Designers’ roles in the founding team

Design has been a trend topic in popular publications and academia in the entrepreneurship scene for the past years. And while many beneficial capabilities are attributed to design there is little investigation into designers’ daily actions as part of a founding team specifically. “Designers’ Roles in the Founding Team” examines the roles designers hold as part of a founding team in startups. The objective of this work is to gain insights into the tasks and responsibilities designers take on a daily basis, and to subsequently determine their roles specifically in the context of a startup founder. For this thesis 15 company founders or c-level executives from five different companies were interviewed. All participating companies are operating since less than five years and are based in the Helsinki capital region. The interviews focus on the participants’ day to day tasks and their collaboration with their co-founders. The interviews included active tasks for the participants and resulted in several different data sets. The results offer a detailed view into the founding teams’ work and collaboration with each other. Two different roles of a designer as part of the founding team were found, the traditional designer, and the integrated designer: the two positions differ in responsibilities and can be distinguished by examining the designer’s involvement with the business development of the company. While designers of both roles are involved in design tasks it is the integrated designer who impacts his or her company’s business development. In addition, it was found that while design is praised for its holistic impact on the whole company, especially in non peer reviewed literature, within this group of interviewees design was mainly associated with traditional design capabilities related to creation and user work. To conclude, this work investigates design’s challenges within a company structure and its perceived capabilities

Chronique de la 61ème session de la Société Internationale Fernand de Visscher à Catane

Peer reviewe

“My book ideas were spinning in my head” : Arts-rich bookmaking experiences to create and sustain multilingual children's meaning making flows and authorial voices

Important theoretical developments in TESOL education challenge the monolingual mindset, instead valuing and leveraging students' complex linguistic repertoires alongside their funds of knowledge and identity through translanguaging practices to foster literacy development. Through a case study of an arts-rich book making experience facilitated by community organization, Kids' Own Publishing, this article uses assemblage thinking to examine how children's semiotic, knowledge, and identity resources interact to support them to create and sustain meaning making flow and to express distinctive authorial voices. Employing a critical content analysis guided by assemblage thinking, we highlight the literacy skills demonstrated in five students' published eight-page books and show how the interaction of children's meaning-making resources is best understood through an “assemblage” lens, a process which is under-researched. Through this lens, we examine the facilitative role of the arts-rich experience in furnishing vibrant activities, artifacts, and an inspiring physical space that shaped how the children's meaning-making resources came together as flows. We consider implications for literacy learning, including the need to create conditions for all children's meaning making resources to be drawn upon in text creation in an approach that values what all students, whether they identify as monolingual or multilingual, bring to their learning

Blind extraction of guitar effects through blind system inversion and neural guitar effect modeling

Audio effects are an ubiquitous tool in music production due to the interesting ways in which they can shape the sound of music. Guitar effects, the subset of all audio effects focusing on guitar signals, are commonly used in popular music to shape the guitar sound to fit specific genres or to create more variety within musical compositions. Automatic extraction of guitar effects and their parameter settings, with the aim to copy a target guitar sound, has been previously investigated, where artificial neural networks first determine the effect class of a reference signal and subsequently the parameter settings. These approaches require a corresponding guitar effect implementation to be available. In general, for very close sound matching, additional research regarding effect implementations is necessary. In this work, we present a different approach to circumvent these issues. We propose blind extraction of guitar effects through a combination of blind system inversion and neural guitar effect modeling. That way, an immediately usable, blind copy of the target guitar effect is obtained. The proposed method is tested with the phaser, softclipping and slapback delay effect. Listening tests with eight subjects indicate excellent quality of the blind copies, i.e., little to no difference to the reference guitar effect