This thesis presents a PhD research project into how learning takes place at the interface of design and client business in a leading-edge design consultancy. The role of design has changed from what was once considered a tactical activity, to a more strategic role today. Designers today are also faced with increasingly complex problems, and debate surrounding the modern emergence of design thinking (Brown, 2009, Lockwood, 2010, Martin, 2009) suggests that designers, now more than ever, need to be client business-aware in order for the UK design industry to remain competitive. Designers therefore, need client business-awareness. But how do they learn to bolster their client business-awareness while working in industry? Can this be used to inform the delivery of design education? This thesis uses a qualitative case study research methodology to examine how designers working in a complex and competitive industry learn to become more client business-aware, and it extends the examination of these findings from the particular case study to the design industry, and to the wider context of the delivery of design education. Factors of influence include methods of learning, specific learning activities, environment and culture. This thesis also uncovers a phenomenon later referred to as the tacit-explicit-tacit dimension. When examining knowledge frameworks in organisations, the literature highlights the desire to make tacit principles explicit and for these to remain explicit, and even to then 'proceduralise' these into a code of practice, or set of procedures (Bohn, 1998). And so, the principles of making something explicit that was once tacit tend to focus on the area of knowledge. This thesis, however, will demonstrate how tacit principles surrounding the acquisition of client-facing business-awareness are made explicit, and then, instead of these elements remaining explicit or becoming 'proceduralised', are made tacit once more, by embedding and tailoring this now explicit 'awareness' into the fabric of the organisation.

Artefact and design process knowledge continually evolve during design development and are closely coupled. Considerable research has been conducted on the artefact, design process knowledge, and their inter-relationships. However, they have only focused on general or specific aspects of their coupling. To address this lack of knowledge, the research presented in this thesis has focused on modelling the nature of the coupling of evolutionary artefact and design process knowledge. A triangulation approach was adopted in the research, through which a coupling model was developed based on different methods including literature review, content analysis, and protocol analysis. The model was subsequently evaluated by questionnaire. A basic set of artefact and design process knowledge elements involved in the coupling (22 in all) were identified through literature review and verified by content analysis of eight industrial design documents and protocol analysis of a supervised student design project. They include 11 fundamental and 4 contextual artefact and 5 fundamental and 2 contextual design process knowledge elements. Occurrence trends of these elements over task clarification, conceptual, and embodiment design were revealed through the protocol analysis, which shows that different types of knowledge elements exhibit different trend patterns, such as increasing, decreasing, or relatively stable. The coupling was found to be composed of 6 creation and 15 employment links through the content analysis. The protocol analysis of the coupling links resulted in 18 creation and 15 employment links. The evolved coupling model is derived through combining the results obtained from both the content and protocol analysis, which was found to be composed of 19 creation and 17 employment links between the artefact and design process knowledge elements. The work reported in this thesis was evaluated through questionnaires answered in two workshops by eight practising designers. The evaluation revealed that all of the 22 knowledge elements were considered to occur during design development. Differences were found not only between the results obtained from the analysis and evaluation, but also among the designers. Specifically, it showed that, of the 22 evaluated elements, 2 were viewed as having the same trend as that obtained from the protocol analysis, while 7 were viewed as similar, and 13 were viewed as different. Moreover, the evaluation resulted in 48 creation and 42 employment links. Among them, 9 creation and 12 employment links were also identified from the content and protocol analysis. However, there were still 12 creation and 7 employment links identified from the analyses that were not identified from the evaluation. Possible reasons for these differences were discussed by comparing results from different designers. Finally, strengths and weaknesses are discussed and potential future work to build on the research are identified.

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Design can be viewed as an activity in which teams of designers work together towards a final solution. As designers collaborate, there is a need to share, coordinate, and annotate various design media. In addition, when a collaborative design project involves both individual and collaborative activities, it is an imperative that the transition between these two types of activity is adequately supported. The designers need to be able to re-establish a common understanding of the state of the project after each individual separately made changes to parts of the design. A collaborative tool such as the interactive tabletop may provide new approach for designers to share these important aspects of their design thinking in a co-located environment. In this research, an evaluation on the usability of an interactive tabletop in a co-located collaborative design task was conducted.

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The use of electrical products has a significant environmental impact, mainly determined by user behaviour, which has overridden the energy efficiency gains in the household from technological and educational solutions. Designers are identifiably in a position to plan and shape the way in which consumption occurs and to fill the gap between values and everyday user actions. Despite this, the literature demonstrates that the use phase of the product life cycle is often neglected in sustainable design. Few attempts have been made to change user behaviour through design-led interventions to limit its environmental burdens. In addition, there is a lack of understanding of users perceptions of environmental issues with reference to the specific context: actual use, habits and fundamental needs of the product as well as the behaviour changing products. This makes creating sustainable use of the household appliance lessen the significance of its original purpose. The aim of this research is to seek the role that design could play in influencing more sustainable actions to reduce environmental household impacts. Based on a comprehensive literature review in diverse disciplinary fields of enquiry, a Design Behaviour Intervention Model has been established to bridge the social-psychological theories of behaviour and the behaviour intervention approaches. To inform this enquiry, a single product type (household cold appliance) was chosen as a case study to explore the capacity of a qualitative behaviour study to identify unsustainable aspects of product use. Two design activities were carried out: one examining the designer s ability to respond to the design brief and the other applying the findings that emerged from the in-depth behaviour analysis and the model into the design process. The selected outcomes from the design study are evaluated by a focus group to uncover the users acceptance level of these concepts and the behaviour intervention approaches applied. The collective findings are discussed along with the usefulness and effectiveness of the Design Behaviour Intervention Model in Design for Sustainable Behaviour. This research highlights that a detailed user study is not only the first step for improving energy efficiency in product use but also the origin of innovative design concepts to tap the market by providing better and greener use experiences. Useful insights on primary findings have emerged: the effectiveness of applying the social-psychological theory in the Sustainable Design domain; principles of improving effectiveness and acceptability of the behaviour interventions; and a guide for Design for Sustainable Behaviour.

Designers consider the future as an intrinsic aspect of the design process yet, there has been limited academic investigation of the approaches designers employ to create next- next generation products and services. The central aim of this thesis is to investigate the role of futures thinking in design. It draws upon the field of future studies to provide a theoretical base for the research. The research answers three questions: How do designers engage with the future within the design process? What futures thinking methods are employed in the design process? What futures thinking methods do designers employ? Data was collected via semi-structured interviews in the UK and USA with 40+ designers, researchers, and design managers. Six research propositions provide a framework for qualitative data analysis through which a series of theoretical categories and associated substantive factors are identified. Analysis of the research findings supported the development of a design futures framework that communicates a representative picture of the role of future thinking in design, and contributes to understanding the ways in which designers consider the future in the design process. The study identifies the growing need for organisations to engage designers to consider the future within an increasingly complex and competitive product and service developmental landscape.

Drawing on descriptions and interpretations of the design process from the design studies literature, this thesis explores and develops a method of interpreting and analysing data about large public projects whose contexts lie outside conventional design studies. The thesis undertakes a design analysis of parliamentary debate and draws data from the documentary records of two infrastructure projects. The first is High Speed Two (HS2), the London to Birmingham rail link proposed by the UK Government in 2010. Parliamentary bills were passing through both houses of Parliament and the relevant select committees, as this research was under way. The second, providing an historical counterpoint, is the first London to Birmingham Railway, planned and built between 1830-38. Through a series of studies of transcripts of debates, committee proceedings and records of meetings, the application of design analysis as a method is refined and reviewed. This analysis yields insight and understanding of the parliamentary processes, including debates and committee proceedings involved in planning and designing major public infrastructure, as well as making a contribution to the field of design studies and its methods. The implications this work has for design research are: • As a contribution to the ongoing debate about the scope and relevance of design studies as a discipline; • As a recognition of the value of the parliamentary record as a dataset, providing detailed records of design processes for complex projects with large budgets that affect large numbers of users; • By drawing on this dataset and recognising the context in which it is created, the importance of such context in the study of design is underlined; • The notion of an assemblage is developed as a mechanism for accommodating, accounting for, and visually representing the actors drawn from the contexts identified.

Art and industrial design share a long history, with some of the first industrial designers originating from the arts. Through the early part of the twentieth century many designers were educated and influenced by artists and on occasions they collaborated in the development of art/design movements. In recent decades this relationship has weakened with artists and industrial designers working towards different goals and paying less attention to how one another work. This research was undertaken to investigate whether contemporary artists were now using methods that may facilitate industrial design.

There may be a predominant tendency that current researchers and design practitioners approach research and designing for visually impaired people (VIP) by using a 'deficit-based' approach or model, which concentrates on addressing their disabilities or limitations resulting from visual impairment (VI), and through the kinds of design strategies and methods they use. Even though these kinds of deficit-based approaches may assist designers to get a sense of the limitations of impaired vision, they are not helpful for designers to understand the more resourceful 'assets' and strategies that VIP may already have developed and use in everyday life. Rather than addressing their disabilities, this research has used an 'asset-based' approach to develop a deeper understanding of VIP's innate capabilities and to establish the extent to which variables such as age, when and how VI occurred, and the kinds of environments they encounter which can affect their use of different kinds and combinations of navigational strategies (NSs), when making a variety of journeys within familiar and unfamiliar environments.