Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

The Semiosis of Civil Society: Theorizing the Media in Postcolonial Polities

My dissertation is an attempt to construct a theoretical framework for the distinctive nature of the mass media in the postcolonial political context through an engagement with the theoretical legacy of Indian political theory and historiography, especially the Subaltern Studies school. I draw from Partha Chatterjee’s conceptualization of Indian politics as divided into the two spheres of civil and political society and interpret these political categories through the rubric of mass media and televisual discourse, both to locate the mass media in the discourse and practice of politics, and to also locate political practice as it takes place in a mediatized context. To extend Chatterjee’s understanding of the postcolonial polity, I map these political categories to Jean Baudrillard’s understanding of human communication that is divided between the symbolic and semiotic domains. I trace Baudrillard’s theoretical trajectory from Durkheim and Marx through social anthropology and media theory. I also try to interpret his categories through Marx’s concept of the subsumption of labor under capital as a metaphor to understand how the thread of capitalist modernity runs through them. I posit that the nation-form is the essential embodiment of capitalist modernity in the context of a mediatized political sphere where the nation is essentially what Baudrillard calls a simulacrum, and I try to understand it as a semiotic discourse that is located within the realm of civil society. I explore this aspect of the relationship between media and politics through instances of the mass-mediation of the symbolic domain of political society. Finally I argue that it is the symbolic domain that is the dominant aspect of communication in the postcolonial context, and it is a recovery of the symbolic that will provide a political challenge radical enough to destabilize the semiotic realm of capitalist modernity. This recovery can only take place if the mass media shifts its location from civil society to the democratic challenges of political society. A radical theory of the media in the postcolonial context will be one that will enable this shift by critically engaging with the absences and silences of the symbolic within current media discourse

Character Recognition

Character recognition is one of the pattern recognition technologies that are most widely used in practical applications. This book presents recent advances that are relevant to character recognition, from technical topics such as image processing, feature extraction or classification, to new applications including human-computer interfaces. The goal of this book is to provide a reference source for academic research and for professionals working in the character recognition field

Conduits of Communion: Monstrous Affections in Algonquin Traditional Territory

This project investigates the legacies of shifting land tenure and stewardship practices on what is now known as the Ottawa Valley watershed (referred to as the Kitchissippi by the Omamawinini or Algonquin people), and the effects that this central colonization project has had on issues of identity and Nationalism on Canadians, diversely identified as settler-colonists of European or at least “Old World” descent and First Nations, Métis and Inuit (Lawrence 2012). Focusing on historical and contemporary political and social issues related to Algonquin Provincial Park and its establishment, this project explores; 1) Competing claims levied by First Nations Peoples, local and descendant communities as well as representatives of the Canadian settler-colonist Nation-State regarding proper relationships to the environment and its stewardship; 2) Popular discursive and practical approaches to conservation, tourism, naturalism, and heritage management; and 3) The complicated entanglements of First Nations, settler-colonist, local and descendant communities and shifting identifications made evident by changes in economic relationships to the territory in and around the Park and in some peoples’ legal status vis-a-vis the Nation-State. This dissertation draws on public history and traditional narrative as sources for a reconsideration of history, ethnohistory, and ethnography in relation to studies of the complex contemporary Canadian Nation-State. Contributing to a specifically Canadian anthropology, I develop vocabulary through which to engage the perpetuation of Traditional Indigenous Knowledge regarding the environment, health and relationality, and to counteract Intergenerational Trauma related to dispossession and the breakdown of identity, personal and collective, under settler-colonial pressures

Developing a Hand Gesture Recognition System for Mapping Symbolic Hand Gestures to Analogous Emoji in Computer-mediated Communication

Recent trends in computer-mediated communications (CMC) have not only led to expanded instant messaging through the use of images and videos, but have also expanded traditional text messaging with richer content, so-called visual communication markers (VCM) such as emoticons, emojis, and stickers. VCMs could prevent a potential loss of subtle emotional conversation in CMC, which is delivered by nonverbal cues that convey affective and emotional information. However, as the number of VCMs grows in the selection set, the problem of VCM entry needs to be addressed. Additionally, conventional ways for accessing VCMs continues to rely on input entry methods that are not directly and intimately tied to expressive nonverbal cues. One such form of expressive nonverbal that does exist and is well-studied comes in the form of hand gestures. In this work, I propose a user-defined hand gesture set that is highly representative to VCMs and a two-stage hand gesture recognition system (trajectory-based, shape-based) that distinguishes the user-defined hand gestures. While the trajectory-based recognizer distinguishes gestures based on the movements of hands, the shape-based recognizer classifies gestures based on the shapes of hands. The goal of this research is to allow users to be more immersed, natural, and quick in generating VCMs through gestures. The idea is for users to maintain the lower-bandwidth online communication of text messaging to largely retain its convenient and discreet properties, while also incorporating the advantages of higher-bandwidth online communication of video messaging by having users naturally gesture their emotions that are then closely mapped to VCMs. Results show that the accuracy of user-dependent is approximately 86% and the accuracy of user-independent is about 82%

Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011

These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2011 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference(SPARC). It includes papers from PhD students in the arts and social sciences, business, computing, science and engineering, education, environment, built environment and health sciences. Contributions from Salford researchers are published here alongside papers from students at the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Chester,De Montfort, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester

Graphonomics and your Brain on Art, Creativity and Innovation : Proceedings of the 19th International Graphonomics Conference (IGS 2019 – Your Brain on Art)

[Italiano]: “Grafonomia e cervello su arte, creatività e innovazione”. Un forum internazionale per discutere sui recenti progressi nell'interazione tra arti creative, neuroscienze, ingegneria, comunicazione, tecnologia, industria, istruzione, design, applicazioni forensi e mediche. I contributi hanno esaminato lo stato dell'arte, identificando sfide e opportunità, e hanno delineato le possibili linee di sviluppo di questo settore di ricerca. I temi affrontati includono: strategie integrate per la comprensione dei sistemi neurali, affettivi e cognitivi in ambienti realistici e complessi; individualità e differenziazione dal punto di vista neurale e comportamentale; neuroaesthetics (uso delle neuroscienze per spiegare e comprendere le esperienze estetiche a livello neurologico); creatività e innovazione; neuro-ingegneria e arte ispirata dal cervello, creatività e uso di dispositivi di mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) indossabili; terapia basata su arte creativa; apprendimento informale; formazione; applicazioni forensi. / [English]: “Graphonomics and your brain on art, creativity and innovation”. A single track, international forum for discussion on recent advances at the intersection of the creative arts, neuroscience, engineering, media, technology, industry, education, design, forensics, and medicine. The contributions reviewed the state of the art, identified challenges and opportunities and created a roadmap for the field of graphonomics and your brain on art. The topics addressed include: integrative strategies for understanding neural, affective and cognitive systems in realistic, complex environments; neural and behavioral individuality and variation; neuroaesthetics (the use of neuroscience to explain and understand the aesthetic experiences at the neurological level); creativity and innovation; neuroengineering and brain-inspired art, creative concepts and wearable mobile brain-body imaging (MoBI) designs; creative art therapy; informal learning; education; forensics

Porto Maphazardly - Representation of Place in Graphic Design

This project, Porto Maphazardly, examines the role of a graphic designer in exploring alternate means of mapping a location. A square in the Portuguese city of Porto was mapped through five sensory approaches: sound, smell, taste, activity, and color perception. The data that was gathered was translated into visuals to create a generated, but totally unique, graphic portrait of a place. The portmanteau maphazardly in the title combines the word ‘map’ with the adverb, ‘haphazardly,’ which means to do something determined by accident rather than design, without a clear plan or at the mercy of chance. The coining of the word is meant to evoke the extent to which the illustrations developed in response to observations, encounters and circumstance, rather than a client brief or a designer’s pre-decided aesthetic. In this report, the project is contextualized between the theory of critical cartography in the field of sociology, and the mapping works which already exist in the graphic design field, including the works of Paula Scher, Pedro Pina, Jeremy Wood, Alison Barnes and Kate McLean. The report presents a synthesized definition of ‘map’ for use in a visual, graphic analysis. A limited survey of the principles of information design is discussed, in its relation to traditional cartography, infographics, and our cognitive interpretations of maps. Finally, a brief analysis of changes in the nature of maps (smart-maps) is included, focusing on how user-centered maps have changed how one interacts with a city. The project endeavors to work in the realm of ‘designer as researcher,’ and is influenced by the writing of Russell Bestley and Ian Noble on visual research, in which the experiential nature of the data collection influences the design process. The methodology was developed through a series of test projects and by the application of ‘walking as method,’ and the report introduces the generative systems which were used to transform data— notes, photographs, and recordings—into illustrations. The final mappings are presented along with an analysis of successes and failures