Defining Ritualistic Driver and Passenger Behaviour to Inform In-Vehicle Experiences

By discovering unconscious ritualistic actions in everyday driving such as preparing for the morning commute, we seek design opportunities to help people achieve critical emotional transitions such as moving from an anxious state to relief. We have gathered and analysed data from workshops and phone interviews from a variety of vehicle and public transport users to capture these key ritualistic scenarios and map their emotional transitions. Design ideation is used to generate concepts for improving the in-vehicle user experience through redesign of vehicle layout, environment and analogue and digital interfaces. We report a set of human-centred design approaches that allow us to study the details of action, objects, people, emotions and meaning for typical car users which are indispensable for designing driving experiences and are often overlooked by the car design process

Emotional tech

The Emotional Tech project applies emotional design as a research approach for investigating how people feel about state of the art and new emerging mobility technologies. How technology influences people at an emotional level and what factors can be improved in the design process has received little research attention and been rarely implemented in urban mobility. We explored the interactions and experiences of people and vehicles from the perspective of 'emotion as affective artefacts' which tackles 'emotion' as a conduit to help with problem-solving, decision-making and sense-making. The study focuses on subtle details of people's emotional transitions during, before and after journeys, and during long term use of mobility services. We created vehicle concepts to explore what innovation opportunities could be applied to bring cutting edge technologies into real world use

Designing for driver's emotional transitions and rituals

Emotions are a topic of increasing interest in vehicle design and research as they have a substantive impact on people's behaviour, affecting driving performance and being a source of safety issues particularly on long journeys. However, emotions do not usually occur distinctly and individually and frequently transition and transform between states. It can be challenging to obtain information about the exact emotions drivers experience, especially when subtle. We present design-led research focusing on identifying scenarios that contain normally unarticulated emotions and mental reminders that drivers use to make a journey safer and develop concepts for in-vehicle interactions that assist with these rituals. As results of the research, we designed and user tested in-vehicle interactions for two emotional transition scenarios - pre-journey preparation (‘Ready... Steady … Relax’) and checking the progress of a journey (‘Driving Whisper’)

Towards a People’s Theology of the road in an African Township: a case study of the Edendale Road Network within the Pietermaritzburg District.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.One of the legacies of the apartheid era in South Africa is the phenomenon of black townships that exist in the outskirts of urban areas. There is very little development in these townships which means that those who live in them have to make their way to the city centers to survive and make a living. This has given rise to the public transport industry. Millions of people in South Africa use kombi taxis every day. It is no secret that when it comes to these vehicles reckless and dangerous driving is an unfortunate reality. This means that people using them take their lives into their hands every day. The trip from home to work is probably the most dangerous daily experience that ordinary people living in the townships have to face. The vulnerability and helplessness that people feel when on the road causes them to seek help through religious faith. This study focused on one particular township, Edendale, outside the city of Pietermaritzburg. I have experienced the dangers of road travel myself and have always been concerned about the death toll on the roads and interested in the kinds of beliefs, rituals, and other expressions of faith that can be found among commuters. I sought permission from the regional taxi council to undertake this research by traveling on the taxis and conversing with commuters about their faith practices while on the road. I went on numerous taxi trips and cultivated relationships with a wide range of commuters, old and young, male and female, and from a variety of religious persuasions and faiths, as well as taxi drivers themselves. My informants were adherents mainly of Christianity, Islam, and African Traditional Religion. They had many different beliefs, performed a variety of rituals, and used a range of biblical texts if they were Christian. While the majority of them were Christian, most of them Christian or otherwise, reverted to their ancestral religion when it came to invoking help from the supernatural realm. This caused me to investigate further the basic features of a primal worldview and how these found expression in the beliefs, rituals, and other faith practices of my informants. This thesis documents my investigation into the environment of religious faith created by road travel in general and on the road from Edendale into Pietermaritzburg in particular. It outlines the rationale, methodology, and findings of my research, and attempts to theologically reflect on them. It is a “people’s” theology because it expresses the beliefs of ordinary people of Edendale, not the religious professionals of Edendale, and it is a theology of the road because it is done on the roads of Edendale.Abstract also available in isiZulu in pdf

Yetu’ – Nanik – Satajtoj Retrospective and Anticipatory Memory and Storytelling among Young People in the Guatemalan Diaspora in Southern Mexico

My thesis is concerned with young people in the Guatemalan diaspora in Southern Mexico and the ways in which they actively participate in the social making of their hometown in past, present, and future. My young interlocutors find themselves in an interesting position between two layers and temporalities of migration; their parents and grandparents who came to Chiapas as refugees in the 1980’s as well as older siblings and peers who frequently migrate to the US. The young people are key actors in the process of negotiating narratives from the past as well as notions of futurity for themselves and their community. During my fieldwork I engaged with young people and the wider community of La Gloria as a teacher, educator, and youth / community worker. A youth group resulted from the process and the topics of space, memory and storytelling are explored through different creative projects that the group and I worked on (oral history, photography, theatre). This thesis contributes to the study of memory specifically by showing how postmemory (as defined by Hirsch 2008) interlinks with futurity. I hope to show that young people are active in the making of space and memory in La Gloria, two aspects which profoundly impact their aspirations for the future

Universe and Inner Self in Early Indian and Early Greek Thought

From the sixth century BCE onwards there occurred a revolution in thought, with novel ideas such as such as that understanding the inner self is both vital for human well-being and central to understanding the universe. This intellectual transformation is sometimes called the beginning of philosophy. And it occurred – independently it seems - in both India and Greece, but not in the vast Persian Empire that divided them. How was this possible? This is a puzzle that has never been solved. This volume brings together Hellenists and Indologists representing a variety of perspectives on the similarities and differences between the two cultures, and on how to explain them. It offers a collaborative contribution to the burgeoning interest in the Axial Age and will be of interest to anyone intrigued by the big questions inspired by the ancient world

Reflecting on the Development of British Ocean Cruise Tourism: Keeping the Romance Afloat

This study reflects on the development of the British ocean cruise industry. In taking a historical perspective this provides an opportunity to discover if, despite changes in social expectation and technological advance, an element of the value cruise passengers place on their experience has been lost. Equating the ocean cruise experience to passenger cumulative value, the study utilises a thematic approach to reviewing literature and relates this to philosophical perspectives in developing a research strategy. The research data collected provides an insight to cruise tourist expectation and their perception of cumulative value in providing conclusions of value to cruise planners and offering a foundation for further research

Writing the railway: biosemiotic strategies for enforming meaning and dispersing authorship in site-specific text-based artworks

This practice-led PhD is concerned with the subject matter of contemporary art. It proposes methods by which a writer-maker’s authorship can be dispersed throughout reticulated networks of interpretation, and tests the limits of detail articulable in an artwork. To counter the literary and discursive turns that have dominated art theory and practice since the 1970s, the thesis demands a reassessment of the privileging of the viewer and of the adoption of indeterminacy as a generic style. It proposes instead a turn to biosemiotics as a means to situate the artwork materially, bodily, historically. That ambiguity and pluralism can consequently be deployed strategically, affectively and to critical effect is tested and evaluated in the accompanying practice. The thesis gives an account of the theorising and devising of text-based artworks which take the UK railway as site, and considers site-specificity a particular sort of engagement with subject matter. The railway is approached as a complex technical object consisting in multiple entangled intentions and interpretations – social, emotional and political valences, diffracted by a spectrum of practices, knowledges and semiotic ontologies – all of which are available to the writermaker as immanent materials of the artwork. Part One of the thesis presents a transdisciplinary argument that draws on biosemiotics, linguistic anthropology, philosophy of time and socio-psychology as well as art history and critical theory. Part Two performs an analysis of paradigmatic descriptions of the railway, speculates on the social dynamics of a train carriage interior and empirically tests the bureaucratic structures of London Underground. Part Three is an exegesis of three pieces submitted as documentation in the practice portfolio: an audio work, a guided tour and a live performance on a train carriage tabletop