Designing a Travel Guide to the Un-Natural World: Exploring a Design-led Methodology

The analogy of designer as tourist in the un-natural world is used as an aid for thinking my way into the nature of design research. An exploration of how the design researcher, like a tourist, travels widely through the un-natural world of thought, theory and concept. If we are to design a travel guide for the un-natural world then what would this guide book look like, why do we need it and how could it work? The paper will propose that a ‘travel guide to the un-natural world’ in the form of a design-led methodology is needed for research into sustainable development and is useful not only for the design discipline but for the research community at large. These premises have been derived from the aptitude of the design process and the creative methods it employs to deal with the complex messiness of issues such as sustainability. Such a design-led methodology would be useful for the wider research community due to the integrative abilities of the design process and the trans-disciplinary scope of the tour through the un-natural world. Design-led methodology will be explored using examples from field work in Tumut (rural New South Wales, Australia) Keywords: Design Research, Design-Led Methods, Metadesign, Sustainability.</p

Designing transition paths for the diffusion of sustainable system innovations. A new potential role for design in transition management?

Copyright @ 2008 Umberto AllemandiIt is a shared opinion that the transition towards sustainability will be a continuous and articulated learning process, which will require radical changes on multiple levels (social, cultural, institutional and technological). It is also shared that, given the nature and the dimension of those changes, a system discontinuity is needed, and that therefore it is necessary to act on a system innovation level. The challenge now is to understand how it is possible to facilitate and support the introduction and diffusion of such innovations. Bringing together insights from both Design for sustainability and Transition management literatures, the paper puts forward a model, called Transition model of evolutionary co-design for sustainable (product-service) system innovations, aimed at facilitating and speed-up the process of designing, experimentation, niche introduction and branching of sustainable such innovations

A model of the dynamics of organizational communication

We propose a model of the dynamics of organizational communication. Our model specifies the mechanics by which communication impact is fed back to communication inputs and closes the gap between sender and receiver of messages. We draw on language critique, a branch of language philosophy, and derive joint linguistic actions of interlocutors to explain the emergence and adaptation of communication on the group level. The model is framed by Te'eni's cognitive-affective model of organizational communication

The role of socio-technical experiments in introducing sustainable Product-Service System innovations

This is the pre-print version of the chapter published in 2015 by Springer in the book “The Handbook of Service Innovation” (edited by Renu Agarwal, Willem Selen, Göran Roos and Roy Green). The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-6590-3_18Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability, but their implementation and diffusion are hindered by several cultural, corporate, and regulative barriers. Hence, an important challenge is not only to conceive sustainable PSS concepts, but also to understand how to manage, support, and orient the introduction and diffusion of these concepts. Building upon insights from transition studies (in particular, the concepts of Strategic Niche Management and Transition Management), and through an action research project, the chapter investigates the role of design in introducing sustainable radical service innovations. A key role is given to the implementation of socio-technical experiments, partially protected spaces where innovations can be incubated and tested, become more mature, and potentially favor the implementation and scaling up process

Reflecting on the usability of research on culture in designing interaction

The concept of culture has been attractive to producers of interactive\ud systems who are willing to design useful and relevant solutions to users\ud increasingly located in culturally diverse contexts. Despite a substantial body of\ud research on culture and technology, interaction designers have not always been\ud able to apply these research outputs to effectively define requirements for\ud culturally diverse users. This paper frames this issue as one of understanding of\ud the different paradigms underpinning the cultural models being applied to\ud interface development and research. Drawing on different social science theories,\ud the authors discuss top-down and bottom-up perspectives in the study of users‟\ud cultural differences and discuss the extent to which each provides usable design\ud knowledge. The case is made for combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives\ud into a sociotechnical approach that can produce knowledge useful and usable by\ud interaction designers. This is illustrated with a case study about the design of\ud interactive systems for farmers in rural Kenya

Spending time with money: from shared values to social connectivity

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is a rapidly growing momentum driving the development of mobile payment systems for co-present interactions, using near-field communication on smartphones and contactless payment systems. The design (and marketing) imperative for this is to enable faster, simpler, effortless and secure transactions, yet our evidence shows that this focus on reducing transactional friction may ignore other important features around making payments. We draw from empirical data to consider user interactions around financial exchanges made on mobile phones. Our findings examine how the practices around making payments support people in making connections, to other people, to their communities, to the places they move through, to their environment, and to what they consume. While these social and community bonds shape the kinds of interactions that become possible, they also shape how users feel about, and act on, the values that they hold with their co-users. We draw implications for future payment systems that make use of community connections, build trust, leverage transactional latency, and generate opportunities for rich social interactions