Teaching Industrial Design Criticism

This paper presents a methodology that allows students to learn criticism as a conceptual tool. Expertise is built up incrementally through the utilisation of lectures, seminars, debate and student presentations. I intend to show how this method can facilitate productive thought about many aspects of design, therefore fostering a more mature approach to criticism than many undergraduates may otherwise achieve. This is brought about through considering together the aspects of a design that third year undergraduate students will already know or can readily infer about a product. They are not required to accommodate much new knowledge, but are shown a way of rearranging aspects of their existing knowledge of diverse subjects such as design history, design theory, materials and manufacturing technology and ergonomics in order to allow critical thinking to take place. The methodology can also be further adapted to allow for criticism of various types of design commentary. Various methods of assessment are proposed, and the most effective ways of both facilitating critical thinking during assessment and judging the development and quality of that thinking are discussed

CROW’S QUIZZICAL EYE: DESIGNING YOUR DESIGNING

A kind of personal manifesto on design thinking, this paper considers four interlaced ingredients:• that designers are Future Curious and pro-active (following Clemens Steenbergen), using thinking focused differently from science and the humanities on different fields, with different methods and values (following Nigel Cross);• that the fields and focuses of designers’ thinking are constructed within Frames (of reference), arguing with and through Philip Plowright, Sir Henry Wotton, art history and Asian landscape and aesthetic traditions, noting, also, work of Carolin Stapenhorst, Klaus Krippendorf and Christian Norberg-Schulz;• that, within continuously negotiated Frames (and their nested layers), following Kate Tregloan, the impulse a personal design epiphany provides is a product of its significance and the progress it engenders and that designers can prepare themselves to have design epiphanies both about an ongoing design and about their own designing practices,• particularly through deliberative reflective thinking, at three levels: making design conjectures, choosing design approaches and methods and, ultimately, designing their own designing.• In this paper, I am concerned with the nature of both design and designing and how what might be called ‘mature’ designers take charge of their own acts of designing, becoming Masters

Dress Behind Bars: Prison Clothing as Criminality

Research for this sole-authored book was undertaken during AHRC-funded Research Leave (2007). It represents Ash’s expertise as a dress historian and interest in the history and current organisation of prisons, which evolved from her teaching experience in Holloway women’s prison and Wakefield top security men’s prison in the 1970s. Crossing the disciplines of dress history, social history and film studies, this is the first book to examine the history of prisoners' clothing. Focusing on UK, American and European prison clothing, this history analyses waves of reform, sandwiched between regimes of punishing clothing restraints. Prison clothing, as Ash demonstrates, raises issues of regional, colonial, post-colonial, gender, fashion and class variations, contested by collective, political and individual tactics devised by inmates to survive and subvert cultures of punishment. This book is based on research into penal history, dress history in relation to uniforms and corporeal identity, criminological debates, oral histories, and 19th- and 20th-century prison art and literature. Material from correspondence and interviews with prisoners, prison reform groups, those who work as designers in prisons, and curators of prison photography and dress informed the study. To demonstrate the value of the clothes themselves to researchers, Ash also wrote an article for the Journal of Design History on ‘The prison uniforms collection at the galleries of Justice Museum, Nottingham, UK’ (2011). The book was reviewed by journals including Journal of Design History (2011), British Journal of Criminology (2011), Textile History (2011), Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology (2010) and Crime Media Culture (2010). Related talks included ‘Prison clothing as political resistance’ at NCAD Dublin (2010). BBC Radio 4 made the book the focus of an episode of Thinking Allowed (2009), and Ash was interviewed about women prisoners' attitudes to uniforms and prison clothing for ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2013)

Gifts to the Future: Design reasoning, design research and critical design practitioners

Set in the context of a particular orthodoxy about the history of design research over the last 50 years, this opinion piece selectively surveys some of the significant findings from research into what expert design reasoning entails. Using the conceit of a pool of knowledge—which has come about from many different design research agendas, using multiple methods, and with differing foci of attention—it indicates some of what we know about design reasoning as a phenomenon by taking three “scoops” from the pool. These scoops, respectively characterize design reasoning as navigating the swamp; having negative capability; and being concerned with framing. This material is then used to contrast expert design reasoning with salient features of some popular characterizations of design thinking. The contribution concludes with some comments on designer formation, centered on the necessity of proficiency in reflection implied by any goal to nurture critical design practitioners

What is it like learning with an eportfolio for online distance learners?

This paper reports on a doctoral research project which examines the nature of the learning experience of using an eportfolio and whether it enhances the development of critical thinking among online distance learners. It aims to interrogate the process of the development of critical thinking rather than the product. The project adopts a case study approach, following 24 online distance learners over the course of one academic year in a Dublin based third level institution. The research question for the study is: How can eportfolios enhance the nature of the learning experience and the development of critical thinking among online distance learners? This study is using an exploratory holistic single-case design where the “object of the study” is the of the learner experience of using an eportfolio and the process of developing critical thinking are investigated. The participants are intermediate online distance sociology learners studying a module called Soc3A- Power, Social Order, Crime, Work and Employment as part of the BA (Hons) in Humanities which is a modular humanities programme whereby learners can study a combination of history, sociology, literature, psychology and philosophy. Participants have used their eportfolios to create a critical commentary of their learning and completed five eportfolio entries over the course of one academic year at key points in their learning journey. Eportfolio entries follow a prescribed structured template of critical questions intended to encourage reflection about their learning. Within this case study 37 interviews were conducted for an in-depth exploration of the learner experience of using an eportfolio and the development of criticality. The participants were interviewed with their eportfolios, written, visual and physical artefacts from the participant’s eportfolios were used as stimulus during the interviews using the technique of “photo elicitation”

Global History Hackathon Playbook Version 1.1: Practical Guidance for Hosting a Hackathon for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

What happens when you take a format more commonly associated with computer science and technology—the hackathon—and apply it to historical thinking and research design in global history using unique archival and museum collections? This playbook shares what we learned from our project, Global History Hackathons: Doing Global History through Local Archives and Museum Collections (January-June 2019). An inspiring crowd of students and staff took part in Global History Hackathons. You can read about some of their creative and intriguing ideas through Twitter (@HistGlobal #GlobalHistHack19) and our event blogs, which are listed in the Bibliography. We hope this playbook will encourage you to plan and carry out your own hackathons: not just for global history, but also across the arts, humanities, and social sciences

GoGlobal Rural-Urban

This is a book of edited articles and design projects from five years of collaborative international design projects in developed and developing economies, including China, Thailand, Ghana and Japan. Part One contains articles on initiatives including e-commerce models for developing economies, massclusivity and craft design. Part Two is dedicated to design solutions for China’s rural-urban migration issues, which affect 55 million people a year. The project enhances knowledge about the application of design thinking to national-level issues connecting policy to implementation, extending design activity into large-scale social and economic areas. The book follows an exhibition of design outcomes in London and Beijing (2010). Hall developed his chapter (‘Go Global: Ghana’) from a conference paper given at the ‘International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference’, South Korea (2009) and further expanded as a book chapter (with Barker) entitled ‘e-Artisans: Contemporary design for the global market’ in Global Design History (2011). ‘eArtisans’ researched a proposed e-commerce model linking designer-craftsmen with a global Internet sale and distribution model for African countries. The originality lay in proposing and testing knowledge, through design collaborations, in a combination of e-commerce enterprise models; it was significant in deploying the proposed model in an experimental educational initiative. The research was based on previous experience of design, craft and enterprise projects in Thailand and China, and aligned with a creative economies report by UNESCO (2008). The context was a collaboration at the KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana, where action-based research methods resulted in a case study illustrating cultural transfer. Support and partnership were also provided by Aid To Artisans, the British Council and Africa 53. A vital aspect was the discovery of how an e-commerce model changed design concepts and creative proposals. The GoGlobal project has continued with an edited publication, Designing Social City Experiences (Jin Nam and Hall 2013)

Differential Perceptions of Teachers and Students About the Teaching and Learning of History in Secondary Schools of Trinidad and Tobago

Problem. Students at the upper secondary-school level sometimes experience difficulties understanding basic historical concepts as well as appreciating the relevance of history as a subject in the school\u27s curriculum. While these students are capable of formulating perspectives of their own, teachers often find it necessary to guide students\u27 thinking toward an accepted paradigm (scholarly concept) of history. The problem is that there are mismatched paradigms that teachers need to bring together in order to establish a foundation for a scholarly approach to history. This study seeks to identify different conceptual frameworks that exist in students\u27 thinking about history. It also probes into teachers\u27 perceptions of history and their opinions about students\u27 understanding of historical concepts. Method. This study employed a mixed-method research design aimed at triangulating quantitative and qualitative data obtained from questionnaires and focus group interviews. Participants were randomly drawn from selected secondary schools in Tobago and the east/west corridor of Trinidad. Four hundred and fifteen history students and 17 history teachers of the Fifth and Sixth Form classes participated in the study. Findings. Analysis of the findings revealed the following: (1) Students generally rejected the notion that history is boring and irrelevant to everyday life. However, those in the Fifth Form were more likely than those in the Lower and Upper Sixth Forms to view history as boring. (2) Although students were able to identify appropriate responses on the surveys regarding the question of multiple causation, they were unable to adequately defend their position in a focus group setting. (3) There were no significant differences between teachers\u27 and students\u27 perceptions of the scope of the history syllabus, students\u27 ability to understand texts used in history classes, and the role of the teacher in the teaching and learning process. Conclusions. This study has highlighted the ability reflective thinking, and to formulate perceptions of their own. While these conceptual paradigms may require some adjustment, it is important for teachers to recognize the potency of students\u27 perceptions as critical factors in influencing how and what they learn about history

The SO2 Allowance Trading System and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990: Reflections on Twenty Years of Policy Innovation

The introduction of the U.S. SO2 allowance-trading program to address the threat of acid rain as part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 is a landmark event in the history of environmental regulation. The program was a great success by almost all measures. This paper, which draws upon a research workshop and a policy roundtable held at Harvard in May 2011, investigates critically the design, enactment, implementation, performance, and implications of this path-breaking application of economic thinking to environmental regulation. Ironically, cap and trade seems especially well suited to addressing the problem of climate change, in that emitted greenhouse gases are evenly distributed throughout the world’s atmosphere. Recent hostility toward cap and trade in debates about U.S. climate legislation may reflect the broader political environment of the climate debate more than the substantive merits of market-based regulation.

Design, history and time: New temporalities in a digital age, eds. Zoë Hendon and Anne Massey (Book Review)

This 2000-word invited review discusses each chapter and the overall concept of Hendon and Massey's book, which brings out the use in many cases of a single object as a source of semiotic, social and political analysis. One of the things that emerges as most clearly “designed” in the volume under review is history itself. When Herbert Simon proposed in 1969 that “everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones,” he was thinking about designing the future. This volume emphasizes how we design certain pasts to suit and shape our chosen narratives. It is a truism of historiography that histories are selective and formative. What this fascinating collection adds is a perception that the design of history is as important as the history of design, and that it takes a multitude of forms both tangible and intangible. Those who succeed in designing the past may control the future