An Investigation into Design-driven Approaches within Fast Moving Consumer Goods Brand Development.

The attention of design has evolved from developing new products to developing a mechanism to offer more innovative and competitive products. Driven by design thinking and design-driven innovation perspectives, expanded roles for design have been highlighted in academia and business and have been identified as a means to bring innovation to organisations through the application of designerly approaches. Such approaches are often applied to diverse organisational activities in a manner that is at odds with conventional roles for design. However, there has been little research investigating how to undertake such a new role for design corresponding to specific industry contexts. In addition little research has explored using (the role of) design in the FMCG industry: research has predominately been confined to design's contribution to brand identity development. Therefore, this PhD aims to propose a way to underpin a new role for design within fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, via the following research phases. First, preliminary research in the form of content analysis of relevant literature was undertaken to discover how an expanded role of design is defined and the manner in which they are being adopted in a number of sectors, which entails a concept of design-driven approaches (DDA): approaches to applying a way of designerly conceptualising and exploiting tasks. Secondly, based on the features of DDA, this research was conducted through transformative mixed methods: a sequence of online survey and in-depth semi-structured interviews in order to explore phenomena which enhance and/or hinder design's integration within business. Grounded on the findings from a series of research activities and empirical data analysis, this research proposes a conceptual model - a framework and roadmap - of how the FMCG industry can overcome impediments to design's integration within brand development and organisational management by establishing a collaborative designerly frame to encompass activity-based and relational perspectives and elucidating contemporary and expanded roles of design. Finally, via member-checking validation, this model proposes an appropriate way to embed designerly ways into FMCG brand development by underpinning a collaborative ideas generation phase, especially for establishing environmental and organisational change to enhance designerly application

Deo Leadership: How Design Executive Officers Lead Creative Organisations in Korea

The purpose of this study was to investigate how Design Executive Officers (DEOs) manage creative employees. It differs from prior leadership research in creative industries in three ways; it focused on DEOs, specified their influences on organisational level, and discovered Korea-specific insights. We conducted in-depth interviews with the seven DEOs who have run their own design agencies for over ten years and hired more than 50 employees in Korea. Our thematic analysis of the 287 quotations collected revealed that 75% of the quotations fit the existing leadership framework and the remaining 25% are two unique attributes of DEO leadership: attitudes toward deeds and business growth. Our findings contribute to the academic discussion on design driven entrepreneurship by shedding light on the changing role of designers in the entrepreneurial landscape

A Framework for Design-Led Culture within the Fast Moving Consumer Goods Industry

The role of design is not limited to developing tangibles outcomes as an operational tool but in recent times has expanded to a strategic one. Corporations' acknowledgement of design has shifted from product development toward cultural transformation and increasingly design-led. However, there has been little research to investigate how to embed design as a cultural entity within different industries in order to defy a limited role of design exploitation. In addition, although the FMCG industry produces brands embedded in our lives, it has not drawn academic attention, compared to the electronic and IT industries. Hence, this paper proposes a framework to assist the FMCG industry in enhancing the role of design within brand development and, through this consistent design exploitation, aims to assist FMCG organisations attain a design-led culture

Slow Dynamics of Ring Polymer Melts by Asymmetric Interaction of Threading Configuration: Monte Carlo Study of a Dynamically Constrained Lattice Model

Abnormally slower diffusional processes than its internal structure relaxation have been observed in ring polymeric melt systems recently. A key structural feature in ring polymer melts is topological constraints which allow rings to assume a threading configuration in the melt phase. In this work, we constructed a lattice model under the assumption of asymmetric diffusivity between two threading rings, and investigated a link between the structural correlation and its dynamic behavior via Monte Carlo simulations. We discovered that the hierarchical threading configurations render the whole system to exhibit abnormally slow dynamics. By analyzing statistical distributions of timescales of threading configurations, we found that the decoupling between internal structure relaxation and diffusion is crucial to understand the threading effects on the dynamics of a ring melt. In particular, in the limit of small but threaded rings, scaling exponents of the diffusion coefficient D and timescale τ diff with respect to the degree of polymerization N agree well with that of the annealed tree model as well as our mean-field analysis. As N increases, however, the ring diffusion abruptly slows down to the glassy behavior, which is supported by a breakdown of the Stokes–Einstein relation

Influence of Surface Chemistry on the Surfactant Organization and Interfacial Structure of Mesoporous Silica and Organosilica

Mesoporous silica (SiO2) and periodic mesoporous organosilica (PMO) with divinylbenzene (DVB)-and divinylaniline (DVA)-bridge groups are studied by solid-state NMR and molecular dynamics simulations to examine the influence of the surface chemistry on the interfacial interactions and the assembly structures of the surfactants. The NMR signals of the surfactants inside the mesopores appear at different chemical shift values depending on the organic bridging groups. Two-dimensional NMR spectroscopy shows that the surfactants assemble as micellar structures, where the polar head groups directly interact with the pore walls, and the interaction strength of the surfactants with pore wall is in the order of SiO2 >DVA-PMO > DVB-PMO. To elucidate the functional dependence of the interfacial structure of SiO2 and PMOs, the radial distribution function is calculated from molecular dynamics simulations, which provides individual atomic correlations quantitatively. For SiO2, the surfactant head is preferentially adsorbed to the inorganic layer with extended aliphatic tail group packing, whereas the adsorption of the surfactant head group to the pore wall is weaker for PMOs. We find that the hydrophobic interaction between DVB and the surfactant tail, which is stronger than that in the case of polar DVA, weakens the interaction between the surfactant head and organic layer for DVB-PMO more than for DVA-PMO. From the conformational analysis, we directly observe a more abundant gauche defect of the surfactant in DVA-PMO than in DVB-PMO. The upfield NMR shift in DVB-PMO is revealed by more planar aromatic ring orientation, which is caused by the steric effect between the organic groups. Our study suggests that the hydrophobicity and bulkiness of the organic bridge can be exploited in the design of PMOs for molecular machines, absorbents, and enzyme immobilization materials.N