Twenty-First Century Design Scholarship

Roundtable DiscussionScholarship is a tricky thing for design academics, especially for junior faculty who are trying to build a body of work towards tenure. To stay relevant in a quickly changing field, we often fluctuate between creative practice and more traditional scholarly pursuits, all while attempting to build a cohesive dossier. At the same time, we work in an especially turbulent environment. Our institutions are under increasing pressure to define their worth and, in turn, are heightening their expectations around scholarship. The field is trying to distinguish itself (or not) from fine art, architecture, and others, muddying our dissemination outlets. Digital media is facilitating new and unproven outlets for publication. And, increasingly, the validity of our creative practice as a form of scholarship is under constant scrutiny. On top of this, we often enter academia under-prepared for the reality of serious scholarship and have to figure out what good work looks like as we go. Unlike other fields, the scholarship—and most importantly the writing—we do as graduate students does not necessarily prepare us for work as a professional academic. These factors all add up to cause many new design academics to struggle as they attempt to build a sound body of work. Luckily, we are not alone in this struggle. Our community of educators are all trying to answer the same question: what is good design scholarship in the Twenty-First Century? This roundtable will attempt to answer this question by bringing together academics with various levels of experience and from a diverse set of institutions. By opening conversation through the roundtable format, we can start to uncover the range of scholarship that is currently being done, how faculty are framing their work in dossier narratives, and how different types of work are being received by T&P committees. Each of our institutions will have its own set of standards and criteria but this discussion will start a dialog about our work that can help us all move forward as a community. One outcome of the conversation will be a plan to start an online community (via LinkedIn or a similar service) where design academics can continue the conversation about scholarship and post questions as they arise

Designing Digital Experiences: Getting started with user experience, user interface, and interaction design

Designing Digital Experiences is a one-time, full day workshop that covers the basics of designing people-centered websites and software. The processes, outcomes, and tools that are used to create digital experiences will be discussed to provide a succinct picture of the industry today. Hands-on activities will teach participants how to best utilize user insights in their designs, enable them to practice industry-relevant prototyping methods, and highlight the key differences in designing within print and digital environments

Participatory Innovation: A Pedagogical Approach To Help Students Reveal Real-World Problems

Full poster available from: [LINK]http://hdl.handle.net/1805/12144[/LINK]In the digital sector, ‘innovation’ is a frequently overused word. Entrepreneurs worldwide are trying to innovate within their market. However, the drive for innovation can blind the creators of these products, obscuring what people actually need and want to use. Countless applications struggle or outright fail because they are created without the user in mind. Digital technology can be a powerful tool in people’s everyday life but it has to be integrated in meaningful ways. Careful consideration must be placed on how these new products will integrate—and improve—life. When new products truly help people, they are more likely to resonate and succeed; this is real innovation. Everyone involved in the production of digital products—entrepreneurs, developers, and experience or visual designers (the focus of this project)—must abide by this philosophy in order for the product to be successful. Students who are preparing to be involved with the design or production of these products need to learn ways to more deeply understand their users, identify problems, and craft meaningful solutions. With this in mind, research was conducted to identify and test methods that allow students to acquire this deeper understanding. This poster will outline one pedagogical approach which utilizes participatory design methods to help students identify problems in people’s lives. For this research, visual communication design students utilized these methods in a project for the course Visual Design for the Web. An overview of the pedagogical approach, project, student outcomes, and implications for future work will be highlighted

High resolution stopwatch for cents

A very low-cost, easy-to-make stopwatch is presented to support various experiments in mechanics. The high-resolution stopwatch is based on two photodetectors connected directly to the microphone input of the sound card. A dedicated free open-source software has been developed and made available to download. The efficiency is demonstrated by a free fall experiment

Redefining radio-loudness for low redshift quasars.

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PEM electrolyzer characterization with carbon-based hardware and material sets

Abstract The research and development of proton exchange membrane water electrolysis (PEMWE) is an upcoming and growing area due to a rising interest in hydrogen as an energy carrier. Operating conditions are harsher than in a fuel cell system, particularly because the potentials required for the oxygen evolution reaction are significantly higher. In commercial water electrolysis systems, this is compensated by typically using titanium material sets that are often protected against oxidation through coating processes. Such material choices make small scale research hardware and porous transport layers expensive and difficult to source. In this work, we show that the stability of traditional, carbon-based fuel cell materials such as porous transport layers and graphite flow fields can be sufficient for electrolyzer initial performance characterization procedures such as cell conditioning, a limited number of polarization curve measurements, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy. We identify and quantify the onset of carbon degradation in porous transport layers with regards to operating length and define a strategy that enables the utilization of standard fuel cell hardware for short-term PEMWE experiments. With the knowledge that existing fuel cell material sets can be applied to conduct electrolyzer research when adhering to such limitations, fuel cell research hardware and experience can be more readily transferred to the younger and rapidly growing electrolysis research field

Quantifying Effusion Rates at Active Volcanoes through Integrated Time-Lapse Laser Scanning and Photography

During volcanic eruptions, measurements of the rate at which magma is erupted underpin hazard assessments. For eruptions dominated by the effusion of lava, estimates are often made using satellite data; here, in a case study at Mount Etna (Sicily), we make the first measurements based on terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), and we also include explosive products. During the study period (17–21 July, 2012), regular strombolian explosions were occurring within the Bocca Nuova crater, producing a ~50 m high scoria cone and a small lava flow field. TLS surveys over multi-day intervals determined a mean cone growth rate (effusive and explosive products) of ~0.24 m3s-1. Differences between 0.3-m-resolution DEMs acquired at 10-minute intervals captured the evolution of a breakout lava flow lobe advancing at 0.01–0.03 m3s-1. Partial occlusion within the crater prevented similar measurement of the main flow, but integrating TLS data with time-lapse imagery enabled lava viscosity (7.4 × 105 Pa s) to be derived from surface velocities and, hence, a flux of 0.11 m3s-1 to be calculated. The total dense-rock equivalent magma discharge estimates range from ~0.1 to ~0.2 m3s-1 over the measurement period, and suggest that simultaneous estimates from satellite data are somewhat overestimated. Our results support the use of integrated TLS and time-lapse photography for ground-truthing space-based measurements and highlight the value of interactive image analysis when automated approaches such as particle image velocimetry (PIV) fail

Evoluzione e destino finale delle stelle massicce

Questa tesi analizza i risultati, tratti dalla letteratura recente, mirati a inve- stigare da un punto di vista teorico, per mezzo di simulazioni idrodinamiche e modelli di evoluzione stellare, quali siano le caratteristiche strutturali della stella pre-supernova che determinano le condizioni di esplodibilità o collasso diretto in buco nero. Le caratteristiche dei progenitori dei remnants infatti possono dare informazioni utili sulle implicazioni astrofisiche che scaturiscono dalla recente e importantissima scoperta delle onde gravitazionali rilevate per la prima volta il 14 Settembre 2015 dai rilevatori del Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) generate dalla fusione di due buchi neri massicci.ope

The Feasibility of a Using a Smart Button Mobile Health System to Self-Track Medication Adherence and Deliver Tailored Short Message Service Text Message Feedback

BACKGROUND: As many as 50% of people experience medication nonadherence, yet studies for detecting nonadherence and delivering real-time interventions to improve adherence are lacking. Mobile health (mHealth) technologies show promise to track and support medication adherence. OBJECTIVE: The study aimed to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of using an mHealth system for medication adherence tracking and intervention delivery. The mHealth system comprises a smart button device to self-track medication taking, a companion smartphone app, a computer algorithm used to determine adherence and then deliver a standard or tailored SMS (short message service) text message on the basis of timing of medication taking. Standard SMS text messages indicated that the smartphone app registered the button press, whereas tailored SMS text messages encouraged habit formation and systems thinking on the basis of the timing the medications were taken. METHODS: A convenience sample of 5 adults with chronic kidney disease (CKD), who were prescribed antihypertensive medication, participated in a 52-day longitudinal study. The study was conducted in 3 phases, with a standard SMS text message sent in phases 1 (study days 1-14) and 3 (study days 46-52) and tailored SMS text messages sent during phase 2 (study days 15-45) in response to participant medication self-tracking. Medication adherence was measured using: (1) the smart button and (2) electronic medication monitoring caps. Concordance between these 2 methods was evaluated using percentage of measurements made on the same day and occurring within ±5 min of one another. Acceptability was evaluated using qualitative feedback from participants. RESULTS: A total of 5 patients with CKD, stages 1-4, were enrolled in the study, with the majority being men (60%), white (80%), and Hispanic/Latino (40%) of middle age (52.6 years, SD 22.49; range 20-70). The mHealth system was successfully initiated in the clinic setting for all enrolled participants. Of the expected 260 data points, 36.5% (n=95) were recorded with the smart button and 76.2% (n=198) with electronic monitoring. Concordant events (n=94), in which events were recorded with both the smart button and electronic monitoring, occurred 47% of the time and 58% of these events occurred within ±5 min of one another. Participant comments suggested SMS text messages were encouraging. CONCLUSIONS: It was feasible to recruit participants in the clinic setting for an mHealth study, and our system was successfully initiated for all enrolled participants. The smart button is an innovative way to self-report adherence data, including date and timing of medication taking, which were not previously available from measures that rely on recall of adherence. Although the selected smart button had poor concordance with electronic monitoring caps, participants were willing to use it to self-track medication adherence, and they found the mHealth system acceptable to use in most cases