Design as a social process: bodies, brains and social aspects of designing

This paper focuses on theory making about 'design' and 'social process'. Building sound extensible theories about design and social process is important because of the essential roles that design teams, as social organisations, play in innovation and knowledge creation processes. Developed and developing countries alike regard these innovation and knowledge creation processes and outcomes as a key to their economic and social futures. The paper explores 'design as a social process' in terms of building theory. It asks which concepts and theories in this area make most epistemological sense. The ubiquitous nature of designing means that a lack of coherence between theories about 'design as a social process' and theories and research findings of other disciplines is likely to be problematic. The paper focuses on identifying conceptual positions that are epistemologically more satisfactory in terms of integrating theories about designing with theories of other disciplines. It draws attention to the need to differentiate between different aspects of design and social process. The paper concludes by mapping out key relationships between different aspects of design and social process

Design and sense: implications of Damasio's neurological findings for design theory

The inclusion of human feelings and emotions presents a serious problem in the design research field. Traditional approaches, focusing on emotions, are problematic for design theory building and do not align with recent findings about human psycho-neuro-physiological functioning. This paper describes research aimed at improving the ways feelings and emotions are represented in theories about design cognition. The paper focuses on recent research findings of Antonio Damasio and colleagues and applies them to theory making about designing and the ways designed artefacts are perceived and used

A unified basis for design research and theory

An epistemologically fundamental problem in design research is contradiction between two opposing perspectives: Belief that design research will lead to the activity of design being completely understood. Belief that research into design will ultimately be limited because design activity is dependent on human creativity and human creativity cannot be deterministically modelled in the manner of simple physical research.Both perspectives are strongly represented in the design literature. The contradiction between them has not been resolved, or addressed in an epistemologically conclusive manner.This paper addresses this problem by outlining a proposal for a unified basis for design theory that builds on previous research by the author in integrating social, environmental, ethical and technical factors in design theory. There are significant advantages for addressing this contradiction to reduce the widely acknowledged epistemological problems found in the design research literature. Addressing the issue also forms the basis for a unified theory of design. The proposal draws on: epistemology and theory of knowledge; ethology and evolutionary development; systems; and organisational theory. The use of ethology in this context is new in the field of design research. The paper concludes by outlining the benefits of the proposed unified basis for design theory and its limitations

Design Guideline Gap and 2 Feedback Loop Limitation: Two issues in Design and Emotion theory, research and practice

This paper identifies and describes two issues, ‘Design Guideline Gap’ and ‘2 Feedback Loop Limitation’ that expose problems in the Design and Emotion theory and more widely challenge the validity of design theory, research findings and design practices. The paper describes the issues by way of examples, draws out the implications for emotion-related design research, theory and practice and suggests ways of addressing the design and emotion theory problems exposed by the analyses presented in the paper

Improving pedestrian access way planning using designing out crime

Pedestrian Access Ways (PAWs) have presented a significant and unresolved challenge to transport planners in local and State government. The result has been piecemeal local government and State government approaches that have frequently resulted in tensions between civic constituencies, high levels of administrative cost, adverse publicity, reduced transport functionality and compromises to the policy intentions of a range of government agencies. In part, this has been due to a gap between the intrinsic complexity of PAW eco-systems and the oversimplification of this complexity in ways that ignores issues of multiple uses, purposes, user interests, user groups, functionality, ownership, control and agency and the ways these vary across the day, week, seasons, years and planning fashions. In short, local interests and incomplete understanding the situation have limited the development of best practice in management of PAWs, have generated unnecessary problems, and in particular have prevented an integrated government approach. This paper presents findings of recent research on the management of PAWs to reduce crime. This required identifying and addressing unresolved and overlooked issues. Outcomes included: a morphology of PAWs and PAW functioning; the identification of information for understanding the functioning of individual PAWs; the discovery of the misapplication of Designing Out Crime techniques to PAWs; the identification of misunderstandings leading to flawed policy actions; the exposure of ways that adverse PAW outcomes are manufactured by planning policies and decisions; proposals for an improved approach to managing PAWs to reduce crime via Designing Out Crime techniques; and, the development of PAW Guidelines as a supplement to the State Designing Out Crime Planning Guidelines for use by local government. The research was funded by the Office of Crime Prevention (OCP) and undertaken by the authors as members of the cross-university Design Out Crime research group

Path-dependent Foundation of Global Design-driven Outdoor Trade in the Northwest of England

This article explores path dependency in the design-based outdoor clothing and equipment sector in the northwest of the United Kingdom in the 1960s. The industry developed a strong export market and remains strong internationally. The article offers several key insights that promise to transform our understanding of the improvements that have taken place in design practice in some industries. In particular, the article focuses on the social, economic and technological factors that shaped the potential for successful design and manufacturing in the outdoor clothing and equipment sector in a region suffering from social and economic collapse. It also examines the role of users as designers and business founders. The region this article examines was a vital centre of the Industrial Revolution. The article shows that skills and knowledge originating in the Industrial Revolution have been vitally important to the development of today’s design-driven industries. The cases presented here involve internationally competitive mountaineering equipment firms. Mountaineering clothing and equipment design was originally based on function and lead-user innovation. Innovative functional products emerged when firms with knowledge and technology originating inthe Industrial Revolution combined their skills with lead-user sporting expertise to generate a user-driven design process. One core finding of this study is that fundamental changes have occurred in the relationship between manufacturers and customers that are vital to design success today. This marks a departure from past practice

Research into integrated crime prevention strategies for rail station environs: Final report

The initial impetus for this project arose from concerns about responses to ‘anti-social behaviour’, especially by young people, in and around rail stations. The primary goal of the research was to develop a collaborative approach that provided a more constructive and integrated response that would produce benefit for local communities, for the Public Transport Authority, and for the young people themselves. In practical terms, this involved: • Development of interagency collaboration processes to support agencies with diverse goals to participate constructively without loss of autonomy; • Identification at a local level of the common issues of concern, their causes, and more integrated collaborative approaches to their prevention; • Identification of areas in which agencies have similar goals and useful operational synergies; • Identification of situations in which organisations have different goals and priorities and identification of the implications for interagency collaboration; and • Identification of strategies and joint activities that would enable disparate agencies to work together in mutually supportive ways without compromising their individual goals and purposes. This research project was funded by six organisations and had 28 participating agencies. Funding was provided by the Office of Crime Prevention (OCP), the Public Transport Authority of Western Australia (PTA), The City of Armadale, the City of Gosnells, the City of Joondalup and the City of Swan. Key participating staff included: PTA transit guard managers; local government community services managers; local government detached and out-reach youth workers; local government youth work team leaders and staff; Department of Community Development staff, including representation from Aboriginal affairs; shopping centre managers; staff from non-government youth work agencies; a representative from Police Crime Prevention; representatives from shopping centre security management; OCP crime prevention advisors; representatives from the Education Department and alternative education providers; and local government planners. The research comprised four individual projects. Each project was undertaken at one of four rail environs identified by the PTA as having a high level of adverse incidents: Armadale/Maddington, Gosnells/ Kelmscott, Joondalup and Midland. The project processes were similar in all locations. Outcomes were strongly positive in all four locations. The types of outcomes, however, reflected the differing mix of participants, interests, goals, and expertise of participating agencies, and the specific problems identified by participants in each location. The research was located within an action research framework. It combined social action and soft systems approaches to support the collaborative design and implementation of integrate Interagency collaboration involves complex social interactions. Additionally, issues of power and control create tensions between participants that reduce the potential for solutions to emerge or to be implemented. Social action methods offer a solution-focused approach that uses social group processes to help participants to gain a more complex understanding of other participants’ perceptions of issues in ways that minimise the adverse effects of the power relationships. The increased level of understanding and reduced tension provided the basis to develop and test interventions that improved the situation for multiple stakeholders. Interviews and focus groups were used to help participants share information about their agency’s roles goals and priorities and to gather initial information about participants’ perceptions of problems, their causes and their relative priority in terms of each organisation’s goals. Soft-systems methods were used to guide data gathering, interpretation and presentation back to participants. The use of the soft-systems approach helped ensure that a broader systemic understanding of problems was made available to participants. The ‘mess’ of data gathered from interviews and focus groups with participants was distilled by the researchers into ‘rich pictures’ that were presented back to participants and provided the basis for discussions about agencies’ differences in perspective and organisational goals. These ‘rich pictures’ also provided the basis for agencies to identify potential local operational synergies and arenas in which agencies’ goals overlapped. Young people were not directly involved in this research. The primary focus of the research was on improving interagency organisational functioning rather than youth work per se. Individual projects, however, involved some agencies undertaking youth work in their normal agency roles. Participating youth workers felt able to represent young peoples’ perspectives based on their interactions with diverse groups. Where youth workers believed they could not do this, they gathered additional information from groups of young people and fed this back in the project. Interventions developed by agencies had to be sustainable beyond the life of the project and undertaken within existing budgets plus very small amounts of ‘seeding’ money. Genuine participation of the full cross-section of young people was impossible in terms of the financial and time constraints. Direct participation by young people would have been tokenistic. Additionally, it would have reshaped the project into youth work. Participants identified a range of successful, useful and practical outcomes from the interagency collaboration approach developed in this research. For example, networks developed between the transit guard manager, transit guards and youth and community organisations enabled practical problems faced by young people to be resolved. This built trust between agencies. New collaborations enabled the PTA community education team to gain better access to schools and youth groups for their track safety and anti-trespass educational programs. In one locality, the collaboration resulting from the research project led to an ongoing pilot collaboration between the PTA and DrugARM WA to address issues of intoxicated young people on trains. In another location, the research project led to the identification of a problem that some young people stay on night trains because it is unsafe for them to go home, especially at weekends. Project participants collaborated to develop a long-term plan to press for a local emergency shelter for young people. The evaluation of the interagency collaboration approach developed in this research indicates it offers benefits in a wide range of contexts. The approach has application in the very large goals work independently without knowledge or understanding of other organisations that have potential to help or hinder their work. In particular, the approach offers the benefits of personal support to the individuals participating. It enables effective collaboration between organisations with disparate goals without loss of autonomy, and it successfully prevents domination of smaller and less powerful organisations by larger and more powerful organisations. A relatively surprising outcome was the strength of the benefits resulting from the way that this interagency collaboration approach facilitated organisational learning. Increased organisational learning was identified as a key outcome by participants in the final evaluation of the project. At all four locations, there was increased understanding by agencies of the operational priorities of other agencies. All participating agencies gained knowledge about how other agencies operated and were able to use this information to more effectively further their own organisational goals and avoid inadvertently causing problems for other organisations. Additionally, participants reported increased organisational learning about their own agency that provided the basis for improving its functioning and outcomes. The evaluations of the interagency collaboration approach developed and tested in this research project indicates it offers significant benefits applications across a range of rail related and other settings. This interagency collaboration approach is applicable across the population and public spaces (i.e. not just young people and not only rail environs). Significant benefits would be expected in reducing problems at any node where people gather. Typical hot spots likely to benefit from synergic interagency collaboration using this approach include bus stations, late night public traffic nodes such as Fremantle Markets, taxi ranks, and, especially, major public social events. An obvious future application is to use this interagency collaboration approach to reduce potential problems in the environs of the new Southern Rail line between Perth and Mandurah. This new rail line passes through suburbs in which there are expected to be similar levels of problems as addressed in the four locations in which this interagency collaboration approach was trialled

Motivational Information Systems: Case study of a University Research Productivity Index and 6th Extension to Ashby\u27s Law

Information systems are widely used to map and chart organisational activities for management to motivate staff. We have coined the term ‘motivational information systems’ for information systems that have this role. This paper describes one example of recent research by the authors using a case study to investigate the internal and external dynamics of motivational information systems. In this paper, causal loop modeling is used to understand the dynamics of a motivational information system in a large organisation: a university-wide motivational information system intended to motivate academics to increase research outcomes. The analyses and findings of the research led to identification of a sixth extension to Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety. The research described in this paper is part of a larger program of systems research by the authors investigating the application and extension of Beer’s, Viable Systems Model, Ashby’s Laws of Requisite Variety, Checkland’s Soft Systems, Critical Systems Analysis, System Dynamics and Causal Loop Diagrams to situations in which these tools are not commonly applied

Evaluation of Indigenous justice programs Project D. Safe Aboriginal Youth Patrol programs in New South Wales and Northbridge policy and Juvenile Aid Group in Western Australia

In this evaluation, we examined two different approaches to delivery of Community and Night patrol services for young people: the Safe Aboriginal Youth Patrol programs (SAYP) of NSW, and the Northbridge Policy project (NPP) sometimes also called the Young people in Northbridge project, in Perth, Western Australia. The overarching focus of this evaluation was to determine whether the programs should be considered as examples of ‘good practice’ to be replicated elsewhere, and to find evidence of outcomes achieved by each program..