Strategic Design through Brand Contextualization

Providing meaningful customer experience is at the core of any successful business activity. Brands can function as vehicles to bundle the ingredients of experience together and give them structure by which consumers are able to understand and interpret products and services. To complement the technical and functional reality and experience, brands create particular narratives around products and services, within the realm of their use experience. This paper aims to contribute to understanding of strategic design and brand contextualization by looking thoroughly into a research-driven student project. The product-service design assignment given to seven teams of four to five post-graduate students was to design a new bike-sharing system, serving the sustainable urban mobility needs of the city of Gothenburg in Sweden. The task was accompanied by a request to create a fictive brand case and specific brand narrative, based on a thorough analysis of pre-selected existing brands. The paper discusses how the teams crafted their brand narratives and how different design and service elements were used to create specific and meaningful brand experiences. In addition to the contribution of the paper to design research and practice, we present a process that might be more widely useful for the education of strategic design and brand management

Encouraging Sustainable Urban Access: An Exploratory Student Approach to Design of Product Service Systems

Urban access is a key trans-disciplinary design axiom looking to ensure that every member of the society can reach those locations and resources one needs for a sustainable standard of living and productivity. This should be achieved in a way that does not deprive others from their right to access the same urban environment. Crafting the future of urban transportation design is a dynamic process that depends on developing a thorough understanding of the complexity of the human needs that associate with delivering ways to support urban access and, in particular, more sustainable and socially inclusive mobility patterns. New market demands and customer expectations force public and private organisations to expand their commitment to cross-border collaborations to provide attractive alternative transport modes. This paper discusses the challenge of utilizing design innovation as a tool for eco-branding and how an exploratory approach to this has been used in a post-graduate course in Visual Brand Identity and Product Design. Seven research teams, closely guided by the authors, were affiliated with designing an innovative hypothetical bike-sharing scheme for the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, with the potential to captivate road users’ acceptability. An overall description of the project concept and a brief summary of the results produced are presented herein. More specifically, this paper concentrates solely on one of the most innovative projects delivered within the course and discusses how the students adopted the challenge, as well as the actual project outcome and its contribution to the overall learning experience

Innovative Bike-Sharing Design as a Research and Educational Platform for Promoting More Livable Urban Futures

Studying the viability of innovative urban access design is the key in achieving optimum results when attempting to transform dogmatism referring to conventional car-orientation into a meaningful driver of modal change founded on the actual societal needs for future transportation. An efficient public bicycle scheme could be the very definition of a system that could encourage and even facilitate, in real terms, such a transition. This paper is discussing how a post-graduate course embraced, through the means of a service-oriented design exercise, the potential introduction of such a system. More specifically, seven research teams, closely guided by the three authors, were affiliated with designing a new hypothetical bike-sharing scheme in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden more captivating than the existing one. The paper reports on: a) the novel educational approach the tutors employed, b) the taught experiences that helped the students utilize their potential as learners but also as inventive designers, c) the research in terms of design results and d) the overall transition from solely serving the needs of automotive mobility in urban environments, to creating a knowledge platform that actually illustrates an improved design-innovation process to tackle future urban demands and eventually have a real-life context impact on the city of Gothenburg

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Modeling and real-time synthesis of the kantele using distributed tension modulation

ABSTRACT Nonlinear behavior of a vibrating string is responsible for acoustical features in some plucked-string instruments, resulting in a characteristic and easily recognizable tone. That is also the case for the Finnish kantele, a traditional plucked-string instrument used in folk music. Earlier works have analyzed the general acoustic properties of the kantele and discussed related sound synthesis techniques. In this study, a novel modeling and sound synthesis method for simulating nonlinear string vibrations with spatially distributed tension modulation is presented. The modeling is conducted through a Digital Waveguide (DWG) approach, using controllable fractional delay elements in implementing the distributed tension modulation nonlinearity. The elongation of the vibrating string is estimated and the result is used in tuning the fractional delay values accordingly. Because of the spatially distributed nature of the approach, control of the string model parameters and observation of its behavior can be implemented at any point along it, in contrast to prior digital waveguide string models. This new approach is applied in constructing a physical model of a five-string kantele. Real-time sound synthesis is implemented using an efficient, block-based modeling tool, the BlockCompiler

Audibility of the timbral effects of inharmonicity in stringed instrument tones

Abstract: Listening tests were conducted to find the audibility of inharmonicity in musical sounds produced by stringed instruments, such as the piano or the guitar. The audibility threshold of inharmonicity was measured at five fundamental frequencies. Results show that the detection of inharmonicity is strongly dependent on the fundamental frequency f 0 . A simple model is presented for estimating the threshold as a function of f 0 . The need to implement inharmonicity in digital sound synthesis is discussed