DETC2009-87749 FRAMING SUSTAINABILITY IN HUMAN-CENTERED PRODUCT DESIGN

ABSTRACT Engineers today have access to a myriad of tools for developing sustainable products that have minimal environmental impact. Although consumer interest in sustainability is increasing, it is still not foremost on the minds of many consumers. Engineers are thus faced with the dilemma of developing sustainable solutions for consumers who may not yet want or be able to articulate sustainability needs. We explore this issue by examining user research conducted by students in a graduate-level product design course. We present findings on how users define and describe sustainability, how sustainability needs interact with other user needs, and what tradeoffs people make and feelings people have when faced with sustainability trade-offs. We present a case study of one design team's findings about sustainability, and how those findings affected the formulation of the team's mission statement and product strategy. Based on these results, we propose recommendations for how to facilitate the design of innovative and sustainable consumer products

Social Television and User Interaction

At first glance, the notion of social interactive television seems to be a tautology. Television watching has always been a social activity. People watch television together in their living rooms, and outside their homes they talk about last night's football match; and even call each other to recommend an interesting program. Unfortunately, until recently, research on social interactive television has been scarce. One limiting factor for the development of innovative services for the home is the interactive technology behind user interaction, which was limited to the remote control. Fortunately, a number of studies concentrate on extending interactive methods, for example by using contextual information. This article reviews the state of the art in these two directions: the social aspects of television and user interaction. We conclude with a research agenda for further research, which might transform current interactive television services into shared experiences

Towards Advanced Social TV in a Cooperative Media Space

Gross T, Fetter M, Paul-Stueve T. Towards Advanced Social TV in a Cooperative Media Space. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction. 2008;24(2):155-173.Social TV systems provide groups of TV spectators with technical support for colo- cated and geographically distributed TV watching and social interaction. This article provides a systematic overview of the design space of Social TV and suggests a tech- nical framework for flexible Social TV providing groups of TV spectators with sophisticated yet easy-to-use support for colocated and geographically distributed TV watching and social interaction. It sketches a scenario of advanced Social TV and then reviews previous concepts and systems as well as studies on Social TV to come to an in-depth presentation of design dimensions of Social TV. It introduces the Cooperative Media Space for Social TV as a technical platform for flexible support of advanced Social TV along the identified design dimensions

Interdisciplinarity in design education: understanding the undergraduate student experience

Interdisciplinarity is becoming a critical issue of concern for design schools across East Asia in their attempts to provide industry graduates with the skills and competences to make creative contributions in a global economy. As a result, East Asian higher education institutions are aggressively endeavouring to provide interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum that combine traditional designerly skills with engineering knowledge and methods. The current study takes an interdisciplinary undergraduate course as case-study to examine how the pedagogic strategy of team teaching influences student learning experience. Two surveys of student learning were conducted for this research purpose. The first provided an indication of the holistic student learning experience, while the second explored the conditions of team and non-team teaching as influence upon learning experiences specifically. Results showed how students taught by a single instructor provided a more positive overall opinion of course quality and experienced significantly more encouragement to participate compared to team taught respondents. However, findings also indicated how team teaching significantly increased the students??? experience of a balanced contribution from different disciplinary perspectives and how the team teaching approach was significantly more effective in providing students with greater opportunities to understand the relevance of the different disciplines to the course subject. We conclude with a discussion of results in terms of the effective use of team teaching at undergraduate level as strategy for interdisciplinary learning experiences.ope