Warts-and-all: The real practice of service design

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Kaleidoscope of roles: Valuing the agencies of the audience, client and the designer

This paper broadens the discussion on the inclusiveness of design process. It discusses the inclusive approach to communication design projects that values the agencies of various stakeholders involved. In particular, this paper explores the importance of the designers' human agency to enable a human-centred approach in the practice of communication design. The paper draws on design-led investigations and interviews with practitioners undertaken in the author's practice-led doctorate research situated in communication design. What roles do people play during the design process? How does that affect the design outcome? Prompted by such questionings, this paper illuminates the main roles people play within a design process; the audience, clients and designers. It explores how and why these roles are central to designing. The paper argues that the dialogic interaction that occurs between these various roles drives the design process in creating engaging and meaningful outcomes for all concerned. The paper concludes with a proposition for the discourse within communication design that embraces designing as an interpersonal, complex and layered relationship that includes the multiple roles that people have

Politics makes strange bedfellows: addressing the 'messy' power dynamics in design practice

The paper addresses the role of the designer in navigating through politics and power dynamics that can potentially hinder ways in which people have input into a design process. It acknowledges that such obstacles are common to design practices and much is already documented in organisational, business and management frameworks (Best, 2006, p. 97; Jones, 2003). However, the paper draws on the author's doctoral research that explored how designers work within the complexities of politics and power dynamics and the agency they bring when working within such contexts. Firstly, the paper clarifies its use of the word politics by distinguishing between the political choices that designers make, to the embedded politics of power dynamics and hidden agendas. It acknowledges how the political content and intention of design is widely discussed in communication design literature where designers have created political content toward a purposeful political outcome. The paper therefore focuses more on another political aspect to communication design practice that relates to values, relationships and power dynamics. These human aspects of practice are complex, 'messy' and are often implicit. The power dynamics within projects can significantly influence the way stakeholders have input into the design process and subsequent project outcome. The politics of the individual, organisation, community or the society can often abruptly and unexpectedly surface through designing

Engaging with ku: From abstraction to meaning through the practice of noticing

This paper presents a design project that explored the practice of "noticing". Noticing is a way in and through which we are able to understand and create our relationship to space and place. The practice of noticing can facilitate awareness, reflection, learning and transformation (Mason 2002). Noticing is a practice that enables us to engage with the concept of Ku~, meaning "space", in Japanese. In this project context, Ku~ is interpreted as a space of potentiality rather than emptiness or nothingness. Engaging with Ku~ through the practice of noticing can enable a transition from abstraction to meaning. Ku~ can also be an expression of the ambiguous potential of design investigations: including knowing and the unknown, the limitations and the challenges. To practice design in this way is to step outside of the confines of certainty and embark on an exploratory path of discovery. Just as design is a way of engaging with space - to enunciate the unknown, to create meaning from the abstract - so too is noticing as a temporal practice of discovery and place making. Through the act of noticing the ambiguous openness of space is transformed into the connectedness of place (Casey 2001)

Design that keeps designing: designing for participation

What role does participation take when engaging the public in communication design projects? What considerations and capacities in the communication design process and practice are required to enable participation? These questions are considered in this paper through critically reflecting on a project entitled Fashion City, which explored engaging the public as co-author of the communication content. The unexpected and confronting outcomes of the project provided valuable insights into designing for participation. The paper summarises three of the key lessons learned during the project that revolved around issues of releasing control and de-centralising the designer and the outcome of design. Following the understandings arising from the project, a 'scaffold' model is proposed. This scaffold can act as a framework that respects the individual's agency and their participation as well as their rights to choose to ignore or interact, engage or disengage in a 'conversation' initiated through design. These scaffolds may be risky and unconventional to normative commercial processes, however, it is argued that they can lead to generative situations of uncertainty and indeterminacy to occur, enabling the discovery of new concepts, knowledge and practices in communication design

Inflating branes inside abelian strings

We study a 6-dimensional brane world model with an abelian string residing in the two extra dimensions. We study both static as well as inflating branes and find analytic solutions for the case of trivial matter fields in the bulk. Next to singular space-times, we also find solutions which are regular including cigar-like universes as well as solutions with periodic metric functions. These latter solutions arise if in a singular space-time a static brane is replaced by an inflating brane. We determine the pattern of generic solutions for positive, negative and zero bulk cosmological constant.Comment: 14 Latex pages, 11 postscript figures; references added, discussion extended; reference adde

Tao of communication design practice : manifesting implicit values through human-centred design

This research explores how human values and concerns are manifested and negotiated through the process of design. In undertaking this study, a variety of design interventions were explored to facilitate how values can be articulated and discussed amongst project stakeholders during the design process. These design interventions will be referred to as projects within the exegesis. In this exegesis, I will argue for the importance of a dialogic process among project stakeholders in the creation of a human-centred design practice in communication design. This exegesis explains the central argument of the research and how the research questions were investigated. It presents a journey of the discoveries, learnings and knowledge gained through an inquiry of the research questions. The total submission for this research consists of the exegesis, exhibition and oral presentation. Through each mode of delivery I will share and illuminate how the research questions were investigated

Experience and imagination in transdisciplinary design: The fabpod

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This article examines how techniques for imagining atmospheres are conceptualized and practiced in architecture, anthropology and acoustic measurement in order to advance discussion of how transdisciplinary theory and practice might be realized. Building on research into the experience of atmospheres of already existing architectural spaces, it discusses how architects, anthropologists and users of designed environments imagine atmospheres. This is explored through an examination of the processes of design, making, quantitative measurement and ethnographic study of an acoustically designed prototype meeting space, the FabPod. It is argued that transdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration offers architecture a new mode through which to participate in imagining and designing atmosphere

Gravity from Spinors

We investigate a possible unified theory of all interactions which is based only on fundamental spinor fields. The vielbein and metric arise as composite objects. The effective quantum gravitational theory can lead to a modification of Einstein's equations due to the lack of local Lorentz-symmetry. We explore the generalized gravity with global instead of local Lorentz symmetry in first order of a systematic derivative expansion. At this level diffeomorphisms and global Lorentz symmetry allow for two new invariants in the gravitational effective action. The one which arises in the one loop approximation to spinor gravity is consistent with all present tests of general relativity and cosmology. This shows that local Lorentz symmetry is tested only very partially by present observations. In contrast, the second possible new coupling is severely restricted by present solar system observations.Comment: New material on absence of observational tests of local Lorentz invariance, 21 pages, to appear in Phys.Rev.

Fermions on Thick Branes in the Background of Sine-Gordon Kinks

A class of thick branes in the background of sine-Gordon kinks with a scalar potential $V(\phi)=p(1+\cos\frac{2\phi}{q})$ was constructed by R. Koley and S. Kar [Classical Quantum Gravity \textbf{22}, 753 (2005)]. In this paper, in the background of the warped geometry, we investigate the issue of localization of spin half fermions on these branes in the presence of two types of scalar-fermion couplings: $\eta\bar{\Psi}\phi\Psi$ and $\eta\bar{\Psi}\sin\phi \Psi$. By presenting the mass-independent potentials in the corresponding Schr\"{o}dinger equations, we obtain the lowest Kaluza--Klein (KK) modes and a continuous gapless spectrum of KK states with $m^2>0$ for both types of couplings. For the Yukawa coupling $\eta\bar{\Psi}\phi\Psi$, the effective potential of the right chiral fermions for positive $q$ and $\eta$ is always positive, hence only the effective potential of the left chiral fermions could trap the corresponding zero mode. This is a well-known conclusion which had been discussed extensively in the literature. However, for the coupling $\eta\bar{\Psi}\sin\phi \Psi$, the effective potential of the right chiral fermions for positive $q$ and $\eta$ is no longer always positive. Although the value of the potential at the location of the brane is still positive, it has a series of wells and barriers on each side, which ensures that the right chiral fermion zero mode could be trapped. Thus we may draw the remarkable conclusion: for positive $\eta$ and $q$, the potentials of both the left and right chiral fermions could trap the corresponding zero modes under certain restrictions.Comment: 22 pages, 21 figures, published version to appear in Phys. Rev.