Development and validation of a product creativity evaluation framework for the assessment of functional consumer products

A reliable method for creativity assessment of functional consumer products has been developed. In literature, creativity is explored in four main aspects of person, process, press, and product known as 4P’s of creativity. In this research, the product creativity measurement is studied aiming at assisting designers to better understand creativity and to be able to implement it in the design process. The research begins with defining the role of creativity in engineering design and continues with reviewing existing approaches for measuring product creativity in three main categories. In this research, a goal is to investigate the ability of the CAT for the assessment of consumer products produced under non-experimental conditions. The CAT was used together with domain experts to assess three categories of consumer products for creativity (home-accessories, electric-vehicles, and smoke-alarms). The results of inter-judge reliabilities indicated that CAT can reliably evaluate these products, although a larger number of raters (10 to 15) compared to those in artistic domains is recommended. Factor analysis revealed that for products with complex structures (electric-vehicles), experts are unable to distinguish the border between creativity and other influential factors such as product’s technical performance and or aesthetic appeal. As a result, the assessment of complex engineering products should be performed with caution. A theoretical framework to enable researchers to develop their own criterion-based instrument based on the product’s functionality is presented. The framework comprises 65 indicators in nine broad categories. A case study using 5 lounge-chairs and 288 university students was conducted to test the applicability and validity of the framework. A new internally consistent and factorially valid model was achieved. Overall, this project contributed to the field by extending the usage of CAT into functional products and by proposing a new framework to evaluate creativity. Accordingly, researchers/designers can get insights and enhance product creativity.Open Acces

Approaching algorithmic power

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. Emerging quite recently as an object of study within media and communications, cultural research, gender and race studies, and urban geography, the algorithm often seems ungraspable. Framed as code, it becomes proprietary property, black-boxed and inaccessible. Framed as a totality, its becomes overwhelmingly complex, incomprehensible in its operations. Framed as a procedure, it becomes a technique to be optimised, bracketing out the political. In struggling to adequately grasp the algorithmic as an object of study, to unravel its mechanisms and materialities, these framings offer limited insight into how algorithmic power is initiated and maintained. This thesis instead argues for an alternative approach: firstly, that the algorithmic is coordinated by a coherent internal logic, a knowledge-structure that understands the world in particular ways; second, that the algorithmic is enacted through control, a material and therefore observable performance which purposively influences people and things towards a predetermined outcome; and third, that this complex totality of architectures and operations can be productively analysed as strategic sociotechnical clusters of machines. This method of inquiry is developed with and tested against four contemporary examples: Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Alexa, and Palantir Gotham. Highly profitable, widely adopted and globally operational, they exemplify the algorithmic shift from whiteboard to world. But if the world is productive, it is also precarious, consisting of frictional spaces and antagonistic subjects. Force cannot be assumed as unilinear, but is incessantly negotiated—operations of parsing data and processing tasks forming broader operations that strive to establish subjectivities and shape relations. These negotiations can fail, destabilised by inadequate logics and weak control. A more generic understanding of logic and control enables a historiography of the algorithmic. The ability to index information, to structure the flow of labor, to exert force over subjects and spaces— these did not emerge with the microchip and the mainframe, but are part of a longer lineage of calculation. Two moments from this lineage are examined: house-numbering in the Habsburg Empire and punch-card machines in the Third Reich. Rather than revolutionary, this genealogy suggests an evolutionary process, albeit uneven, linking the computation of past and present. The thesis makes a methodological contribution to the nascent field of algorithmic studies. But more importantly, it renders algorithmic power more intelligible as a material force. Structured and implemented in particular ways, the design of logic and control construct different versions, or modalities, of algorithmic power. This power is political, it calibrates subjectivities towards certain ends, it prioritises space in specific ways, and it privileges particular practices whilst suppressing others. In apprehending operational logics, the practice of method thus foregrounds the sociopolitical dimensions of algorithmic power. As the algorithmic increasingly infiltrates into and governs the everyday, the ability to understand, critique, and intervene in this new field of power becomes more urgent

American Literary Environmentalism, 1637-1872.

The American environment is a mythic narrative that has served to mystify the social and economic relationships linking people and place. This study examines the early writing of the environment, from the 1637 Pequot War to the creation of the first national parks in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 1 draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Edward Said to theorize literary environmentalism as a knowledge-power formation that functions as a domestic Orientalism. Chapter 2 theorizes the narratological and psychosociological bases of environmental constructions generally before analyzing two colonial texts whose literary environmentalism is paradigmatic: John Underhill\u27s Newes from America (1638), which writes the New England wilderness via tropes of gender and race that explicitly link the environment\u27s description to its possession, and Mary Rowlandson\u27s The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682), which recapitulates but also complicates these figures. Chapter 3 analyzes James Fenimore Cooper\u27s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), paying particular attention to how its wilderness serves to naturalize the regeneration of a racially pure American civilization. Chapter 4 analyzes three works related by their linked constructions of Yosemite Valley. Lafayette Bunnell\u27s account of the Mariposa Indian War (1851-1852), The History of the Discovery of the Yosemite, utilizes an aesthetic discourse to justify the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the discovery of Yosemite. Frederick Law Olmsted\u27s 1865 management report on the new Yosemite Park implicates the national park idea in an urban-industrial ideology of social sanitation through outdoor recreation. Clarence King\u27s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872) links environmentalism and literary realism to the exigencies of a fast-maturing corporate capitalism. My concluding chapter analyzes the idea of the postnatural in two contemporary ecocritical texts, Bill McKibben\u27s The End of Nature and Rebecca Solnit\u27s Savage Dreams. McKibben\u27s work recapitulates the early colonialist and capitalist trope of the virgin wilderness, while Savage Dreams refuses the concept of an originary nature and adopts a more promising mode for a genuinely revisionist environmental writing, one that refuses to seek in nature the sorts of lessons and remedies available only through a conscious engagement with this nation\u27s own cultures

Beyond Media Borders, Volume 2

This open access book promotes the idea that all media types are multimodal and that comparing media types, through an intermedial lens, necessarily involves analysing these multimodal traits. The collection includes a series of interconnected articles that illustrate and clarify how the concepts developed in Elleström’s influential article The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) can be used for methodical investigation and interpretation of media traits and media interrelations. The authors work with a wide range of old and new media types that are traditionally investigated through limited, media-specific concepts. The publication is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary research, advancing the frontiers of conceptual as well as practical understanding of media interrelations. This is the second of two volumes. It contains a concluding article by Elleström and seven contributions concentrated on the issue of media transformations: how media characteristics are transferred and transfigured among various media products and media types

The Irresistible Animacy of Lively Artefacts

This thesis explores the perception of ‘liveliness’, or ‘animacy’, in robotically driven artefacts. This perception is irresistible, pervasive, aesthetically potent and poorly understood. I argue that the Cartesian rationalist tendencies of robotic and artificial intelligence research cultures, and associated cognitivist theories of mind, fail to acknowledge the perceptual and instinctual emotional affects that lively artefacts elicit. The thesis examines how we see artefacts with particular qualities of motion to be alive, and asks what notions of cognition can explain these perceptions. ‘Irresistible Animacy’ is our human tendency to be drawn to the primitive and strangely thrilling nature of experiencing lively artefacts. I have two research methodologies; one is interdisciplinary scholarship and the other is my artistic practice of building lively artefacts. I have developed an approach that draws on first-order cybernetics’ central animating principle of feedback-control, and second-order cybernetics’ concerns with cognition. The foundations of this approach are based upon practices of machine making to embody and perform animate behaviour, both as scientific and artistic pursuits. These have inspired embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended notions of cognition. I have developed an understanding using a theoretical framework, drawing upon literature on visual perception, behavioural and social psychology, puppetry, animation, cybernetics, robotics, interaction and aesthetics. I take as a starting point, the understanding that the visual cortex of the vertebrate eye includes active feature-detection for animate agents in our environment, and actively constructs the causal and social structure of this environment. I suggest perceptual ambiguity is at the centre of all animated art forms. Ambiguity encourages natural curiosity and interactive participation. It also elicits complex visceral qualities of presence and the uncanny. In the making of my own Lively Artefacts, I demonstrate a series of different approaches including the use of abstraction, artificial life algorithms, and reactive techniques

Evidence-based design utilized in hospital architecture and changing the design process: a hospital case study

As a new paradigm in healthcare design in the 21st century, evidence-based design (EBD) has played a critical role in the changing hospital architectural design process and shaping new images of hospital architecture. Evidence-based design is research informed, and its results affect not only patients' clinical outcomes but also medical facility operational efficiency and its staff retention and satisfaction. This research investigated how EBD was implemented in hospital architectural design and how traditional design process was modified to incorporate credible research evidence through a case study at Grand River Hospital in the United States. This study took a qualitative approach with grounded theory methodology. The methods used for this research were multiple sources of data collection through document reviews, observations, and interviews. Findings revealed that the investigation for EBD needs to focus on environment-behavior studies especially in the development of explanatory theory. This study also recommended a modified cyclical design process model for integrating EBD. This redefined design process model requires collaborations with all stakeholders by adding visioning sessions, multiple design charrettes, mock-ups, and the functional performance evaluation to help to implement research evidence and make design decisions to achieve the best possible outcomes

Spatial technology as a tool to analyse and combat crime

This study explores the utilisation of spatial technologies as a tool to analyse and combat crime. The study deals specifically with remote sensing and its potential for being integrated with geographical information systems (GIS). The integrated spatial approach resulted in the understanding of land use class behaviour over time and its relationship to specific crime incidents per police precinct area. The incorporation of spatial technologies to test criminological theories in practice, such as the ecological theories of criminology, provides the science with strategic value. It proves the value of combining multi-disciplinary scientific fields to create a more advanced platform to understand land use behaviour and its relationship to crime. Crime in South Africa is a serious concern and it impacts negatively on so many lives. The fear of crime, the loss of life, the socio-economic impact of crime, etc. create the impression that the battle against crime has been lost. The limited knowledge base within the law enforcement agencies, limited logistical resources and low retention rate of critical staff all contribute to making the reduction of crime more difficult to achieve. A practical procedure of using remote sensing technology integrated with geographical information systems (GIS), overlaid with geo-coded crime data to provide a spatial technological basis to analyse and combat crime, is illustrated by a practical study of the Tshwane municipality area. The methodology applied in this study required multi-skilled resources incorporating GIS and the understanding of crime to integrate the diverse scientific fields into a consolidated process that can contribute to the combating of crime in general. The existence of informal settlement areas in South Africa stresses the socio-economic problems that need to be addressed as there is a clear correlation of land use data with serious crime incidents in these areas. The fact that no formal cadastre exists for these areas, combined with a great diversity in densification and growth of the periphery, makes analysis very difficult without remote sensing imagery. Revisits over time to assess changes in these areas in order to adapt policing strategies will create an improved information layer for responding to crime. Final computerised maps generated from remote sensing and GIS layers are not the only information that can be used to prevent and combat crime. An important recipe for ultimately successfully managing and controlling crime in South Africa is to strategically combine training of the law enforcement agencies in the use of spatial information with police science. The researcher concludes with the hope that this study will contribute to the improved utilisation of spatial technology to analyse and combat crime in South Africa. The ultimate vision is the expansion of the science of criminology by adding an advanced spatial technology module to its curriculum.Criminology and Security ScienceD.Litt. et Phil. (Criminology

Precision Oncology and Cancer Biomarkers

This open access book reflects on matters of social and ethical concern raised in the daily practices of those working in and around precision oncology. Each chapter addresses the experiences, concerns and issues at stake for people who work in settings where precision oncology is practiced, enacted, imagined or discussed. It subsequently discusses and analyses bioethical dilemmas, scientific challenges and economic trade-offs, the need for new policies, further technological innovation, social work, as well as phenomenological research. This volume takes a broad actor-centred perspective as, whenever cancer is present, the range of actors with issues at stake appears almost unlimited. This perspective and approach opens up the possibility for further in-depth and diverse questions, posed by the actors themselves, such as: How are cancer researchers navigating biological uncertainties? How do clinicians and policy-makers address ethical dilemmas around prioritisation of care? What are the patients’ experiences with, and hopes for, precision oncology? How do policy-makers and entrepreneurs envisage precision oncology? These questions are of great interest to a broad audience, including cancer researchers, oncologists, policy-makers, medical ethicists and philosophers, social scientists, patients and health economists

Nietzsche on Individual Autopoiesis: Critical Dialogue with Ethno-philosophy of Shienyu Ni Shienyuand Cosmopoeisis

The argument in this dissertation revolves aroundapositive reading of Nietzsche on the tragic nature of existence. The specificnarrative being advanced is that for Nietzsche, the task of individual fashioning must be conceived and examined within the tragic nature of existence. In fact, it can be claimed that,on Nietzsche’s account, existence properly conceived as tragic ipso factodemands a qualitative individual response. I arguethat the qualitative response amounts to an affirmation of life via cultivating singular individuality. These assertions respond to two related questions: What accounts for Nietzsche’s conception of singular individuality as a task? And howto create the necessary conditions for singular individuality? Nonetheless, this dissertation also toilswith the question of communalityand tragic existence. If existence is tragic within Nietzsche’s scope,then is a communal response tenable enough? Does theaporiaof existencefundamentallydemand an individual or communal response? These questions are precisely engaged with under Nietzsche’s Übermenschas the type which properly affirms existence as tragic.This research is conceived within two supposedly unrelated settings: Nietzsche’s philosophy of the type Übermenschand African ethno-philosophy. The two settings inevitablyare responding to the same reality, the aporiaof existence