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The contemporary reorientation of design research interest away from cognitive transparency in product interfaces towards the imbuement of designed artefacts with emotion-eliciting qualities has precipitated a surge of interest in means of assessing emotionally objectively. A number of methodologies have been proposed that provide a framework for participants’ emotional expression (e.g. Kansei rating scales, PrEmo cards). However, these methods are of limited use in more interactive scenarios. Physiological assessment of emotion via tools developed in psychology and neuroscience potentially represent non-invasive means of assessing participants’ emotional state without requiring their active reflection. Using as a vehicle for discussion the Emotional Spectrum Analysis system developed by BFL, Kawasaki, Japan, we discuss the contemporary neuroscientific conception of emotion, and the difficulties of adapting research techniques and equipment from academic science to the applied arena of design research, particularly the low intensity of emotion experiences in design research tasks and the difficulties of categorising emotion. We conclude that while such techniques show promise, they are currently underdeveloped, and we draw attention to the potential over-emphasis in the field toward objective assessment of a superficial elicitation of emotional experience, for example by seeing or using a product, at the expense of pursuing a deeper understanding of how people interact emotionally with designed artefacts at the level of personal narrative.

Case studies are discussed, from Northumbria University’s practice-led Centre for Design Research (CfDR) that demonstrate how visualising concepts and designs through digital animation can enable effective communication of ideas and interactions, which in turn enables creative leaps in thinking, understanding and decision-making. Animation is a tool that can unlock the comprehension into what is and what could be. This paper reflects on a number of collaborative projects between the CfDR and several scientific communities, demonstrating and focusing in particular on the process of visualisation, designing digital\ud animations to communicate complex processes, ideas and interactions. An approach and understanding has been developed about how to effectively communicate potentially complex, scientific and technical concepts for the benefit of the client and the end user, in particular the lay audience whose knowledge of the subject may be limited or non-existing. Findings indicate that the process of constructing simple digital animated stories becomes a\ud learning process for both designer and client. Critical discussions during collaborative meetings develop shared understandings: helping clients to think more creatively about communication (appreciating the benefits of manipulating a truth to position to waylay contextual confusion), and making implicit knowledge belonging to the client explicit to the designer. It is important to state that this negotiation is more effective when the designer is a layperson with respect to the complex implicit knowledge of the client. During these collaborative conditions the untangling of complex ideas have achieve the a-ha moments in the animations’ audiences.

In consideration of the labels and definitions of gender identities, and the differences in experience of stasis or fluidity of gender, this paper describes a role for design in the political activities of gender diversity inclusion and equality as a facilitator of open-minded debate and decision-making. The process of design in ‘enabling the improvement of qualities of life’, can positively transform the way we see, think and behave, and so, not only can it enable creation of products and services to support inclusive practices, it can also be socially innovative in developing new models and policies for inclusion and equality. One particular model is the Gender Cube, which enables individuals to dimensionally define and consider their gender identity rather than seek to fit to a category, labelled by society, with its incumbent expectations.\ud With consideration of both personal and social constructs of gender, experienced alone at home and socially in our cities, it is argued here that inclusion cannot be seen as simply an attitude of ‘not excluding’, but must actively develop coherence in both perspective and behaviour through mindful acceptance, integration and equality. The limitations of an androcentric, male dominant, binary model, and associated behaviours are discussed, including the need for a more balanced and credible engagement in supporting the design of gender inclusivity, for equality to be achieved for the expressions of the full range of gender identities.

This paper proposes benefits of using service design against organised crime. As a vehicle to this discussion, the focus is an anti-child-trafficking project at Northumbria University in the UK, involving its multidisciplinary Northumbria Crime Prevention Network.\ud The last 10 years have shown increasing evidence of people trafficking, internationally (DoS, 2010), generally for the purposes of illegal labour and/or sex. A significant fraction of those who are trafficked are children. The majority of these children are in their mid-teens, but some are as young as five years old.\ud The C4 persona-based critical design process, (Hilton, 2008), is proposed to strategically enable a service design approach to counter organised crime, by first developing the required criminal personas in order to use their competitive perspectives in critical review of the preventative initiatives. Opportunities from such a service design approach, to child trafficking for example would include new means of: interruption or redirection of child trafficking services so that these children end up in legitimate care; also the proposition of considering new opportunities and improvements in child trafficking service routes and processes as a means of second guessing how and where Recruiters, Transporters, and Exploiters, (Van Dijck, 2005), might next be found operating, and then through border and security agencies successfully countered.

This paper argues a ‘thought structure’ and narrative of ‘seeing’ exists through critical gaze when viewing and engaging with fashion practice. Through the creative practice of curatorial project work the unity of discourse between reflection and practice can be attributed to mapping and developing the knowledge’s of fashion practice experienced and exploited through the practice portfolio or exhibition.\ud \ud There is opportunity for professional doctorates of design practice to develop insightful methodological approaches informed through the design process of practice. The context of this research paper is the learning experience of a professional doctorate study that focuses on developing and evaluating a fashion (design) practice process of constructing the fashion narrative in a contemporary context. \ud \ud Research suggests that present texts on design practice, reflective practice, visual anthropology and curation are still not effectively informing creative-authorship of practice as portfolio or exhibition of Design Practice. The fashion commerce and fashion cultural industries have much to gain in linking theory with practice towards a better understanding of what designers do, in, through and of practice.\ud \ud The research concludes that a conscious ‘seeing’ exists as a pure discourse of fashion practice toward an understanding of what designers 'do' in thought and action and how the spectator can apply critical gaze to understand, perform, and respond to fashion practice in both a commercial and cultural context that is to be collectively understood; and that this achievement can be effectively facilitated through engagement with a professional doctorate programme.

The linkage between raw resources consumption and economic growth through product manufacture and disposal is creating an untenable pressure on the planet’s natural systems; therefore understanding and embracing the mechanics of the biology and physics of our context could lead to novel approaches in the design of human-built systems/products.\ud \ud Designers are, by active association, responsible for that pressure and much of the impact can be traced back to the early stages of the design process. For designers and engineers the main constraint is accessibility to knowledge of multiple and complex factors in easily digestible form when starting a project. Added to this is the possibility to transcend the realm of products and explore creative solutions throughout the entire life cycle, giving designers the opportunity to propose entire new business models and systems.\ud \ud This paper exposes the search for an intuitive soft modeling tool that considers some of these factors and inspires the innovation of business and systems innovation from a biophysical perspective. The aim of this tool is to enable the exploration of these factors in a playful intuitive way and relate these outcomes to the design of a business model operating within the principles of trophic levels.\ud \ud The first key question to the development of this approach has been: how does it work in nature? Organisms search for their food in other organisms and at the same time are the food of others; biomass and energy are transferred from one level to another, losses occur, higher qualities of energy are created and all is maintained in continuous cycles. The linear human production of goods can be rethought by taking into account this basic principle of thermodynamics and although this is not a technological problem, the relevant constrains need to be integrated for this approach to be feasible. These are from an economics origin: how to achieve a healthy business from a non-linear process? It is proposed that an analogy between natural and human systems: autotrophs = manufacturing, heterotrophs = distributors and consumers, their concentration and size, their possible combinations and their eventual business interpretations, is referred to as Trophic Economics.\ud \ud The envisioned tool will combine the exploration of the complex factors involved in the lifecycle of a product with\ud the suggested Trophic Economics models. The outcome could be sketches of the possible boundaries and structures of new business and products, to be resolved later on the drawing board. In order to measure and keep track of the most relevant decisions, a designer must embrace tools like emergy accounting, MIPS and MI (Wuppertal Institute, 2002) used in related combination, plus indexes of CO2 emissions and relevant economic, social-demographic and ecosystems information about the countries involved in any give proposition of manufacture and use.

This paper outlines the importance of sustainable product developments and their role in securing a sustainable future through current practices and procedures. It discusses the difficulties faced within organisations through the complexities and swamping of regulations when considering sustainability and the problems in policing such a system to ensure compliance. Focus is centred on the design stage, where large numbers of standards and interests must be factored in to create specifications that are highly compliant. Where there is a limited understanding of the complexities that are presented at this stage, less optimum specifications will be dispatched. This presents the need to think strategically with new systems and approaches which adapt to company behaviour, where decisions that are made at a design stage have impacts up and down the supply chain, changes that are made must be in line with company strategic objectives and provide influential returns on investment.

“I’m not saying it’s a good quality to have, but my observation is that good designers are never happy, they’re never satisfied, never content” (Adrian Stokes, quoted in Spencer, 2008, p. 145). It seems self-evident that designers, whose raison d’être is to initiate change in man-made things (Jones, 1970), devising courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones (Simon, 1969), will be dissatisfied, at some level, with the way they experience the material world. However, recent research (Spencer, 2008) suggests that expert designers deliberately enhance the pressure and stress of the design situation – stimulating dissatisfaction. By stimulating the experience of dissatisfaction their imaginative and investigative action is given urgency, focus and purpose as they pursue excellence and attempt to unfold from their own view of the world to empathise with a broad project community. This discursive paper highlights the need for a developed understanding of the reflective practitioner model to inform the post-rationalist generation of design methods. This paper: reviews critical literature about the experience of designing; discusses the role of dissatisfaction within the practise of design; and presents a research project that aims to evaluate the value of stimulated dissatisfaction for the purpose of supporting practitioners’ empathic appreciation in early design direction generation. This paper argues that the reflective practitioner model of the designer must address the stimulation of dissatisfaction as a condition of creative and explorative design practice.

This paper describes a research method used to develop criminal personas for use by designers in a process called Cyclic Countering of Competitive Creativity (C4). Personas rather than profiles are developed to encourage designer ownership, to improve the level of engagement with countering the criminal mind, and encourage the responsibility to keep the personas live and developing, rather than be adopted as simple checklists built from available criminal profile data. In this case study indirect access to offender details was used to develop the personas. The aim was to give particular focus to the offenders’ ‘creative prompts’, which enable designers to more effectively counter their own design solutions, by a role-play approach to critical review and counter design. The C4 process enables learning through failure, and strengthens the development and selection that takes place within the design process, but C4 does rely upon the development of relevant and engaging personas to be effective.

Social inclusion continues to develop as a key issue in responsible design practices. To date, we have witnessed change in the development of inclusivity for the aged, and the physically and mentally challenged, but little more than exploration by certain minorities has been achieved concerning gender diversity and fluidity. A key reason for this is cultural complexity, in terms of differences in social constructs, and conflicts with personal constructs, but there is a perceived need for change, towards more inclusive perceptions and behaviours. The commonly held ‘binary’ model may have appeared to offer society a natural method of controlling complexity, by reducing mental effort involved in social decision-making. However, in terms of innovation, the use of such stereotyping may be seen as acting against originality and individualism, certainly not encouraging of positive change and diversity. The traditions attached to the binary model permeate our language, constraining our perceptions and thinking. To present an alternative perspective, this project developed a more inclusive model of gender to recognize diversity and fluidity, while maintaining a level of simplicity to ensure effective comprehension and application. This paper’s presentation of the ‘Gender Fluidity Cube’, seeks to describe the context for a more inclusive view of gender, sex and sexuality, as three dimensions which enable inclusion of any individual or group within its volume. Through a more indepth study this dimensional model may offer creative opportunities to a number of professions including design, marketing and education, as a stepping-stone ‘population’ model, to inform more effective ‘causal’ models for systems thinking.

A study of six international design conferences was carried out in 2002, to review opportunities for improving inter and intra-disciplinary knowledge dissemination. A metacognitive perspective (Flavell, 1979) was adopted for the consideration of individual differences and their affect upon delivery and reception of information. A participative observational method was used by the investigator, as a presenter and audience member at all six conferences. This investigation reviewed conference organisation, venue facilities, presentation format, delivery, and audience comments. The investigator’s presentations were all delivered using the same format, which aimed to facilitate ease of contextualisation and retention of information. It was concluded that there are a number of quality improvements that can be adopted in the short and mediumterm, by organisers, presenters and audience members.

This paper describes the review of a design project devised to pilot a student community learning experience at a heightened level of social responsibility. There is evidence around the world that degree level programmes are beginning this process, albeit through initial discussions (Swan, 2000). The project involved students in the use of open-space technology to promote creative team working and reflective practice reporting on the design project. The review involved a programme of qualitative research into the evidence and outputs created by the students and staff and compared these with interviews with the; participants, industrial sponsor, independent academic staff and professional designers. It was not possible to determine in the review whether the project had led to a greater level of creativity, but those involved described it as a profoundly creative experience. The findings showed that the project engendered truly effective teamworking, complete consensus to solutions amongst the students and a heightened sensitivity to societal issues. The review makes recommendations for the future development of this form of design practice learning at appropriate levels of study.

This paper discusses how drama process and techniques are providing alternative approaches to product concept generation. An investigation that used drama techniques for concept generation sessions observed that there appears to be an implicit response among designers to investigate functionality before, or instead of form. However, it was proposed that through practice the approach of ‘concept-acting’ would provide support for the designer’s kinaesthetic needs for touch, feel and positional experience. It was also observed that whilst an increasing number of people in the US are actively embracing this type of approach, through a variety of techniques, UK designers appear somewhat more sceptical of the value of drama to their design processes.

Industries which utilize Computer Aided Design, (CAD), are in a similar situation to the film industry, where the use of Computer Graphics, (CG), has reached such a level of reality that audiences often do not spot where CG has been used. This has resulted in a general attitude among critics of: “CG is what you expect in a film, but what we often lack is a decent plot”. Over a similar period, CAD software has become a powerful tool with proficient users, whilst the marketplace for such services now takes such facilities for granted. The ‘wow factor’ has faded. The special effects used in films has contributed to this dulling of presentation impact, which leads us to question where we stand in relation to a competitive edge, with the realization that: “CAD is what you expect from a firm, but what we often lack is clear intent.” The questioning of competitive edge draws us into some complex issues, concerning the reduction of compromise for design intent, where priorities fight for first place. There is no disputing the importance of time to market, yet the time compression technologies may no longer be providing a sufficient cutting edge. Even if new technologies facilitate even shorter lead-times we will always face the threat of a time management trap and potential loss of design quality. As a high-risk strategy for competitive advantage, contractual agreements for specified short lead-time deliveries, in some cases with penalty clauses written in, have established an expectation among the client base. Such a strategy leads us to effectively burn our bridges, in sacrificing margins for schedule 3 slippage and error compensation, leaving us nowhere to go but back. With such a lean approach to product development we have to improve our focus on the plot and its intent for design quality. The more investment we make at the front end, to enable the decision making process, the more likely we are to avoid pain at the back-end. Presently, decisions are made on a resource of available quality and quantity of data, using a perspective which is based on the experience, tacit knowledge and intuition of those involved. Whilst intuition is a good starting point or fall-back, as with tacit knowledge, it often proves difficult to substantiate. Background experience is the most valuable asset here but proves ineffectual when faced with low quality data, either through ambiguity, error or lack of substance. The improvement of quality standards require that we look closely at the production and presentation of data in the context of decision making and establish a process by which quality decisions can be made quickly and efficiently. This paper focuses on the process of communication between designers and their colleagues and clients, concerning the presentation of CAD models, from a cognitive perspective. It first establishes a context for individual differences in the management of auditory and visual information for decision making. This is followed by a discussion of five approaches to the communication of design intent and concludes with a checklist, to aid selection of an effective approach to communication.