A New Consumerism: The influence of social technologies on product design

Social media has enabled a new style of consumerism. Consumers are no longer passive recipients; instead they are assuming active and participatory roles in product design and production, facilitated by interaction and collaboration in virtual communities. This new participatory culture is blurring the boundaries between the specific roles of designer, consumer and producer, creating entrepreneurial opportunities for designers, and empowering consumers to influence product strategies. Evolving designer-consumer interactions are enabling an enhanced model of co-production, through a value-adding social exchange that is driving changes in consumer behaviour and influencing both product strategies and design practice. The consumer is now a knowledgeable participant, or prosumer, who can contribute to user–centered research through crowd sourcing, collaborate and co-create through open-source or open-innovation platforms, assist creative endeavors by pledging venture capital through crowd funding and advocate the product in blogs and forums. Social media- enabled product implementation strategies working in conjunction with digital production technologies (e.g. additive manufacture), enable consumer-directed adaptive customisation, product personalisation, and self-production, with once passive consumers becoming product produsers. Not only is social media driving unprecedented consumer engagement and significant behavioural change, it is emerging as a major enabler of design entrepreneurship, creating new collaborative opportunities. Innovative processes in design practice are emerging, such as the provision of digital artifacts and customisable product frameworks, rather than standardised manufactured solutions. This paper examines the influence of social media-enabled product strategies on the methodology of the next generation of product designers, and discusses the need for an educational response

Using social engagement to inspire design learning

Social design and ‘design for need’ are important frameworks for establishing ethical understanding amongst novice product designers. Typically, product design is a value-adding activity where normally aesthetics, usability and manufacturability are the key agendas. Howard [1] in his essay “Design beyond commodification” discusses the role of designers in contributing to cultural expressions designed to influence consumer aspirations and desires. He argues that designers are impelled “to participate in the creation of lifestyles that demand the acquisition of goods as a measure of progress and status.” As emerging consumers, student designers tend to reflect this consumer culture in their work, seeking to add ‘marketability’ by focusing on aesthetic development. However value adding can occur in many different manifestations, often outside commercial expectations and the students’ experience. Projects that may be perceived as having limited market potential can often have significant personal impact for both recipient and designer. Social engagement provides a valuable insight for design students into the potential of design to contribute solutions to societal well-being, rather than serve market forces. Working in a local context can enhance this, with unlimited access to end users, their environs and the product context, enabling the development of user empathy and a more intgrated collaborative process. The ‘Fixperts’ social project discussed in this paper has proved to be an effective method of engaging undergraduate students in participatory design within their local community. This model for social engagement has provided an unprecedented learning experience, and established a strong ethical framework amongst Brunel design students

The influence of work placement on the academic achievement of undergraduate design students

The aim of this paper is to investigate the contribution of work placement in enhancing the academic performance of undergraduate design students. A statistical analysis was carried out on a population sample which comprised design students who had graduated at Brunel University London in four different academic years. All the required (anonymous) data were obtained from the university electronic records system. The dataset comprises a total of 411 students, of which 323 were placement students and 88 non-placement students. Students were also classified as higher achievers (students whose second year average mark was 60% or above) and lower achievers. The results seem to suggest that for both higher and lower achievers the placement experience enables students to achieve on average a greater final year mark and a greater improvement from the second to the final year. The study also established that these grade gains were of a similar magnitude irrespective of the students overall academic standing. Finally, the results of this study seem to suggest that the work placement experience give students a particular advantage in the final year project and in the modules characterized by design-focused assessment components

Design Processes for OBM first in the NPD process

DOI is unpublished.Copyright © 2017 The Authors. For production-oriented companies such as original brand manufacturers (OBMs), management of the NPD cycle is essential to how their business functions. However, because these companies focus on R&D activities,engineering and manufacturing goods, they often see design as a small fragment of their product development cycle rather than as an integral part of the process. This paper investigates current design processes, identifying how each process is run by different businesses. Literature reviews and in-depth interviews are undertaken with key NPD project personnel from OBM firms and international brands, to evaluate firms’ current problems operating the existing processes. The findings show an overview of how the design process is carried out by various functional groups in OBM consumer electronics companies and international brands respectively. It is anticipated that contributions to this research will guide OBM firms’ activities in each process of design, and help to improve managing overall design practices

General moments of the inverse real Wishart distribution and orthogonal Weingarten functions

Let $W$ be a random positive definite symmetric matrix distributed according to a real Wishart distribution and let $W^{-1}=(W^{ij})_{i,j}$ be its inverse matrix. We compute general moments $\mathbb{E} [W^{k_1 k_2} W^{k_3 k_4} ... W^{k_{2n-1}k_{2n}}]$ explicitly. To do so, we employ the orthogonal Weingarten function, which was recently introduced in the study for Haar-distributed orthogonal matrices. As applications, we give formulas for moments of traces of a Wishart matrix and its inverse.Comment: 29 pages. The last version differs from the published version, but it includes Appendi

Modelling systemic price cojumps with Hawkes factor models

Instabilities in the price dynamics of a large number of financial assets are a clear sign of systemic events. By investigating portfolios of highly liquid stocks, we find that there are a large number of high-frequency cojumps. We show that the dynamics of these jumps is described neither by a multivariate Poisson nor by a multivariate Hawkes model. We introduce a Hawkes one-factor model which is able to capture simultaneously the time clustering of jumps and the high synchronization of jumps across assets

The occupation of a box as a toy model for the seismic cycle of a fault

We illustrate how a simple statistical model can describe the quasiperiodic occurrence of large earthquakes. The model idealizes the loading of elastic energy in a seismic fault by the stochastic filling of a box. The emptying of the box after it is full is analogous to the generation of a large earthquake in which the fault relaxes after having been loaded to its failure threshold. The duration of the filling process is analogous to the seismic cycle, the time interval between two successive large earthquakes in a particular fault. The simplicity of the model enables us to derive the statistical distribution of its seismic cycle. We use this distribution to fit the series of earthquakes with magnitude around 6 that occurred at the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas fault in California. Using this fit, we estimate the probability of the next large earthquake at Parkfield and devise a simple forecasting strategy.Comment: Final version of the published paper, with an erratum and an unpublished appendix with some proof

Cognitive architectures as Lakatosian research programmes: two case studies

Cognitive architectures - task-general theories of the structure and function of the complete cognitive system - are sometimes argued to be more akin to frameworks or belief systems than scientific theories. The argument stems from the apparent non-falsifiability of existing cognitive architectures. Newell was aware of this criticism and argued that architectures should be viewed not as theories subject to Popperian falsification, but rather as Lakatosian research programs based on cumulative growth. Newell's argument is undermined because he failed to demonstrate that the development of Soar, his own candidate architecture, adhered to Lakatosian principles. This paper presents detailed case studies of the development of two cognitive architectures, Soar and ACT-R, from a Lakatosian perspective. It is demonstrated that both are broadly Lakatosian, but that in both cases there have been theoretical progressions that, according to Lakatosian criteria, are pseudo-scientific. Thus, Newell's defense of Soar as a scientific rather than pseudo-scientific theory is not supported in practice. The ACT series of architectures has fewer pseudo-scientific progressions than Soar, but it too is vulnerable to accusations of pseudo-science. From this analysis, it is argued that successive versions of theories of the human cognitive architecture must explicitly address five questions to maintain scientific credibility

Equifinality and preservation potential of complex eskers

Eskers are useful for reconstructing meltwater drainage systems of glaciers and ice sheets. However, our process understanding of eskers suffers from a disconnect between sporadic detailed morpho‐sedimentary investigations of abundant large‐scale ancient esker systems, and a small number of modern analogues where esker formation has been observed. This paper presents the results of detailed field and high‐resolution remote sensing studies into two esker systems that have recently emerged at Hørbyebreen, Svalbard, and one at Breiðamerkurjökull, Iceland. Despite the different glaciological settings (polythermal valley glacier vs. active temperate piedmont lobe), in all cases a distinctive planform morphology has developed, where ridges are orientated in two dominant directions corresponding to the direction of ice flow and the shape of the ice margin. These two orientations in combination form a cross‐cutting and locally rectilinear pattern. One set of ridges at Hørbyebreen is a hybrid of eskers and geometric ridges formed during a surge and/or jökulhlaup event. The other sets of ridges are eskers formed time‐transgressively at a retreating ice margin. The similar morphology of esker complexes formed in different ways on both glacier forelands implies equifinality, meaning that care should be taken when interpreting Quaternary esker patterns. The eskers at Hørbyebreen contain substantial ice‐cores with a high ice:sediment ratio, suggesting that they would be unlikely to survive after ice melt. The Breiðamerkurjökull eskers emerged from terrain characterized by buried ice that has melted out. Our observations lead us to conclude that eskers may reflect a wide range of processes at dynamic ice margins, including significant paraglacial adjustments. This work, as well as previous studies, confirms that constraints on esker morphology include: topographic setting (e.g. confined valley or broad plain); sediment and meltwater availability (including surges and jökulhlaups); position of formation (supraglacial, englacial or subglacial); and ice‐marginal dynamics such as channel abandonment, the formation of outwash heads or the burial and/or exhumation of dead ice

Ten‐a‐day: Bumblebee pollen loads reveal high consistency in foraging breadth among species, sites and seasons

Pollen and nectar are crucial resources for bees but vary greatly among plant species in their quantity, nutritional quality and timing of availability. This makes it challenging to identify an appropriate range of plants to meet the nutritional needs of bees throughout the year, though this information is important in the design of pollinator conservation schemes. Using DNA metabarcoding of pollen loads, we record the floral resource use of UK farmland bumblebees at different stages of their colony lifecycle, and compare this with null models of ‘expected’ resource use based on landscape‐scale resource availability (pollen and nectar), to identify foraging priorities and preferences. We use this approach to ask three main questions: (i) what is the foraging breadth of individual bumblebees?; (ii) do bumblebees utilise a greater or lesser diversity of plant species than expected if they foraged in proportion to resource availability?; (iii) which plant species do bumblebees preferentially utilise? Individual bumblebees foraged from a highly consistent number of different plant taxa (mean: 10 ± 0.37 SE per bee), regardless of their species, sampling site or time of year. This high consistency in foraging breadth, despite large changes in the quantity, identity and diversity of resource availability, implies a strong behavioural tendency towards a fixed range of foraging resources. This effect was most striking in April when foraging diversity was maintained despite very low landscape‐level resource diversity. Bumblebees used some plant taxa significantly more than predicted from their landscape‐level floral abundance, nectar or pollen supply, implying certain desirable characteristics beyond the mere quantity of resource. These included Allium spp. and Vicia spp. in April; Trifolium repens and Lotus corniculatus in July and Cardueae spp. (thistles) and Taraxacum officinale in September. Practical implication: Our results strongly indicate that resource quantity is not the only factor driving bumblebee foraging patterns and that resource diversity and quality are also important factors. Thus, in addition to providing large quantities of floral resources, we recommend that pollinator conservation schemes also focus on providing a sufficient diversity of preferred floral resources, enabling pollinators to self‐select a diverse and nutritious diet