Attitude development in designer's education

Modern academic design and engineering education adopted the issues and goals of holistic development of design competence. Holistic design competence is a combination of generic capacities: capability, knowledge, skill, experience and attitude. All capacities should be addressed in academic education, but the development of attitude is not sufficiently emphasized. Designers’ attitude can be seen as the relationship between a designer and the design profession. With a good designers’ attitude, different types of design problems can be solved and all the capacities, including attitude, can be developed. This paper proposes that developing a good designers’ attitude can be implemented in design education and should be done. We present the five different elements that comprise an attitude: communication, reliability, trust, motivation and open mindset. The relations between elements of designers’ attitude and other capacities of design competence are discussed. We studied the manifestation of attitudes and their development in a project of the so called Global Product Realization (GPR) course. The GPR course incorporates students from several European universities who are asked to solve a real design problem for an industrial company. The conclusion is that this project has supported the development of all five attitudinal elements. Since GPR projects are multi disciplinary, multi cultural and communication is non face-toface, a certain level of designers’ attitude is required for such projects. Further research is needed to support the vision that development of designers’ attitude needs to be addressed earlier in design education, preferably from the very first course

A critical analysis of the X.400 model of message handling systems

The CCITT X.400 model of store and forward Message Handling Systems (MHS) serves as a common basis for the definition of electronic mail services and protocols both within CCITT and ISO. This paper presents an analysis of this model and its related recommendations from two perspectives. First the concepts of service, protocol and interface are discussed together with their application to this model; second the positioning within ISO's reference model for Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) is commented on

Girlie

‘Girlie’ was a solo show of paintings in October-November 2008 that commented on the idea of the girlie in popular culture. Historically, the term referred to early pornographic magazines. Contemporary usage of the term is employed by advertisers and is aimed at selling products that sexualise pre-pubescent girls. This exhibition was an attempt to explore the paradoxes that issue from the popular conflation of these two ideas. References to fairy queens, princesses, girlie tattoos, cuddly toys, playboy bunnies and slogans from girlie T-shirts are juxtaposed with patronising and derogatory labels such as bitch, whore, tart, slut etc., so as to draw attention to the persistence of hypocritical moral judgements of women. Not only are these judgements inconsistent with the egalitarian ideals implicit in our democracy but also they endorse distorted conceptions of the boundaries between women and children’s sexuality. At a more formal level, the paintings were intentionally constructed to evoke standard prejudices of painting. That is, the medium of painting is often regarded with disdain and/or is seen as a quaint activity pursued by women (evidence of which can be seen in a review of the show in Art Review, issue no. 29, Jan-Feb, 2009). I wanted to play with these common attitudes by setting up the viewer to assume that the work fits seamlessly with these prejudices. Indeed, I wanted to mock those in the art-world who have little ability or interest in looking at art that is not presented in conventional modes

Teaching archive skills: a pedagogical journey with impact

This article considers the pedagogical practice of the Special Collections staff team at the University of Sussex and the impact of the group visit experience on student learning. It addresses our current group visit teaching offer to students at the University of Sussex and our move to a more student-led active learning approach. It considers the use of the ‘pedagogical toolkit’ including technology within the classroom, and the creation of a document identification form to encourage critical thinking. Our aim for any group visit is to provide a positive first experience and get students enthused about using archives. In 2017 we undertook our own impact study, detailed within the article, to follow the student journey with the intention of finding out if students returned to use archives for their studies as a result of their group visit. Moving forward, this article considers our future activities in response to the impact study and institutional initiatives

The shudder of a cinephiliac idea? Videographic film studies practice as material thinking

Long after the advent of the digital era, while most university-based film studies academics still choose to publish their critical, theoretical and historical research in conventional written formats, a small but growing number of scholars working on the moving image have begun to explore the online publication possibilities of the digital video essay. This multimedia form has come to prominence in recent years in much Internet-based cinephile and film critical culture. In this article, I will consider, above all from a personal perspective looking back at two of the sixty or so videos that I have made, some of the possibilities that these processes offer for the production of new knowledge, forged out of the conjunction of the film object(s) to be studied, digital technologies of reproduction and editing tools, and the facticity of the researcher(s). I will argue that digital video is usefully seen not only as a promising communicative tool with different affordances than those of written text, but also as an important emergent cultural and phenomenological field for the creative practice of our work as film scholars

Revealing the Vicious Circle of Disengaged User Acceptance: A SaaS Provider's Perspective

User acceptance tests (UAT) are an integral part of many different software engineering methodologies. In this paper, we examine the influence of UATs on the relationship between users and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, which are continuously delivered rather than rolled out during a one-off signoff process. Based on an exploratory qualitative field study at a multinational SaaS provider in Denmark, we show that UATs often address the wrong problem in that positive user acceptance may actually indicate a negative user experience. Hence, SaaS providers should be careful not to rest on what we term disengaged user acceptance. Instead, we outline an approach that purposefully queries users for ambivalent emotions that evoke constructive criticism, in order to facilitate a discourse that favors the continuous innovation of a SaaS system. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our approach for the study of user engagement in testing SaaS applications

Learning from the Success of MPI

The Message Passing Interface (MPI) has been extremely successful as a portable way to program high-performance parallel computers. This success has occurred in spite of the view of many that message passing is difficult and that other approaches, including automatic parallelization and directive-based parallelism, are easier to use. This paper argues that MPI has succeeded because it addresses all of the important issues in providing a parallel programming model.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Circular 74

In 1985, members of the Applied Reindeer Research Project at the University of Alaska Fairbanks obtained and reviewed a Scandinavian instructional video1 on reindeer herding in Norway. This video described a structure that was developed and used by the Scandinavian reindeer industry to prevent injuries during corralling by segregating fawns from adults. The following is a description of how the fawn separator is built, how it works, and its current use in western Alaska

Circular 86

Reindeer in western Alaska have been described as a free-ranging, semi-domesticated animal. Herd management is minimal and animals are less tractable when compared to domestic livestock. Consequently, when reindeer are moved through a corral system they are more susceptible to stress. Stress can occur as a result of circumstances that are related to nutritional, social (crowding), induced psychological or physiological trauma, and parasitic problems, all of which can be interrelated. Excessive stress can reduce herd productivity by lowering reproductive rates, weight gains, survivorship, and immune response. Stress during corralling can result in trauma from overcrowding and trampling, inadequate food and water, disturbance of normal behavioral patterns, and exhaustion. Proper corral design and its operation play a vital role in both prevention of injury and the level of stress the reindeer experience