The EC Water Framework Directive and its implications for the Environment Agency

The bulk of the European Community's water policy legislation was developed between the mid 1970s and the early 1990s. These directives addressed specific substances, sources, uses or processes but caused problems with differing methods definitions and aims. The Water Framework Directive (WFD) aims to resolve the piecemeal approach. The Environemnt Agency (EA) welcomes and supported the overall objective of establishing a coherent legislative framework. The EA has been discussing the implications of the WFD with European partners and has developed a timetable for the implementation and a special team will commission necessary research

Illustrating Semiosis: A Pragmatic Turn to Peircean Semiotic Theory for Illustrators

The pragmatic semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce has a lot of practical benefits for enhancing visual communication in illustrations. His triadic theory of Semiosis focuses on the dynamic interrelationships between the concept to be communicated, how it is represented through a semiotic sign, and how this affects the success of how the concept is eventually interpreted. Peirce's pragmatic semiotic theory uses complex language, and although Peirce is embraced in some design disciplines, the language that defines Semiosis (or sign-action) is problematic beyond academia. This paper is an attempt to address this by providing illustrators with a basic introduction to how Semiosis can help to enhance the success of the visual communication in their illustrations. This is done by translating Peircean terminology into illustrator-centric language and providing an example of how the Semiosis is implemented in an illustration. Within the limits of a short paper, illustrators can begin to understand how the triadic nature of concept/representation/interpretation can benefit them during their ideation and sketching phase to author effective images. In doing this, this paper will mostly discuss iconic, indexical, and symbolic semiotic representation within pragmatic semiotic signs of the intended concept to be communicated in an illustration. This paper's aim is to enact a pragmatic turn in illustrators, in which Semiosis theory becomes more integrated within their practical work, by providing a more illustrator-centric dissemination of Peirce's semiotic theory

Re-contextualising Illustration to Inform Sexual Consent:#JustSoYouKnow

This paper will discuss two illustration projects that helped Rape Crisis Tyneside and Northumberland (RCTN) expand their outreach across the North East of England. These were Hope Solidarity Liberation (2017), and #JustSoYouKnow (2018), which ran consecutively over 12 months with 2nd year illustration students. The first project was to produce merchandise illustrations to help RCTN to fund-raise. RCTN ran this as a competition challenge to the students, with the winning illustrator’s work being made into tote bags, mugs, and other merchandise. All the participating illustrators were rewarded with a gallery exhibition where the students could sell their work, and raise additional funds for RCTN. The second project called #JustSoYouKnow re-contextualised some of the illustrations from the merchandise competition into a new campaign to aid RCTN’s outreach work. The aim of this second project was to counter young people’s misdirection on understanding sexual consent, and to challenge prevalent myths about what constitutes rape. The illustration project lead chaired an inter-disciplinary steering group, to advise RCTN on re-contextualising the illustrations as the core for a new RCTN information pack. This steering group’s inter-disciplinary team to help develop the information pack came from design, illustration, law, forensic science and social science. Through the collegial alliance in the steering group, many new perspectives were discussed that enhanced the visual communication of the sexual consent information cards. This paper will outline how the same sets of illustrations worked across two different contexts, to positively impact on the visual communication of two different RCTN messages in support of women. Throughout these two projects, the illustrators learnt how their skills as visual communicators could be positively employed, and how a re-contextualisation of purpose opened up new communicational situations for their illustrations within real-world social issues

A Semiotic Rosetta Stone Research Project:Defining designer-centric semiotic practice

This research project will provide a richer understanding of how a designer-centric reframing of Peirce’s semiotic theory could manifest itself. We propose to run it throughout the length of the conference with EAD’s design delegates opting in through informed consent. It will pragmatically construct a body of sensory data from a semiotic probe (a variation of a cultural probe) that participants will complete in their own time. We would like this probe to be distributed in the EAD conference goody bag at conference registration. It will feature several practical visual tasks, plus a semiotic audit section, and it would be collected during the conference. From the semiotic probe data we aim to discover how Peirce’s complex terminology could be translated into a designer-centric metalanguage. Like the historical Rosetta Stone, this data would then help designers and theoreticians to improve the communicational situation in disseminating Peircean semiotic theory

Spacecraft design project: Low Earth orbit communications satellite

This is the final product of the spacecraft design project completed to fulfill the academic requirements of the Spacecraft Design and Integration 2 course (AE-4871) taught at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. The Spacecraft Design and Integration 2 course is intended to provide students detailed design experience in selection and design of both satellite system and subsystem components, and their location and integration into a final spacecraft configuration. The design team pursued a design to support a Low Earth Orbiting (LEO) communications system (GLOBALSTAR) currently under development by the Loral Cellular Systems Corporation. Each of the 14 team members was assigned both primary and secondary duties in program management or system design. Hardware selection, spacecraft component design, analysis, and integration were accomplished within the constraints imposed by the 11 week academic schedule and the available design facilities

Visually Interpreting Experience

This paper provides an overview of the Circle of Visual Interpretation methodology that is workshopped during Interacción 2014. This new method uses visual interpretation techniques to phenomenologically reveal extra detail of user behaviour from within user research. The Circle of Visual Interpretation methodology is aimed at design teams engaged in designing interactions to use during their ideation phase. Through visual interpretation a dialogue between designers and their target audience is phenomenologically crafted. From engaging in this hermeneutic-semiotic process fresh understanding regarding user motivations behind user actions visually emerges. In this paper each practical step in this methodology is summarised and illustrated with examples from a user research project