In the 1960"s and 1970', when most of these unfinished essays were written, I was a free thinking architecture student who perceived a fundamental disconnect within diverse institutions, including Architecture and Education and Money - Banking. I had an intuitive feeling that architecture is more than a visual aesthetic, rather a holistic social experience. The everyday objects with which we interact are an integral part of our social disposition and social wellbeing. The attempt is to develop a method for understanding some previously largely ignored aspects of environmental design – the role of Common Objects as a communication facilitator.- Eric M. Lee
Traditional craft has been relegated to the margins in modern culture, being perceived as out step with technological, economic and societal progress. However, emergent research is rediscovering the nature of craft and its potential for contributing to design practice in conjunction with developments in science and technology. Through the analyses of craft and sustainability, strong connections are revealed as well as some incompatibilities. The contribution of this paper is to a) map a systemic view of craft and b) establish a theoretical understanding of the relationship between craft and a holistic understanding of sustainability. Drawing on recent research that proposes three areas of leverage for sustainability, we argue that craft, as a system of making, knowing and being, has significant potential to contribute actively and tangibly to the transitional conditions, thereby serving as an agency for sustainable transformation.
Japan has become a super-aging society, with the number of older people (over the age of 65) at a historical high both in absolute numbers (33 million) and as a proportion of the total population (26.0%). Walking is known to be associated with positive psychological improvements such as in subjective sense of wellbeing, life satisfaction, and a sense of purpose in life, as well as improvements in physical and mental function, such as arm/leg muscle strength and standing balance. In this study, we focus on information about functions for assisting walking, comparing and contrasting the information provided by existing products that support walking with the goal of clarifying issues from an information-provision viewpoint. We conducted interviews with eight older people who go for walks on a daily basis, asking about their thoughts before, during, and after walking. From 110 total comments, we obtained 30 comments relating to the action of walking. Furthermore, we investigated the functions of 11 devices and 20 applications that support walking, and from 24 functions, we focused on 20 functions relating to the action of walking. By comparing and contrasting the twin perspectives of “information items” and “information content” with visualization levels identified in the field of management, we clarified issues relating to devices and applications for supporting walking among older users, from the viewpoint of information provision.
How do arts-based writing endeavors catalyze generative thinking and support research development in design students’ thesis endeavors? This paper offers reflections from an industrial design masters student, a graphic design masters student, and their arts education professor in a School of Design at a Research I institution. Informed by theoretical and historical contexts of the design discipline and perspectives from composition studies and fine arts practice, we explore the potential of arts-based writing as an evocative, speculative tool and a distinctive form of reflective practice for the development of graduate design research. We suggest that arts-based writing’s iterative process, dialogic engagement, and speculative approach to knowledge-construction provide critical, reflective structures for working through uncertainties and thus are uniquely responsive to the evolving epistemologies of the transdisciplinary university. Three focal questions guide this reflection: What is arts-based writing? What role does arts-based writing play in students’ design research endeavors? How can arts-based writing practices support the growth of speculative and pragmatic design research?
Having observed that many industrial design projects are started with the wrong approach, producing loss of resources, time, and professional relationships, this article presents a set of three tools that enables a clearer view of the Fuzzy Front-end (Vogel, Cagan). The first tool helps to understand the design order (Buchanan) of the product to be developed, and to place it in the utilitarian product universe (practical and economically biased), the transitional-wholistic product universe (practical, economic, and emotionally balanced), or the emotional product universe (viscerally and symbolically biased). The second identifies a product’s global purpose composed by its practical, economic, and emotional purposes, as well as the value factors they include (practical and indicative function, usability, practical or emotional cost-benefit, visceral appeal, and symbolic meaning). The third tool involves the type of project to be undertaken (vision, new development, major enhancement, or minor enhancement). Applicable to all disciplines of design, the three tools comprise the product identity footprint, which helps inform the selection of appropriate strategies to start a project the right way. It can increase the efficiency of the product development process by providing an agreed view that can be shared with all the development team, from the project sponsor to the engineering, marketing, planning, and creative departments.
This submission reports a design-driven integrated innovation on EV mobility, EV 3.0, as a collaboration between design research institution and a small BEV company in China. The on-going project provides a novel vision and design strategies of Battery Electric Vehicle (BEV) and mobility and has achieved a key technological performance on rapid charging of BEV. The current situation of BEV Industry and their recharging patterns show a big gap of new energy mobility. Key issues of BEV and mobility are defined by analysis of users’ need of mass market and a case study of a leading BEV. Usability of charging is identified as a bottleneck of BEV industry. Hence a new vision and scenario of rapid charging are defined, leading to respective design strategies and technological routines. With a long term investigation and iterative prototyping, an established prototype is developed and officially tested in the National Center of Supervision and Inspection on New Energy Motor Vehicle Products Quality in Shanghai. The test result indicates that the prototype has 431 km range in speed of 80km/h with only 15 minutes’ recharging, which provides a valid routine to break bottleneck of BEV industry .
Design processes are so complex that it is not easy to remember, reflect and record in detail after the actual processes are over. This paper proposes a notation to depict a design process as a whole while keeping its original complexity in terms of visual and structural aspects. The notion affords two types of structures to represent design processes, through activity units, a series of actions of the same kind, and design elements including ideas, prototypes and theories emerged, created, and applied during the design process. We use a design process of an actual design workshop as a case to derive the notation while using the online presentation tool “Prezi” as an interaction framework. We then investigated the depicted design process by re-experiencing the process as a first-person engagement using the designed notation. Prezi's animation mode allowed us designate a sequence along which viewers can experience the design process by zooming in some activity units and design elements, and its presentation mode allows us to look back the design process from the start to the end by following activity units arranged in the temporal order. Following the transitions among some design elements allows us to focus on essential objects in the design process. The depicted process illustrate that the two structures of activity units and design elements are not corresponding to but independent of each other.
Over the last two decades, constructive design research (CDR) — also known as Research through Design — has become an accepted mode of scholarly inquiry within the design research community. CDR is a broad term encompassing almost any kind of research that uses design action as a mode of inquiry. It has been described as having three distinct genres: lab, field, and showroom. The lab and field genres typically take a pragmatic stance, making things as a way of investigating what preferred futures might be. In contrast, research done following the showroom approach (more commonly known as critical design (CD), speculative design, or design fictions) offers a polemic and sometimes also a critique of the current state embodied in an artifact. Recently, we have observed a growing conflict within the design research community between pragmatic and critical researchers. To help reduce this conflict, we call for a divorce between CD and pragmatic CDR. We clarify how CDR and CD exist along a continuum. We conclude with suggestions for the design research community, about how each unique research approach can be used singly or in combination, and how they can push the boundaries of academic design research in new collaboration with different disciplines.
Understanding the user’s situation is very important in the design process. There are many ways to understand a user’s situation – a designer might observe a user’s situation or a user
might record their own situation in Human Centered Design (HCD) file. However, the latter of these methods has not been very popular mainly because of the burden it place on the users. This research proposes a new smartphone-based design support application, named “HN camera”, which can be used to record the users’ situation, without any additional burden on them. This application is based on the ‘Extended Alethic/Deontic/Temporal (ADT) model’ concept. A user or a designer can understand and record the user’s situation based on the Physical factor, the Kansei factor, and the Cultural factor using HN Camera. The application was used in visualizing and analyzing tourists’ travel as a service design. Through this, the effectiveness of the proposed application was clarified.
To limit the harm and damage caused by river flooding, signs to indicate dangerous water levels are placed along the river, particularly where there is a danger of overflow. However, the general level of awareness of such signs is low. In this study, we examined ways to efficiently convey information that people have little interest in and find difficult to understand.
Dangerous water levels are quantified and communicated using colors to indicate the degree of danger, and this information is conveyed to the public with signs on bridge piers and slopes. Various other measures are also employed, e.g., adding evacuation pictograms to signs, displaying signs separate from graduated water level indicators, and providing detailed information via the river office website. In addition to using Internet channels such as websites and Facebook, it is common to create and distribute pamphlets and other kinds of printed notifications to communicate such important information as widely as possible. Nevertheless, information that is essential in an emergency but unnecessary at ordinary times is difficult to communicate widely and effectively, even if all these measures are taken. This is because even if people accept that such information must be understood, they remain uninterested and find the information difficult to understand. To solve this problem, we created a story featuring mascot characters for each danger level. This story, presented as a picture book, overturns the conventional attitude toward such information. We thereby developed a medium for communicating important information in a way that better captures people’s interest.
The Japanese government has planned by 2020 to introduce the Finnish Neuvola System, a fundamental social childcare system that covers the period of pregnancy to child care. The purpose of this research is to clarify the conditions for high quality of Neuvola service, comparing childcare of Finland and Japan. First, the social systems of Finland and Japan, legal actions and other related social backgrounds are covered. Following this, the results are analyzed. Secondly, the results of interviews in Finland with Neuvola public health nurses and three typical Neuvola users, including a father, mother, and pregnant woman are presented. As a result of survey, six conditions were identified as the basis of Neuvola services: personal health checks, facility preparation, pleotropic care, communication through mutual dialogue, customized information and management of service provider quality. In a society where nuclear families are increasing, it is harder to care for children without someone’s support. In comparing Finnish and Japanese childcare systems, the Finnish system perceives childcare as a social matter. In the Neuvola System, people are always open to discuss about any worries or queries. In Japan, the system is closed toward personal matters and private treatment options are not adequate. This is a major factor in larger problems that exist in the Japanese system.
The results are discussed in relation to previous studies of participatory roles in social health care services in the Japanese government and users of these services, leading to the proposal of a Japanese childcare service design.
In an equally distressed and burgeoning community just outside of our major metropolitan city, there is a history of transformation efforts—from creative placemaking, to affordable housing initiatives, to economic re-development—which have all seemed to fall short in the area of community engagement.
From the creation of neighborhood festivals that have low resident turnout, to a backlash of discouraged citizens who feel unheard and uninformed, there was a need to re-consider how to involve this unique community—made up of four very distinct neighborhoods— in the imminent re-development of the area in which they live.
In the winter of 2016, our service design and creative strategy consultancy was brought in to a city-wide visionary community development project tied to our rapidly approaching bicentennial, in order to utilize service design methodologies as a way to engage communities and to design with organizations and community residents according to their needs and desires.
This short paper will highlight a case study of an ongoing collaboration between our consultancy; a non-profit organization dedicated to the growth of it’s community; a higher education institution with a legacy of community engagement; a local office of the country’s largest community development corporation focused on Creative Placemaking and community revitalization; and, most importantly, various residents and stakeholders.
The accompanying poster will visualize the process of engagement of various community stakeholders, tailored design research methods, and mechanisms for assessing short- and longterm
community impact.
Industrial design education has existed for a long time as part of the university system, but the curriculum and contents of each subject vary considerably from school to school. In recent years, the introduction of new concepts that change the definition of design has blurred the boundaries of design, making the curriculum different. Establishing a standard curriculum to address these challenges is an important task, but it is necessary to fully understand how design education actually takes place and to share content with educators. This paper aims to contribute to the debate on industrial design education by fully disclosing the process and results of the first stage of industrial design education of a university by autobiographical method. The first course, Product Design Practice 1, is a studio class based on a task feedback iteration system. Students are required to submit assignments showing weekly progress. The instructor reviewed the assignments submitted before the class and gave written comments in class. In addition, details of the design process and method that are difficult to identify as novice students are learned through twelve case studies and applied to the project. This Task Feedback Repeating Class system gives students the opportunity to implement design ability while gaining detailed skills with a comprehensive view. Through this process, the researcher got a reflection on the class and implications for the improvement of the class.
The purpose of this study is to plan and operate design-workshops based on project-based learning (PBL), and examine their educational value for students. The PBL workshop encour- ages direct participation from students and produces educational value, and it is important to raise the interest level of workshops to elicit proactive participation. The workshop in this study was carried out over two weeks in January 2017 at Korea’s Yonsei University. The workshop was composed of eight teams of students from three countries, including Korea, China, and Japan, and the course was primarily divided into two sessions. The workshop participants examined in this thesis were notably satised with the elements of the course meant to garner interest. In the questionnaire results, participants also indicated that they obtained ample educational value through the workshop. An important element of the workshop was to connect the participants with businesses, which is also an important component of design education. Despite this, participants expressed a relatively lower level of satisfaction com- pared to other elements of the workshop. The results and analysis of this study will hopefully become a meaningful resource for educators when designing workshops in the future.
Decisions made by user interface designers play an influential role in how people interact with software, this is especially true when it comes to the creation of tools to support teaching. As technology continues to play a more prominent role in schools, it poses an important question about how the design of learning tools influence what teachers do in classrooms. Data analytics is one opportunity technology offers for teachers to foster collaboration in student groups. Data analytics have the potential to provide teachers with a live view of what students are doing when using technology, which research shows is challenging to implement in classrooms. This paper focuses on the process to design a tool that assists engineering discussion session teacher assistants (TAs) to monitor collaboration within groups. We report on findings from interviews with TAs on what they anticipate they would need in order to support group work, and discuss how their responses influenced the design of this tool.
Graphic design is often seen in the commercial context and is discussed through topics linked to software and technology. When we look around us we can realise that billboards, banners, posters and most of the print that surround us in the public space are delivering messages of marketing, corporations, consumerism and other commercially inclined narratives. This, however, is not the only way to comprehend the practice of a graphic designer. Graphic design can take a socio-pedagogical and historical role and distribute alternative messages in the society which are not linked to money and consumption, unless education, reading and studying are considered consumption of sorts.
It is obvious that graphic design is a powerful tool that shapes our understanding of reality. This happens through being exposed to the work. Posters are claimed to mirror societies by many theorists and most visual communication is mediated by a graphic designer. Thus, Bonsiepe stated already in 2005 in his speech Design and Democracy that there is an absence of questioning activities linked to design production. It is yet a relevant theme that research needs to approach; also in a post-colony where the printed poster is ubiquitous. A simple sheet of printed paper. A very simple but extremely complex and powerful. There lies an investigation that this paper will start. The outcome of this paper to share knowledge within the researchers about creating new meaningful pathways in understanding globally important practice of graphic design. Art and design are universally important.
Childhood obesity increases the risk of obesity in adulthood and is associated with cardiovascular disease risk factors. The prevalence of overweight and obesity is increasing in China. It is necessary to develop an intervention project for preschool children. Based on a service design project aiming at the communication of balanced diet information to the preschool children in China, this paper discusses how to take advantage of the digital platform and game-based learning to empower the preschool children. It argues for the importance of the DIKW hierarchy for empowerment. It also proposes an innovative model to involve new stakeholders into the whole system and to improve the viability of the project.
It was late on a Friday evening. A great time to avoid crowds. Most people were dining and drinking, absorbing the city’s capacity for pleasure, or maybe relaxing at home. That left the supermarket to me and others whose lives are synchronized differently. But as I stumbled my way through those harshly lit corridors of obscene American consumption, I realized I was among some highly unusual company. In every aisle, there were people—people?—clad in blue uniforms with devices attached to their forearms and fingertips, cables and wires dangling, each methodically filling large specialized carts. These were not shoppers like me. They were employees of the grocery chain operating— operated by?—new software for online ordering and curbside pickup. Surely, this wasn’t such a strange scene in contemporary stores around the world. Yet, it did raise strange—radical? — possibilities: a specter of “before” for an unforeseeable and potentially unpleasant “after.” The unity of the human and the machine, not implanted but merged in the operation, made me wonder: Are they cyborgs? Incipient cyborgs? Is this still a supermarket? Or an altogether different kind of space? One in the process of becoming? But becoming what?
The image that flashed to mind was that of an Amazon fulfillment center: a million acres of non-stop conveyor belts with robots finding and retrieving machine-labeled products and filling yellow bins under the supervision of a handful of humans. Robotic automation creating efficiency while eliminating the unpredictable and unproductive complexities of human labor and interactions. Perhaps, supermarkets are undergoing a transformation from spaces where humans browse, compare, select, and purchase to cyborg-operated warehouses. Perhaps this rapid and fundamental revision of function is an inevitable result of the increasing rate of technical reformation of everyday life.
Then again, perhaps my lucid vision of this scene as a new-reality- becoming is an example of what has been called “dystopian imagination”—an imaginary projection of “ethical and political concern” [Baccolini & Moylan, 2]. Or maybe it’s only a personal paranoia about the brave new world unfolding.
The user experience difference between China and USA elderly people in using public space was discussed in this paper based on the questionnaire process. 1960 elderly people were selected from the four cities in Shanghai (China), Wuxi (China), New York City (USA), Cincinnati (USA) to complete the questionnaire, and the result shows the similarities and differences between the elderly people in China and USA. That is: The using frequency of the public space for the former is much higher than the later; the main purpose of the former in public space is sports and fitness, and relaxation is the chief choice of the later; weather condition and easy communication are the key factors for former to participate in public space, while timing is that for the later; all the elderly people in the two countries are favorite on the sports and fitness, but the party chatting is the feature of the former and the sightseeing is the feature of the later; the facility requirement is the most important attributes for the former to the public space, and the interaction design is the unique demands of the later, while the former had no interests on that demands. In the end, the reason for all the similarities and differences were analyzed in this paper, and the culture, the economics, as well as the politics factors were discussed in detail.
Design oriented educational institution around the world, project based learning is well practiced in local setting as well as global setting. Communication is one of the significant aspect in this learning settings. Currently, many design projects are implemented by members beyond their belonging organization, creating difficulties in face to face communication, especially when members are in different countries. This study proposes a new method for project-based learning in design education program implemented on international design workshop and discuss about outcome through empirical program.
This method is composed in three phases. First phase is online pre-workshop session using SLACK, where each member do their own researching and surveying on the specific topic related to the project, share and discuss them with other members. The second phase is face to face workshop, which all members gather in one place to work on the project intensively to make their group design proposal. The lastly in the post workshop phase, each member get back online to make reflection on the project, feedback them on the proposal, and make improvements. Also, compile and publish a project reports on the overall program for documentation. Through out the program, SLACK platform is used for basic communication and sharing data and information. S This program are operated in an international design workshop called “Global Design Workshop” of Chiba Institute of Technology(CIT, Chiba, Japan), with students from Chiba University(CU, Chiba, Japan) and Tunghai University(THU, Taichung, Taiwan) . The theme of the workshop was “New work place, space, style using IoT technologies.