Can't go home

This thesis is a compilation of short stories around the theme of home. The characters struggle with how home shapes their values and desires. They seek to reconcile where they've come from with who they presently are and who they wish to become. Most of the characters are looking for a place to belong

The communication and recording of conceptual design information by the inclusion of visual data

This thesis reports the results of a three year, full-time research project investigating the generation and communication of product descriptions within the conceptual phase of the engineering design process. The research pays particular attention to the role played by the designer's sketch in communicating new product ideas. The investigation commences with a literature review of existing design process models (Chapter 2), which helps to define the area under investigation while presenting modern views of the process in relation to classic examples from established design research. Chapter 3 presents a literature review of the methods currently used to support communication of product descriptions. These methods of Specification are assessed and particular attention is given to new computer-based recording methods such as DOORS and Cradle. Suggestions for improving the efficiency of such models are put forward and the text-only bias of such systems is identified. This comparison of the existing systems thus identifies the research questions. Having identified the possible improvement to be gained by the incorporation of visual material in addition to the universal text description, Chapter 4 presents a literature review assessing the roles of the conceptual sketch in engineering design. As well as presenting views of drawing from philosophical, psychological and scientific standpoints, this section compares attempts made to support the engineer's sketching activity by computer means. This chapter concludes that efforts made to provide effective computer support of sketching by freehand methods are preferred to attempts made to replicate the process with current computer tools. The resulting research experiment, the methodology of which is described in Chapter 5, uses students from the final year of the Product Design Engineering course at Glasgow School of Art and the University of Glasgow. The main aim of the experiment is to identify means of including sketching within the kind of text-based support methods discussed in Chapter 3. It also observes the volume and pattern of information produced by sketch activity throughout the conceptual stages of the design process and aims to find methods which would enable sketches to indicate the general progress of a design. The findings are detailed in Chapter 6

Imaginative design : forming productive ideas

x, 96 leaves ; 29 cm. --This project explores Imaginative Design--how Industrial Designers, using creative imagination, produce their most creative ideas from conception to completion. It is a naturalistic, qualitative study, and creation of a video documentary for educational purposes. Inductive themes were gathered from videotaped interviews and related pictures of four Industrial Designers that were arranged and edited on computer, then copied to VHS tapes and DVD's. This documentary depicts a process of refinement and evolution that is strongly informed by a corresponding external, physical visualization and social influence. This process includes: completed design ideas and thoughts on different forms of design creativity; external criteria from the clients' needs and wants to personal and aesthetic principles like function, efficiency, economy, simplicity, and craftsmanship; gathering ideas from both conscious, existent, and related sources and unconscious, nonexistent, less related sources; using physical visualization to enhance mental visualization; discovering, playing with, devaluing ideas in order to conceptualize; choosing, noticing and isolating, and analyzing to edit ideas; and continual refinement even after idea completion. Recommendations from the study are to use physical visualization and social influences to inform the process, use a discriminating both/and approach regarding issues like unconscious or conscious control and combination or synthesis, and intentionally use "whole brain" models and creative thinking strategies

Reconhecimento de expressões faciais na língua de sinais brasileira por meio do sistema de códigos de ação facial

Orientadores: Paula Dornhofer Paro Costa, Kate Mamhy Oliveira KumadaTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Surdos ao redor do mundo usam a língua de sinais para se comunicarem, porém, apesar da ampla disseminação dessas línguas, os surdos ou indivíduos com deficiência auditiva ainda enfrentam dificuldades na comunicação com ouvintes, na ausência de um intérprete. Tais dificuldades impactam negativamente o acesso dos surdos à educação, ao mercado de trabalho e aos serviços públicos em geral. As tecnologias assistivas, como o Reconhecimento Automático de Língua de Sinais, do inglês Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR), visam superar esses obstáculos de comunicação. No entanto, o desenvolvimento de sistemas ASLR confiáveis apresenta vários desafios devido à complexidade linguística das línguas de sinais. As línguas de sinais (LSs) são sistemas linguísticos visuoespaciais que, como qualquer outra língua humana, apresentam variações linguísticas globais e regionais, além de um sistema gramatical. Além disso, as línguas de sinais não se baseiam apenas em gestos manuais, mas também em marcadores não-manuais, como expressões faciais. Nas línguas de sinais, as expressões faciais podem diferenciar itens lexicais, participar da construção sintática e contribuir para processos de intensificação, entre outras funções gramaticais e afetivas. Associado aos modelos de reconhecimento de gestos, o reconhecimento da expressões faciais é um componente essencial da tecnologia ASLR. Neste trabalho, propomos um sistema automático de reconhecimento de expressões faciais para Libras, a língua brasileira de sinais. A partir de uma pesquisa bibliográfica, apresentamos um estudo da linguagem e uma taxonomia diferente para expressões faciais de Libras associadas ao sistema de codificação de ações faciais. Além disso, um conjunto de dados de expressões faciais em Libras foi criado. Com base em experimentos, a decisão sobre a construção do nosso sistema foi através de pré-processamento e modelos de reconhecimento. Os recursos obtidos para a classificação das ações faciais são resultado da aplicação combinada de uma região de interesse, e informações geométricas da face dado embasamento teórico e a obtenção de desempenho melhor do que outras etapas testadas. Quanto aos classificadores, o SqueezeNet apresentou melhores taxas de precisão. Com isso, o potencial do modelo proposto vem da análise de 77% da acurácia média de reconhecimento das expressões faciais de Libras. Este trabalho contribui para o crescimento dos estudos que envolvem a visão computacional e os aspectos de reconhecimento da estrutura das expressões faciais da língua de sinais, e tem como foco principal a importância da anotação da ação facial de forma automatizadaAbstract: Deaf people around the world use sign languages to communicate but, despite the wide dissemination of such languages, deaf or hard of hearing individuals still face difficulties in communicating with hearing individuals, in the absence of an interpreter. Such difficulties negatively impact the access of deaf individuals to education, to the job market, and to public services in general. Assistive technologies, such as Automatic Sign Language Recognition (ASLR), aim at overcoming such communication obstacles. However, the development of reliable ASLR systems imposes numerous challenges due the linguistic complexity of sign languages. Sign languages (SLs) are visuospatial linguistic systems that, like any other human language, present global and regional linguistic variations, and a grammatical system. Also, sign languages do not rely only on manual gestures but also non-manual markers, such as facial expressions. In SL, facial expressions may differentiate lexical items, participate in syntactic construction, and contribute to change the intensity of a sentence, among other grammatical and affective functions. Associated with the gesture recognition models, facial expression recognition (FER) is an essential component of ASLR technology. In this work, we propose an automatic facial expression recognition (FER) system for Brazilian Sign Language (Libras). Derived from a literature survey, we present a language study and a different taxonomy for facial expressions of Libras associated with the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Also, a dataset of facial expressions in Libras was created. An experimental setting was done for the construction of our framework for a preprocessing stage and recognizer model. The features for the classification of the facial actions resulted from the application of a combined region of interest and geometric information given a theoretical basis and better performance than other tested steps. As for classifiers, SqueezeNet returned better accuracy rates. With this, the potential of the proposed model comes from the analysis of 77% of the average accuracy of recognition of Libras' facial expressions. This work contributes to the growth of studies that involve the computational vision and recognition aspects of the structure of sign language facial expressions, and its main focus is the importance of facial action annotation in an automated wayDoutoradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoDoutora em Engenharia Elétrica001CAPE

Scale Up This? Improving Scalability and Viability in Upcycling Design

The circular economy (CE) has been hailed as a model for material recirculation, but waste management remains the dominant method of material recovery. Upcycling offers a transitional approach to the CE, reusing waste in ways which increase its value using current recovery systems. However, craft production methods common to the repurposing approach of most upcycling enterprises hinder their ability to scale up. This thesis aims to assist designers in these challenges by informing and improving operational scalability and business viability in upcycling design. Despite its multifold benefits, upcycling practices remain niche. Research on the topic is scattered, and very few publications offer detailed practical guidelines for designers, particularly in furniture and object design, a priority sector for circular initiatives given its heavy waste volumes. To bridge these gaps, this research-creation project employs practice-based, primary and secondary source methods. The author’s design practice in developing a collection of upcycled furniture and objects serves as a real-world example — from material sourcing to design, prototyping and exhibition. This project is later considered in light of two upcycling enterprise case studies as well as a comparative analysis of 20 upcycled furniture and object projects across four categories. This research confirms the challenges of scaling up while identifying numerous practices which can help. These contribute to a proposed strategic design process for upcycling, from material sourcing through to design development. This practical framework aims to support designers and others in creating scalable, viable upcycling projects and enterprises, thus contributing to increased material circularity

Photography in the Middle: Dispatches on Media Ecologies and Aesthetics

It’s easy to forget there’s a war on when the front line is everywhere encrypted in plain sight. Gathered in this book’s several chapters are dispatches on the role of photography in a War Universe, a space and time in which photographers such as Hilla Becher, Don McCullin and Eadweard Muybridge exist only insofar as they are a mark of possession, in the sway of larger forces. These photographers are conceptual personae that collectively fabulate a different kind of photography, a paraphotography in which the camera produces negative abyssal flashes or ‘endarkenment.’ In his Vietnam War memoir, Dispatches, Michael Herr imagines a ‘dropped camera’ receiving ‘jumping and falling’ images, images which capture the weird indivisibility of medium and mediated in a time of war. The movies and the war, the photographs and the torn bodies, fused and exchanged. Reporting from the chaos at the middle of things, Herr invokes a kind of writing attuned to this experience. Photography in the Middle, eschewing a high theoretical mode, seeks to exploit the bag of tricks that is the dispatch. The dispatch makes no grand statement about the progress of the war. Cultivating the most perverse implications of its sources, it tries to express what the daily briefing never can. Ports of entry in the script we’re given, odd and hasty little glyphs, unhelpful rips in the cover story, dispatches are futile, dark intuitions, an expeditious inefficacy. They are bleak but necessary responses to an indifferent world in which any action whatever has little noticeable effect

Layered Approaches - Woven eTextile Explorations Through Applied Textile Thinking

Woven structures form the most common type of textile in our everyday life. Their potential for eTextile development, ranging from component integration to entirely woven user interfaces, has invited researchers from various fields to explore how weaving can expand the interactive capabilities of textile surfaces around us. However, eTextile literature typically considers weaving as a method of constructing, and rarely acknowledges the reflective nature of weaving, and the insights related to thinking associated with textile design practices, that is, textile thinking, are often sparingly described. The overarching research question in this thesis is how can weaving be used to explore new concepts and design opportunities for eTextiles, and it is examined through five academic publications. The exploration of textile thinking was carried out through a practice-based design research approach on technical woven eTextile development. The primary methods for data collection were the woven textile design practices and semi-structured interviews, complemented by reviewing grey and academic literature related to woven eTextiles. The first study investigated how the orthogonal yarn architecture of woven structures enables the integration of electrical circuitry. The second study examined how electrically functional structures and sensorial properties of a textile surface can be designed in parallel to form a user interface for an interactive textile object through a case of an interactive hand puppet. The third study included an exploratory weaving process to map the possibilities of multi-layer weaves for woven eTextile development through accumulative design experimentation. The fourth study reviewed eTextile literature through the lens of woven textile design to understand how weaving has been used in eTextile research across different disciplines. The review identified woven structures whose potential for eTextile development has remained uncharted. The fifth study examined the role of weaving within an interdisciplinary eTextile material development process by focusing on the experiences of the researchers working on a project developing yarn-like actuators for shape-changing interactive textiles. The practice-based approach grounded on textile thinking was found to be well-suited for mapping the design space of woven eTextiles to discover new research opportunities. The approach enables accessing methods based on textile design and construction skills and conducting the investigation through the possibilities of weaving. As a core contribution, this thesis proposes a model for approaching woven eTextiles as electrically functional material systems, in which woven textiles' structural hierarchy collides with circuit design principles

Building E-education platform for design-oriented learning

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-155).Design-oriented learning requires tools that support creative processes and student-to-student and student-to-faculty interactions. While most present E-Education systems perform as the asynchronous distribution channel for teaching material, they usually offer little support for project based design processes. This research maps out the key learning events in design classes at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering, and proposes guidelines for building E-Education systems to support the unique characteristics of design-oriented learning. Two creative learning processes are identified and two independent, yet tightly related, software systems are implemented and evaluated. The first application, the Peer Review and Engineering Process (PREP), is a web system that helps instructors and students conduct and manage peer review evaluation of design concepts. The second is a real time application called InkBoard that leverages the Tablet PC and Ink medium to provide real-time collaborative sketching over TCP/IP networks. A new streaming network protocol for transferring Ink objects is proposed and implemented. A comparative study against other ink-enabled protocols is also presented.by Hai Ning.Ph.D