Assessment of cognitive development in four to eight year old children by means of drawing tasks

The present thesis explores the link between children's drawings and cognitive development. The aim of this study is to investigate the intellectual abilities of the child draughtsman with good depiction skills and to evaluate the merit of the drawing technique in the assessment of conceptual maturity. The standardised Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test (GHDT) of intellectual maturity was administered to 115 children between 4 to 8 years of age against criterion ability measures (Wechsler scales). Its psychometric properties are examined in respect to its norms and scales, its reliability and validity at different age levels and ranges of intelligence. Early theories in the area of pictorial representation were directed towards identifying features characteristic of different developmental periods (Kerschensteiner, 1905; Luquet, 1927/1977). At the same time Piaget and Inhelder (1948/1967) incorporated these stage theories into their model of spatial intelligence. Yet, the recent experimental study of children's drawings has disclosed a number of variables which interfere during the course of production, challenging the view that drawings can be seen as the royal route to access children's concepts. Stage theories are re-evaluated by means of fourteen experimental drawing tasks with various degree of difficulty. The tasks - administered to the same children tested with the standardised instruments -are spatial in nature and have been sampled from two widely researched areas related to the pictorial representation of partial occlusion and of spatial axes (horizontal/vertical). The acquisition of the pertinent spatial concepts by means of drawings is examined, considering competence-deficiency and competence-utilisation accounts of children's performance at different ages. Finally, overall perfomance on spatial tasks is compared with performance on conventional (Wechsler scales) and non-verbal (GHDT) measures of intellectual functioning, considering the optimum method to assess children's abilities by means of drawings. In general, drawing performance is reasonably sensitive to children's level of intelligence, yet the significance of drawing varies at different ages and ranges of IQ. Finally, the establishment of steadfast developmental trajectories falls short in the field of pictorial representation. The variable performance, particularly from the children at intermediate ages, suggests that the stages of intellectual or visual realism should be seen as relative and not as absolute

The development of design strategies that promote the engagement of users in the authorship process

Underlying all the ideas articulated in this thesis is a political challenge to the designer's innate right to occupy a hierarchical position in the designer/user relationship. Equally, where these relationships have been superseded (in for example Desktop Publishing and web page design) the designer still has an important, but quite different, role to play. In contrast to some community design-led initiatives, the aim here is not necessarily to welcome users into an aspect of the conventional design process on terms determined by the designer by helping users conform to practices established by the designer. The aim is the development of strategies in which the designer and user can influence each other without dominating, going beyond conventional strategies of consultancy or feedback. My determination is not to turn everyday users into mouthpieces of surrogate design sensibility, in the way that 'makeover' TV programs, and their DIY predecessors, promote a particular aesthetic as good design, leading to a rejection of direct communication between designer and user. This places the designer in a position of power; users will skew their responses towards what they think the designer is looking for. Also designers could never work so inexpensively as to engage in bespoke design activity for more than a fraction of the population. This view has been achieved through the interplay of my own design practice and a spectrum of theoretical (broadly post-structural) influences, although most individuals referenced here would reject this (or any category), including Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and the Situationists. My responses to these ideas influence and are influenced by the production of a range of design proposals, and the promotion of the colonisation, modification and even hijacking by others, including designers, users and educators. These have developed in a number of phases: 1 Modular/Adaptive proposals for office furniture, and product design; 2 CAD/CAM proposals in which users select and modify 'design methods' to help them exploit the more technical expert systems available to help them create their own artefacts; 3 Flexible communication systems, which are designs populated and modified by users in ways beyond the control or knowledge of the designer. These stages show an evolution in my creative responses from producing designed artefacts that promote interaction with users, to systems in which the designer and user have to contribute jointly for the systems to function. It is organic, uncontrolled development by the user that determines the development and configuration of these systems guided by the initial conditions and processes determined by the designer. This allows the interreIationship of designers and truly user-led creative activities

Teacher roles during amusement park visits – insights from observations, interviews and questionnaires

Amusement parks offer rich possibilities for physics learning, through observations and experiments that illustrate important physical principles and often involve the whole body. Amusement parks are also among the most popular school excursions, but very often the learning possibilities are underused. In this work we have studied different teacher roles and discuss how universities, parks or event managers can encourage and support teachers and schools in their efforts to make amusement park visits true learning experiences for their students

The Role of the Designer in the Facilitation of Meaningful Play between Disabled and Non-disabled Children

User-centred design seeks to respond to the needs and aspirations of the end user at each stage of the design process. Yet when attempts are made to engage children as users in the design process, the pre-existing power differentials between adults and children can lead to the silencing of children’s voices. As disabled children are amongst the most marginalised of an already disempowered group, for them, this problem is further compounded. This calls for a new approach towards user-centred design with disabled and non-disabled children. This thesis draws upon the methodological aspects of Together Through Play - a three-year, interdisciplinary research project at the University of Leeds, which sought to develop understanding of children’s needs and aspirations for playing together. It reflects upon the processes that led to the emergence of rich, sociological data through this case study. How to encourage designers to truly listen to the voices of disabled children and how to effectively convey the aspirations of disabled children to product design and development teams, became key emergent issues. With the intention of addressing the power imbalance between designers and children in the design process, the researcher employed and adapted methods of cooperative inquiry, an approach to creating new technologies for children, with children (Druin, 1999). Reflections upon the methods employed are used to inform a set of guidelines for design curricula for interaction design (IxD) with children and child computer interaction (CCI) researchers seeking to work in the area of user-centred design with disabled children in the future

Suspicion, control and desire - a criminological analysis of secretive conduct and smart devices

The topic of this thesis is the connection between secrecy and the onlife reality, a blurring line between being online and offline. Specifically, it offers a novel criminological perspective on how the smart technological devices integrated in the onlife ecology (with its technologies, features, design, instant online access, and messaging) aid specific instances of 'secretive conduct', involving regular and mundane episodes of suspicion, control and desire towards our kin, partners, co-worker, and perfect strangers. While most studies on smart technology (phones, pc, homes, watches, cars) concern privacy and security, as well as the elements of isolation and social disintegration - this thesis offers an innovative contribution in the field of criminology. The elements which protect our devices, such as touch ID and face recognition have created an un-accessible wall against other users, both online and offline; the character of such elements and their effects is a central concern of this thesis, revolving around suspicion, control and desire such a condition induces. Using a cultural criminology perspective, this work will theorize the ecology of onlife reality, the secretive conduct that characterises its environment; interpreting how tools of monitoring and control appear to have taken over any 'space' - from public to private. It appears that not only is anything observable - but it is done in a covert and discreet manner - the Goffmanian front & back stage result constantly under scrutiny. In this context, the users become increasingly effected by this covert scrutiny. The smartphone functions as a quintessential tool that allows such a blur - leading into the onlife question of crime and cybercrime. Advancing an experimental 'hybrid' methodology that attempts to unite both digital and 'in-person' ethnographic considerations, the research makes use of informal and incidental 'confessions' of smart technology users, such as their personal or witnessed secretive conducts. The analysis concentrates on specific abusive episodes in which the use of onlife devices allow all sorts of secretive conducts, with direct or indirect elements of harm: these are treated as social 'vignettes', and include parents secretly monitoring their children, partners making assumptions on the other's whereabouts, perpetuating elements of stalking, blackmailing, monitoring, all in a remote and apparently 'secured' environment. This work contributes to cultural criminology with analysis of the blasé approach to such elements of secretive conduct becoming integral in the onlife habitus of smartphone users. Secrecy is becoming a central element of onlife ecology, taking place unwillingly, and mostly unknowingly. To act in secret, to monitor in secret - wanting to see, control, and observe all become central elements of the onlife

Evaluating Copyright Protection in the Data-Driven Era: Centering on Motion Picture\u27s Past and Future

Since the 1910s, Hollywood has measured audience preferences with rough industry-created methods. In the 1940s, scientific audience research led by George Gallup started to conduct film audience surveys with traditional statistical and psychological methods. However, the quantity, quality, and speed were limited. Things dramatically changed in the internet age. The prevalence of digital data increases the instantaneousness, convenience, width, and depth of collecting audience and content data. Advanced data and AI technologies have also allowed machines to provide filmmakers with ideas or even make human-like expressions. This brings new copyright challenges in the data-driven era. Massive amounts of text and data are the premise of text and data mining (TDM), as well as the admission ticket to access machine learning technologies. Given the high and uncertain copyright violation risks in the data-driven creation process, whoever controls the copyrighted film materials can monopolize the data and AI technologies to create motion pictures in the data-driven era. Considering that copyright shall not be the gatekeeper to new technological uses that do not impair the original uses of copyrighted works in the existing markets, this study proposes to create a TDM and model training limitations or exceptions to copyrights and recommends the Singapore legislative model. Motion pictures, as public entertainment media, have inherently limited creative choices. Identifying data-driven works’ human original expression components is also challenging. This study proposes establishing a voluntarily negotiated license institution backed up by a compulsory license to enable other filmmakers to reuse film materials in new motion pictures. The film material’s degree of human original authorship certified by film artists’ guilds shall be a crucial factor in deciding the compulsory license’s royalty rate and terms to encourage retaining human artists. This study argues that international and domestic policymakers should enjoy broad discretion to qualify data-driven work’s copyright protection because data-driven work is a new category of work. It would be too late to wait until ubiquitous data-driven works block human creative freedom and floods of data-driven work copyright litigations overwhelm the judicial systems