Thesis (M.F.A.)--Washington State University, May 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 12).

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This thesis broadly engages with the design process and design education, but focuses particularly on sociocultural and (in)tangible references that are communicated verbally, visually and textually within the design environment. With the aim of defining references and subsequently understanding the contextualized sociocultural environments ethnographically oriented methods and an interdisciplinary theoretical model are developed and applied to two field studies. This research combines design with cultural anthropology, social psychology and social cognition towards gaining a more holistic viewpoint on design processes. Each empirical field study uses the same research approach, methodology, theoretical framework, and subsequent data analyses and display. The methods include observational techniques, questionnaires to query personal information, and informal interviews to track the design process. Videotape recordings are used to track the in-studio activity and still photography is used to capture the visual communications along with the sociocultural context of the participants. The studies are longitudinal, being six and seven weeks in duration, and follow university level industrial design students and their instructors from the onset of their design brief to the completion of their project. The first study takes place in Scotland in the United Kingdom (UK) where the students are working towards the design of an airline meal tray. The second study takes place in Western Canada and involves the design of sports eyewear. This research defines and describes sociocultural factors as these are identified through references. Sociocultural references include the individual-personal and social-cultural inforrnation that is embedded in an individuals' personal make-up, called here sociocultural capital. How, when and why sociocultural capital is used during the creation of an artefact is of primary interest in this work. Design decisions are made regarding artefact form, overall aesthetics, materials, manufacture, user experience and more. These decisions are made through considering the stakeholders in the project (e.g., instructors, clients, users) and references to these are called tangible because they are easily relatable to the design brief and the well-known documented stages of deSigning. The references that are abstract and have distance from the task at hand are called the intangibles. Sociocultural references are both tangible and intangible but relate specifically to the sociocultural capital of the individuals making them. Patterns, themes and categories about the design process, designing, the individual design students and two educational scenarios including the studio culture and design culture are revealed through the references. This research herein discusses and raises three central ideas as follows: • A theoretical model called the deSign process milieu for understanding the holistic designing scenario including inside-local, inside-universal, outside-local and inside-universal environments. This includes a detailed breakdown of how to use the model including a systematic approach, methods and analyses system. • A definition and description of the nature of (in)tangible references including when and why they are used during the design process. • Detailed descriptions of two design environments including the studio culture and design culture. It is argued in this research that references provide important details about the sociocultural context of the design scenario. Furthermore it is also argued that all things discussed in the design process are meaningful and have the potential to steer the development of an artefact. Therefore, there are substantial implications for this research relating to how design students, educators and designers are affected by the sociocultural contexts enveloping them; what types of sociocultural capital designers use; and to a lesser degree, how, when and why they use their sociocultural capital. The insights from this work result in recommendations for design education, practice and design research in general.

This thesis brings forth a perspective on the need for an isolated conceptual design phase in process models of designing. The perspective is made possible by identifying theories to describe designers in practice. The research sets out to describe concept negotiation during early design collaboration in cross-cultural teams of Western designers and Chinese designers. A series of ethnographic studies and in-depth interviews were carried out in a leading design practice in China on collocated and synchronous teams of Chinese designers from Mainland China, and Western designers from Germany, France and America. Themes were interpreted from the observations and interview through inductive analyses using a grounded theory approach and a hermeneutic circle. Silences among Chinese designers were first observed during design meetings, instead of verbal discussion in an argumentative process as anticipated by the social process of negotiation. Socio-linguistic reasons are understood to be influential but rectifiable by both Western and Chinese designers. Instead, a pattern of their differences in concept articulation became evidential and brought about a subsequent hermeneutic turn to also describe concept generation. The description on their cognitive patterns found dichotomies in creative processes between Western and Chinese designers. Specifically it was found that Chinese designers tend to ideate and Western designers tend to conceptualise. To overcome the dichotomies, the company's elaborate design process with an abstract-concrete progression was simplified into a situationist design cycle in which designing happens in a creative space. A literature review on design processes identified the isolated conceptual design phase as a fixated ideal from 1980s design models. Crucially, the conceptual design phase with an abstract-concrete progression is equated with the early design stage when studying designers in collaboration. Conceptualisation and concepts remain very much influential today. The dichotomies in creative processes between Western designers and Chinese designers brought to light an epistemological comparison between the rationalist and the situationist. The dichotomies were at first posed as difficulties but later overcome by the cross-cultural teams by making their practice flexible without specific design process. Instead of commonly studying designers at the conceptual design stage and analysing design concept, this thesis identified the designers' differences in creative processes as factors to be considered when studying designers in collaboration.

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Since childhood, drawing has been a constant method and medium of enquiry for me, a medium that is beyond the term ‘art’, that is an instinctive physical and perceptual response to phenomena. As such, it is a natural development for me to desire to understand this phenomenon, to question the act of drawing as a mode of communication that appears to be so suitable to my understanding. This has led to a period of research into the formal structures of drawing, to ask how abstract marks on a ground can be of use to our understanding. Developed to question the universal relevance of drawing, this study is a practice-led investigation into the formal tectonics of drawing practice. As such it charts a period of research that comprises a re-learning of the building blocks of drawing practice in an effort to better understand how drawing influences how we encounter the world or, how drawing structures visual perception. Part I begins by outlining the historical lineage of which this thesis is a continuance, positioning the research as a non-essentialist, moderate manifestation of the formalist position. Part I proceeds to employ drawing as an analytical tool, to compartmentalise a past drawing into seven distinct components, identified as united within the diversity of the drawing process. The seven components are not original in their connection to drawing, and therefore do not, by their mere presence, comprise an original contribution to knowledge. In fact it is the universal acceptance of the components as the formal scaffold on which most drawings are built, that enables a rigorous interrogation of their properties to be undertaken, further explored and developed so that an understanding of how these components structure the visual perception of the drawer can be reached. Adopting the seven components as seven separate lines of inquiry, Part II establishes the Components of Drawing. Each is subsequently analysed and extended through my practice, theory and pedagogy. Within this process drawing operates as the principal originator, developer and vector of the hypothesis, the core of the investigation being a heuristic analysis of the structure of drawing that mobilises the components of drawing from a subconscious by-product of process, to a conscious understanding of the purposiveness of each mark made. The study concludes with a reflection on the research period in response to the hypothesis outlining the original contribution to knowledge, before positing possible future areas for further research.

A graph consists of a set and a binary relation on that set. Each element of the set is a node of the graph, while each element of the binary relation is an edge of the graph that encodes a relationship between two nodes. Graph are pervasive in many areas of science, engineering, and the social sciences: servers on the Internet are connected, proteins interact in large biological systems, social networks encode the relationships between people, and functions call each other in a program. In these domains, the graphs can become very large, consisting of hundreds of thousands of nodes and millions of edges. Graph drawing approaches endeavour to place these nodes in two or three-dimensional space with the intention of fostering an understanding of the binary relation by a human being examining the image. However, many of these approaches to drawing do not exploit higher-level structures in the graph beyond the nodes and edges. Frequently, these structures can be exploited for drawing. As an example, consider a large computer network where nodes are servers and edges are connections between those servers. If a user would like understand how servers at UBC connect to the rest of the network, a drawing that accentuates the set of nodes representing those servers may be more helpful than an approach where all nodes are drawn in the same way. In a feature-based approach, features are subgraphs exploited for the purposes of drawing. We endeavour to depict not only the binary relation, but the high-level relationships between features. This thesis extensively explores a feature-based approach to graph vi sualization and demonstrates the viability of tools that aid in the visual ization of large graphs. Our contributions lie in presenting and evaluating novel techniques and algorithms for graph visualization. We implement five systems in order to empirically evaluate these techniques and algorithms, comparing them to previous approaches. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

How is a process of serial drawing understood to record the phenomenological stream of consciousness that underpins it? This research question emerges from a hypothesis driving the research: that when considered as a form of expression which speaks in a particular way (Tormey, 2007), drawing re-presents ( records ) the stream of consciousness underpinning it in a rather fundamental manner. The purpose of this first person, practice-led research is to question how this hypothesis is understood, treating it as an assumption to be tested via practice and theory combined. Within the research this hypothesis is linked to both the wider assumption that drawing records thought (Rosand, 2002) and to the contemporary idea that drawing is a form of perpetual becoming (Hoptman, 2002; de Zegher & Butler, 2010) given the temporality which underpins the act of drawing. To help facilitate investigation of the hypothesis, the assumption that drawing records thought is duly suspended (bracketed) for the duration of the research, allowing the structure and process of serially developed drawing (Chavez, 2004) in conjunction with first-person methods for approaching phenomenal consciousness (Varela & Shear, 1999; Depraz, 1999) to investigate it in practical terms. The significance of the research resides in a scrutiny of the drawing process, undertaken in close relation to Husserl s (1931/2012; 1950/1999) Phenomenology. As a result, the phenomenon of drawing is re-described as a self-temporalizing phenomenon, emphasising how the appearance of drawing (noun) not only re-presents the prior act of drawing (verb) which produced it, but also provides the practitioner with a look ahead, indicating the hope and expectation of drawings not yet made. This claim emerges via the specific manner in which my serially developed drawings demonstrate re-presenting the streaming of consciousness described (in Husserlian terms) as the self-temporalization of consciousness, experienced within the duration of now. This phenomenological description of how drawing operates builds upon Rawson s (1969/1987) statement regarding the special charm of drawing - the underlying quality of movement that drawings (noun) exhibit on the basis they were drawn. Husserl s protentional focus on hope and expectation (de Warren, 2009) allows the research to expand upon this idea, describing the underlying movement within drawing as a form of self-temporalization that also points ahead to what is not yet drawn. This forward looking, practitioner centred claim is intended to compliment the focus on trace and memory that a proportion of the current critical discourse on drawing remains engaged with (Newman M, 1996; Tormey, 2007; Newman & de Zegher, 2003; Derrida J, 1993).