Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 2: Living, Making, Value

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 2 includes papers from Living, Making and Value tracks of the conference

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities

Mapping gestures in the creation of intangible artworks

"Mapping gestures in the creation of intangible artworks" considers that what is normally understood as an artwork, such as a painting or music, is in fact a tangible thing experienced via excitation of the physical senses. It is the perceiver's interpretation of this excitation that creates their unique experience of the object, and this interpretation creates the artwork. Rather than a linear, single-trajectory interaction from the art-maker to the art-perceiver, “Mapping gestures ...” hypothesises that this relationship is best understood as having the qualities of a Möbius strip, in that the maker and perceiver are engaged in an interaction in which each are simultaneously creator and perceiver. "Mapping gestures ...” has two parts: the three art-objects, MOTION, SPEECH and VISION, and the accompanying exegesis, which discusses the ideas and processes that informed their development. Its process is to explore the making of these art-objects and the discoveries that that generates. These discoveries in turn influence the process of creating the art-objects, which consequently leads to more discoveries. MOTION, SPEECH, and VISION are designed to engage the perceiver both physically and mentally, and to represent that engagement through simultaneously showing the result of their physical and their mental interactions with it. "Mapping gestures in the creation of intangible artworks" coalesces a bricolage of diverse aspects, including: concepts and theories relating to art making and communication, various art works, and art making concepts and processes, into a set of art-objects that overtly, fundamentally, and in essence rely on the interaction and interpretation of the perceiver in order to become artworks

Applied Cognitive Sciences

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field in the study of the mind and intelligence. The term cognition refers to a variety of mental processes, including perception, problem solving, learning, decision making, language use, and emotional experience. The basis of the cognitive sciences is the contribution of philosophy and computing to the study of cognition. Computing is very important in the study of cognition because computer-aided research helps to develop mental processes, and computers are used to test scientific hypotheses about mental organization and functioning. This book provides a platform for reviewing these disciplines and presenting cognitive research as a separate discipline

Towards an understanding of product pleasure

It is now widely acknowledged that consumers in developed markets tend not to see functionality and usability as major differentiators in the products that they buy. Recent years have seen the growth of the 'hedonic consumer'; the products that they buy are often chosen for the pleasures that they elicit. To satisfy these consumer demands, designers need to understand more about the less tangible emotional aspects of consumers. The principle aim of this programme of research was to develop a design resource that could support designers in understanding more about the pleasure needs and attitudes of individual consumers and demographic groups. The discipline of ergonomics already supports design, and other disciplines, with understanding the physical and cognitive characteristics of consumers and a growing number of ergonomists have begun to apply its scientifiC methods and human centred perspective to the emotional needs of the consumer. To develop a resource that would ultimately appeal to designers, a study was conducted to investigate their attitudes towards pleasure and design and their needs for tools developed to support them. This led to a comprehensive specification that governed the functional and aesthetic qualities of the resource and its data content. Using Jordan's Four Pleasure Framework (1997); Physio-pleasure, Socio-pleasure, Psycho-pleasure, and Ideo-pleasure, qualitative and quantitative data were collected that showed the manner in which consumers can derive pleasure from the products that they own. The qualitative data consisted of extensive Video-interviews with 100 consumers concerning three products that they own that give them pleasure. Other sets of data were also collected to give the designer more insight into an individual consumer's lifestyle. The quantitative data were the product of a UK wide survey of 682 consumers' attitudes towards product pleasure. A number of significant gender and age effects, concerning the pleasures that we seek from the products we own, were found. For example, females found greater pleasure from the social and ideological aspects of products and males tended to draw pleasure from the status and performance demonstrated. Older generations drew pleasure from sound functionality and usability, while younger generations were more willing to use challenging products and placed more emphasis on the social aspects of prodUcts. To house this data an interactive design resource, named RealPeople, was developed. The driving principle behind its development was the representation of information about real consumers that is not diluted; maintaining the empathic link between the data and the consumer from which it originated. Designers can search and review the database, absorbing information about different individual consumers and the population trends. They can search the data base by product type or consumer characteristics, view video clips of consumers talking about their favourite products and access lifestyle information. Tile functionality of the resource allows designers to save and share different search results, annotate search results with comments, and produce rudimentary presentations of their findings. This information can be used early in the design process to increase awareness of the pleasure needs of different consumer groups, invigorate concept generation, and to initiate research. It can also be used later in the design process, to verify design deCisions, evaluate prototypes against other 'pleasurable' products, and as a presentation tool. Evaluation of the RealPeople resource was extremely Positive. Designers found it highly functional and usable. They were impressed with the relevance and quality of the data that It held. Crucially, they found the novel manner In which the data was presented and the level to which they could interact with it to be appealing. The assessment with designers also unveiled a number of different avenues that future iterations of the resource could potentially take, as well as several longer term research questions that warrant investigation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

Human Expressivity in the Control and Integration of Computationally Generated Audio

PhDWhile physics-based synthesis offers a wide range of benefits in the real-time generation of sound for interactive environments, it is difficult to incorporate nuanced and complex behaviour that enhances the sound in a narrative or aesthetic context. The work presented in this thesis explores real-time human performance as a means of stylistically augmenting computational sound models. Transdisciplinary in nature, this thesis builds upon previous work in sound synthesis, film sound theory and physical sound interaction. Two levels on which human performance can enhance the aesthetic value of computational models are investigated: first, in the real-time manipulation of an idiosyncratic parameter space to generate unique sound effects, and second, in the performance of physical source models in synchrony with moving images. In the former, various mapping techniques were evaluated to control a model of a creaking door based on a proposed extension of practical synthesis techniques. In the latter, audio post-production professionals with extensive experience in performing Foley were asked to perform the soundtrack to a physics-based animation using bespoke physical interfaces and synthesis engines. The generated dataset was used to gain insights into stylistic features afforded by performed sound synchronisation, and potential ways of integrating them into an interactive environment such as a game engine. Interacting with practical synthesis models that have extended to incorporate performability enables rapid generation of unique and expressive sound effects, while maintaining a believable source-sound relationship. Performatively authoring behaviours of sound models makes it possible to enhance the relationship between sound and image (both stylistically and perceptually) in ways precluded by one-to-one mappings between physics-based parameters. Mediation layers are required in order to facilitate performed behaviour: in the design of the model on one hand, and in the integration of such behaviours into interactive environments on the other. This thesis provides some examples of how such a system could be implemented. Furthermore, some interesting observations are made regarding the design of physical interfaces for performing environmental sound, and the creative exploitation of model constraints.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Doctoral Training Centre in Media and Arts Technology (ref: EP/G03723X/1)