Emotional tech

The Emotional Tech project applies emotional design as a research approach for investigating how people feel about state of the art and new emerging mobility technologies. How technology influences people at an emotional level and what factors can be improved in the design process has received little research attention and been rarely implemented in urban mobility. We explored the interactions and experiences of people and vehicles from the perspective of 'emotion as affective artefacts' which tackles 'emotion' as a conduit to help with problem-solving, decision-making and sense-making. The study focuses on subtle details of people's emotional transitions during, before and after journeys, and during long term use of mobility services. We created vehicle concepts to explore what innovation opportunities could be applied to bring cutting edge technologies into real world use

The Compositor Tool: Investigating Consumer Experiences in the Circular Economy

Humanity is living through a crisis that sees our way of life exhausting the resources of the earth and ourselves. The fashion sector shows the negative impacts of conspicuous consumption on our socioenvironmental wellbeing. Despite citizens’ growing awareness of their responsibility within consumption cycles, they reveal concerns about their lack of understanding and the support required for them to become agents of responsible consumption. The Circular Economy flourishes as a conceptual approach to help society transition to a more sustainable existence. This paper explores how emerging creative technology and interaction design might support a shift in the role of citizens in the Circular Economy. We performed a design inquiry that investigated the moment of acquisition via configuration of products, storytelling, and multimodal interaction techniques for the creation of experiences that could catalyse citizen-consumers to become custodians of materials. We developed a retail-based concept tool—The Compositor Tool—with which we ran a user study to investigate new experiential ways that consumers can participate in materials’ circularity. The study highlighted how experience design and new interaction techniques can introduce circularity as part of consumer experience by forging deeper connections between people and products/materials and enabling consumers to have more creative and informative material engagement

Process matters: From car owner experiences to automotive design proposals

Collecting and analysing user experiences, communicating discovered patterns, translating information into design proposals and materialising designed features is central to design driven research. This process immerses design teams into all aspects of users’ experiences, helping them empathise with and scrutinise every detail until designers own the experiences and produce design proposals addressing end users’ needs in unique ways leading to disruptive innovation. Design practice’s strength is crystallising solutions into visualised and interactive proposals, presenting in-depth details of the look, feel and emotions they stimulate, and assisting decision making in product, service and business innovations. Existing research focusses on early stage collection of lived user experiences and final visualisation of the design proposal, yet seems to miss detailed discussion of the core bridging of user experiences and precise design proposals. We describe optimising a process supporting designers continuously switching between gathering user experiences and industry/market contexts when generating automotive design proposals

The Compositor Tool: Investigating consumer experiences in the Circular Economy

Humanity is living through a crisis that sees our way of life exhausting the resources of the earth and ourselves. The fashion sector shows the negative impacts of conspicuous consumption on our socioenvironmental wellbeing. Despite citizens’ growing awareness of their responsibility within consumption cycles, they reveal concerns about their lack of understanding and the support required for them to become agents of responsible consumption. The Circular Economy flourishes as a conceptual approach to help society transition to a more sustainable existence. This paper explores how emerging creative technology and interaction design might support a shift in the role of citizens in the Circular Economy. We performed a design inquiry that investigated the moment of acquisition via configuration of products, storytelling, and multimodal interaction techniques for the creation of experiences that could catalyse citizen-consumers to become custodians of materials. We developed a retail-based concept tool—The Compositor Tool—with which we ran a user study to investigate new experiential ways that consumers can participate in materials’ circularity. The study highlighted how experience design and new interaction techniques can introduce circularity as part of consumer experience by forging deeper connections between people and products/materials and enabling consumers to have more creative and informative material engagement

Defining Ritualistic Driver and Passenger Behaviour to Inform In-Vehicle Experiences

By discovering unconscious ritualistic actions in everyday driving such as preparing for the morning commute, we seek design opportunities to help people achieve critical emotional transitions such as moving from an anxious state to relief. We have gathered and analysed data from workshops and phone interviews from a variety of vehicle and public transport users to capture these key ritualistic scenarios and map their emotional transitions. Design ideation is used to generate concepts for improving the in-vehicle user experience through redesign of vehicle layout, environment and analogue and digital interfaces. We report a set of human-centred design approaches that allow us to study the details of action, objects, people, emotions and meaning for typical car users which are indispensable for designing driving experiences and are often overlooked by the car design process

Designing for driver's emotional transitions and rituals

Emotions are a topic of increasing interest in vehicle design and research as they have a substantive impact on people's behaviour, affecting driving performance and being a source of safety issues particularly on long journeys. However, emotions do not usually occur distinctly and individually and frequently transition and transform between states. It can be challenging to obtain information about the exact emotions drivers experience, especially when subtle. We present design-led research focusing on identifying scenarios that contain normally unarticulated emotions and mental reminders that drivers use to make a journey safer and develop concepts for in-vehicle interactions that assist with these rituals. As results of the research, we designed and user tested in-vehicle interactions for two emotional transition scenarios - pre-journey preparation (‘Ready... Steady … Relax’) and checking the progress of a journey (‘Driving Whisper’)

The garment life matrix: A tool for negotiating complexity in Design for Sustainability

This research project develops a new tool, ‘The Garment Life Matrix’ (GLM), to enable the fashion industry to shift towards a sustainable circular economy model. Fashion is a complex system, with long supply chains, and vast networks of actors and physical components participating in different parts of the system. Fashion’s emissions are produced not just at the production stage, but at multiple points throughout the lifecycles of garments. This complexity makes it challenging for designers to identify where best to focus their efforts to conduct sustainable practice. A substantial number of strategies for Design for Sustainability (DfS) have been proposed, but the tangible impact of these on fashion design practice has been limited. A key reason for this is a lack of understanding amongst designers as to how to implement them efficiently in practice. The effectiveness of DfS strategies depends on the designer's ability to holistically consider factors which impact on a garments’ sustainability and based on this understanding, select the most appropriate strategies for each case. Several tools have been developed to support designers to do this, but these do not provide sufficient consideration of crucial factors and prescribe overly granular approaches, as well as present overly complex guidance that is unsuitable for design practice. There is a need for more straightforward and applicable support for applying DfS strategies in garment design practice. In other words, designers need a systematic approach to help them choose the most effective “tool” in the “toolbox” of DfS strategies. My project aims to redress this gap. This research project develops a tool that supports garment designers in considering and negotiating the many factors that interrelate to determine the environmental impact of garments’ lifecycles. This research project has two main contributions. The first is the identification of a set of key factors for enabling sustainable garment design, consisting of the primary and enabling factors, and putting these factors into a relationship. The identification of these factors was based on a review of literature on DfS and DfS tools, and further established through empirical research which included two studies. Study 1, which comprised a series of interviews with consumers, investigated if/how the identified DfS-factors were affected by/affected their behaviour. And Study 2, which enriched understanding of the identified key factors by drawing in the perspective of garment industry professionals to understand if and how the identified factors were affected by/affected their practice. Findings from these studies and a supplementary review of literature were used as input for designing ‘The Garment Life Matrix’ (GLM) framework, which articulates the key factors for DfS and their relationship. Through a series of Research through Design experiments, the GLM framework was developed into an interactive tool, proposed as DfS support. This leads to the thesis’ second contribution: A new DfS tool and method which enables designers to manage effective selection and implementation of DfS strategies. By prompting designers to systematically consider a holistic set of DfS factors, and articulating how these correlate to affect garment’s lifecycles, the GLM supports designers to competently select and combine appropriate DfS strategies for each product they are working on. The tool and method were developed and tested with garment designers through a series of action research studies. First, as support for designers to diagnose the sustainability of their current practice and pin-point relevant opportunities to improve this. Next, as support for designers to systematically select and apply appropriate DfS strategies to ensure their efficacy