Digital Commons Network^™

The Designed Object That We Know And See, D. M. Büchler, M. A. R Biggs

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper discusses perception of the designed object and how our knowledge impacts on our visual perception of that designed object. It expands on the notion of interpretation both in the context of material culture and in the context of psychology. It explains how the approach to interpretation in both disciplines relies on an active observer/perceiver. The issue of perception of the designed object is approached using the theories of the perceptual psychologist Richard L. Gregory. His work is shown to be especially relevant because there is a degree of commonality between his view of interpretation and that of material …

Wallpaper Tiger: The Florence Broadhurst Collection And The Questions Of Cultural Appropriation In Design., Vicki Karaminas, Alana Clifton-Cunningham

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In 1959, Sydney based textile designer Florence Broadhurst emerged on the design scene with a collection of prints inspired by Japanese motifs; Art Nouveau and Deco swirls, abstract weaves and traditional tapestry designs. Setting up her studio in the heart of avant-garde Paddington with a team of young designers and screen printers at her side, Florence Broadhurst, also known as ‘Madame Pellier’, began creating her lavish, bold coloured designs. These eclectic prints were extensively utilised for wallpaper and interior furnishings and introduced the Australian post war consumer to vibrant geometric patterns and valiant colour plans. If one examines the cultural …

Drs Quarterly Council Report: Issue 11, Alec Robertson

Quarterly Council Reports

QCR Issue 10 did not appear due to a hard-disc failure. Some material was used in the following Issue, 11.

This QCR Issue includes a short Obituary on Professor L Bruce Archer who died on 16th May 2005. There is Part 2 of Vesna Popovic’s report on design research in Australian Universities and a report from new ICM Eduardo Corte-Real who announces the DRS Biennial 2006 Conference. In addition there an overview of Journals for which DRS member subscription discounts have been negotiated and it includes a reminder of the DRS AGM and associated Event held on 15 July 2005. …

The Affective Sustainability Of Objects; A Search For Causal Connections., Kristina Börjesson

Nordes Conference Series

This trans-disciplinary research project aims to answer 2 vital questions concerning the ‘timeless’ object: 1. Can designers’ way of thinking be enlarged and deepened to include the knowledge how to make an object retain its significance over time in a changing human context? 2. Will designers’ way of thinking thus further developed contribute in a substantial way to an improved and more holistic view on sustainability? ‘Affective sustainability’ doesn’t belong to established terminology and didn’t exist when these research questions were formulated. It has grown out of ongoing research but its relevance is still explored. The compressed results of the …

Webgenres And -Styles As Socio-Cultural Indicators - An Experimental, Interdisciplinary Dialogue, Ida Engholm, Karen Lisa Salamon

Nordes Conference Series

The article presents a crossdisciplinary experiment of analysing web-design through a combination of the academic fields of design history and anthropology. The two authors merge aesthetic and socio-cultural aspects of new technology in a case-based discussion of the invention and use of contemporary web design. Indicating the potentials of an inter-disciplinary perspective in exploring design in general they draw on such parameters as user-differentiation and aesthetic positioning in a discussion of the role of genre and style in commercial formations on the web. Comparing examples from banking web-pages, they discuss certain aspects of cultural and esthetical conceptual representational systems that …

Six Decades – And Six Different Roles For The Industrial Designer., Anna Valtonen

Nordes Conference Series

In Finland the role of the industrial designer has changed with time. When the professional practice of industrial design first started to form, the designer was a creator whose work was likened to that of the artist. In the sixties designers started to work in closer co- operation with the industry, and the designer became a member of a team together with the engineer and the marketing representatives. In the seventies ergonomics were largely discussed and in the eighties the issue of Design Management became popular. In the nineties brand building and strategic design became the focus areas, and in …

Researching The Visual Qualities Of Exhibition Design Through Experimental And Cross-, Outi Turpeinen

Nordes Conference Series

This article is based on my ongoing PhD research, particularly on the questions of practice-based research combined with theoretical analysis. In this article, I will try to briefly clarify and give some examples of the use of experimental and cross- disciplinary methods in design research. I will start by analysing the relationships between museum objects and cultural history museums based on the assumption that the practices used for representation create meanings. I am particularly interested in how meanings are built into such visual elements of exhibition design as light, colour and materials. The process of meaning creation is semiotic in …

Domestication And Context: Studying Objectification In Print Media, Sara Routarinne

Nordes Conference Series

This article investigates into the domestication of communication technology through two cultural discourses, for one that of interior magazines and for two that of technology magazines. During domestication process technological items are objectified by ways in which they are brought to a physical environment and in ways in which they rearrange that environment (cf. Silverstone & al. 1992). The study is inspired by the domestication approach (Silverstone & Hirsch 1992, Silverstone 1994), while its methodological background is mainly based on critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995). The data consist of 55 magazine articles including 687 images. The findings indicate that the …

Products And Practices. Selected Concepts From Science And Technology Studies And From Social Theories Of Consumption And Practice, Elizabeth Shove, Matt Watson, Jack Ingram

Nordes Conference Series

Design researchers and practitioners are increasingly interested in how designed artefacts shape and are shaped by the contexts in which they are used. Despite a long if selective history of theoretical engagement between design and social science, there has yet to be an effective exchange of ideas on this subject in particular. In this article, we present a selection of concepts drawn from recent debates in science and technology studies and consumption theory. We introduce notions of acquisition; scripting; appropriation; assembly; normalisation and practice with the aim of initiating an inter- disciplinary conversation about how designed artefacts are configured and …

The Salient Features Of The Clock – A Functional Semiotic Design Analysis Of Relevance To Digital Design, Toke Riis Ebbesen

Nordes Conference Series

What is the basis for talking about digital design products? How can designers be more concise in their discourse on design. This article argues for the use of semiotics in practical design processes as well as within historical and interpretive research approaches. For this purpose the position of functional semiotics is explained in short terms and then further demonstrated in the analysis of a basic mechanical alarm clock. On this ground, the digital watch and digital design products in general are characterised and three possible avenues for the interpretation of the interactive possibilities of design products are discussed. Finally some …

Power To The People: Electricity And Domestic Design., Kathleen Connellan, Jim Moss

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The paper will tease out a number of tensions including domestic product design and designed domesticity, particularly within the post World War 2 emphasis of embracing electricity into the home with all of its concomitant ‘labour saving’ devices. Pre –Apartheid South Africa will be used as a context for a domestic engagement of a different kind – one in which black African maids in a starched white aprons and headscarfs worked silently as the best of white goods were promoted as doing. This situation flew in the face of emerging modernist tendencies. It created the unresolved tension between the white …

Design Methods For Cross-Cultural Collaborative Design Project., Kun-Pyo Lee

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As ‘globalization’ becomes hot buzzword, designers begin to deal with culture in serious manner than ever. However, in design field, major topics in cultural design have been limited mainly around identifying aesthetic stereotypes such as national shape or color preferences. Furthermore, major methods of cultural design were limited only in designer’s personal intuition or pencil and paper survey that requires time and effort. Considering these background and needs of the study, the study sets the objective as ‘to develop frameworks of design methods for cross-cultural collaborative design project.’ At first, culture was defined as one having structure with multi-layers including …

A Cross-Cultural Study On Colour Emotion And Colour Harmony., Li-Chen Ou, Ming Ronnier Luo, Guihua Cui, Angela Wright, Andrée Woodcock, Monica Billger, Beata Stahre, Rafael Huertas, Alain Tremeau, Eric Dinet, Klaus Richter

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This study investigates: (a) the relationship between colour combinations and adjective combinations and (b) to verify the colour harmony theory developed by Angela Wright (called the Wright theory in this study). Two experiments were carried out with subjects from the following six countries: Britain, China, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. In Experiment 1, 100 adjectives and 32 colours were used as stimuli presented on a calibrated Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitor. All the colour stimuli were selected evenly from four colour groups, CG 1 to CG 4, which were defined according to the Wright theory, and so were the adjectives, …

Notions Of Practice: Design As Facilitation For Interactive Social Systems., Penny Hagen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper introduces the notion of ‘design as facilitation’ identifying some of the places it features in current research, and how it informs design of interactive social systems, such as multi-user communication technologies. This research is motivated by the shift in focus from the technical to the social in technology. A parallel shift in the notion of design practice is suggested in the move to understand interactive systems in relation to users as seen in design theory and interaction design research and methodology (Dourish 2001), (Preece et al 2002), (Winograd 1997). By examining the commonalities that exist in four different …

Disciplining Creativity: Neoliberalism And Design Education In New Zealand., Amanda Bill

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Two decades of educational reform in New Zealand have resulted in one of the most market-oriented regimes of higher education in the OECD. In this environment, enrolments in design and other creative degree courses that seem to provide an opportunity for individual expression and self-development have greatly increased. However, representatives of traditional industry sectors complain that there are hardly any jobs for these graduates, and little in the way of career paths. The situation thus seems to confound human capital approaches to education policy, in which tactics such as high fees and student loans are meant to exert a conservative …

The Panoramic Narrative And The Production Of Historical Consciousness: This Is Australia., Denise Whitehouse

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper takes a cross-disciplinary approach drawing on developments in Australian historical and cultural studies to investigate the role of design in the production of national cultures and more specifically the construction of colonising histories. It argues that in modern settler nations such as Australia, graphic design has had a significant role in the shaping of the public imagination of nationhood. This paper investigates the historical involvement of the graphic designer in constructing the visual vocabulary and communication strategies of the modern panoramic narrative and its origins in 1930s when business and government turned to modern design to bring aesthetic …

Research Through Design: Observational Research For Sustainability., Abby Mellick Lopes

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The aim of this paper is to develop an effective observational research method that will foster a practical sense for sustainability in student designers. It brings together the social science derived research method of observing material culture with the ergonomic method of heuristics, whereby the physical object guides self-learning. It takes an action-research approach to the theory/practice divide, arguing that theory best makes sense for the form-focussed designer in ‘concrete’ situations in which the designer is engaged. It also reflects upon the experience of teaching this form of observational research to industrial design students. The presentation will use a series …

Ontological Depth Of The Designed Object From Instrumental Reason To Reflective Judgement, J. Verwijnen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper states that in order to contribute to epistemology design must clarify its ontological perspective. The act of designing occupies a position fundamentally different from the natural sciences that examine only things or matter and is also beyond the social sciences that deal with people and their relations. In this paper design departs from the relationship of people and things, of subjects and objects. It proposes that within the relationship of subjects to objects, of people to things and thus also of designers to the products they design, there are three different ontological positions. A corresponding epistemological position of …

Human Factors Considerations In Human-Webpad Interaction – A Discussion On Color Application, C-H. Chen, Y-T. Chen, B-C. Chiou

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The purpose of this study is to explore the role of color in human-Webpad interaction based on a model of human factors. Color is a prominent and prevailing visual stimulus encountered by humans daily. It affects how humans process information perceptually and cognitively. Four important design issues pertaining to the model of human factors, i.e., issues concerning humans, Webpad technology, user interface, and environment, are discussed in this paper. The authors hope that this discussion can be utilized to improve the applications of color in Webpad user interface design and, at the same time, point us towards the right direction …

The Study Of Design And The Ethically Reflexive Student, C. Crouch

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The core units in the Visual Culture course at the School of Visual Arts, Edith Cowan University, draw heavily upon key concepts in post-colonial theory. Particularly the premises of the social and political inequality of much cultural exchange, and the ultimate impossibility of cross-cultural understanding. These are considered essential for practice in a multi-culture such as Australia’s. Despite this contextualisation, during a final year professional practice tutorial, a group of students dealing with Aboriginal copyright law argued that cultural appropriation was simply a matter of formal stylistic borrowing. They proposed that designing was an unproblematic union of expression and technical …

Design Research: The Newsletter Of The Design Research Society No.62, Stephen Little

Design Research Newsletters (1966-1999)

No abstract provided.

Design Research: The Newsletter Of The Design Research Society No.27, Necdet Teymur

Design Research Newsletters (1966-1999)

No abstract provided.

Design Research: The Newsletter Of The Design Research Society No.11, James Powell

Design Research Newsletters (1966-1999)

No abstract provided.