Designers’ roles in the founding team

Design has been a trend topic in popular publications and academia in the entrepreneurship scene for the past years. And while many beneficial capabilities are attributed to design there is little investigation into designers’ daily actions as part of a founding team specifically. “Designers’ Roles in the Founding Team” examines the roles designers hold as part of a founding team in startups. The objective of this work is to gain insights into the tasks and responsibilities designers take on a daily basis, and to subsequently determine their roles specifically in the context of a startup founder. For this thesis 15 company founders or c-level executives from five different companies were interviewed. All participating companies are operating since less than five years and are based in the Helsinki capital region. The interviews focus on the participants’ day to day tasks and their collaboration with their co-founders. The interviews included active tasks for the participants and resulted in several different data sets. The results offer a detailed view into the founding teams’ work and collaboration with each other. Two different roles of a designer as part of the founding team were found, the traditional designer, and the integrated designer: the two positions differ in responsibilities and can be distinguished by examining the designer’s involvement with the business development of the company. While designers of both roles are involved in design tasks it is the integrated designer who impacts his or her company’s business development. In addition, it was found that while design is praised for its holistic impact on the whole company, especially in non peer reviewed literature, within this group of interviewees design was mainly associated with traditional design capabilities related to creation and user work. To conclude, this work investigates design’s challenges within a company structure and its perceived capabilities

Chronique de la 61ème session de la Société Internationale Fernand de Visscher à Catane

Peer reviewe

Convolutional neural networks for the classification of guitar effects and extraction of the parameter settings of single and multi-guitar effects from instrument mixes

Guitar effects are commonly used in popular music to shape the guitar sound to fit specific genres, or to create more variety within musical compositions. The sound not only is determined by the choice of the guitar effect, but also heavily depends on the parameter settings of the effect. Previous research focused on the classification of guitar effects and extraction of their parameter settings from solo guitar audio recordings. However, more realistic is the classification and extraction from instrument mixes. This work investigates the use of convolution neural networks (CNNs) for the classification and parameter extraction of guitar effects from audio samples containing guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. The CNN was compared to baseline methods previously proposed, like support vector machines and shallow neural networks together with predesigned features. On two datasets, the CNN achieved classification accuracies 1-5% above the baseline accuracy, achieving up to 97.4% accuracy. With parameter values between 0.0 and 1.0, mean absolute parameter extraction errors of below 0.016 for the distortion, below 0.052 for the tremolo, and below 0.038 for the slapback delay effect were achieved, matching or surpassing the presumed human expert error of 0.05. The CNN approach was found to generalize to further effects, achieving mean absolute parameter extraction errors below 0.05 for the chorus, phaser, reverb, and overdrive effect. For sequentially applied combinations of distortion, tremolo, and slapback delay, the mean extraction error slightly increased from the performance for the single effects to the range of 0.05 to 0.1. The CNN was found to be moderately robust to noise and pitch changes of the background instrumentation suggesting that the CNN extracted meaningful features

The Graham Island Case. Acquiring by Occupatio

editorial reviewe

Chronicle of the 73rd session of the SIHDA in Edinburgh

peer reviewe