Investigating our future: how designers can get us all thinking

This paper, and the presentation it represents, discusses the importance of bringing users into the design process and some of the techniques that can be employed to achieve that. Designing for older people is particularly challenging because most designers do not have direct experience of the ways that people’s lives and expectations change as they become older so it is even more important than usual to give the user a direct voice in the designing. However this is not straightforward. Most people find it difficult to visualise products and environments that do not exist at the moment so we need to help them imagine possibilities and express their needs and desires. Sheffield Hallam University has pioneered methods for using the designer’s creative talents to create situations that allow people to act out new situations and engage with the creative opportunities that they present. These methods are particularly important in the contemporary world where products are connected by complex information systems so we must attend to how people engage with both the physical aspects of a product or environment and the systems that underlie the

Design enquiry: tacit knowledge and invention in science

For some years there has been discussion and speculation on the subject of "design enquiry" and a number of people, for example Richard Buchanan and Clive Dilnot , have looked for forms of enquiry appropriate to, or fruitful for, design as an academic and professional discipline. From a different perspective, Ranulph Glanville has suggested that the relationship between design and science might be redefined to acknowledge similarities of method that are disguised by forms of narrative employed by scientists. However most contributions in these debates deal with generalisations so I would like to propose some specific ways in which designers can explore and develop the concepts and practices of design enquiry. In particular I would like to discuss a kind of enquiry where designers can play a role in forming and pursuing questions which arise in the natural sciences and I will suggest that this role might be extended into some other fields. In doing so I will make reference to the subject of tacit knowledge, a concept which was formalised by Michael Polanyi in his consideration of the philosophy of science 50 years ago and which has attracted continuing interest (his 1958 book, Personal Knowledge, was reprinted most recently in 1998 and 2002), but also some shallow interpretation since then. I believe that Polanyi has a great deal to offer the design community, perhaps more in some respects than the widely cited work of Donald Schon who dealt with general questions of practice relevant to many disciplines while Polanyi addressed the relationship between enquiry and creativity in a very direct way. </p

Review of practice-led research in art, design & architecture

This review report sets out the outcomes of a 10 month investigation to describe the landscape of practice-led research in Art, Design and Architecture (ADA) in the UK and beyond. We were asked for a qualitative review but of course it has been important to gather some numbers to check and illustrate our observations. We have consulted widely, both face to face and in the virtual world, with experts and novices in the UK and around the world. We have tried to strike a balance between the natural desire of our colleagues to debate the more contentious aspects of this territory (they were never going to forgo that opportunity) and the equally strong wish of the AHRC that we should provide a clear description of what is happening. We have collected some diverse examples of research and subjected them to various examinations. We have also examined a selection of research projects funded by AHRC and other projects by creative practitioners, funded by a non-research organisation. From all this we have been able to describe the landscape in a straightforward sense: We have measures of the proportions of ADA academics involved in practice-led research. We have clarified differences in the ways that the different ADA disciplines engage with practice-led research and identified some problems that indicate possible future support strategies. We have discussed some problems with general definitions of research and identified issues that should be addressed to ensure that the AHRC definition can be applied to the full range of practice-led research. We have picked out some specific case examples that illustrate the range of contexts, methods and contributions made by practice-led researchers, and more are described in detail in Appendix F. We have also sought to assess how this research relates to the wider international picture in which the UK appears to have a strong position in both volume and development of research. We have also set out some issues that affect this community of researchers: What strengths and weaknesses have we observed and where is there a need to support development? Do the AHRC definition of research and guidance on practice-led research provide an effective framework? We have illustrated the state of development of research in ADA, and some reasons why it is less robust than might be expected from such long established disciplines. We recommend that the career path of researchers in ADA needs some attention and make some suggestions about how that could be achieved. We have also indicated some areas of inquiry that might be supported to advance the theory and methods of practice-led research. In particular we have come to the conclusion that conventional ideas of contribution to knowledge or understanding may not be serving us well. This is significant to fine artists but we believe that it relevant across ADA and a shared effort to develop appropriate new models would be a constructive development. The full set of recommendations can be found in chapter 5

The Unscholarly Use of Numbers in Our Assessment Practices: What Will Make Us Change?

Excerpt: On being invited to write something informative or evocative. I really couldn\u27t resist the temptation to be a little provocative and return to a theme that I have touched on before (Rust, 2007), and is a particular bête noir of mine. Although I have to admit that, given I have no reason to believe that what I wrote previously has had any discernable impact, there is a slight sense of futility even as..

How may designers create furniture that allows meaningful place-making in a modern office?: Case study in the Malaysian office environment

There have been many discussions on office environments, but there have been few studies on the designer relationship with the workplace that they are designing. Given the benefit of the findings of this research, designers might create opportunities for the user to express their emotions through their workplace personalization. In my early field work, I used a participatory design approach and used mock-ups to investigate the main problems and to explore design opportunities in developing new office environments. The findings revealed that meaningful workplaces can be achieved in different way and for different reason according to different needs

'Personal literacy': the vital, yet often overlooked, graduate attribute.

"There is no difference between academic skills and employment skills,"(Jackson, 2011, p1). This paper argues that there is often a false dichotomy in the minds of academics between employability, and the so-called 'skills agenda', and the teaching of academic disciplines. And even in professional courses, the view of employability can be very blinkered, limited to getting a job and working in the specific profession e.g. law, nursing, architecture. It is our argument that an explicit focus on the graduate attribute 'personal literacy' - literally the ability to 'read oneself', to be critically self-aware- can unite the academic and employability agendas and reveal them as one, joint enterprise. We also argue that both the development of employability and the learning of academic disciplines can be significantly improved through the development of students' critical self-awareness and personal literacy. Having made this case, we then go on to consider examples of how this might be achieved in practice

Decentralised creative economies and transactional creative communities:New value discovery in the performing arts

While the past decade has seen cuts to public funding to the arts, it has also seen the development of online technologies which have the potential to reach increasingly diverse and global audiences. As a result, individuals and organisations across the creative industries and performing arts have experimented and embraced more diverse, innovative, and direct approaches to engage and monetise tangible support from their audiences and communities. Prior work has identified the evolution of crowdfunding in the arts as a form of 'crowd patronage' - where platforms such as Patreon and Kickstarter function as new intermediaries that can radically reconfigure how and why creative work is funded. The 'pivot to digital' - which brought audiences and creative workers together in new online spaces throughout the pandemic - further reinforced the potential for direct communication and financial support from audiences of creative work. This chapter will reflect on how contemporary data-driven, monetary technologies have begun to decentralise how creative work is valued, supported, and paid for, with a particular focus on the performing arts.</p

Participatory design: how may designers create furniture that allows meaningful place-making

This paper has developed design method for furniture designer’s that allow users to express their needs through place making or creation of meaningful office workspaces. We discovered that there were problems in getting the users to explain their ideas through verbal explanations. From there we started to use a participatory design approach with mock-ups to investigate the main methods and to explore design opportunities in developing new office environments. The study revealed, by using role-play with mock-ups directly with the users, allowed the designers to quickly become aware of arising issues without the need to do a potentially time-consuming, normative and tedious observational study. This research approach is primarily leads to new understanding about practice and described as "practice-led" approach to research. This project had investigated, demonstrated and opened the possibility that these approaches could be turned into a practical participatory process toward design in furniture industry practice in Malaysia

Designing new socio-economic imaginaries

This short paper recovers the term ‘imaginaries’ which is often used in the social sciences to describe a meaning system that frames individuals lived experience of an inordinately complex world. The paper goes on to reflect on the extent to which design has the capability to disrupt imaginaries through the development of products in order for people to construct new ones, or whether the discipline is perpetuating old models of the world. The paper uses a workshop method to explore socioeconomic models in order to better balance the multiple imaginaries that participants hold with the opportunity to design disruptive and critical propositions. Reflections upon the workshop and the concept of imaginaries allows the authors to identify a challenge for design in which it must accept its role as mediator and exacerbator. <br/