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This study focuses on critical design practice. The research challenges the colloquial understanding of ‘critical design.’ It problamatises, defines and reassesses the concept of ‘critical design’ situating it among other forms of critical design practice. The research reviews the field of activity from a historical perspective. It reviews contemporary activity in contexts of design research and the gallery system to establish domain authorities and theoretical perspectives that inform critical design practice. The research draws from a body of literature relating to design theory and critical design practice to identify several important themes by which to discuss the practice. The research employs a hermeneutic methodology and engages expert ‘critical’ designers through a series of conversational interviews. The interviews are analysed using code to theory methods of inductive qualitative analysis and subjected to hermeneutic analysis that draws on the extensive contextual review. Salient concepts found in the discourse are extracted, theorised and organised to create taxonomy of critical design practice. In the taxonomy, the field of critical design practice is categorised by three types of practice: Associative Design, Speculative Design and Critical Design. These three practices are differentiated by topics addressed in each and further differentiated by the type of Satire, Narrative and Object Rationality used in each practice. The original contribution of this research is a Taxonomy of critical practice in product design, which consists of a written and visual dimension. The taxonomy acts as a discursive tool to chart design activity and it illustrates the diversity in critical design practice beyond the colloquial understanding of ‘critical design’. The taxonomy presents three distinct types of critical design practice; it outlines the design methods used to establish the critical move through design and identifies the contexts where critical design is practiced. It can be used to compare projects, chart designers’ activity over time, illustrate trajectories of practice and identify themes in practice. The taxonomy provides theoretical apparatus to analyse the field. Such analysis contributes towards a discussion on critical design within design studies.

To succeed and survive in competitive markets, products need to be of the desired quality. Quality is how well the product, in its entirety, satisfies the needs of the intended customers. With products in industrial markets, there are many different types of customers to satisfy. Research has been published that is of general use to help define the New Product Development (NPD) process and the management of its activities and this was useful as a basis for this research study. However, little previous work is available that details the specific aspect of designing for customer needs compliance. An exploratory investigation, using analysis of selected cases and experience surveys, was undertaken to help direct conceptual work. A conceptual model was developed to help describe the NPD process and customer needs compliance. The hypotheses that guided the main study sought to understand the perceptions which the design team has of the product in terms of different customer needs. They also aimed to determine how information management during NPD may affect the final design and, consequently, the quality of the product. With the objective of drawing conclusions across the four companies involved in the main study, collection methods and data analysis provided quantitative results on what is essentially qualitative types of information. The findings conclude that each of the companies do perceive a difference in the needs of the customers between different product types. However, they also imply that specific types of customers have similar needs, no matter what types of products are involved. With a small set of respondents in each company, no evidence was found to suggest that the different perceptions the people involved in the design and development of the product had could be attributed to the functional, managerial or customer involvement groupings under investigation. However, there was some evidence that customer needs compliance may be affected by the way the company handled its information management during the NPD process.

Possible changes in brain metabolites are associated with Motor Neurone Disease (MND). Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) has been performed on the brains of MND patients and control volunteers to acquire signals which contain information about brain metabolites from within the motor cortex area. Discrimination between JvThD and normal groups may help to understand the pathogenic mechanisms in MND and may be useful for monitoring the effects of future trial treatment regimens. The research described in this thesis presents the development of a pattern recognition system based on neural networks to correctly distinguish between motor neurone disease (MND) patients and controls when presented with a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum. The NMR spectra are pre-processed to obtain consistent data, and statistical parameters are extracted and selected from each spectrum. Four statistical neural network classifiers are used to provide information and initial decisions (MND/normal). A neural network is then used to combine these to give a final decision. Experimental results indicate that the system can achieve high performance classification on the spectra, including spectra not seen by the system during training. The experiment was repeated on different training and test sets to validate the method and the repeated design shows that the final system was able to achieve high performance classification. A ifizzy rule-based system teclmique is applied to translate and extract rules encoded in weights of neural network classifiers. The neural networks are translated into a few comprehensible rules to understand how the network performs the final decision.

This thesis describes research in the area of automated industrial inspection using machine vision systems. It is anticipated that the algorithms described will contribute to the design of a machine vision system for the automatic surface inspection of cylindrical pellets. Firstly, the acquisition and segmentation of pellet tray images using area capture is described. Individual pellets are segmented from a pellet tray image by a novel system using the Radon transform coupled with data clustering. Subsequent to the segmentation, the linking of four pellet views depicting the entire circumferential area of the pellet is described along with a simple technique to compensate for intensity variations brought about by imaging the three-dimensional cylindrical surface of the pellet. The image processing techniques of filtering, edge detection, thresholding and morphology are used in the segmentation of grey level pellet defect images. The grey level pellet images are low-pass filtered and binary images formed using edge detection with thresholding. Binary morphology operators are then used in conjunction with a termination condition based on the number of objects in the image to ensure homogenous defect representations. The problem of overlapping defects is addressed, resulting in a second algorithm using the Radon transform coupled with data clustering. Prior to classification salient features are extracted from a set of synthetic binary defect images to form feature vectors. The novel idea of image object classification using 100% fuzzy inference is described, and results are shown to be superior to results obtained by feature space classifiers. The sub-classification of crack defects is carried out using a heuristic classifier, and the parameterisation of pellet defects is described.

The research contained in this thesis provides an investigation into a new method of minimising the perceptual differences when encoding digitised speech. An application of the perceptual criteria is described in the context of a codebook encoding methodology Some of the background studies covered aspects of psychoacoustics, in particular the effects of the human outer, middle and inner ear. Models approximating each region of the ear are utilised and concatenated into a single overall auditory response path model. As the objective of the research is to encode and decode speech waveforms, some study into how speech is produced and the classification of speech sounds is required. From this there is a description of a basic speech production model which is modelled as a digital filter. A review of the main categories for coding schemes that are currently employed is presented along with commonly used coding methods. In particular the codebook coding method is reviewed in sufficient detail to contrast with the new coding method. The development of a new perceptual minimisation criterion which relies on dual application of the auditory response path model on the original and reconstructed speech waveforms is described. In this the ordering of eodebook searches, the frequency spectrum used as the search target, windowing functions with durations and placement are all analysed to determine the optimum encoder design. Also described are a number of prospective gain algorithms which cover both time and frequency domain implementations. A new encoder is constructed which fully integrates the new perceptual criterion into the minimisation of the original and reconstructed speech waveforms. In the minimisation no part of the traditional encoder method is used, however both methods use a similar technique for determining gain factors. Speech derived from both encoders was subjectively assessed by a number of untrained, independent listeners. The results presented show that both methods are comparable but there is a slight preference towards the traditional encoder. A measure of the complexity indicated that the new minimisation method is also more complex than the traditional encoder.

The research contained in this thesis is an investigation into mosaic construction. Mosaic techniques are used to obtain images with a large field of view by assembling a sequence of smaller individual overlapping images. In existing methods of mosaic construction only successive images are aligned. Accumulation of small alignment errors occur, and in the case of the image path returning to a previous position in the mosaic, a significant mismatch between nonconsecutive images will result (looping path problem). A new method for consistently aligning all the images in a mosaic is proposed in this thesis. This is achieved by distribution of the small alignment errors. Each image is allowed to modify its position relative to its neighbour images in the mosaic by a small amount with respect to the computed registration. Two images recorded by a rotating ideal camera are related by the same transformation that relates the camera's sensor plane at the time the images were captured. When two images overlap, the intensity values in both images coincide through the intersection line of the sensor planes. This intersection line has the property that the images can be seamlessly joined through that line. An analogy between the images and the physical world is proposed to solve the looping path problem. The images correspond to rigid objects, and these are linked with forces which pull them towards the right positions with respect to their neighbours. That is, every pair of overlapping images are "hinged" through their corresponding intersection line. Aided by another constraint named the spherical constraint, this network of selforganising images has the ability of distributing itself on the surface of a sphere. As a direct result of the new concepts developed in this research work, spherical mosaics (i.e. mosaics with unlimited horizontal and vertical field of view) can be created.

The levels of income and employment rates of people with disabilities are often lower than those without them. An effective way to free disabled people from these circumstances would be to design proper job accommodation for them. Ordinarily, physical conditions severely restrict their ability to carry out their work efficiently unless they have are provided with appropriately designed assistive technology (AT). However, due to the physical conditions unique to each disabled person, understanding the requirements of a disabled person is often a challenge to an AT designer. The aims of this research were to develop a design model for an empathy tool that would assist in the process of designing AT for job accommodation, and to explore the relationship between the use of empathy tools and the improvement of design elements in job accommodation AT. The design models employed were developed by analysing interviews with AT users and examining the results of observations and a literature review. The model was then used to build an empathy tool to be used in designing job accommodation AT for a selected subject; the empathy tools were used in a series of assessments of designer users. The results show that, when compared with tools used in traditional design briefs, empathy tools can successfully help designers to improve design elements in terms, respectively, of their understanding of users' physical abilities (22 per cent), work requirements (26.6 per cent), ergonomic requirements (22.8 per cent), and environment characteristics (21.4 per cent). Meanwhile, it is difficult for the tool to improve upon other design elements, about which one must learn by gaining design experience.

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The planning and scheduling of appropriate resources is essential in engineering design for delivering quality products on time, within cost and at acceptable risk. There is an inherent complexity in deciding what resources should perform which tasks taking into account their effectiveness towards completing the task, whilst adjusting to their availabilities. The right resources must be applied to the right tasks in the correct order. In this context, process modelling and simulation could aid in resource management decision making. However, most approaches define resources as elements needed to perform the activities without defining their characteristics, or use a single classification such as human designers. Other resources such as computational and testing resources, amongst others have been overlooked during process planning stages. In order to achieve this, literature and empirical investigations were conducted. Firstly, literature investigations focused on what elements have been considered design resources by current modelling approaches. Secondly, empirical studies characterised key design resources, which included designers, computational, testing and prototyping resources. The findings advocated for an approach that allows allocation flexibility to balance different resource instances within the process. In addition, capabilities to diagnose the impact of attaining specific performance to search for a preferred resource allocation were also required. Therefore, the thesis presents a new method to model different resource types with their attributes and studies the impact of using different instances of those resources by simulating the model and analysing the results. The method, which extends a task network model, Applied Signposting Model (ASM), with Bayesian Networks (BN), allows testing the influence of using different resources combinations on process performance. The model uses BN within each task to model different instances of resources that carries out the design activities (computational, designers and testing) along with its configurable attributes (time, risk, learning curve etc.), and tasks requirements. The model was embedded in an approach and was evaluated by applying it to two aerospace case studies. The results identified insights to improve process performance such as the best performing resource combinations, resource utilisation, resource sensitive activities, the impact of different variables, and the probability of reaching set performance targets by the different resource instances.