Showing papers in "Codesign in 2016"
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analysed a series of design review videos depicting students' design procedures within a service-learning course and explored how empathy functioned throughout the development of the students' final design solutions, which included a zip-line access point, ramp and cheering platform.
Abstract: The emergence of human-centred design strategies has directed attention to the role of empathy within design. While research on co-design acknowledges the potentially improved outcomes of using an empathic design approach, a comprehensive analysis on how empathy functions throughout the design process has been minimally explored in this literature. In this study, we analysed a series of design review videos depicting students’ design procedures within a service-learning course. These student designers were tasked to design a universally accessible zip-line and access ramp along with associated features. Our objective was to explore how empathy functioned throughout the development of the students’ final design solutions, which included a zip-line access point, ramp and cheering platform. To guide our depiction of these empathic design pathways, we relied on a set of pre-established empathic design techniques utilised by student designers. We provide a visual summary of student designers’ empathic ...
88 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present an empirical comparison of idea generation within the context of reducing the number of single occupancy car journeys to and from a UK university campus, and find that the co-design group generated a significantly higher number of innovative ideas than the consultative group.
Abstract: This paper presents an empirical comparison of idea generation within the context of reducing the number of single occupancy car journeys to and from a UK university campus. Separate co-design and consultative groups were matched with respect to (1) creativity when problem solving, (2) normal commuting mode and (3) intention to adopt sustainable behaviours. The co-design group generated a significantly greater number of innovative ideas than the consultative group (using an email-based methodology); however, this was due to the greater number of total ideas (rather than the higher proportion of innovative ideas) generated by this group. The co-design group was able to think more systemically about potential solutions and generate proposals that were not either linked to their own commute mode, or aligned with any one specific mode of transport. The findings suggest that co-design offers benefits as a process for idea generation within the sustainable travel context as it promotes idea generation a...
86 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that codesign should look into how codesign comes into being in practice, what I call design before design, and the pragmatic and political questions that arise in this context.
Abstract: This paper argues that codesign should look into how codesign comes into being in practice, what I call design before design, and the pragmatic and political questions that arise in this context. Using the example of the work that goes into creating and sustaining interest in codesign among prospective participants the pragmatics and politics of codesign itself is questioned. It is argued that codesign is not necessarily in the interest of the people it is ostensibly ‘for’, and that codesign in its implementation of its particular ideals of participation and democracy is following a ‘logic of war’ where winning, losing or making a tactical retreat are the only possibilities. However, as code signers it is suggested that we exchange this logic with a more diplomatic and designerly approach to allow for both creativity and concession out of a concern for improving codesign.
32 citations
TL;DR: An explorative study that uses the design grammar model (DGM) as an observational framework for teacher–student interactions and results resulted in encouraging results regarding the DGM’s potential as an analysis tool for teacher and student interactions, as well as a diagnostic tool for teachers.
Abstract: Teacher and student interaction in a design studio setting has always been the basis of design education. A fundamental difficulty of design education is that the content of these one-on-one meetings between teacher and students remains remarkably implicit. In this paper, we present an explorative study that uses the design grammar model (DGM) as an observational framework for teacher–student interactions. The DGM is rooted on the concept of design grammar that can be broadly defined as the visual language used to design. The study focuses on the industrial design junior students’ meetings with their teacher; our research proceeds from a protocol analysis of the transcripts that are coded according to the DGM. The resulting data are then used to develop a series of diagrams that are employed as a visual analysis tool. The diagrams synthesise and convey large amounts of data that permit immediate analysis and elicit new interpretations. The study resulted in encouraging results regarding the DGM’s ...
21 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, two design teams were informed about the changes induced on operators and driver deliverymen following the introduction of new equipment and each team conducted a design session to generate and select ideas.
Abstract: Research on personas often lacks real assessment of their pros and cons. This paper proposes a measure of the effects of personas on the creativity of a team involved in the improvement of working conditions. It describes an exploratory study carried out in a real setting, which explores the effects of two sources of information on collective creativity. Two design teams were informed about the changes induced on operators and driver deliverymen following the introduction of new equipment. One team had a written list of findings and the other team a set of personas, also in written format. Each team conducted a design session to generate and select ideas. In a second phase, a steering committee was responsible for validating the ideas to be implemented. These sessions were videotaped, transcribed and analysed. The results show that the team with personas generated the most appropriate ideas and had the highest argumentative activity, which was used to filter the largest number of ideas. These resu...
20 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a waste management system for soft plastic for a small village in India, personas were developed and applied by the designer to maintain a user-oriented focus throughout the participatory design process.
Abstract: Much research on personas focuses on how to develop and use personas, less on the validation and concrete value of them in the development of products for cultures far away from the actual design site. This article illustrates how such a validation was accomplished through producing a film and it provides an in-depth case description of how personas were developed and used. When designing a waste management system for soft plastic for a small village in India, personas were developed and applied by the designer to maintain a user-oriented focus throughout the participatory design process. During a three-month stay in the village, personas based on real people and the villagers’ everyday life and practices were developed by getting to know people and their ways of life through the use of ethnographic methods (observations, interviews, workshops and a film). The personas created a substantial understanding of the users’ individual needs, interests, values and emotions and helped to overcome the phys...
18 citations
TL;DR: CoDesign presented papers selected from work initially presented at the 10th Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS 10), which took place at Purdue University in the fall of 2010.
Abstract: This special issue of CoDesign presents papers selected from work initially presented at the 10th Design Thinking Research Symposium (DTRS 10), which took place at Purdue University in the fall of ...
13 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the relationship among visualisation, ambiguity and critique, where each of these components offers a lens into understanding how designers use the tensions within ambiguity and clarity to achieve designs that fulfil assignments or other purposes.
Abstract: Designers develop skills and knowledge through experience and feedback – feedback from colleagues, clients, supervisors, users, stakeholders, or the success or failure of a solution and design instructors. However, the design coaches (instructors and industry clients) and design students must negotiate ambiguity in the feedback process. In this article, we investigate visualisation within a design critique setting, where the industrial design instructor and the students are navigating ambiguity while the instructor is providing feedback on the design work. Using a constitutive research approach, we investigate the relationships among visualisation, ambiguity and critique, where each of these components offers a lens into understanding how designers use the tensions within ambiguity and clarity to achieve designs that fulfil assignments or other purposes. As part of this process, we characterise differences between the ways the instructor and the student interact with the human and non-human agents...
12 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the co-presence of an instructor and students impacts the overall performance of the review and some of the pedagogic practices of design education are enacted through the contexts of discourse and embodiment.
Abstract: This paper explores interaction in graduate-level industrial design education. We outline two instances of how design reviews are conducted through social contexts and provide a theorised analysis of these instances. In particular, this paper considers how participants in a design review – both an instructor and students – enact aspects of role-oriented authority and affiliation within the context of the review. Through perspectives associated with ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, this paper discusses how a misunderstanding and a request (and the response to that request) are managed through speech, gesture, and gaze direction. We explore how the interactive, co-presence of an instructor and students impacts upon the overall performance of the review and show how some of the pedagogic practices of design education are enacted through the contexts of discourse and embodiment. This paper provides opportunities for design instructors, students, professionals and researchers to reflect upon...
10 citations
TL;DR: The technique proved to be valuable in making sense of fragmented data, and supported the design team's collaborative work when designing a ship’s bridge, and it is expected that the technique can also prove valuable when designing for other contexts where the spatial and/or temporal dimensions are of importance.
Abstract: Making use of insights gained through field research in design can be challenging. Some issues that design teams may face are making sense of fragmented data collected, sharing insight among the design team and presenting the data in ways that support the situated design work. This paper introduces layered scenario mapping, a technique aimed at meeting such issues when designing a ship’s bridge. The technique builds on and expands traditional techniques for representing user data in design and results in a map describing a typical scenario along several dimensions and at different levels of abstraction. It highlights the spatial and temporal aspects of the situation, and emphasises the use of visual presentations. This paper describes why and how the layered scenario mapping technique was created, it critically assesses the technique and discusses experiences with using it. The technique proved to be valuable in making sense of fragmented data, and supported the design team’s collaborative work wh...
10 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored the role of joint remembering in collaborative design and found that questions acting as reminders foster the formation of multimodal remembering sequences (MRSs) that connect multiple timescales over the duration of co-design projects.
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to explore the role of joint remembering in collaborative design. Joint remembering sequences are identified on the basis of questions that act as triggers to specific interactive sequences. The sequences are situated in the ongoing collaborative design process, and empirical evidence is provided that illustrates how the interweaving of verbal, bodily, social and material resources supports joint remembering. Three examples of joint remembering sequences in co-design are analysed from a corpus of interactions (45+ hours of audio and video recording), collected during an observational study of a team of four 3D designers working on a TV commercial. This study suggests that questions acting as reminders foster the formation of multimodal remembering sequences (MRSs) that connect multiple timescales over the duration of co-design projects. In the corpus under study, MRSs enable designers to plan future actions and make decisions on the fly.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate how design artefacts shape interactions among student designers and design reviewers to mediate design and design learning and find that functional and well-developed design artefact allowed students to position themselves as experts of their designs; engage in collaborative, innovative discussion with design reviewers; and elicit constructive feedback from reviewers.
Abstract: This study investigates how design artefacts shape interactions among student designers and design reviewers to mediate design and design learning. By analysing data collected from two design courses in mechanical engineering and industrial design courses, this study draws on Winner’s concept of politics of the artefact and Gee’s discourse analysis to explore the ways in which design artefacts help structure social relationships and power dynamics between reviewers and students in design learning settings. We use this exploration to examine how student designers work with reviewers to negotiate meaning as they shift from student to collaborator. Our results indicate that functional and well-developed design artefacts allowed students to position themselves as experts of their designs; engage in collaborative, innovative discussion with design reviewers; and elicit constructive feedback from reviewers. In contrast, students who developed incomplete or inaccurate design artefacts experienced limited...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors investigate the stances that designers take in relation to one another in design critiques and find that participants adopt and shift between several identified stances, which they call inscriptional, third-person, first-person and phenomenal.
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the stances that designers take in relation to one another in design critiques. Analysis of audiovisual recordings of critiques between students and professional designers in industrial design in the DTRS 10 data-set reveals that design concepts not only are verbally narrated but also come to life in gesture, gaze, orientation and body movement. In these bodily performances, participants adopt and shift between several identified stances, which we call inscriptional, third-person, first-person and phenomenal. In social relations, these stances are mirrored, taken up, responded to and elaborated by the other participants. The critique itself, then, can be seen as a dialogical movement by the participating designers through a set of stances. By comparing a case in which participants are collocated to a case in which the participants are at a geographic distance facilitated only by real-time audio and shared computer display, we conjecture that this responsive mirroring ...
TL;DR: In this article, a visual notation called interaction dynamics notation was used for analysing the moment-to-moment interpersonal interactions in design reviews and the expressions of professional vision (PV) were identified in these design review interactions.
Abstract: A visual notation called the interaction dynamics notation was used for analysing the moment-to-moment interpersonal interactions in design reviews. The expressions of professional vision (PV) – a system of seeing and interpreting that characterises a professional group – are identified in these design review interactions. The analysis showed that students’ participation was important to the articulation of PV in design reviews. Specifically, there were four interaction patterns – question-asking, supportive behaviour, building-on behaviour and humour that were associated with nine types of PV expressions in design review interactions. These interaction patterns are examined in the context of existing literature on design reviews. The implication of using the visual representation of review interactions as an educational tool is explored.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared MUVE and sketching media in face-to-face and remote collaboration modes, involving 22 pairs of architecture major students and found that anthropomorphic avatars enabled individual and collaborative explorations to discover unexpected affordances of new solutions, with evaluation on physical properties and layouts of solutions.
Abstract: Pioneering psychology and co-design research has highlighted the potential that multi-user virtual environment (MUVE) may help architects’ exploratory creativity that is a recursive search to discover an optimal match of novel and appropriate solutions. However, it has been not reported hitherto in what ways MUVE helps or obstructs architects’ exploratory creativity in individual and collaborative modes of collaboration. To investigate this issue, we compared MUVE and sketching media in face-to-face and remote collaboration modes, involving 22 pairs of architecture major students. Based on interview and video-observation, we discovered that (1) in MUVE, anthropomorphic avatars, which other media do not have, enabled individual and collaborative explorations to discover unexpected affordances of new solutions, with evaluation on physical properties and layouts of solutions. In addition, (2) co-presence with collaborator’s avatars enabled inspiration on new ways of problem-solving and puzzle-making ...
TL;DR: In this paper, three case studies were used to answer the research question: What factors contribute to the success of virtual cross-disciplinary design teams in large multinational engineering corporations? Results indicate that factors that contribute to success include the context in which teams work, the method by which teams do their work, and the media by which they communicate.
Abstract: The nature of design problems facing industry today often requires the use of cross-disciplinary teams in order to maximise innovation. Three case studies were used to answer the research question: What factors contribute to the success of virtual cross-disciplinary design teams in large multinational engineering corporations? Results indicate that factors that contribute to success include the context in which teams work, the method by which teams do their work, and the media by which teams communicate. In addition, this study also found that technology facilitates, but does not take the place of, well-defined and shared processes.