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Making Histories: changing students’ perception on the value of their work using the Research Catalogue
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DRSelects: Hua Dong on the Proceedings of the First Conference on Doctoral Education in Design (1998)
No full textMaterials Libraries: designing the experiential knowledge transfer through prototyping
No full textExperiential knowledge plays a crucial role in exploiting new materials within real contexts, i.e., designing products and applications. As a result, understanding and transferring this kind of knowledge has gained increasing attention, as well as developing new experiential tools addressing this challenge. This contribution investigates the role of physical prototypes in designing new experiential tools for the knowledge transfer of emerging materials and technologies, i.e., Materials Libraries. The analysis is performed through a reflective practice approach based on two practical case studies dealing with new materials from waste for 3D printing. The former Materials Library focuses on the recycling of composite materials from products at their End-of-Life in industrial contexts, i.e., wind turbine blades. The latter one, RepMat Library, is an ongoing experimentation that aims to develop an open source Materials Library to collect new 3D printable materials and applications from waste-based polymers and biomass involving distributed networks and local communities, i.e., makerspaces and fablabs. After briefly explaining the two case studies, this work defines an outline proposal of the main contributions of prototypes in designing new Materials Libraries, which means: (i) generating and detecting the experiential knowledge to transfer; (ii) categorizing and defining the taxonomy of the tool; (iii) testing the experiential knowledge transfer; and (iv) speculating on new possible ways of using Materials Libraries. In short, prototypes were mainly used as a physical learning medium to preliminary tinker with materials and technology, as well as a validating tool for the interaction between the users and the library. Furthermore, prototypes may contribute to envisioning new ways of developing and using Materials Libraries to spread experiential knowledge, i.e., democratizing the design process of the tool by encouraging distributed, accessible, and collaborative work within local communities and distributed networks
Idiotic Agents: Exploring more open-ended and creative interactions between humans and Intelligent Personal Assistants in the home
No full textIntelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs), like Amazon Alexa, are voice-enabled virtual agents handling mundane domestic tasks. They interact with humans in specific ways structured around their embedded intelligence to achieve automated functionality. However, this intelligence is a human-centered and technology-driven construct limited to that which is algorithmically computable for the sake of operationality, hence deficient for encapsulating the complexity of human and non-human ecologies. This deprives agents of any creative potential in the home, a space of multiplicity wherein life can be lived in unique ways beyond mere functionality. Turning to the opposite of intelligence to explore alternative interactions, I utilize idiocy as that which lies outside norms. Drawing on post-structuralism and post-humanism, while merging speculative design with participatory methods, I adopt an idiotic approach that moves away from classifications of agency and pre-scripted interactions. I describe three idiotic agents – interactive artifacts acting in absurd, unpredictable ways – and their implementation in homes through participatory material speculation. I found that idiotic agents can enable more social (but not human-like) interactions with humans, while altering and enriching the overall ambience of the home. Interactions emerged contextually and situatedly through relational human-agent entanglements rather than pre-scritped interactions
Oxymoron in Prototyping Digital Artifacts: Reviews of Digitalised Product-Service System (DPSS) Development Projects of Global Tech Companies
No full textPrototyping is one of the vital attributes of establishing a design-thinking organisation. This study suggests it also implies its oxymorons as an organisational material practice when it comes to digitalised product-service system (DPSS) development practice. DPSS development involves digital artefact design. This however requires a new organisational approach to prototyping. Designing a digital artefact is concerned with digital materiality - a combination of heterogeneous digitised materials: tangible materials (products and network systems) with intangible ones (service and contents), accomplished in a generative design approach. But it also presents new organisational challenges on increasing unknown factors emerging from the heterogeneous and generative design practices, calling for dedicated experiential learning practices through organisational prototyping. Qualitative case studies of three tech companies sharing common design philosophies found key organisational barriers to establishing a prototyping culture in association with DPSS development projects. It revealed that prototyping processes and the outcomes can be purposively manipulated for an organisation’s exploitative purposes. As an organisation’s social material practice, increasing unknown factors associated with digital artefact design engage with characterising an organisation’s concerns on the unknown. These are likely reflected in organisational prototyping. In an organisation’s design process, its conventional assumptions coupled with dominant analogies, superiors’ high power desirability and its coercive bureaucratic features reflected in prototyping processes can implicitly lead its prototyping to its exploitative purpose instead of experiential and exploratory purposes. This study presents empirical evidence that prototyping as an organisation\u27s social material practice connotes its oxymoron
Cultivating and Eliciting Felt Experiences for Design Use: Physical Manifestations of Abstract Bodily Experiences
No full textDesigning for bodily engagements requires cultivating and eliciting felt experiences that are related to the embodied concepts in question. Cultivation provides a source of bodily information through enabling and exploring bodily experiences, whereas elicitation renders that information in a form that can be analysed and articulated for use in design. In this paper, we present two projects, Squeaky/Pain and Intimacy with Far-Away Bodies, that start the design process with movement-based practices to harvest felt experiences by applying soma design and embodied design approaches. We analyse the cultivation and elicitation tools that are applied in these projects. As a result of the analysis, we offer a toolset for possible ways to cultivate and elicit the first-and-second-person felt experiences for design use. This toolset is intended to invite designers to employ and reflect on the translation of abstract bodily concepts into design prototypes
Designing Fungal Kinship: From Material to Co-Creator Through Speculative Prototyping
No full textThis paper explores speculative prototyping as a way of enabling kinship between humans and non-humans through the pathway of biophilic design. With a theoretical backdrop in post-humanist design, the authors propose that fungi are not only a material for prototyping, but potentially a co-creator of the design process. Through Edward O. Wilson’s concept of the ‘Biophilia Hypothesis’, the paper suggests that the designer’s ‘fascination’ and ‘affiliation’ should be addressed in order to establish an affective and emotional connectedness to nature. Building upon the design case ‘Fungi Kinship’, which consists of two workshops and a speculative design prototype the paper offers a renewed technique for prototyping with attention towards multispecies-inclusive design practices. The objective of this paper is to initiate a discussion on how the designer\u27s approach to speculative prototyping can contribute towards creating more sustainable and resilient futures for all living creatures
Prototyping Dialogues
No full textFor designers and design researchers, the ecological crisis and the quest for sustainability do not only mean a re-orientation in what design provides in terms of products, services, and systems. It also demands a change in how design is done, acknowledging that sustainable design and use have to co-evolve through speculative dialogues addressing a radical re-configuration of both the crafts of making and the crafts of use. This paper is an attempt to revisit one of the key tenants of contemporary design practice, the prototype, to find a language of prototyping that can sensitize us to what evolves when engaging with future sustainable practices through such speculative dialogues. In this paper, we dive into three co-explorative design engagements of a research project on sustainable knitwear design to further explore what we call prototyping dialogues. Through these accounts of prototyping dialogues, we argue that prototypes are outcomes of the dialogues rather than distinct proposals from the designer to be iteratively presented and evaluated. Furthermore, we suggest that the prototype, as an outcome, comes about through a dialectic between different modes of engagement which we term the ‘experiential’ and the ‘experimental’, having both material, performative, and speculative manifestations in the collaborative encounters