Digital Commons Network^™

Specialisation In The Profession Of Industrial Design In Finland., Anna Valtonen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Industrial Design in Finland has changed a lot during the past ten years. Ten years ago most of the Finnish industrial designers worked in small or middle-sized design agencies. There was very little specialisation; one office could do everything from toys to trucks. There were very few designers employed directly by the industry. Today the biggest offices have a clear focus and even the design process has become a well-marketed commodity – only in order to make the use of strategic design as easy as possible for the customer. Today many industrial designers are employed as in-house designers in large …

Relating Social Contextual Knowledge To Graphic Designers' Practice., Stan Mauger

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Graphic design is a conceptual activity that draws heavily on acquired design knowledge through practice. The role that designers place on knowledge of social contexts in their conceptual processes is highly variable and often unrecognised or undervalued by them in their practice. The ethnographic study upon which this paper is based used case studies to investigate this question. It considered the relative importance that a number of New Zealand graphic designers placed on bringing contextual knowledge into their practice. Graphic designers in the study had varying experience and worked in different types of firms and areas of the graphic design …

Designing For Experiential And 'Aspirational' Needs: Observations Of Student Design Activity., Jonathan Talbot, Stephen Ward

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The work reported in this paper investigates the application, within the industrial design education context, of methods of inquiry and design problem-framing derived from social research disciplines. The notion of developing more holistic approaches to human factors in design which incorporate affective and socio-cultural needs has gained some currency in recent years. Developments in this area have resulted in the proposal of a range of tools and methods such as Jordan’s (2000) ‘New Human Factors’ and Watts-Perotti and Sanders’ (2000) ‘Generative User Needs Analysis’. The issues addressed by these tools and methods are clearly not new to design. To a …

The Idealist Practice Of Reflection: Typologies, Techniques And Ideologies For Design Researchers., Cameron Tonkinwise

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The following will attempt clarify and complexify the notion of reflective practice. Ironically, invocations of reflective practice are often themselves not at all reflective of the consequences associated with where this practice comes from. (Ecclestone 1996) Ignorance of the genealogy of reflective practice risks the practice of reflective practice being insufficiently reflective. Awareness of that geneaology opens reflective practice to more effective techniques that are otherwise missed, whilst also limiting claims about the effectivity of reflective practice more generally. To put this another way, Donald Schon’s notion of reflective practice is appealing because of its pragmatism. Developed from American pragmatist …

The Utility Of Design Vision: The Crisis Of The Artificial., Mark Roxburgh

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This research explores the effect on visual communication design of the differences between what is observed (seen), how that is recorded (documented) and what is subsequently projected to viewers (designed).

Designers And Their Clients: An Anthropological View., Alun Price

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper will use examples from research in Australia and the United Kingdom to highlight the relationships between designers and clients. These relationships are sometimes difficult, balancing the needs of both parties can pose challenges for all involved. For example creative freedom can be constrained by financial considerations. For the designer creative freedom can be the most important factor in a job, however for a client, coming in on budget and market effectiveness are more likely to be valued. Salaman mentions sources of intrinsic satisfaction for architects, in a survey of 51 practitioners 63.46% mentioned creativity of work and the …

A Matrix Of Material Representation., Hengfeng Zuo, Mark Jones, Tony Hope

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The sensory properties of materials such as colour, texture, sound, smell, etc and people’s perceptual responses to them are very important information for designers to consider when selecting or combining materials for a manufactured product. Based on theoretical, experimental and computer programming methods, this research has established a framework of a database referred to as ‘Matrix of Material Representation’. The Matrix is a visual narrative model that systematically contains the holistic information about the factors involved in the human perception of materials and illustrates the interrelationship between these factors. Currently, the detailed information about material texture perception has been integrated …

User-Centred Approach In Visual And Spatial Reasoning: Design Research In Wayfinding Map Design., Christopher Kueh

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Designing effective wayfinding maps to assist people to navigate effectively within a specific environment has always been an issue. According to Wright, ‘[users] have responded negatively to map design in the past ... ’(cited in Wood 1993). The aim of this paper is to address the importance of user-centred approaches in the design of wayfinding maps. In this paper I am proposing that graphic and information designers should emphasize the interaction processes between people and maps, people and the physical environment, and the relationship that people create between the map and the environment. This paper also suggests a speculative wayfinding …

Romanticism Reinforced: The Construction Of Nature Through 'Green' Advertising And The Implications For Ecodesign., Marie Sierra

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper makes a critical assessment of the construction of nature through advertising. Like any other subject, the complex and rich subject of nature can be portrayed metaphorically. Due to its complexity, the idea of nature is often depicted obliquely in advertising, rather than through direct pictorial representation. There is fertile ground for this approach in the advertising of home appliances – particularly appliances designed to be ‘green’, or what is referred to in design culture as ‘ecodesign’.

Design For Sustainable Consumption., Miles Park

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper examines current eco-design approaches that focus upon eco-efficiency strategies. It attempts to demonstrate how such strategies are failing to address the emergent issues of unsustainable consumption and are the cause of environmental ‘rebound effects’. This paper considers the importance of behavioural factors as a key to stemming unsustainable consumption. The transition from designing eco-efficient to eco-effective products and systems is considered. Design practice and methodologies are explored as a means to engage with these important issues. How do we engage designers and clients to go deeper and consider the cumulative context of product design and social/environmental issues? The …

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 …

Driving Experience And The Effect Of Challenging Interactions In High Traffic Context., Rafael Gomez, Vesna Popovic, Sam Bucolo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper focuses on exploring the emotional experience of driving and aims to identify some of the aspects that may influence this experience. The paper presents an exploratory study focusing on the driver’s experience during interaction with the vehicle interface while driving. The study is based on a data triangulation approach including interviews, observation, and think-aloud protocol. Preliminary analysis of the study provided encouraging indicative findings, identifying aspects of design that enhance and/or detract from the driving experience. Previous analysis suggests that context and situation have a dominant impact on the driving experience. Further analysis has shown that challenges with …

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 System Around The Product: Methodologies And Experiences Focusing On Material And Immaterial Aspects In Design Solutions., Nicola Morelli

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The design discipline has traditionally focused on products physical aspects, giving for granted that the context of services, infrastructures and technology will support the product life. A systemic perspective would revise such a focus, in order to project design competences over systemic aspects usually neglected by designers. This perspective shift is a challenge for designers, who have very efficient methods and tools to handle physical aspects of product design, but need to define an ‘operative paradigm’ to operate in a systemic context. An operative paradigm consists of a set of tools and methods to handle immaterial aspects such as time …

Profiling The Designer: How Are The Design Professions Perceived?, T W Allan Whitfield, Gillian Smith

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper draws upon the results of two large-scale investigations into the public’s perceptions of the design professions. The first was a comparative study involving matched samples of Australians and South Koreans. Carried out within the framework of occupational prestige assessment (e.g. Daniel, 1983), it sought to position the design professions in terms of social standing relative to a range of other professions and occupations. It also provided a comparison of how designers perceived themselves against how the public perceived them (Chung and Whitfield, 1999; Whitfield and Smith, 2003). The second was the most extensive field survey so far undertaken …

Revolutionary Images And Images Of Revolution. Graphic Resistance Through Culture Jamming And Radical Commodities., Brad Haylock

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Culture jamming offers both a practical blueprint and some social theoretical foundation according to which graphic designers might play a consequential role in shaping their world, emancipated from their typical realm of corporate subservience. Culture jamming, however, is obviously not the only means through which graphic design may be of political significance. This article, therefore, is not focussed specifically upon culture jamming; rather, the article is concerned with the broader question of graphic resistance, and particularly also with the question of graphic design’s significance within the context of what might be termed ‘radical commodities’. This paper seeks to argue that …

Designing In A Multicultural World., Konstantinos Syrmos, John Boult, Ray Holland

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The purpose of this study is to investigate a new paradigm in consumer behaviour, which is a conceptual framework to study how consumers behave through theoretical categories originating within different cultures. As individuals we belong to different cultures, but all of us belong to a cultural group called consumer culture, where design and branding play a major part when it comes to decision making. Today’s consumers are brand weary. They are surrounded by brands; they use brands and in many occasions identify themselves with the brand.

Interpreting Graphic Design: Cultural Imaginaries And Social Productions., Raymond Donovan, Leong K Chan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Graphic design influences and shapes the production and interpretation of cultural information and visual knowledge. The Australian Socio-Graphic AIDS Project (AGAP) locates graphic design as a social process in the production of epidemic knowledge, applying a textual-visual analysis to the images and messages of public health prevention campaigns, including brochures, posters and videos. It documents the influence of government policies and community-sector ideologies in the formulation of safer sex campaigns: how campaigns shape public knowledge of the epidemic; how graphic images generate social meanings about the epidemic; and how cultural responses influence designers in a morally charged arena. The research …

The Big Brand: Designing A National Identity System. A New Australian Flag And Supporting Ensigns., Russell Kennedy

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The paper tests the Advance Australia National Flag in the context of an extended visual identity program. The colonial flag system used by the Britain to brand its empire has provided an insight into the possible implementation of any new Australian flag design. The flag of the colonising country assumes a position of dominance in the canton or first quarter. The individual symbol or badge of the colony is then positioned in the field (prominent back ground colour) of the flag. If it is important for Australia to retain its state flags then any new Australian flag design should consider …

The Domestic Cooking Appliance: A Fundamental Re-Evaluation., Selby Coxon

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Central to this papers discussion is that a proliferation in kitchen ‘gadgetry’ has led to kitchen benches crowded with appliances: toasters, kettles, rice cookers, bread makers, electric woks and sundry objects that jostle for short-lived fashionable supremacy. Coinciding with this consumerism has been a rapid expansion in dietary choice. A wide range of food is available to the western palate that would have been unheard of a generation ago. Multiculturalism in countries, especially Australia, has led to the broadening of culinary tastes and with that a diversity of cooking techniques. Outside these culinary changes family and domestic structures are evolving. …

Creating A Space For Practicing Designers To Intellectualise; Bringing Theory To Life For Designers., Richelle Harun

DRS Biennial Conference Series

A number of barriers exist to engaging professional designers with discussions of theory, the industry is relatively young and design practice is both time pressured and fast changing, with designers moving rapidly from project to project. This is coupled with a lack of substantive provision of continual professional development which can isolate designers from contemporary debate. Additionally, designers have a preferred learning style that can disconnect them from theory, having a tendency to favour exploratory or trial and error methods rather than seek academic models. The remit of this research has been the integration of theory and practice focusing in …

Spartan Daily, November 16, 2004, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily (School of Journalism and Mass Communications)

Volume 123, Issue 55

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 80, No. 21 [No. 22], Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news. This issue contains articles:

• Reed, Lindsey. Remedial Courses Get New Policy
• Bruggemann, Marlene. Standing Tall – Quinton Head
• Richardson, Kelly. Trial Set for Alleged Peeper – Reginald Calhoun
• Coulter, Amber. Shantytown Raises Money for Habitat for Humanity
• Richardson, Kelly. Aneurisms Claim Life of Western Employee – Nancy Ausbrooks
• Wilberding, Beth. Student Government Association to Present Evaluation Plan
• Richardson, Kelly. Man Arrested for Computer Theft – William Simmons
• Ingram, Brooks. Editorial Cartoon re: Charles Moose
• North, Amber. Is Gay the New Communism?
• Casagrande, Michael. Somebody Save Private Ryan
• Buckman, Josh. …

Daily Eastern News: November 16, 2004, Eastern Illinois University

November

No abstract provided.

What's In A Name? Keeping The Va In Arnova, Roger A. Lohmann

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

As the name suggests, Voluntary Action (VA) was one of the constituent interests in the formation of ARNOVA. The popularity of nonprofit organizations (NO) among researchers, scholars and students threatens to overwhelm the scholarly interest in voluntary action. Yet, this latter topic is both more interesting theoretically and more important to larger questions of democracy and local and national community and therefore needs to be preserved and protected.

The Ticker, November 15, 2004

The Ticker

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York.

Coulrophobia And The Trickster, Joseph Durwin

Trickster's Way

No abstract provided.

Recruitment Of Students Of Color Panel Discussion, Robert K. Page, George A. Jackson, Stephan Reyes

Different Perspectives on Majority Rules: 9th Annual Conference (2004)

No abstract provided.

Obstacles To Embracing Diversity: Some Psychological Aspects, Jenina S. Lepard

Different Perspectives on Majority Rules: 9th Annual Conference (2004)

This presentation will examine the issue of racial prejudice both within and beyond the schools from a psychological perspective. It will explore insights and illustrations from the field of psychology and related disciplines, and will use these to evaluate the current relevance of the psychological analysis contained in Brown v. Board of Education. Suggestions will be made for how we can monitor and improve our interactions with people of different ethnic origins, so that we may be more confident in our ability to ensure more successful building of diversity in educational settings during the twenty-first century and beyond.

Why Don't They Stay? Exploring Supervisors' Level Of Intercultural Sensitivity And Employee Perceptions Of Fairness In The Workplace, Gina S. Matkin

Different Perspectives on Majority Rules: 9th Annual Conference (2004)

"My supervisor is nice, but she/he just doesn't understand me!" This statement may help explain some of the mixed success for predominantly white workplaces in retaining people of color. This presentation outlines a dissertation study exploring the relationship between intercultural sensitivity of leaders, and followers' ratings of workplace fairness. Demographic similarity or difference between supervisor and supervisee will also be considered as a moderating variable. Findings may help us to better understand how workplace relationships impact issues related to retention.