Using games as learning tools for design research planning

Designers are required to understand human behavior and people’s needs in order to design solutions. According to Muratovsky (2015), society today demands designers to not only design products and communications, but also a system for living. The definition of design is changing from a craft-oriented profession where the emphasis is on individual creativity and commerce, to a discipline that is robust and committed to conceptualization, configuration, and the implementation of new ideas (Muratovsky, 2015). Therefore, the current demands become the reason cross-disciplinary studies is a required skill for designers (Muratovsky, 2015). In order to broaden their knowledge, designers need to become strategic planners and thinkers who can work across disciplines. In order to meet the current demands for designers to become strategic planners, the designer needs to find a way of improving the design research planning process. Based on the author’s experience and observations, novice designers or design students found difficulties when they plan to design research in professional and academic contexts on their teams. It seems that they often forget the various methods, theories, or tools about design methods that should be used for the research. To solve these issues, games could convey a solution that helps designers to understand the whole process of design research. Games can be used for designers as an activity to learn the planning design research experimenting method by knowing what is a better plan in a particular case. Design games enable design actions to be studied in a manipulable and well-bounded environment that creates situations similar to real-life situations (Habraken & Gross, as cited in Vaajakallio, 2012). Games can be used as a tool or medium in a cross-disciplinary team for having engaging discussion and collaboration process. This thesis explores how to create games that help the designer to plan research in order to guide designers to understand better the design research context. This knowledge can help designers to expand their emphasis based on individual creativity towards conceptualization, configuration, and implementation of new ideas. The outcome of this thesis is games that help designers to plan design research

Physical, digital, and hybrid setups supporting card-based collaborative design ideation

Physical tools and materials like pen, paper, sticky-notes, and whiteboards are commonly used in collaborative creative design processes, whereas digital tools play a more marginal role. But what are the benefits and drawbacks of physical, digital, and hybrid physical-digital setups when it comes to supporting collaborative ideation? To answer this question, we present a study and analysis of three different implementations of a well-established collaborative ideation technique called Inspiration Card Workshop, with physical, digital, and hybrid setups. Each setup is a controlled experiment with three different groups of designers. We analyse the setups in terms of how they support five key aspects of collaborative design. Based on our insights, we present implications for future use of digital tools to support card-based collaborative design ideation, in which we argue for a technically lightweight hybrid workflow setup that builds on well-proven physical and digital components.publishe

Compute-proximal Energy Harvesting for Mobile Environments: Fundamentals, Applications, and Tools

Over the past two decades, we have witnessed remarkable achievements in computing, sensing, actuating, and communications capabilities of ubiquitous computing applications. However, due to the limitations in stable energy supply, it is difficult to make the applications ubiquitous. Batteries have been considered a promising technology for this problem, but their low energy density and sluggish innovation have constrained the utility and expansion of ubiquitous computing. Two key techniques—energy harvesting and power management—have been studied as alternatives to overcome the battery limitations. Compared to static environments such as homes or buildings, there are more energy harvesting opportunities in mobile environments since ubiquitous systems can generate various forms of energy as they move. Most of the previous studies in this regard have been focused on human movements for wearable computing, while other mobile environments (e.g., cars, motorcycles, and bikes) have received limited attention. In this thesis, I present a class of energy harvesting approaches called compute-proximal energy harvesting, which allows us to develop energy harvesting technology where computing, sensing, and actuating are needed in vehicles. Computing includes sensing phenomena, executing instructions, actuating components, storing information, and communication. Proximal considers the harvesting of energy available around the specific location where computation is needed, reducing the need for excessive wiring. A primary goal of this new approach is to mitigate the effort associated with the installation and field deployment of self-sustained computing and lower the entry barriers to developing self-sustainable systems for vehicles. In this thesis, I first select an automobile as a promising case study and discuss the opportunities, challenges, and design guidelines of compute-proximal energy harvesting with practical yet advanced examples in the automotive domain. Second, I present research in the design of small-scale wind energy harvesters and the implementation and evaluation of two advanced safety sensing systems—a blind spot monitoring system and a lane detection system—with the harvested power from wind. Finally, I conduct a study to democratize the lessons learned from the automotive case studies for makers and people with no prior experience in energy harvesting technology. In this study, I seek to understand what problems they have encountered and what possible solutions they have considered while dealing with energy harvesting technology. Based on the findings, I develop a comprehensive energy harvesting toolkit and examine its utility, usability, and creativity through a series of workshops.Ph.D

Inclusive colour and information design

Background: The roles and responsibilities of designers today include considering how design outcomes can have a positive influence on people’s lives and our society. However, inaccessible design outcomes that are created by designers are commonplace. This is an issue identified by scholars from various fields of design research. Aim: The main aim of this research is to explore the fundamental reasons behind the phenomenon of design exclusion in our society by gaining an interpretive understanding of the meaning of the behaviour of individual designers. This is based on the belief that individuals in designer groups will share aspects of the same reality and express these through language, based on sociolinguistic approaches combining theories of the community of practice and linguistic relativity. The ultimate purpose is to consider more effective ways of offering user-related colour information to designers from a perspective of inclusive design within the socially responsible design paradigm. Methods: There were three designer studies in this research project which apply multidisciplinary methodological approaches. These were think-aloud protocol, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and colour design experiments. The data collected was analysed both qualitatively by adopting linguistic analysis, thematic analysis, and content analysis, and quantitatively by applying descriptive statistics. Results: In the first designer study, a think-aloud protocol was utilised to explore characteristics of designers by analysing their language use while doing a colour description task. This involved comparing a designer group and a non-designer group. Behavioural features also were observed. The fundamental characteristics of designers were explored by applying linguistic analysis considering four key adjectives (associative, evocative, emotive, and imaginative). These indicate why designers continue to produce inaccessible design artefacts. Three adverbs (artistically, emotionally, and creatively) may indicate ways to provide information for designers to motivate them to think about users of design artefacts. Based on the findings from the first study, the second designer study considered how we can apply and use fundamental characteristics of designers to encourage them to change their designing behaviour towards a more user-centred inclusive perspective. For this, a new attempt at providing information was made by creating a set of Affective Imaginary Information [AII] card formats in both digital and physical forms. These included facial images that conveyed emotions. The contents of each of the AII card formats were decided on based on a small additional user study. The actual set of AII card formats was created collaboratively by the author of this thesis with a professional graphic designer and an information design researcher. Focus group interviews were carried out subsequently with design doctoral students to gain feedback for refinement, and evaluate the usefulness of the AII formats. Due to the emotional and creative characteristics of designers, when looking at the AII formats, design participants tended to imagine the situation of information users and create a story when they look at the facial emotion. More refined AII card formats were created following this stage. In the third designer study, the set of AII card formats were used for actual colour design tasks to test the practical use of the format. The actual use of colour information and designers’ experience while doing tasks were investigated among designer groups with different levels of experience, using online surveys and email interviews. Furthermore, professional design educators were involved to evaluate the usefulness of the AII card formats and gain their suggestions for future directions for these AII formats. This was done by email interviews. Thus, in this stage, the AII card formats were tested by designers with different levels of experience, and positively evaluated by professional design educators. Conclusion: Designers display emotion and subjectivity toward design tasks. In tasks they tended to focus on expressing their personal feelings, experiences, or preferences, even neglecting design tasks. Also, a subjective outlook, and use of personal factors (design sensibilities, previous subjective experiences, imagination, intuition, perceptions of common sense, and conjecture) along with their effect on design tasks were discovered throughout designer studies. Considering the fundamental characteristics of designers, it is likely that AII card formats with use of facial expressions would be useful in communicating user experiences to designers as this encourages designers to imagine the situation of users and empathise with their feelings. Further investigation is needed about the appropriate amount of text in combination with appropriate images for designers as a source of information and inspiration. Research is needed also on what makes designers heavily react emotionally and subjectively to design tasks and the positive or negative impact of this on design and our society. Contribution: Various research methods and analysis techniques were applied throughout this research project. This has enhanced the reliability of the outcomes of the research by providing in-depth findings. Furthermore, sociolinguistic theories and concepts were applied to the design research project to examine the phenomena of design exclusion and inclusion by analysing designers’ linguistic characteristics. This is a new theoretical and methodological approach in the area of design which broadens ways of approaching and understanding the behaviour of designers. Also, based on understanding of characteristics of designers, the AII card formats were created. These were tested, evaluated, and revised several times by designers (with different years of work experience and also different levels of design education) in addition to design education experts. All the procedures for creating the AII formats and final outcomes may encourage design researchers to consider how the characteristics of designers can be used to create visual information formats for them, and to consider how providing information effectively to designers may change their behaviour to empathise more with information users from an inclusive perspective