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This thesis examines the collaborative development of corporate responsibility (CR) standards from the perspective of organisational learning theory. The author proposes that standards development projects can be understood as Network Learning episodes where learning is reflected in changes in structures, interpretations and practices accompanied by learning processes. Network Learning alone is seen as insufficient to reflect the diverse contributions and outcomes in the special case of CR standards. Concepts from multi-stakeholder learning like the role of dissensus in learning and the empowerment of weaker stakeholders are therefore used to create a synthesis of the two theories in a single conceptual framework. This framework is then tested against a pilot case and three case studies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards including the development of the new ISO international standard on social responsibility (SR). The data validates and extended this framework to yield a Multi-Stakeholder Network Learning theory capable of describing the how participants and non-participant stakeholders learn in this context. New concepts are generated from the data, like dislocated learning, which demonstrate how participants in the process and those they represent can experience quite different learning outcomes. Stakeholders whose learning is aligned with the learning of their participant representatives truly have a stake in these influential standards. However, where representatives fail to learn from those represented, the latter¿s stake is diminished. By shedding light on the mechanisms of effective collaborative learning this work contributes to learning theory, the practice of standardization and the normative stakeholder empowerment agenda. / British Standards Institution

Users are shifting from traditional TV to video streaming platforms because of the flexibility of using these media. However, most studies on accessibility in media streaming platforms explore physical impairments. Despite ADHD and dyslexia affecting around 5 and 10 percent of the population, studies combining the experience in streaming services and this neurodiverse group are still limited. This study aims to understand how people with ADHD and dyslexia experience video streaming platforms. The investigation involved recruiting people from this neurodiverse population who consume streaming and facilitate sessions with semi-structured interviews and co-design. The results show that the participants did not always show empowerment to express their needs. The study suggests an explanation of the topics that will be covered during the sessions to prepare the participant for the co-design. By doing so, the participants can reflect on their experiences beforehand. Similarly, sending them a summary of how the design methodology works might help participants understand the importance of the process, giving them more empowerment before the session starts. These suggestions can support future studies involving this neurodiverse group to be more inclusive. / Mediakonsumenter flyttar från traditionell TV till streamingplattformar eftersom de är mer flexibla. De flesta studierna om tillgänglighet på streamingplattformar handlar däremot enbart om fysiska funktionsnedsättningar. Trots att ungefär 5 till 10 procent av befolkningen antingen har ADHD eller dyslexi är de få studier som tar upp neurodiversitet i samband med streamingtjänster. Den här studien försöker förstå hur personer med ADHD eller dyslexi upplever videostreamingplattformar. Undersökningen gick ut på att personer från den neurodiversa gruppen som använde streamingplattformar fick delta i semi-strukturerade intervjuer och co-design-sessioner. Resultaten visar att deltagarna ibland inte kände att de hade möjligheten att säga vad de tyckte. Den här studien föreslår att de ämnen som ska behandlas förklaras på förhand så deltagarna kan förbereda sig inför sessionen. Deltagarna kan på så sätt reflektera över sina egna erfarenheter på förhand. Att skicka en sammanfattning av hur designmetodik fungerar kan också hjälpa deltagarna förstå vikten av designprocessen, vilket stärker dem innan sessionen börjar. Den här förslagen är några sätt att öka gruppens makt i design-sessioner som möjliggör att framtida studier kan bli mer inkluderande.

Denna C-uppsats är ett resultat av ett examensarbete som fokuserat på design som är kritisk till industrins agenda för att producera en produkt. Den är kritiskt till produktdesignerns roll som bunden till att leverera vad marknaden säger sig önska. Den är också kritisk till produktdesignerns modus operandi, att om designfältstudier utförs, finns redan beslutet att något ska produceras – inte tvärt om. Uppsatsen korrelerar en marknad i överflöd med ökad stress på arbetsplatsen. Deltagarna i arbetslivet måste reflektera på deras eget beteende, men för att ändra sitt beteende till ett mindre stressat, måste klienten (chefen, investeraren, huvudansvariga) organisatoriskt och systematiskt tillåta beteendeförändringar. Intressen är i många situationer i konflikt. Detta examensarbete föreslår den demokratiska workshopen ”ProvoTing”, för att lyfta dagliga stressbeteenden och skapa argumenterade provotyper. Det slutgiltiga konceptet är ett framtida ”business-as-usual” scenario med följdfrågan; – ”är denna framtid önskvärd?”. / This paper is the result of a thesis focusing on critical design and the industries agenda for creating products. The thesis criticize designer’s role, while intertwined with the industry, will only deliver products the “market” wish to have. It is critical to conventional designer’s modus operandi, deep designerly and ethnographical studies are only made if there is a plan to create a product. The thesis correlates a saturated market in abundance to stress in work life. Participants in work life need to reflect on their own behavior, but to change behavior for less stress, the client (CEO, investor, head of organization) have to organizational allow behavioral changes. This is in many situations in conflict. The thesis proposes the democratic workshop “ProvoTing”, to lift daily stress behaviors, with creating argumenting and provoking products. The final concept is a future scenario of what happens with “business as usual” tactics and a supplementary question; – “is this future desired?”

This design-based research provides design considerations for developing educational tools for teaching programming to blind primary schoolers, as an effort towards more inclusive classrooms, given that the tools available today are not accessible to these students. Existing tools were analyzed and tested, and co-design practices were applied in exploring ‘instructions’ as a main logic operation for computer programming, through experimenting with diverse types of interfaces, having visually impaired participants at the center of the process. Physical and mental patterns, relevant for improving the accessibility of such tools, are unveiled and further discussed in this study.

The unabated continuation of the Moore's law has allowed the doubling of the number of transistors per unit area of a silicon die every 2 years or so. At the same time, an increasing demand on consumer electronics and computing equipments to run sophisticated applications has led to an unprecedented complexity of hardware designs. These factors have necessitated the abstraction level of design-entry of hardware systems to be raised beyond the Register-Transfer-Level (RTL) to Electronic System Level (ESL). However, power envelope on the designs due to packaging and other thermal limitations, and the energy envelope due to battery life-time considerations have also created a need for power/energy efficient design. The confluence of these two technological issues has created an urgent need for solving two problems: (i) How do we enable a power-aware design flow with a design entry point at the Electronic System Level? (ii) How do we enable power aware High Level Synthesis to automatically synthesize RTL implementation from ESL? This dissertation distinguishes itself by addressing the following two issues: (i) Since power/energy consumption of electronic systems largely depends on implementation details, and high-level models abstract away from such details, power/energy estimation at such levels has not been addressed thoroughly. (ii) A lot of work has been done in applying various techniques on control-data-flow graphs (CDFG) to find power/area/latency pareto points during behavioral synthesis. However, high level C-based functional models of various compute-intensive components, which could be easily synthesized as co-processors, have many opportunities to reduce power. Some of these savings opportunities are traditional such as clock-gating, operand-isolation etc. The exploration of alternate granularities of these techniques with target applications in mind, opens the door for traditional power reduction opportunities at the high-level. This work therefore concentrates on the aforementioned two areas of inadequacy of hardware design methodologies. Our proposed solutions include utilizing ESL simulation traces and mapping those to lower abstraction levels for power estimation, derivation of statistical power models using regression based learning for power estimation at early design stages, etc. On the HLS front, techniques that insert the power saving features during the synthesis process using exploration of granularity and scope of clock-gating, sequential clock-gating are proposed. Finally, this work shows how to marry two domains, that is estimation and reduction. In this regard, a power model is proposed, which helps in predicting power savings obtained using clock-gating and further guiding HLS to selectively insert clock-gating. / Ph. D.

As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly integral in various sectors, its role in the design industry, particularly in education, necessitates examination. This thesis explores the integration of AI in design processes from the perspective of designers as users, particularly focusing on Design students in a case study. By adopting a humanistic approach within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), this research develops the "AI-Designer Collaboration Canvas," a tool designed to facilitate effective collaboration between designers and AI systems. The study addresses how designers can be supported to develop a nuanced view of AI integration in the design process. The developed tool, the "AI collaboration canvas," aims to assist designers in planning and integrating AI into their design processes, aiming to transform perceptions and enhance engagement with AI technologies.

<p dir="ltr">Modeling and simulation play a pivotal role in engineering and research, enabling cost effective solutions for design, manufacturing, and failure analysis, especially where physical testing is infeasible. This work explores numerical methods for multi-scale domains, where structures span diverse length scales, presenting unique challenges in meshing and accuracy. Advanced approaches such as domain decomposition and global-local methods are discussed, with an emphasis on their application in heterogeneous integration (HI) for advanced packaging. HI, which addresses the limitations of Moore’s Law, integrates diverse components into 2.5D and 3D architectures but introduces complex mechanical and thermo-mechanical challenges. This research addresses gaps in multi-scale numerical frameworks, proposing novel methods to handle non-linear physical evolution while maintaining compatibility with existing tools. A non-intrusive global-local inspired methodology that couples the local subdomain back to the global subdomain was implemented to increase the accuracy in non-linear multi-scale simulations involving evolution at local scale. The developed framework was then generalized to solve rate dependent and rate independent phenomenon. The work further extends into numerical methods for design of HI packages as well. Unlike detailed analysis, the design stage analysis prioritizes speed of computation with a first order accuracy of results. This is achieved using machine learning techniques for efficient design space exploration in HI. The study overall aims to advance computational frameworks tailored for accuracy in reliability analysis and speed in design stages, focusing on semiconductors and advanced packaging applications.</p>

Simulators are important tools for analyzing and evaluating different design options for wireless sensor networks (sensornets) and hence, have been intensively studied in the past decades. However, existing simulators only support evaluations of protocols and software aspects of sensornet design. They cannot accurately capture the significant impacts of various hardware designs on sensornet performance.  As a result, the performance/energy benefits of customized hardware designs are difficult to be evaluated in sensornet research. To fill in this technical void, in first section, we describe the design and implementation of SUNSHINE, a scalable hardware-software emulator for sensornet applications. SUNSHINE is the first sensornet simulator that effectively supports joint evaluation and design of sensor hardware and software performance in a networked context. SUNSHINE captures the performance of network protocols, software and hardware up to cycle-level accuracy through its seamless integration of three existing sensornet simulators: a network simulator TOSSIM, an instruction-set simulator SimulAVR and a hardware simulator GEZEL. SUNSHINE solves several sensornet simulation challenges, including data exchanges and time synchronization across different simulation domains and simulation accuracy levels. SUNSHINE also provides hardware specification scheme for simulating flexible and customized hardware designs. Several experiments are given to illustrate SUNSHINE's simulation capability. Evaluation results are provided to demonstrate that SUNSHINE is an efficient tool for software-hardware co-design in sensornet research. Even though SUNSHINE can simulate flexible sensor nodes (nodes contain FPGA chips as coprocessors) in wireless networks, it does not estimate power/energy consumption of sensor nodes. So far, no simulators have been developed to evaluate the performance of such flexible nodes in wireless networks. In second section, we present PowerSUNSHINE, a power- and energy-estimation tool that fills the void. PowerSUNSHINE is the first scalable power/energy estimation tool for WSNs that provides an accurate prediction for both fixed and flexible sensor nodes. In the section, we first describe requirements and challenges of building PowerSUNSHINE. Then, we present power/energy models for both fixed and flexible sensor nodes. Two testbeds, a MicaZ platform and a flexible node consisting of a microcontroller, a radio and a FPGA based co-processor, are provided to demonstrate the simulation fidelity of PowerSUNSHINE. We also discuss several evaluation results based on simulation and testbeds to show that PowerSUNSHINE is a scalable simulation tool that provides accurate estimation of power/energy consumption for both fixed and flexible sensor nodes. Since the main components of sensor nodes include a microcontroller and a wireless transceiver (radio), their real-time performance may be a bottleneck when executing computation-intensive tasks in sensor networks. A coprocessor can alleviate the burden of microcontroller from multiple tasks and hence decrease the probability of dropping packets from wireless channel. Even though adding a coprocessor would gain benefits for sensor networks, designing applications for sensor nodes with coprocessors from scratch is challenging due to the consideration of design details in multiple domains, including software, hardware, and network. To solve this problem, we propose a hardware-software co-design framework for network applications that contain multiprocessor sensor nodes. The framework includes a three-layered architecture for multiprocessor sensor nodes and application interfaces under the framework. The layered architecture is to make the design of multiprocessor nodes' applications flexible and efficient. The application interfaces under the framework are implemented for deploying reliable applications of multiprocessor sensor nodes. Resource sharing technique is provided to make processor, coprocessor and radio work coordinately via communication bus. Several testbeds containing multiprocessor sensor nodes are deployed to evaluate the effectiveness of our framework. Network experiments are executed in SUNSHINE emulator to demonstrate the benefits of using multiprocessor sensor nodes in many network scenarios. / Ph. D.

Yes / UK and global policies recommend whole-school approaches to improve childrens' inadequate physical activity (PA) levels. Yet, recent meta-analyses establish current interventions as ineffective due to suboptimal implementation rates and poor sustainability. To create effective interventions, which recognise schools as complex adaptive sub-systems, multi-stakeholder input is necessary. Further, to ensure 'systems' change, a framework is required that identifies all components of a whole-school PA approach. The study's aim was to co-develop a whole-school PA framework using the double diamond design approach (DDDA). Fifty stakeholders engaged in a six-phase DDDA workshop undertaking tasks within same stakeholder (n = 9; UK researchers, public health specialists, active schools coordinators, headteachers, teachers, active partner schools specialists, national organisations, Sport England local delivery pilot representatives and international researchers) and mixed (n = 6) stakeholder groupings. Six draft frameworks were created before stakeholders voted for one 'initial' framework. Next, stakeholders reviewed the 'initial' framework, proposing modifications. Following the workshop, stakeholders voted on eight modifications using an online questionnaire. Following voting, the Creating Active Schools Framework (CAS) was designed. At the centre, ethos and practice drive school policy and vision, creating the physical and social environments in which five key stakeholder groups operate to deliver PA through seven opportunities both within and beyond school. At the top of the model, initial and in-service teacher training foster teachers' capability, opportunity and motivation (COM-B) to deliver whole-school PA. National policy and organisations drive top-down initiatives that support or hinder whole-school PA. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time practitioners, policymakers and researchers have co-designed a whole-school PA framework from initial conception. The novelty of CAS resides in identifying the multitude of interconnecting components of a whole-school adaptive sub-system; exposing the complexity required to create systems change. The framework can be used to shape future policy, research and practice to embed sustainable PA interventions within schools. To enact such change, CAS presents a potential paradigm shift, providing a map and method to guide future co-production by multiple experts of PA initiatives 'with' schools, while abandoning outdated traditional approaches of implementing interventions 'on' schools. / The conference and workshop were jointly funded through an internal Leeds Beckett Research grant, the Yorkshire Sport Foundation and Public Health England (Yorkshire and Humber). Twinkl Educational Publishing kindly sponsored the conference and workshop event. DDB and SEB’s involvement was supported by Sport England’s Local Delivery Pilot – Bradford. DDB and SEB invovlement was also funded by the National Institute for Health Research Yorkshire and Humber ARC (reference: NIHR20016), and the UK Prevention Research Partnership, an initiative funded by UK Research and Innovation Councils, the Department of Health and Social Care (England) and the UK devolved administrations, and leading health research charities. ACR is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration East Midlands (ARC EM).