plans and Situated Actions. The Problem of Human-Machine Communication”, Cambridge U. P.: 1987. 4. Harrison S. and Dourish P. “Re-Placing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems”, Proceedings of CSCW 1996, ACM. 5. Ciolfi L. and Bannon L.J. “Space, place and the design of technologically enhanced physical environments”, in Turner, P. and Davenport E. (eds.) Space, Spatiality and Technology. London: Springer, 2005 6. Julier G. The Culture of Design. London: Sage Publications, 2000 7. Osborne, A. F. Applied Imagination, Schribener and Sons, NY. 1963. 8. Newman, W. and Lamming M. “Interactive Systems Design”. Addison-Wesley. 1994. 9. Whyte, W. The Social life of Small Urban Spaces. New York: Project for Public Spaces. 1998. 10. Gaver, W, Dunne T., Pacenti E. Cultural Probes, Interactions jan/feb 1999, pp.21-29 11. Carroll, J. Scenario-Based Design, London: Wiley. 1995 12. Greenbaum, J. Kyng, M. (Eds.). Design at Work: Cooperative Design of Computer Systems. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1991 13. Isensee, S, & Rudd J. The Art of Rapid Prototyping. International Thomson Computer Press, London. 1966 14. Monk, A., Wright, P., Haber, J., and Davenport, L. Improving your human-computer interface: A practical technique. Prentice Hall Intl. (UK) Ltd. 1993.

CONCEPT TO SPATIAL – BRIDGING THE GAP Judith Hills* Division of Design, University of Glamorgan, Pontypridd, Wales. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Increasing numbers of engineering and design students find it difficult to accurately sketch existing observed objects. Sketching their own ideas accurately can be even more difficult and can potentially become a barrier to creative expression and problem solving. All too often students will discard good ideas because they cannot express them sufficiently well on paper. ‘Too difficult to draw’ is related to drawing ability and experience but is also linked with a student’s understanding of the relationship between two and three dimensions. While the use of computer visualization applications can help, limitations are imposed by student knowledge and capability of the application. Techniques have been developed that give students a starting point in year one of an undergraduate degree developing confidence and accuracy in the representation of their ideas. This paper is the result of some initial research and recording of the transition from conceptual to spatial description and the use of techniques to encourage students to move between two and three dimensional expression. Keywords: Sketching, sketch modeling, conceptual design 1 INTRODUCTION Students with an academic background suitable for engineering design sometimes have had limited or no experience of design or art beyond year nine of secondary school. This is probably even more marked in those students for who design and technology GCSE is not compulsory. However, even students who study design and technology to GCSE or A2 level, before a degree course in product design and engineering design, are found to have lower skill levels in terms of sketching 3D views and visualization than their predecessors [1]. Students often believe that tutors would prefer an approximate but rendered computer image of a concept to a hand drawn, but more detailed one [1]. *

University of Glamorgan, Division of Design, Pontypridd, Wales, CF37 1DL Tel: 01443 482875 Email: [email protected]

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The teaching of Computer Aided Design (CAD) within the design and technology curriculum has had a detrimental effect as students who find sketching difficult can rely on computer generated images. These ideas usually lack detail and can interrupt the flow of creativity resulting in fewer ideas [1]. In addition the time taken to teach CAD, such as Pro Desktop, in schools must also impact upon the time available for teaching hand sketching [2]. Some prospective students, for product design and engineering design, present folders of design and technology work at interview with almost no hand drawn work, making it necessary to assess sketching and spatial skills at interview. Even with students applying for courses where drawing is regarded as a core skill, such as graphic design, a few interviewed students cannot draw accurately from observation but are still able to achieve a high grade, A or B, at art A2 level. While it is not suggested that the only reason for an art AS or A2 level is to learn to sketch it is believed that the breadth and choices in the curriculum can, sometimes, prepare students poorly for design degrees. In the field of design and engineering it is the problem solving aspect that attracts and challenges many prospective students. However many engineering and some design students find themselves quite inarticulate with a pencil, when it comes to communicating ideas. The confidence to put pencil to paper and sketch is extremely difficult for some [2] restricting the ideas students allow themselves to express. When challenged about the lack of ideas many students stated that they had ‘lots of ideas but they were too difficult to sketch’ so they had pursued the simpler ideas. The development of CAD and its use in a widening industrial sector has not however removed the need for sketching skills. Good sketching skills enable more innovative solutions and an ability to communicate ideas more easily without language barriers [3]. Romer et al [4] reported that 96% of sampled designers still use sketches to develop new concepts. Typically two dimensional (2D) sketches are used for rapid idea generation, three dimensional (3D) sketch models used for the development of more detailed form, 2D renderings are mainly for showing to the client, 3D block models an exact replica of appearance with prototypes for testing and definition of internal detail [5]. The realisation of concepts and initial ideas however still rests heavily on the need to be able to sketch, not only what can be seen but that which is imagined. Sketches are seen as essential for concept generation in design and for stimulating creativity [6]. Research findings found that over 85% of respondents, professional designers, researchers and students, consider sketching suited for concept generation because it allows fast expression and recording of impulsive ideas [7]. Designers frequently sketch to record an idea but also to generate ideas by identifying visual clues to inform the emerging design concepts [8]. Reinterpretation leads towards further interpretation and knowledge [6]. With time and commitment all students can learn to sketch but this research is most concerned with students who have undeveloped spatial awareness and little skill with sketching but are required to solve problems, generate and express ideas.

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2.0 VERBAL VERSUS SPATIAL There are many design methods available for stimulating creativity and coming up with ideas, scamper, morphology, analogies, mood boards, brain writing and 635 to name but a few. Most of these focus on the sketching of ideas but attempt to approach the problem in a fresh or unusual way. At the University of Glamorgan both engineering and design students are taught a wide range of creative methods and are encouraged to experiment and discover what ’works best’ for them individually. It has been noticed that many of the engineering students prefer the more verbally based methods and often try to adapt drawn methods to verbal description, see figure 1. However design students typically record ideas with a 3 dimensional representation, e.g. perspective or isometric, annotation and often a detail or alternative view, revisiting the idea later to re-draw and clarify, adding colour and detail. While maintaining the purpose of concept sketching as a personal recording of ideas a small experiment was undertaken in an attempt to make the sketching of ideas both more accurate and easier to achieve. Students were asked to generate ideas for a moderately complex design problem, e.g. more than 8 components, recording their ideas using a combination of verbal and sketch input. The percentage of words and graphics used was assessed. Students in three first year undergraduate groups were involved and the percentages are an average across each group: • BA Product Design, 80% drawn 20% text, some students did not use text • B.Sc. Product Design, 70% drawn 30% text • B.Eng. Mech. Engineering, 50% drawn 50% some students using (90%) text. As a result the following method was tested with the engineering group. 2.1 INSTRUCTIONS GIVEN WITH A DESIGN BRIEF TO THE STUDENTS Description - at the concept idea stage concentrate on getting your ideas down in the most effective method, use any combinations of text and sketching. Resist the attempt to simplify things. If you find sketching something difficult try to describe it by comparing to something else. e.g. The handle is underneath and looks like the handle of a rendering float but it has a slot down the middle to put your fingers in.

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Figure 1. Example of the balance of verbal and sketched ideas. Approximation - try to model your idea, or part of your idea using plastacine, wire, paper etc. The model does not need to be very accurate or to scale. Don’t worry about the finish; just concentrate on getting it as close as you can to your recorded description. Recording - looking carefully at your rough model from all sides and try to sketch what you have made, adjusting any details to fit the description better. Resist the temptation to simplify your idea. Sketch more than one view and annotate if it helps. Improving - look at your drawing, model and description. How close are they? Can you improve anything? If you modify the model try to sketch the improvement. You may find this easier to do if you trace off your original drawing and work on the copy. If you make any changes to the drawing try to update the model. If you are making a lot of changes it might be a good idea to record these so take a photograph at each stage. If you are using a digital camera try drawing from the photographs too. Move between the description, model and drawing until you are satisfied. It is very likely that your final drawing and model are different from your original starting point. This is positive; you’ve just improved and developed your idea by iteration. 3 RESULTS Using this methodology encouraged students to investigate their ideas more thoroughly. This resulted in more stages of development being undertaken and more usable and innovative solutions being produced. There was however a significant increase in time required by students to generate their ideas. The experience of transferring between the 3D model and the 2D sketch improved the students drawing and spatial ability. Figure 2 shows a first attempt, sketch model and a couple of iterations. Feedback indicated that students gained confidence in their ability to find solutions, visualise them and discuss them. With increased numbers of clearer, detailed concepts students proceeded to use a computer visualisation application with greater confidence.

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Students were positive about their results and preferred not having to compromise or simplify their ideas. 4 CONCLUSION The above method has demonstrated some success with a group of engineering students. However the improvement in confidence alone is sufficient to justify further investigation and use. Additional small improvements in spatial ability and sketching have also been noticed. Further research could investigate any significant links between student’s previous academic backgrounds, motives for choosing a particular degree course and concept sketching ability.

Figure 2. Example of first sketch attempt, sketch model and iteration. REFERENCES [1] Evatt M.A.C., Sketching – a dying art? Proceedings of the 24th SEED Annual Design Conference Coventry 2002, pp.229-236

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[2] Storer I., Reflecting on Professional Practice: capturing an industrial designer’s expertise to support the development of the sketching capabilities of novices. Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 10,1 2005 pp54-72 [3] Ottersson S., PAD, MAD, CAE-CAD Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Engineering Design Tampere 1997, pp271-276 [4] Romer A.,Webhahn, G., Hacker W., Lindemann,U. and Pache M., Effort Saving Product Representations in Design- results of a questionnaire survey, Design Studies, Vol 22, No.6, pp473-491 [5] Evans M. A. and Smith J. S., Model or prototype which, when and why? International Conference on Design and Technology Education and Curriculum Development Loughborough 1992, pp 42-66 [6] Purcell A. T. and Gero G. S., Drawings and the design process, Design Studies, Vol 19, No.4, 1998 pp389-430 [7] Lim S. et al, A study of sketching behaviour to support free-form surface modeling from on-line sketching, Design Studies, Vol 24, No.2, 2003 pp135-153 [8] Tovey M., Porter S. and Newman R., Sketching, concept development and automotive design, Design Studies, Vol 25, No.4, 2004 pp393-413

EVALUATING CULTURE IN PRODUCT DESIGN BY INTEGRATING THE SOLO TAXONOMY AND THE CIRCUIT OF CULTURE T. Katz* School of Engineering, University of Brighton, England. R. Mortezaei** School of Engineering, University of Brighton, England. R. Morris*** School of Engineering, University of Brighton, England. Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

ABSTRACT Through a short survey into students’ implicit design thinking, the authors identified some important aspects of design education relative to the cultural background of international students at the IEPDE 2004. Further research in the area was however highly recommended. The authors therefore decided to validate the position by running an empirical study using the ‘SOLO Taxonomy’, a standardised cognitive development system which has diverse applications and which is well recognised in education. It does however require some modification in its application to design education as it is normally based on the verbal and written outcomes of the learner. The modification of the SOLO classification was however not regarded as the difficult part of the study as the crux of the problem revolved around the more challenging task of measuring cultural content. The approach taken for this was to use a Circuit of Culture methodology to evaluate the design outcomes of final year design students who were asked to design urban streetscape elements (‘USE’ or street furniture products). Subsequent cross-referencing between the SOLO taxonomy and the Circuit of Culture produced a model for cultural analysis. *

School of Engineering, University of Brighton, Brighton BN2 4GJ England. Tel: +44 1273 642217 [email protected] ** School of Engineering, University of Brighton, Brighton BN2 4GJ England. Tel: +44 1273 642247 [email protected] *** School of Engineering, University of Brighton, Brighton BN2 4GJ England. Tel: +44 1273 642307 [email protected]

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Keywords: SOLO Taxonomy, cultural assessment, design project assessment 1 INTRODUCTION The School of Engineering at the University of Brighton is engaged in research that attempts to explore cultural values in design education and practice. A clearer understanding of the role of culture in design is expected to provide a more informed strategy in both design education and practice, ultimately producing more culturally aware products. This paper represents a subset of the study, and considers the role of culture in the education of young designers. 2 CULTURE Culture is a complex subject. It can be debated as being substantive (i.e. materially substantial) or epistemological (i.e. knowledge based). It can also be considered as ‘a whole way of life’ or more eclectically as the “production and circulation of meaning”. As such, it can be difficult to define. It can however be argued that culture is the collective representation that leads to shared understandings and which help to form societies [1]. It does not as such equate to society but covers issues such as symbols, signs, images, meanings, language and beliefs. It is both individualistic and societal, and affected by economics, politics and corporations. Such a perspective is established by the arguments of social scientists such as Durkheim, E, Williams, R, and the Frankfurt School who have argued that production of meaning is through consumption and that meaning is itself a factor of culture and therefore society. Products can therefore be considered as objects that carry cultural and symbolic values [2] [3]. A product is an object that on its own does not have meaning, so cannot fulfil expectations, but it can pull together our experiences and analogies to give meaning and catalyse change. One of the main roles of the designer is therefore to relate to and address issues that generate a collective representation. This is an extension of work by Antonio Gramsci who described the confluence of issues at a point in time as articulation. From this, a ‘cultural artefact’ can be considered as a product that has become a meaningful object in its own right [4] [5]. A number of frameworks exist which attempt to organise these collective issues [6] [7], and a ‘Circuit of Culture’ (CoC) has been referred to with respect to design [8]. The CoC comprises 5 key headings of Representation, Regulation, Production, Consumption, Identity, each described as ‘moments’ that are interlinked and dynamic elements, in an on-going process of cultural encoding and dissemination called ‘Articulation’. Creating meaning through ‘moments’ and ‘articulation’ are key factors in this framework. 3 EDUCATION Within this cultural framework, we have considered that practitioners of design have varying levels of sophistication with respect to the understanding and use of culture, and

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that such levels can themselves be assessed within the SOLO taxonomy framework [9]. SOLO stands for Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes. A revised version, laden with cultural context can be summarised as below: Prestructural Unistructural Multistructural

No evidence of using any aspect of culture; One relevant perspective of using culture; Several relevant elements showing application of culture in design project, but without a good sense of coherence in context; Relational The relevant elements of culture have been integrated into a sensible structure, which leads toward a cultural design; Extended-Abstract A high understanding and application of using culture in design projects with reasonable extension to other domains can be distinguished.

4 ANALYTICAL METHOD One method of cultural design analysis might be to study products through consumers themselves (ethnography). For example, it is possible to theorise about the meaning a safety pin might have to the world. However, by viewing the way in which the punks used the safety pin it is possible to interpret a meaning for this sub culture. Theorising about meaning is fraught with difficulties and any firm cultural declarations can therefore be contentious. If, however, a framework is used, such as the Circuit of Culture (moments), and the interconnections between them are studied thoroughly, then a holistic analysis of the object of study can potentially be made. It is not important where an analysis starts, as long as account is taken of the entire complex series of connections [10]. To gain an insight into a student level of cultural cognition, it was also necessary to reference to the SOLO taxonomy. The SOLO taxonomy might also seem remote from evaluating the student application of design [11] but integrating the two frameworks provides a practical and relevant structure that benefits from the advantages of both frameworks (fig. 1). For example, as the considering black cabs, red buses or union jacks as the simple cultural symbols of Britishness. A more advanced understanding at an Extended-Abstract level might acknowledge the historic connections between such symbols and conclude the role of tradition in contemporary design. In more detail, at the Prestructural level an implication of one aspect of culture is seen clearly. Within the CoC framework, it means one of the moments (e.g. Representation) should be distinguished in students’ designs. The works should interpret meanings in association with culture through visual or written language (in the case of Representation). When one or two moments of the CoC are associated with at least one distinct articulation element a unistructural level is revealed. At a Multistructural level there are more than two moments of the CoC in a typical work, which have been articulated within cultural context. Students make a number of connections/articulations and provide (an) application of meaning into their works. Relational status shows three to four moments, with a good sense of connection between elements. Through writings, images, drawings and notes, students attempt to show the relational network running through moments. Finally, in the Extended-Abstract, the highest level of cultural understanding applicable to CoC resides. Most of the requirements in this level should be evident in students’

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work. Design projects done should reveal many connections/articulations while strongly reflecting on all five moments in CoC. The other major criterion in this level is to make connections beyond the boundaries of the subject area. A lot of explicit and implicit meaning should be deduced from the work. Students generalise and transfer the principle from the specific to the abstract. 5 ASSESSMENT In our survey, 10 British final year Product Design students were requested to design any item of street furniture of their choosing. They were directed to apply ‘Design for X’ techniques, in this case replacing ‘X’ with ‘Culture’. The aim was to evaluate their current understanding of culture, and the way they apply it into projects. They were also asked to support their design work with comments and notes, a ‘thinking aloud’ strategy. Assessment was done in two ways. Firstly, a general assessment which pays attention to the whole process of development and specifically to the way that design gets shape, is structured and is supposed to meet the requirement of a cultural design. Secondly, a specialist assessment is made by the integration of the CoC and SOLO frameworks which focuses on the final concept or idea. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, the production and exchanging of meaning through design projects are the main factors.

Figure 1. Interpretation CoC via SOLO.

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6 RESULTS 6.1 POINTS IN GENERAL • Seating design played a great role in their students’ works; 8 out of 10 explicitly designed a type of seating, the rest (2) went for integrated seating. Seating could be seen as an implication of British comfort, an admiration and celebration of nature, vista, relaxing, greenery and beauty. A possibility could be the word furniture has always been involved with metaphoric concept of seating and relaxing. • Skateboarding and skating culture has taken a great place in students consideration while designingseating; • An interest in combining and integrating products was evident; • There was little reference to historical and old icons; • An attempt at interpreting culture within contemporary sociological issues like ‘Vandalism and Antisocial behaviour’ was common; • Britishness was perceived as Englishness and Englishness as Londonish in many works; briefly, British culture means London icons, naively (much objective and explicit); • Much interest in details, technical elements and specification affirms the idea of the promotion of technical aspects of design within existing design education rather then sociological/cultural (non-technical) values. 6.2 POINTS IN RELATION TO COC AND SOLO Four works were assessed at the Prestructural level of cultural understanding. Mostly they have referred to one and rarely two moments but with no or weak articulation among elements of the CoC. Representation and Identity have been mostly addressed via using written and visual languages. In all these works there has been an attempt to connect/articulate more moments of CoC but the general outcome has remained unsuccessful in creating any meaning. For instance, one student (fig. 2, bottom middle) implies a social value that is ‘coming together’ in public places, but the extent of the Representation element carrying this meaning is limited. The same numbers of designs were classified as Unistructural. These four works met more of the requirements of the assessment than previous ones. They generated meaning through addressing one or two moments and tried to show interconnection between them. ‘Vandal proof design’, ‘Anti-terrorist design’ and ‘Social interaction point’ are buzzwords in their works, revolving around Representation and Identity. ‘Protecting and sheltering’ suggests regulation dealing with geographical factors and regulating people’s behaviour, as well. In a sensible and explicit way, one generates a meaning using ‘Souvenir-Style’ approach and links it to cultural objectivity in Britain. The problem here rises in the area of semiotics, where integrating different functions and significance in one product might be a matter of confusion. Less attention has been paid to the other three moments, but a sense of articulation has been alluded to. Figure 2 (top left and top right) shows some examples.

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Ultimately, a coherent connection among three moments is perceived in the Multistructural level (mostly Representation, Identity and Regulation. There are some concerns about Consumption and how it is used in one work but in another has been articulated with Identity and encodes details as a ‘Distance Dial’ on top of the designed seating (fig. 2, bottom left). Some relatively good articulation is seen, generally. The integrated seating-bike rack (fig. 2, bottom right) tried to address a number of meanings that have been represented by text and image through initial analysis. In other words, it tries to be British and represent it. Signs of using Regulation can be seen as the designed seating tries to integrate with cycling, one of the British urban living culture. Some rural cultural values (admiring the view, relaxing and resting in nature, user/environmentalfriendly and vernacular material) have also been articulated. Although more than others, not all the moments in CoC framework have been addressed successfully. this means that the remaining 20% of submissions are positioned in the Multistructural level of the SOLO taxonomy. The results showed students reflected a diverse range of cultural understanding generally, but some 80 % had a low depth of cultural understanding with respect to design and an inability to applying cultural considerations in design projects (Table 1)

Figure 2. Some examples of students’ designs. Table 1. Cultural Understanding of Participants. Pre Uni Multi Relational Extended Total 40 % 40 % 20 %

-

-

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Many factors may be contributing to this result. One of the main ones could be the lack of practising culture sufficiently within design projects through the whole course. The role of tutors and their own understanding and awareness is also important. Less attention seems to be paid to choosing projects with culture-laden orientation along with a perceived tendency toward technological aspects could be influencing the result. In total, culture, as seen, has been highly underestimated/ignored through the design projects. 7 CONCLUSION One of the designer’s main activities is articulation - bringing together seemingly conflicting types of information, ideas and requirements. The designers’ awareness of culture and the understanding of the need to meet requirements across a range of expectations is vital if the dull uniformity of conventionalised ‘schemes’ of design is to be avoided. We have concluded that young (novice) designers, in the form of students, pay more attention to the product function and aesthetic and less attention to the inherent qualities of culture and articulation. The course at Brighton is educationally culture rich, being served by classical cultural studies including semiotics and cultural dissertations, yet students are still often unable to translate this knowledge successfully into working designs. It is clear that a more robust conclusion might be obtained if the study continued by follow-up interviews and complimentary research in the form of a triangulation. Being aware of their limited development in cultural thinking in design projects is a first step to a proactive intervention strategy. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors would like to thank Joe Gould, Ralph Hawtin, Joaquim Viseu, Michelle Mead, Imogen Lawson, Jamie Palmer, Harry Patient, Dylan Kaloo, Sarah McDiamid and Michael Page final year Product Design students at the University of Brighton for their help in the study that made this study possible. REFERENCES [1] Gilles, J. and Middleton, T., Studying culture, a practical introduction. Blackwell, Oxford, 1999. [2] Marcuse, H., Critique of Marcuse: one-dimensional man in class society. Merlin, London, 1972. [3] Norman, D.A., Emotional Design. Basic books, New York, 2004. [4] Hall, S., On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall, ed. L., Grossberg, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 10.2, 1986, pp. 45-60. [5] Hall, S., “Popular culture, politics, and history”, in: Popular Culture Bulletin, 3, Open University duplicated paper, 1978. [6] Hofsted G., Culture’s consequences: comparing values, behaviours, institutions, and organisation across nations. Thousand Oaks, California; Sage Publications, London, 2001, 2nd ed.

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[7] SIU, K.W.M. Product Design and Culture: A Case Study of Hong Kong Public Space Rubbish Bins, 2003. [online]. Honolulu, International Conference on Art and Humanities. Available from: http://www.hichumanities.org/AHproceedings/%20Kin%20Wai%%2020Michael%20%20Siu.p df [Access 15 July 2003]. [8] Woodward, K., ed. Identities and Difference. Sage, London, 1997. [9] Biggs, J and Collis, K., Evaluating the Quality of Learning: the SOLO taxonomy. Academic Press, New York, 1982. [10] Du Gay, P., et al, Doing Cultural Studies: The story of the Sony Walkman, Sage in association with the Open University, London, 1997. [11] Jackson, B., Assessment practices in art and design: a contribution to student learning. In: G. Gibbs. Improving student learning: through assessment and evaluation (Papers from the 2nd International Improving Student Learning Symposium), Oxford, Centre for Staff Development, 1995, p.154-166.

Author Index Crossing Design Boundaries – Rodgers, Brodhurst & Hepburn (eds) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 0 415 39118 0

Aksnes, Dagfinn 389, 471 Anderson, Anne H. 27 Anderson, Eric 383 André Nørstebø, Carl 269 Are Øritsland, Trond 269 Armstrong, Meg 527 Badke, Craig 175, 289 Baelus, Chris 3 Bannon, Liam 565 Barber, Patrick 201 Barham, Gareth 213 Baxter, S. 283 Baxter, Seaton 77, 243 Beate Reitan, Janne 89, 389 Bier, Henriette 539 Boelskifte, Per 401 Bohemia, Erik 45 Bruce, Fraser 77 Bull, K. 515 Casakin, H. 303 Cautela, Cabirio 433 Chaur, Jairo 447 Chu, Louis K.P. 71 Chueng-Nainby, Priscilla 101 Ciolfi, Luigina 565 Colin Ledsome, Eur Ing 115 Cumming, Deborah 441 de Boer, A. 121 De Grande, Guido 3 Dickson, Anthea 471 Digranes, Ingvild 389 Dowlen, Chris 225 Dowling, Cathy 471 Duplock, Polly 33

Author index Eason, M. 465 Edwards, K.L. 189 Eger, A.O. 121, 145 Espinach, Xavier 415 Evans, M. 459 Evatt, M.A.C. 483 Evyapan, Naz A.G.Z. 477 Felton, A.J. 359 Ford, Peter 169, 453 Formánek, Josef 421 Forrester, Jason 15 Forsgren, Roger 427 Garner, K.B. 359 Garner, Steve 377 Gellion, Antony 175 Gerson, Ir. Philips M. 365 Gill, Carolina 427, 559 Gill, Steve 213 Goodlet, Jim 395 Green, Graham 323 Grierson, Hilary 551 Griffiths, Roger 231 Hall, Lee 275 Hands, D. 207 Hepburn, Duncan 395 Hewett, Bethan 263 Heylighen, Ann 59 Hills, Judith 571 Hobson, Nick 95 Hooper, Richard 503 Hudson, G. 465 Hughes, Ben 339 Inns, Tom 77, 243 Ion, William 551 Jakobsen, Arne 407 Joel, Sian 157 Jørgensen, Ulrik 401 Juster, Neal 551 Justice, L. 71 Katz, T. 575 Kaufman, James 219 Kettley, Sarah 545 Kingsley, Sean 243 Korkut, Fatma 477

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Author index Kreitler, S. 303 Kumar Das, Amarendra 133, 139 Lambert, Ian 295 Land, Ray 195 Lau, K.T. 71 Lee, SeungHee 151 Lee, T.C. 71 Lennon, Marilyn 565 Liem, André 269 Lilly, Blaine 427 Lim, Christopher S.C. 521 Lloveras, Joaquim 447 Lloyd, Peter 509 Macdonald, Alastair S. 257, 521 MacGregor, Steven 415 Mair, Gordon M. 27 Marsden, Michael 169, 453 Marshall, John 21 Matthews, Geoff 15 Miller, Kevin 27 Milligan, Andy 237 Milton, Alex 339 Molokwane, Shorn 163 Montoya, Julio 163 Morris, Lesley 489 Morris, R. 575 Mortezaei, R. 575 Munch, Birgitte 407 Munson, Stephanie 249 Neuckermans, Herman 59 Niedderer, Kristina 9 Nielsen, Liv Merete 389 O’Brien, M.A. 207 Owen, John 195 Page, Tom 497 Parkes, D.C. 189 Peng, Li-Hsun 53 Pengelly, Jon 21 Pichlmair, Martin 39 Prior, Stephen 225 Prior, Stephen D. 65 Ramachandran, K. 133 Reddy, Gudur Raghavendra 181 Reinders, A.H.M.E. 145

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Author index Rodgers, Paul 59, 95, 157 Rodnes, Bjorn 395 Rogers, Jon 33, 237 Ross, Philip 151 Sedenkov, V. 127 Sharp, M. 533 Shen, Siu-Tsen 65 Smrcek, Ladislav 323 Smyth, Michael 157 So, Ronald M.C. 71 Southee, Darren 317 Spruce, J. 459 Steiner, Mark 371 Stilma, M.D.C. 145 Strickfaden, Megan 59 Szczerba, Lisa 83 Teixeira, Jose Carlos 351 Titley, Will 395 Tomico, Oscar 163 Tovey, Mike 195 Townson, David 33, 77 Tresserras, Josep 415 Turnock, Paul 107 van de Poel, Ibo 509 van Oost, E.C.J. 145 Velásquez-Posada, Alejandra 345 Walker, Stuart 289 Whittet, Craig 333 Wielkopolska, Jacki 489 Wilgeroth, Paul 213, 231, 263 Winner, Langdon 371 Wodehouse, Andrew 551 Wylant, Barry 175, 309

Zurlo, Francesco 433

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