Making Custodians: A design anthropology approach to designing emotionally enduring built environment artefacts

My doctoral research through creative production takes a Design Anthropology approach to examine the person-object relationship typical of artefacts with long-term attachment and significance. I then speculate on the implications of these findings with the goal of designing enduring new built environment artefacts, surfaces, and furniture. The exegesis explores the context of this enquiry within design theory and practice and its significance, given the environmental impact of high levels of premature disposal and ‘fast’ consumption

Telling stories with personas

Even though the persona method is a well-known tool in the Human-Technology Interaction field for knowing users and their goals, tasks and environments, there are varying opinions about how personas should be developed and used. Many agree that combining personas with scenarios and user stories is useful, but scenarios and user stories can also be defined and used in various ways. The purpose of my master's thesis is to examine with a literature review different ways to develop and use personas together with scenarios and user stories. My thesis aims to gain a broad picture of the topic rather than confirm one, single perspective. I will search for sources in multiple places since quantitative research alone cannot provide complete enough answers to my research questions. I have divided personas into four types based on my literature review. Manual, semi-automatic and automatic personas are based on mostly user research, but they vary on how many steps in their development are done manually. Expert personas are based on knowledge gathered from stakeholders, literature and other experts. Designers should decide the type of persona based on the purpose of the project and available data and resources. The most important elements in persona description are a photo, name, background information, goals, pain points and story. All personas in the project should be comparable by using the same elements in persona descriptions and same layout in persona documents. Deciding what sources are included in a literature review and how extensively new sources are searched for are always subjective decisions. Another limitation of my thesis is that it does not cover visual design methods, such as storyboards or user journeys. There is some academic research about personas, scenarios and user stories, but knowledge about this topic could be broadened and deepened by conducting more research on the effectiveness, popularity and usage of these methods. Comparisons of practices between countries and companies would also be interesting

Design for Narrative Experience in Product Interactions

This practice-led investigation asks if and how design can enhance the user’s experience of interacting with everyday physical domestic objects through the application of narrative storytelling devices derived from film. The concepts of tellability and narrativity are used to explore the way people interpret interactions with objects and to develop methods for product designers to integrate narrativity into the product experience of mundane objects, things we use every day, objects which are often overlooked. The interest of the design community in experience and interaction design has tended to focus on digital products or interfaces because these fields emerged in large part from computer science in the area of Human Computer Interaction. By contrast, this investigation draws attention to the way users can also have meaningful and interesting interactions with tangible non-digital products. Since interactions with products happen over time, the concept of narrative is useful to help envision how experiences will unfold. Narratives are used in everyday life to communicate, engage others, and interpret our experiences. Narrative is closely tied to memory and we tend to remember information better when this is presented in narrative form. This research focuses on how products can prompt or reveal a narrative through their use, and how the designer of a product can embed qualities that enhance the narrativity of the user experience. This research develops design work, a set of domestic kettles, specifically to address the area of design praxeology, or research into the process of designing, so that in the first instance its direct audience is product designers, in particular those designers working within speculative design and product design research. However, the scope of the study has also produced approaches and design methods applicable to product design for mass production and design for social impact

Designerly ways of speaking: investigating how the design tribe of researchers speak on design thinking

This thesis investigates how a community of design researchers speak on ‘Design Thinking’, a key concept in design research. The thesis traces the development of Design Thinking theory over the last 100 years. It identifies errors associated with how influential research (for example, Buchanan; Cross) frames the history of investigation into Design Thinking. For example, influential theorists do not consider a complete history of investigation into the way that designers think when discussing timescales of Design Thinking research. The thesis then summarises existing research into ways of speaking associated with Design Thinking and identifies significant gaps in the knowledge. Gaps include the absence of an agreed definition of ‘Design Thinking’ despite repeated calls. A lack of existing studies which use methods specifically designed to investigate ways of speaking have helped to create the gaps in knowledge. The thesis asks: how do Design Thinking researchers speak on Design Thinking? What purposes do these ways of speaking serve? The original work involves using methods specifically designed to investigate ways of speaking (Corpus Linguistics and Content Analysis). Three studies on ways of speaking are undertaken. The data set consists of peer-reviewed papers which focus on Design Thinking. The papers are published in design journals so are representative of ways of speaking used by the small academic design research community. This thesis terms this community the Design Tribe. Ways of speaking contrast progressive Design Thinking with a range of dominant, established ways of thinking (for example, STEM models). A distinctive lexicon characterises the way that researchers speak on Design thinking. Design Thinking is: agile, complex, fluid, multimodal and collaborative; established alternative ways of thinking conceal, standardize, are rigid, squash and reduce. The study reveals a range of inconsistencies associated with the ways that researchers classify Design Thinking. These issues highlight the part that a distinctive lexicon plays in enabling researchers to claim knowledge on Design Thinking. While there is little evidence to suggest a distinctive Design Thinking, there is certainly a distinctive and coherent form of discourse. This thesis terms this discourse, ‘designerly ways of speaking’. The thesis also uses critical theory developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to speculate on aspects which help to sustain designerly ways of speaking

Designers, Emotions, And Ideas: How Graphic Designers Understand Their Emotional Experiences Around Ideation

Research on the role of designers’ own emotions as an influence on design processes, outcomes, and professional identity is limited but indicates that these experiences may play a meaningful role in design, particularly around ideation processes. This phenomenographic study sought to investigate and identify critical variations in the ways that graphic designers understand their emotional experiences around ideation. Based on interviews with 15 graphic designers, seven distinct categories of understanding emerged. These included (1) goodness-of-fit between designer and project sets an emotional tone for ideation; (2) high arousal emotions are present during ideation but incidental; (3) high arousal emotions are present during ideation and are managed by seeking calmness; (4) high arousal emotions present during ideation are managed by introducing structure or restraint; (5) high arousal emotions present during ideation are managed by seeking feedback; (6) emotional cues serve as intuitive signals for idea evaluation; and (7) reflection on emotional patterns supports professional growth. Implications for the relationship between creativity and emotions as well as for learning design and allied fields are discussed. Directions for future research on creativity and emotions, professional identity in design, and design education are also identified

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Into the Wilds: Influences from Video Games on Our Perception of \u27Nature\u27

In this paper I examine how representations of human-sparse natural environments, e.g. wilderness, influence what expectations we have when we actually engage with comparable physical places. I use Don Ihde\u27s phenomenology of technology to describe my own experiences playing three games that take place among large photorealistic human-sparse natural environments: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Horizon Zero Dawn, and theHunter: Call of the Wild. I also conduct a brief literature review on the effects of video games as interactive media on players. I argue that players are capable of applying their expectations of what constitutes realism from digital to physical environments, and that some of these translocations (transferring the perceptual framework from one space to another) limit our ability to meaningfully engage with the world. Although some video games may condition players to hyperreal expectations that leave them disappointed with physical spaces, some games might also produce increased interest and care for human-sparse spaces. The causal relationship between playing video games, changing expectations, and offline behavior therefore merits further study. I conclude with the claim that our experiences with unmediated physical nature should ground our perceptual baselines, rather than evaluating the physical by the standards of the digital

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference