Are We All Designers?

Several design writers have proposed, or at least implied, that “…we are all designers…” through the way we manipulate the environment around us, select the items we wish to own, plan, build, buy, arrange, and restructure things all in a form of design. During the same time, design as a behavioural phenomenon has increased its capacity and breadth and as a result, design activity extends from the objects we use on a daily basis to cities, landscapes, nations, cultures, bodies, genes, political systems, digital existences, food production, the way we travel and even cloning sheep. This paper reports on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project that seeks to explore current models of creative practice, examining where disciplinary, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological edges lie in an attempt to define the significant drivers of any movements across disciplinary boundaries. The project’s creative workshop activities have also facilitated comparison of the outputs between single-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary group working and has allowed the research team to explore how non-designers and designers alike transfigure creative space during practical design exercises. The outputs of the first workshop pose fundamental questions for the future of design education models based purely on disciplinary perspectives and furthermore questions whether current understandings of design thinking encompass more generalist human traits. The need to educate designers who can surf across disciplinary boundaries to tackle the 21st century’s emerging complex and wicked social, environmental and economic issues suggests a radical rethink against the individual and disciplinary based perspectives that largely prevail

Question asking in design reviews: how does inquiry facilitate the learning interaction?

Design reviews are common educational practice in design disciplines, where students meet with instructors and other stakeholders to discuss the progress of a project they are engaged in. Such reviews are tightly coupled with project-based learning approaches in the design studio. A number of research studies have looked into various characteristics of instructor-student interactions during design reviews. In this study, we investigated the question-asking behavior of instructors, students and clients. We paid particular attention to high-level questions that relate to causal and generative reasoning. We analyzed 22 reviews involving six undergraduate industrial designers, who undertook design projects individually. We observed that the instructors and clients were not effective in modeling question asking behavior for the students during the reviews. We also observed that the structure of the reviews did not facilitate the desired behavior either. Consequently, we present a theoretical framework that proposes a more explicit structure for design reviews, deliberately addressing particular aspects of the design process. Ultimately, we suggest that instructors should be inquisitive about the students’ design approach, and that the students should take responsibility for reflectively articulating their design thinking and actions during design reviews

Twenty questions about design behavior for sustainability, report of the International Expert Panel on behavioral science for design

How behavioral scientists, engineers, and architects can work together to advance how we all understand and practice design—in order to enhance sustainability in the built environment, and beyond.https://www.nature.com/documents/design_behavior_for_sustainability.pdfPublished versio

A systems thinking framework integrating circular behaviour research

Consumer goods industries are increasingly incorporating circular practices (e.g. recycling and reuse) into their offerings to reduce environmental impact and combat the issue of waste. The success of these offerings depends on consumers significantly changing their behaviour across the journey of purchase, use and disposal. There are a number of unique features that demarcate circular behaviour from other types of consumer behaviour, such as the fact that consumers must operate within a system of interconnected elements to enable resources to flow continuously. However, research to date has applied methodological approaches and behaviour models in a way that only addresses a fraction of the picture. In moving beyond this reductive framing of circular behaviour, a systems thinking framework is introduced, integrating circular behaviour research. The framework is applied to a case example and preliminary findings are presented, which highlight the capability of the proposed framework to explain broad and deep data on circular consumer behaviour. This can be used to pinpoint specific problems in an interconnected chain of behaviours, understand how system elements can cause unintended behavioural consequences, highlight barriers and opportunities to circularity and develop more informed intervention strategies

Mechanical Design of the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC) Beam Screen through a Multiphysics Model

A novel numerical model to estimate the mechanical behaviour of the new HL - LHC beam screen duri ng a magnet quench is presented. The temperature rise due to the resistive losses of the induced currents is considered. This enables to refine the estimation of the Lorentz forces as they depend on the electrical resistivity of the materials, which in tur n depends on the temperature. Compared to the analytical formulations used to design the current beam screen, the proposed model introduces four new features. Mechanical contacts have been set - up between multiple components, and the mechanical response of the beam screen is evaluated dynamically over the whole evolution of the quench. The pathways of the eddy currents are displayed on 3D geometries to better investigate the behaviour of any component placed along the beam axis. As the resistivity of some ma terials used for the beam screen is very low, self - inductance effects are included as well. These features make the estimation of beam screen behaviour more accurat

Sustainable materials in design projects

New types of sustainable materials are introduced in our markets every year to minimise the environmental impact of products. The search for more environmentally benign materials is crucial in reducing the depletion of non-renewable material resources. Recent literature indicates that there is a growing interest and rapid technological progression from various industry stakeholders on this matter. Nevertheless, the sustainability issues pursued by designers and other material developers are still ambiguous. The overall aim of this research is to develop new understanding of the sustainable materials being developed and applied in product design. Seventy-two material-centred design projects are analysed in terms of resource renewability and resource origin. The data obtained are further classified according to the material group and products produced with such materials. Renewable materials make up half of the materials used. Moreover, waste materials comprise up to half of the materials used. Three materials groups were found to be more frequently used, namely natural composites, synthetic polymers and organic materials. Most of these materials are being made into furniture, household objects and clothing and accessories. Within the natural composites and organic materials, various extraordinary materials were used, reflecting the dynamicity of designers’ work and experimentation with materials. As for synthetic polymers, recycled plastics are the main materials used and this is not surprising given their abundance in the environment. In general, the application of sustainable materials seems to be at its infancy but explorations are vibrant and progressive. The impact of these materials in the mainstream market is unknown and other sustainability factors need further evaluation. As such, design as a discipline is yet to facilitate the uptake of these materials