Digital Commons Network^™

Exploring Holistic Solutions For Type-2 Diabetes For Bottom Of Pyramid Population In India, Vinay Venkatraman, Prerak Mehta

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Healthcare is a prominent sector where design intervention can make tremendous impact in the way people live and receive treatment.Type-2 diabetes is a huge system condition that involves lifestyle, insulin therapy, oral medication, dietary restrictions and exercise regimen. The underlying socio-economic environment plays a major role in the way patients behave. The research explores the experience and process of treating diabetes in India for the bottom of the pyramid population. This paper presents the approach and the implications of the approach for identifying patient needs and issues and the key elements relating to design. Emphasis has been laid on a …

A Critique Of Design Methods In Synthetic Biological Design, Orkan Telhan

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Today, with the emergence of Synthetic Biology, living systems are increasingly conceived as design products that can circulate outside laboratories, factories, or distant farm lands. From medical applications to fashion, product, graphic design, and architecture, biological designs claim the potential to shape the social norms and influence the aesthetic, economic, ethical, and moral values of everyday. Synthetic biological design shares tools, techniques, and paradigms with most modern design disciplines. Designers compose biological forms and functions running modeling and simulation software; order standardized biological parts from online libraries and databases; ask companies to synthesize gene products to prototype their designs; and …

Learning From Media Studies Theory And Design Practice: Using The Interpretive Nature Of Film Media For The Communication Of Tacit Knowledge In Design Research, Tom Barker

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper investigates the interpretive nature of film media as a format for tacit knowledge communication in design research. Film is already utilised in this capacity for documentaries and fictional films and the theory of tacit communication is well understood in the field of media studies. Lessons from the use of film in design practice, although more typically used for explicit communication, are also considered. The paper sets the historical context of film theory covering narrative, documentary types, aesthetics, and drawing on semiotics and rhetoric in design. The author describes two case studies: extensive design research was summarised into a …

Intuitive Interaction And Older People, Alethea Blackler, Vesna Popovic, Doug Mahar, Gudur Raghavendra Reddy, Simon Lawry

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Older people often struggle with using contemporary products and interfaces. They show slower, less intuitive interaction with more errors. This paper reports on a large project designed to investigate why older people have these difficulties and what strategies could be used to mitigate them. The project team found that older people are less familiar with products that they own than younger ones, while both older and middle aged people are less familiar with products that they do not own than younger ones. Age-related cognitive decline is also related to slower and less intuitive performance with contemporary products and interfaces. Therefore, …

Authentic Learning Practices: International Design Project, Erik Bohemia, Gillian Davison

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Higher Education is experiencing an increasingly diverse student population. Students bring a range of skills and experiences to their courses; they have different backgrounds and different needs. This fluidity requires an approach to teaching that encompasses the social aspects of learning. It has been suggested that authentic approaches to teaching and learning can assist in offering a perspective on learning which views learning as ‘enabling participation in knowing’. We propose that the authentic learning practices developed in The Gift design project, discussed in this paper, constituted approaches which acknowledged that students’ interests and experience are intrinsically bound up with motivation …

An Overview Of The Issues Facing The Craft Industry And The Potential For Design, With A Case Study In Upper Northern Thailand, Disaya Chudasri, Stuart Walker, Martyn Evans

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents initial findings from an ongoing research project that explores opportunities for design to contribute to a sustainable future for the craft industry. The research asks“Are there potential areas for design to make a positive contribution to the craft industry in upper northern Thailand to help ensure its viable future, and if so, in what areas can design best contribute?”The research consists of three main components: (i) background research into crafts; (ii) identification of a specific study site; (iii) investigation of craft practices, products and issues of concern in the context of the study site. Background research includes: …

Design For Longevity: Obstacles And Opportunities Posed By New Public Policy Developments, Tim Cooper

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper explores the implications for design theory and practice of recent public policy initiatives that aim to promote longer lasting products. Public concern relating to product lifetimes and, specifically, a perception that manufacturers of certain consumer durables are responsible for planned obsolescence, is long established. Academic engagement in this area has latterly increased and governments have taken interest in product longevity as a means of increasing resource efficiency and reducing waste. One of the driving forces is the revised EU Waste Framework Directive, which requires Member States to develop waste prevention programmes and highlights product life extension as a …

Upcycling: Where Function Follows Form, Anthony Crabbe

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Up-cycling is a “responsible” design approach in which designers seek to put discarded consumer products, such as bottles, to new and valuable uses, such as making lampshades. Since that approach involves finding new functions for extant manufactured forms, upcycled products appear to be typical of other products created as a result of both designers and users adapting extant forms to serve entirely different functions. This form-adaptive approach appears to reverse the causal direction implied by Louis Sullivan's famous dictum "form ever follows function". This paper then reviews antecedents of the up-cycling approach historically, in order to critically examine the form-function …

Design As Trickster, Tom Fisher

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper discusses the relationship between abstract conceptualizations of design and the uncertainty and contradiction that result from the need to re-configure our relationship to the material world that is presented by issues of sustainability. In ‘About the Word Design’ (2005) the philosopher Vilém Flusser provides an etymological analysis that goes beyond the word’s conventional connection to representation and form giving, pointing out a relationship between the ‘Design’ and the sense of human intentions, ‘to have designs on something’, connecting this with a sense of ‘cunning and deception’ - the designer is ‘a cunning plotter laying his traps’ (1999: 17). …

Nation Branding: Developing A Visual Identity Handbook For Graphic Design Practitioners In Malaysia, Debbie Siew Siew Gan, Douglas Wilson, Anthony Crabbe

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper presents a project developed during the course of a PhD investigating the role graphic design can play in the national branding of emergent nations such as Malaysia. Contemporary Malaysian society and culture was reviewed in the context of present views of globalisation and postcolonialism, and the phenomenon of “glocalisation” emerges as an important one in Malaysia. The need for a design handbook was suggested by the findings of a variety of design research methods that were used to identify the nature of graphic design practice in Malaysia, including the examination of the national governmental framework of design practices …

Treeversity: Visualizing Hierarchal Data For Value With Topology Changes, John Alexis Guerra Gómez, Audra Buck-Coleman, Catherine Plaisant, Ben Shneiderman

DRS Biennial Conference Series

As the world becomes more complex and plagued by wicked problems, there is an increased need for more multifaceted visual frameworks to untangle and clarify global issues. Budgets, census outcomes, stock market results, and other statistical data are best understood and explored through comparison, however to date there has been no effective visual solution framework for assessing a variety of hierarchal data sets. TreeVersity, a new interactive framework, is changing this. TreeVersity facilitates visual comparisons for hierarchical data, revealing trends, significant changes and other data revelations through multiple tree visualizations. The framework enables comparison within small, 10-node data sets to …

Decentralizing The Classroom: Utilizing Network Theory, Collaborative Teaching, And Agile Development To Create A Softstructured Learning Environment, Levi Hammett, Michael Hersrud

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Graphic Design is increasingly becoming an interdisciplinary practice where designers in the industry can expect to work on a variety of projects, some of which may require an array of disparate skill sets and tools. Given the difficulty of making fundamental changes to existing design curriculums, and the fact that programs cannot educate students to be ‘experts’ in every discipline they will encounter in professional practice, what changes can individual instructors make within their courses to address this situation? In response to this challenge the authors of this paper implemented a number of structural changes to two distinct courses in …

From Pictogram To Sensogram: Wayfinding Through Pervasive Computing And Multisensory Perception, Mette Harrestrup Lauritzen, Ida Engholm

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Within the latest decades, geographical and navigational information has formed the basis for the design discipline of wayfinding. Until now, this field has mainly been characterized by a visual approach through static, two-dimensional signs, symbols and typography on signposts, walls and buildings in the urban space. With the advances in computer technology and the rising complexity of available embedded information in public places, a new approach to wayfinding and navigation is emerging where the traditional static and visual wayfinding is supplemented or replaced by multisensory and digital communication. This paper coins a new term: sensogram and outlines how technology and …

From The Culture Of Project To Spread Creativity: Mutations Of Design As A Profession In The Society Of Knowledge, Lorenzo Imbesi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Along with the transition to the 'new capitalism', which may be variously defined as cognitive, flexible, post-industrial or post-Fordist, we are experiencing a new productive scenario since the Seventies of the last century, where innovation and creativity are rising as key factors for competitiveness and come to be the capital for the production system to open a new stage. If the industrial capitalism of modernity required the manufacturing of big quantities of physical products, the mutation of the role of industry and production, the globalization of markets and the emergence of communication in every social occurrence are changing the nature …

Tailoring Snack Food Package Design To Children As A Health Communication Strategy, Sunghyun R. Kang, Debra Satterfield, Joanne Lasrado, Richard Gonzalez, Nora Ladjahasan, Gregory Welk, Cynthia Wiley

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The excess consumption of unhealthy snack foods by children and young adults has been shown to increase their rate of development of obesity, as well as decrease their likelihood of meeting current U.S. nutritional recommendations. Nutritional messages on snack food product labels have been traditionally evaluated almost exclusively from the perspective of the verbal content of the message. While such messages are important for communicating factual information, they do not address the potential significance of the visual qualities of that message in appropriately communicating with the target audience. The visual properties of the nutritional messages are critical in their ability …

Towards A Taxonomy Of Airport Passenger Activities, Philip J Kirk, Vesna Popovic, Ben Kraal, Alison Livingstone

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Airports are vital sources of income to a country and city. Airports are often understood from a management perspective, rather than a passenger perspective. As passengers are a vital customer of airports, a passenger perspective can provide a novel approach in understanding and improving the airport experience. This paper focuses on the study of passenger experiences at airports. This research is built on recent investigations of passenger discretionary activities in airports by the authors, which have provided a new perspective on understanding the airport experience. The research reported in this paper involves field studies at three Australian airports. Seventy one …

Design & Determined Indeterminism, Vasilije Kokotovich

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The world is filled with artefacts/products, systems, and environments. We consider these to be made by humans who determine their subsequent use as suggested by their embedded characteristics. Often these artefacts are the result of a design process. That is to say, they are developed by designers through some considered design process. This holds true for Product designers, Architects or Engineers. When developing their artefacts, these designers make many varied design decisions. In essence these designers determine the nature and characteristics of the artefact. These may include both functional and nonfunctional issues. These design decisions are sometimes related to each …

Walk, Feel, Think, And Make: Creative Design Learning With Nature, Eunsook Kwon, Karen Fraiser-Scott

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The purpose of this study is to examine and establish a road map of the integration process of sustainable and experiential learning into the industrial design curriculum. In order to facilitate the sustainable design process while developing the reflective learning to become more environmentally responsible a new approach was initiated to incorporate new sustainable tools into our design process in 2011. An immersive workshop was developed on the basis of the shared philosophies of John Dewey’s experiential education and Biomimicry, and introduced to the senior design studio. The workshop was conducted over a four day period giving the students the …

Towards A Formal Evaluation Of Creativity In Parametric Design Process: A Pilot Study, Ju Hyun Lee, Ning Gu, Julie Jupp, Sue Sherratt

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Parametric design has become an emerging research issue in the design domain. However, our current understanding of creativity in the parametric design process is very limited. This study presents a formal approach for describing and identifying cognitive thinking and activities for evaluating creativity in parametric design process using protocol analysis. This coding scheme is based on the creative acts: Representation, Perception, and Searching for a solution. Also, it provides Geometry and Algorithm categories to capture the cognitive activity in the parametric design process. The effectiveness of this formal approach was examined in a pilot study. The percentage of coverage of …

Understanding The Airport Passenger Landside Retail Experience, Alison Livingstone, Vesna Popovic, Ben Kraal, Philip J. Kirk

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The landside environment of an airport terminal is an important area for both passengers and the airport as it is the first area passengers enter and experience, influencing passengers’ overall airport experiences. This paper focuses on landside passenger experiences and factors which influence the quality of these experiences. Data collection occurred through video recorded observations of 40 passengers’ airport experiences at two Australian international departure terminals. The Observer software was used to code and analyse data. Indicative results show that passengers spend over half of their landside dwell time undertaking processing activities. The results highlight the important influencing role passengers’ …

Exploring User Playing Factors For Online Pets, Ding-Bang Luh, Elena Carolina Li, Jia-Jan Dai

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The popularity of online games has driven the development of online pets. Players obtain a sense of satisfaction through raising an online pet that cannot be realized in real life. Online pet games emphasize the enjoyment of raising a pet, the interaction between players, and the expression of players’ personal uniqueness. Identifying why players like to continue interacting with online pets can help game designers develop a better game and increase players’ positive experiences when playing online pet games. Based on flow theory, this study not only analyzes players’ flow process and playing factors, but also identifies game activities that …

Dynamic Research Sketching – A New Explanatory Tool For Understanding Theory Construction In Design Research, Thomas Markussen, Anne Louise Bang, Pia Pedersen, Eva Knutz

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In this paper we offer a new explanatory tool, called ‘dynamic research sketching’ useful for mapping and understanding how research through design can be a vehicle for theory construction. ‘Research through design’ is often used as an all-inclusive umbrella term for research practices that recognize the process of designing and making an artifact as a legitimate method of inquiry. However, even though this type of research is thus grounded in design practice there are many different ways in which the process of designing and making an artifact can be used as a method of inquiry in order to explore a …

Design Expertise Practices And Affordance, Sally Mclaughlin

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The work reported in this paper is based on a study that adopts a naturalistic qualitative approach to the study of design expertise. The study explores the ‘designer’s talk’ as a site for the articulation and dissemination of design expertise. Theoretical resources adopted in the study were drawn from a model of expertise developed by Hubert Dreyfus and from a wide body of phenomenological literature that informed this model. The Dreyfus model is based on a practice oriented account of agency and perception that offers a viable alternative to the cognitivist models of design expertise. The research discussed in this …

Flowcards - A Communication Tool, Jussi Mikkonen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

There is a difference in the way designers and engineers usually look and think about designing a prototype. The designers are taught to have more open ended approach, whereas the engineers are more strict about the specifications and syntax. This creates a communication gap in the way the prototyping is approached. In order to improve the communication and to augment joint design capabilities between industrial designers and engineers, a set of cards and a way of using them was developed. It relies on the well explored use of flowcharts, which for some reason have not been used extensively. This paper …

On Drawing In Mass Media Contexts, Mario Minichiello

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper discusses the role of the author’s drawing practice as applied to mass-mediated contexts. That is, the use of drawn imagery as a paradigm of analysis and expression of ideas published in various print and screen media. It seeks to explain the rationale for both the author’s individual, and editorially collaborative decision-making through the methodological framework of an Action Research model. In each case this is a ‘reflective’ process, which also helps examine how the images were developed in response to problem solving. The paper includes Action Research reflection on data collected in collaboration with filmmaker Solon Papadopoulos about …

Unesco Cities Of Design: Montréal As Prototype, Christopher J. Moore

DRS Biennial Conference Series

On May 12, 2006, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) officially declared Montréal as an international City of Design. As the only North American metropolis to have received this designation from UNESCO, Montréal is the ideal location to begin a program of research interrogating and questioning the merits of a “Design City.” This paper outlines the early stages of a transnational investigation connecting all ten UNESCO cities through comparative case study analysis. For six days in May 2011, a diverse group of 22 designers, artists and researchers from seven countries explored Montréal’s designation as a design capital. …

Design Case Studies: Never Let The Facts Get In The Way Of A Good Story!, Seymour Roworth-Stokes

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper argues that the primary advantage of the case study, its ability to reveal insight into ‘real-life’ contemporary phenomena (the here and now) set against critical incidents, happenings or events over time (cause and effect), could be undermined by a lack of methodological rigor and sound empiricism in design research. Often the ‘one off’ is reported as a ‘case’ without the critical insight or analytical discourse necessary to derive sound theory from practice. A systematic audit of design case studies in four of the leading design research journals has been undertaken along with a detailed analysis of the type, …

Growing South Dakota (Summer 2012), College Of Agriculture &. Biological Sciences

Growing South Dakota (Publication of the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences)

[Page] 2 150 Years and Counting: 2012 Marks a Significant Milestone for Land-Grant Universities [Page] 4 Summer College News
[Page] 6 Ready, Set, Grow: Gardening Programs Offer bevy of Benefits to Community
[Page] 8 SDSU Extension Staff Directory: Pull Out and Save for Future Reference
[Page] 13 Bugs Beware!: SDSU Assembles Talented Team of Entomologists
[Page] 14 High-Tech Teaching: Curriculums Now Integrate iPads, Social Media & Peer Mentoring
[Page] 16 A Lesson in Chinese: SDSU Contingent Experiences World's Largest Marketplace
[Page] 18 Here and There
[Page] 20 Adapting with Apps: Technological Advancements Offer Opportunities for Farming's Future
[Page] 21 A …

‘You’D Stand In Line To Buy Potato Peelings’: German Women's Memories Of World War Ii, Gail Hickey

Journal of International Women's Studies

How do U.S. women immigrants remember their experiences of World War II? In what ways do these women choose to transmit their memories to the next generation? These are the questions explored in this study.

Women immigrants have been treated as if they were insignificant actors in history and socialization (Kelson & DeLaet, 1999). Feminist scholarship challenges this portrait of women as insignificant actors, arguing against gender-biased perspectives on the immigration experience. Yet scholarly sources provide little information about the “real life problems” of women immigrants (Barber, 2005).

Immigration research historically has tended toward historical and demographical data compilations, resulting …

Occupational Health And Safety In Small Scale Mining: Focus On Women Workers In The Philippines, Jinky Leilanie Lu

Journal of International Women's Studies

This study highlights women’s participation in small scale mining, and their occupational safety and health conditions. Small scale mining is a significant source of income in many developing countries such as the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Bolivia, Colombia, Indonesia, Mali, and Zimbabwe. In the Philippines, small-scale mining has been the leading occupational group among all mineral industries. However, data show that women face many issues in mining such as double burden of work-home responsibilities, chemical exposure to either cyanide or mercury used in extracting gold, dust from manganese and other minerals, and respiratory and systemic diseases from toxic chemical exposures. …