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This thesis concerns the roles and responsibilities of designers when we design workshops with democratic ambitions. Reflecting on my experiences from making co-design workshops for citizen participation to support sustainable urban development in municipal planning processes, I inquire into designers' societal entanglements and explore these from democratic, social, political and designerly perspectives. Designing workshops in municipal planning processes made me curious about the diverse interpretations and practices of democracy. Seeking to make sense of my role in relation to these, I trace intertwinements between design and democracy. I reflect on how industrial designers' roles are historically entangled with market-driven relations, formed by production and consumption. I also look at how political theory and philosophy articulate tensions within democracy, and criticise neoliberal political rationality for erasing the tension between democracy and capitalism. As designers are entangled in past and present relations affecting our roles and practices, we are affected by, but also influence, what we engage with. Designers who engage with democratic concerns navigate these tensions and thus affect how democracy is practiced. My inquiry into these perspectives led me to argue for designers' responsibilities and for the need to reorient our practices to respond to democratic issues. Responsibilities need to be articulated in relation to tensions, as well as from within our practices; tensions can help us consider how we orient our practices – in relation to whom, what and where we design. As our relations also form our response-abilities, these reorientations also reshape our abilities to respond in practice, critically and carefully. I propose three concerns to support designers, design students and design researchers in orienting their practices, arguing that it is important to reflect on the concerns of entanglements, tensions, and responsibilities. These concerns focus on designers' potential of making, on ...

The workplace of construction is considered complex with diversity of activities, teams, using machinery and equipment during the production process. Also particular aspects are inherent to the methods of production. If considering the multiple factors involved in construction and their high rates of accidents, it means that is crucial to implement preventive measures thought from the beginning of risks, during the project design. Generally, literature presents the benefits of prevention through design, demonstrates the viability and makes projections for the future. In some countries, the legislation of responsibility for construction worker safety is also shared with the designer. However the existing material is still new, integrating safety considerations into the design process in practice is low and there are still many difficulties and associated resistances. In this context, this paper aims to presentation an ongoing study, which its objective is contribute to filling this gap in order to directly assist the designers and contractors. The proposal is to produce a model for integrating safety considerations into the design process and a practical guide containing work safety guidelines for designers.

Several global reports have concluded that natural resource extraction at its current levels is unsustainable and will lead to rapid erosion of the environment and tax global economic growth. One of the alternative paradigms to conserve those resources is the Circular Economy, a system driven by innovation that extends the utility of products as long as possible through a series of strategies that re-use resources. Design can act as a bridging tool and a catalyst for the innovation demanded by the Circular Economy because of its flexibility as a problem-solving discipline. The intermediary role of design can adapt to the complex requirements of Circular Economy stakeholders who want to shift their way of doing business to a more sustainable model, despite formidable policy, economic, cultural and political obstacles. The author explores the evolution and utility of design from a discipline that shapes objects to one that constructs and facilitates complex systems of interactions among collaborators, which in the Circular Economy includes consumers, manufacturers, logistics companies, governments, business and science entrepreneurs. Several examples of design's role in this facilitative process are presented that showcase the power of design to drive social and cultural transformations and re-cast industrial and business processes. Sustainable innovation is the centrepiece of the Circular Economy and design has a significant role to play in its adoption, particularly from a human-centred perspective that can address formidable constraints to its implementation.

Lighting Research and Technology Vol.44 Nr.2, 171-185 ; Road lighting practice in Europe is currently under change, the changes being induced by the European Union Ecodesign regulations, the rapid development of LEDs and the new CIE system of mesopic photometry. This makes it a good time to listen to the opinions of the end users of road lighting. What are the aspects of road lighting that the drivers value? What are the most difficult visual tasks faced by drivers at night? Are drivers willing to reduce the amount and quality of lighting to save energy: All these questions and more were presented to over 100 drivers aged 20-79 years in a questionnaire in Finland during the autumn of 2010. This paper summarises the results and discusses the expectations of drivers that should be considered when preparing future guidelines for road lighting

The discipline of Transition Design, or design for transition, is concerned with designing systemic strategies aimed at medium-term futures, to address what can be described as complex and interconnected issues that exist on multiple levels of a system. According to Irwin Transition design turns its attention towards two fundamental concepts: (a) the idea that entire societies will face a transition towards sustainable futures, and (b) the realisation that this will involve changes at a systemic level, triggered necessarily by a deep understanding of the anatomy and dynamics of complexity. The Transition design framework includes a set of practices and knowledge derived from other disciplines and integrated into its principles, and envisages a mediating role for design itself, to facilitate multilevel and multistage socio-technical transitions. The second part of the paper addresses and proposes a comparison between transition and systemic product design, to highlight new virtuous practices also in a more traditional design framework. For Scupelli the approach to design and complex problem solving of transition design fulfill two conditions: (a) they are used for the transition to a more sustainable society; (b) the understanding of the interconnectedness of social, political and natural systems is aimed at improving the quality of life. Products designed through this new methodology must fulfill the role of potential catalysts for transitions, and it is assumed that these can be translated into the development of further innovative products that reflect the characteristics of the new and emerging socio-technical system; this requires a transformation in design thinking to give importance to the concept of durability, the temporal dimension of the product and new value propositions. The last part of the paper aims at comparing the curricula of the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano and Carnegie Mellon University and in particular at taking a workshop course of the latter as a case study.

The Global Innovation Design (GID) Masters Programme aims to develop research and teaching collaboration opportunities between international academic institutions, and among a range of international Governmental and Non-Governmental Organisations. A theme of increasing interest is humanitarian innovation, in which many organisations are actively engaged. However, most academic documentation is in engineering and the humanities; there is little scholarly, empirical examination of design-led interdisciplinary methods and practice, spanning this fertile and important intersection, or of educational efforts to equip future designers with appropriate skills and knowledge. This paper outlines the developing educational context of experiential learning applied to innovation for disaster management and humanitarian response. Two examples of student design workshops on the subject of humanitarian or emergency response are described, to illustrate some of the benefits of immersive learning in this subject area (such as increased empathy and contextual understanding) weighed against the challenges (such as risk of physical or emotional harm) involved in first-hand encounter.

This paper aims to provide a disciplinary contribution concerning the role that Communication Design has and could play in Gender Studies, focusing on the university educational context. The starting point is the issue of the women representation in the media and the resulting need to promote actions aimed at media alphabetization. From this scenario the urgent need to "focus more on vocational training - of the communication designer - and on education activities as a vehicle to fight discriminations and promote gender equality" (European Parliament Resolution, April 2018 - 2017/2210(INI)) emerges. The environment in which we live and form ourselves is full with communicative artifacts (advertising, information, web, TV.) that convey and promote degrading stereotypes towards women, feeding gender inequalities. Media images act on thought, influencing the construction of individual and social biographies and consequently the way they relate to themselves and the community. In this context, the Communication Designer takes on a role of social and cultural responsibility and has the duty to act towards a socially "sustainable" communication. The media message acts in a vicious circle, it draws on and simultaneously influences social reality by orienting thoughts and behaviors of individuals. Communication Design can therefore operate on this circle through communicative actions aimed at increasing the sensitivity and awareness of the designer himself as well as of the potential user. Our contribution is based on these assumptions, focusing on the work carried on by the research group DCXCG — Communication Design for Gender Cultures — in the field of university education. Specifically, the aim is to highlight the need to intervene on design thinking starting from the training of conscious designers, documenting the group's experimentations in the field of education. The aim of the experimentations is to provide tools for a critical reading of the communication project and contribute to the training of responsible designers, able to design and relate themselves in a society still intensely unbalanced and male-oriented. The DCXCG group is located at the intersection of Communication Design and Gender Studies and works in a multidisciplinary perspective to provide a critical view of the forms of representation of gender and develop new communication models able to act on the quality of the media message – both form and content - as well as on the modalities of distribution and consumption of the same.

We report on participatory design activities within the POLITeam project, a large project which introduces groupware into the German government. Working with a representative small group of users in different worksites, an existing system was adapted to user and organizational needs, with the plan to improve and expand the system to a large scale. We integrated new approaches of user advocacy and osmosis with an evolutionary cycling process. User advocates and osmosis were techniques used to explore the users' needs during actual system use and were incorporated into the system development. In this paper, we present experiences with this approach and reflect on its impact on the design process from the designers' point of view.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge in Design for Personalisation on 22/5/2017, available online: http://www.routledge.com/9781472457394. ; This book presents taxonomy of personalisation, and its potential consequences for the design profession as well as its ethical and political dimensions through a collection of essays from a range of academic perspectives.

Addressing problems of highly disadvantaged public housing communities requires multi-faceted, multidisciplinary approaches to both the social and physical environment. Accordingly, over the last decade and a half Australian governments have developed a suite of community regeneration initiatives involving both social and physical design interventions. These also provide an opportunity for valuable learning experiences for university students to learn about the complex problems faced by disadvantaged communities and how design interventions need to work hand in hand with social initiatives to help improve quality of life. This paper outlines a unique 12 year partnership between schools of social work and built environment, a state housing department and public housing communities in inner Sydney. It outlines the background to the approaches used, the range of project types, participatory mechanisms, the educational benefits for both students and public housing tenants, and ethical issues in this collaborative community based learning. Its conclusions are supported by quantitative and qualitative evidence from a variety of sources during the life of the project.

Contrary to earlier research on why universities change their visual identities from traditional to more abstract ones, resting on a demand-side approach, we offer an explanation based on a supply-side approach. We argue that universities' change of visual identities toward abstract symbols reflects a professional logic shared by graphic designers and discuss the mechanisms and institutional agents that have fueled the professional project of graphic designers and the institutionalization of their professional logic. Simultaneously, we make visible the role of a professional group—the graphic designers—that have escaped the gaze of earlier organizational research.

This thesis explores fashion education in the People's Republic of China (PRC) as it evolved historically, with a concentration on the teaching and learning of undergraduate fashion design programs. I use a mixed methodology that includes discourse analysis, case studies, archival studies and interviews with founders of fashion design programs and fashion design professors. This research is underpinned by a comparative approach in which I explore the similarities and differences between the top Chinese programs and their counterpart fashion institutions in the United States of America and Britain. This thesis argues that the Chinese government has been the dominant influence on the development of fashion education in the PRC whereas in the United States and Britain the evolution of this sector was initially primarily driven by the fashion industry and currently responds to social movements and activism. I show that despite their different development driving engines, a close examination of the evolving curricula in both of the international and Chinese fashion institutions follow similar paths. The trajectory for curriculum development is the move from being oriented towards "drawing" and the "artistic" aspects of design to a focus on "clothing construction", "production technologies" and the business of "selling" clothes, through to the current emphasis on "creative thinking" today. Despite their different starting points, the top Chinese fashion schools have achieved the same benchmarks as top international fashion schools in terms of "what should designers design? (form)" and "how do designers complete their designs? (technology)." This thesis shows that today the major difference between the top Chinese schools and their international counterparts lies in the question: "Why should designers design? (objective)" In China, design is still mainly oriented towards promoting Chinese culture and is often expressed as a form of nationalism; while in the international institutions the role of design is expanding from serving the business sector to serving the society—using design to solve social problems is the cutting edge trend. It took the top international fashion institutions nearly a century to reach their current levels. With the help of the active engagement of the Chinese government, PRC institutions have attained this same level in just 30 years. During these same three decades, this thesis shows that PRC fashion education is experiencing a transition from "serving the people (wei renmin fuwu)" to "serving the individual cadres" who represent the government. The result of this trend is that Chinese institutions have become "cadre-centered" rather than "student-centered." ; published_or_final_version ; Modern Languages and Cultures ; Doctoral ; Doctor of Philosophy

There is startling evidence that we now have a waste problem - too much waste, limited resources and the over-consumption of products- in particular, fashion and clothing that is discarded and thrown into the landfill. We are using technology to create faster, bigger, more, cheaper, disposable products. Technological innovation has accelerated the process of designing and selling clothes so that clothes now lack value, creativity, craftsmanship and are designed for obsolescence. Current industry practices have placed pressure on fashion designers to create for price and profit rather than quality, craft or innovation. In an increasingly mobile society and workforce, individuals lack a sense of belonging and attachment to place, things, or culture. People have little connection to the clothing worn and removed from the manufacture of the products they purchase. This research dissertation critically examines the fashion cycle and supply chain to highlight its inefficiencies and waste, fashion practices and the role of technology in developing fashion and clothing. The research addresses alternative working models and creative strategies that could augur the way toward a more democratic, participatory, and socially conscious industry and enable contemporary fashion designers the relevant skills to become sustainable practitioners in the design and production of fashion clothing. Through practice-based research, it has investigated a range of materials, fabrications, and processes such as handcraft techniques, along with digital technologies including 3D prototyping and printing. Experimental and exploratory research methods have been used to create a series of artefacts that minimize resources, consider product lifecycle, to create value in clothes that encourage consumers to keep, use less, repair and then recycle their garments.

Command and control is central in all distributed tactical operations such as rescue operations and military operations. It takes place in a complex system of humans and artefacts, striving to reach common goals. The command and control complexity springs from several sources, including dynamism, uncertainty, risk, time pressure, feedback delays and interdependencies. Stemming from this complexity, the thesis approaches two important and related problem areas in command and control research. On a general level, the thesis seeks to approach the problems facing the command and control operators and the problems facing the designers in the associated systems development process. We investigate the specific problem of operators losing sight of the overall perspective when working with large maps in geographical information systems with limited screen area. To approach this problem, we propose high-precision input techniques that reduce the need for zooming and panning in touch-screen systems, and informative unit representations that make better use of the screen area available. The results from an experimental study show that the proposed input techniques are as fast and accurate as state-of-the-art techniques without the need to resort to zooming. Furthermore, results from a prototype design show that the proposed unit representation reduces on-screen clutter and makes use of off-screen units to better exploit the valuable screen area. Developing command and control systems is a complex task with several pitfalls, including getting stuck in exhaustive analyses and overrated reliance on rational methods. In this thesis, we employ a design-oriented research framework that acknowledges creative and pragmatic ingredients to handle the pitfalls. Our approach adopts the method of reconstruction and exploration of mission histories from distributed tactical operations as a means for command and control analysis. To support explorative analysis of mission histories within our framework, we propose tools for communication analysis and tools for managing metadata such as reflections, questions, hypotheses and expert comments. By using these tools together with real data from live tactical operations, we show that they can manage large amounts of data, preserve contextual data, support navigation within data, make original data easily accessible, and strengthen the link between metadata and supporting raw data. Furthermore, we show that by using these tools, multiple analysts, experts, and researchers can exchange comments on both data and metadata in a collaborative and explorative investigation of a complex scenario. ; Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2004:61.

At a time when major climate change and aspiration for sustainable economic and social development have become major issues, the objective of this guide is to consider school retrofitting from a holistic point of view by developing guidelines not just in terms of energy performances or solar systems but also in terms of comfort, quality of life, environmental impact and resource consumption. Across Europe and worldwide, infant, primary and secondary schools are essential tools in the construction of tomorrow's society and transmission of democratic values. Schools are, first and foremost, places for opening up to the world, to the acquisition of knowledge and places for socialisation: three indispensable foundations for becoming a citizen of tomorrow's world, capable of good governance. This is a fundamental role in our societies. In order to fulfill this role, schools must provide places for training and teaching that are comfortable and of high quality. This is currently not the situation in Europe. Most school buildings are old, dilapidated and poorly insulated. Heating systems too are old and often cannot be regulated. Ventilation systems, if any, are inefficient. Outdoor spaces and playgrounds are often restricted and of poor quality. This lack of comfort has negative and scientifically proven consequences on pupils' concentration and learning. This is why school buildings have an urgent need of fundamental refurbishment. Moreover, sustainable and cost-efficient refurbishment of school buildings provides a real opportunity for making pupils, teachers and parents aware of energy efficiency as well as comfort and the quality of indoor and outdoor environments. School buildings, their technical equipment and operation can be used as a showcase for the pupils and their families. A showcase that, once experienced, can influence their attitudes and lead them to behave in a more responsible and public-spirited way. This guide is mainly intended for architects and architecture students and also for principals and other school administrative authorities. Richly illustrated with both explanatory diagrams and photographs, the guide provides designers with information and resources needed to retrofit school buildings in a responsible and efficient way.