Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2004. / Includes bibliography.

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University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building / My research takes place against the backdrop of the design research debate ongoing since the 1990s. This debate highlighted the potential contributions that design artefacts and practice could make in a scholarly and professional research context. Despite numerous interesting possibilities, the discussions taking place in the design research community largely do not attend to contemporary Visual Communication Design practices and outcomes. In this research, I specifically focus on outcomes taking place at the margins of the Visual Communication field, which, though peripheral, are both admired and engaging, and what this research entitles ‘sticky’. Eleven projects are examined including, for example, one that collected the ephemera serving as the impromptu bookmarks in the books shelved in a university library, yielding the meticulous inventory of three hundred scraps of paper listed by Dewey decimal classification number. Despite their ‘stickiness’, I found that these outcomes are in fact only partially accounted for by key authorities in Visual Communication Design: despite a strong graphic language these projects are not concerned to convey an unmistakable message directed to a particular audience. Instead other discussions taking place in the sociological sub-field of Visual Research, which values the open-ended inquiry of the observable features of everyday subject matter, seemed more relevant. Ultimately however, in view of other expectations – a theoretical framework and sustained textual analysis – these ‘sticky’ projects similarly confound Visual Research. Consequently I realised that these ‘sticky’ projects are ‘homeless’ and, to indicate the partial explanations provided by Visual Communication Design and Visual Research, I tagged them ‘creative, investigative, visual projects’. This research thus sets out to derive a language to attend to such ‘sticky’ but ‘homeless’ creative, investigative, visual projects. I explored diverse literature and additional visual work – on topics such as the origins of the encyclopaedia, the tendency to make lists, psychological explanations for keeping personal collections, scientific visualizations, French Poetry, experimental travel, where to file UFOs in a picture archive, information management, the anatomy of the human heart, documentary photography and post–modern cartography. By bringing this interdisciplinary analysis to bear on the set of ‘sticky’, ‘homeless’, creative, investigative, visual projects, I derived a language of Collecting, Ordering and Positioning. From this tripartite model a design strategy was then extrapolated which I applied to produce an original creative, investigative, visual project, called BikeWork, which involved the participation of sixty-five cyclists and production of a series of three posters. This research concludes by speculating that the value of a creative, investigative, visual approach – vivid and systematic though fragmentary and approximate – is its agency. Accordingly I finally recommend that future ‘sticky’ researchers further explore the distinctive appeal of a vivid and fragmentary approach. THE ‘HOMELESS’, ‘STICKY’ DESIGN IN QUESTION Eleven key projects are discussed. Collecting Lipstick (Greene 2001) Why Are All These Books Orange? (Siegel 2004) The Last Periods of Some Books (magnified 4266%) (Buchanan-Smith 2003 [2002]) The Bicycle, Cross, and Desert (Weed 2005) A Coming Of Age Reading Checklist (McMullen 2004) The Readers Before Us (Waller & Beard 2002) Ordering Periodic Breakfast Table (Weese & Halpern 2001) Endcommercial: Reading the City (Böhm, Pizzaroni & Scheppe 2002) I [heart] [heart] (Daly 2007 [2005]) Positioning Newsmap (Weskamp 2004) NameVoyager (Wattenberg & Wattenberg 2004-2005)

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building / My research takes place against the backdrop of the design research debate ongoing since the 1990s. This debate highlighted the potential contributions that design artefacts and practice could make in a scholarly and professional research context. Despite numerous interesting possibilities, the discussions taking place in the design research community largely do not attend to contemporary Visual Communication Design practices and outcomes. In this research, I specifically focus on outcomes taking place at the margins of the Visual Communication field, which, though peripheral, are both admired and engaging, and what this research entitles ‘sticky’. Eleven projects are examined including, for example, one that collected the ephemera serving as the impromptu bookmarks in the books shelved in a university library, yielding the meticulous inventory of three hundred scraps of paper listed by Dewey decimal classification number. Despite their ‘stickiness’, I found that these outcomes are in fact only partially accounted for by key authorities in Visual Communication Design: despite a strong graphic language these projects are not concerned to convey an unmistakable message directed to a particular audience. Instead other discussions taking place in the sociological sub-field of Visual Research, which values the open-ended inquiry of the observable features of everyday subject matter, seemed more relevant. Ultimately however, in view of other expectations – a theoretical framework and sustained textual analysis – these ‘sticky’ projects similarly confound Visual Research. Consequently I realised that these ‘sticky’ projects are ‘homeless’ and, to indicate the partial explanations provided by Visual Communication Design and Visual Research, I tagged them ‘creative, investigative, visual projects’. This research thus sets out to derive a language to attend to such ‘sticky’ but ‘homeless’ creative, investigative, visual projects. I explored diverse literature and additional visual work – on topics such as the origins of the encyclopaedia, the tendency to make lists, psychological explanations for keeping personal collections, scientific visualizations, French Poetry, experimental travel, where to file UFOs in a picture archive, information management, the anatomy of the human heart, documentary photography and post–modern cartography. By bringing this interdisciplinary analysis to bear on the set of ‘sticky’, ‘homeless’, creative, investigative, visual projects, I derived a language of Collecting, Ordering and Positioning. From this tripartite model a design strategy was then extrapolated which I applied to produce an original creative, investigative, visual project, called BikeWork, which involved the participation of sixty-five cyclists and production of a series of three posters. This research concludes by speculating that the value of a creative, investigative, visual approach – vivid and systematic though fragmentary and approximate – is its agency. Accordingly I finally recommend that future ‘sticky’ researchers further explore the distinctive appeal of a vivid and fragmentary approach. THE ‘HOMELESS’, ‘STICKY’ DESIGN IN QUESTION Eleven key projects are discussed. Collecting Lipstick (Greene 2001) Why Are All These Books Orange? (Siegel 2004) The Last Periods of Some Books (magnified 4266%) (Buchanan-Smith 2003 [2002]) The Bicycle, Cross, and Desert (Weed 2005) A Coming Of Age Reading Checklist (McMullen 2004) The Readers Before Us (Waller & Beard 2002) Ordering Periodic Breakfast Table (Weese & Halpern 2001) Endcommercial: Reading the City (Böhm, Pizzaroni & Scheppe 2002) I [heart] [heart] (Daly 2007 [2005]) Positioning Newsmap (Weskamp 2004) NameVoyager (Wattenberg & Wattenberg 2004-2005)

No description available.

The design of medical devices has failed to satisfy the needs of resource-limited settings (RLSs). Whether purposefully designed for RSLs or transferred from a high-income country, the resulting devices often misalign with the characteristics of the context and the real needs of users. The challenges of contextualising medical devices in RLSs are widely acknowledged, but research to overcome these issues in practice is lacking. This study focuses on examining and defining the context for medical devices in RLSs. Two perspectives were employed for the study of context of medical devices in RLSs. The first approach, using design expert interviews and a systematic literature review, resulted in a contextual framework with factors relevant for the design, use and deployment of medical devices in RLSs. These factors were categorised in eight groups: public health, industrial, technological, institutional, financial, socio-cultural, geographical or environmental and economic. This approach, however, falls short in understanding the complexities behind these contextual factors. In order to tackle these limitations, the second approach used generative techniques for network mapping and mixed-methods for network analysis. This network approach resulted in the identification of networks surrounding MDs in RLSs, and the roles played by medical devices in these networks. These roles were categorised by type of interaction in six types: wellbeing, affiliation, organisational, clinical practice, cognitive and technical. Three assemblies of entities were also identified that were responsible for ensuring that MDs stay in the network and are available, used, maintained, and ultimately replaced when they fail. From this perspective, the investigation focused on how devices move in the network, change roles and are supported by other actors. In other words, the elements that assemble and allow medical devices to exist and subsist in the networks of care. Complexity and non-reducibility are at the core of this approach. The results from the exercise show that the approach sheds light on interesting and unexpected aspects of the use, adoption or deployment of medical devices in RLSs. However, the approach is abstract and overwhelmingly difficult to grasp in practical research. The approaches are compared and contrasted using an example of a MDs designed for RLSs. The approaches are not seen as competing but as complementary views of context. Their advantages and disadvantages are described, and recommendations are made for their application and improvement. The conclusions from this study contribute to new approaches to exploring the context of use for products in Design research by using, on the one hand, the concept of the collectives---as proposed by the actor-network theory---and, on the other hand, the idea of a holistic contextual framework for product design and development. For the field of global health, this research contributes to improving the design of much-needed technologies as solutions to global challenges.

Modern product design projects are often challenged by their interdisciplinary nature, increasing product complexity and time pressure. The challenge for product designers is to recall all relevant design aspects that are potentially applicable and important for the product to be designed at the right time. The negligence of certain design aspects may result in increased development costs and in inferior products. A recommended way to handle complexity in the design process is to work systematically, with checklists and guidelines offering a possibility to support product designers in this task. However, design guidelines that provide a comprehensive and generically content that support product designers holistically in their design projects are not readily available. Moreover, in-depth evaluations of the role, use, usefulness and usability of design guidelines are quite rare in the current literature. Therefore, the research study presented in this thesis sought to accomplish two tasks: the generation of a comprehensive set of generic and practically aimed product design guidelines in a paper-copy format that holistically supports product designers in their often complex design projects; and the evaluation of these generated design guidelines with the purpose of determining their role, use, usefulness and usability for product designers. A comprehensive and generically applicable set of product design guidelines in a ready-to-use paper-copy format that holistically provides in-depth information for the product design aspects that need to be considered during a design process was generated. Besides, a research study, using questionnaires and interviews, with product design students and professional product designers in New Zealand was carried out with the purpose of determining the role, use, usefulness and usability of the generated design guidelines for designers. As a consequence, valuable insights into the role of the guidelines as practitioners� design tool for professional designers and noteworthy findings about the role of the guidelines as educational tool for novice designers were obtained. The findings suggested that the use of guidelines as a tool in the design process is generally not very prevalent due to the designers� lack of knowledge about the benefits, location and accessibility of useful product design guidelines. Furthermore, it has been found that the designers used the generated guidelines sporadically and driven by their interest or demand in the design aspects applicable to their projects. In terms of the guidelines� usefulness it has been identified that the guidelines evaluated were generically applicable to different projects and provided a specific in-depth content. The guidelines have also been found to be quite useful as educational, planning, management and evaluation tool for novice and professional designers. However, in terms of the guidelines� usability, several problems were determined that made the generated guidelines too inefficient to be beneficial for the participants, especially for the professional designers. Accordingly, it has been concluded that a change of the guidelines� format into a digital interactive format, is likely to solve most of the identified problems and provide a useful and usable tool for product designers respectively.

Modern product design projects are often challenged by their interdisciplinary nature, increasing product complexity and time pressure. The challenge for product designers is to recall all relevant design aspects that are potentially applicable and important for the product to be designed at the right time. The negligence of certain design aspects may result in increased development costs and in inferior products. A recommended way to handle complexity in the design process is to work systematically, with checklists and guidelines offering a possibility to support product designers in this task. However, design guidelines that provide a comprehensive and generically content that support product designers holistically in their design projects are not readily available. Moreover, in-depth evaluations of the role, use, usefulness and usability of design guidelines are quite rare in the current literature. Therefore, the research study presented in this thesis sought to accomplish two tasks: the generation of a comprehensive set of generic and practically aimed product design guidelines in a paper-copy format that holistically supports product designers in their often complex design projects; and the evaluation of these generated design guidelines with the purpose of determining their role, use, usefulness and usability for product designers. A comprehensive and generically applicable set of product design guidelines in a ready-to-use paper-copy format that holistically provides in-depth information for the product design aspects that need to be considered during a design process was generated. Besides, a research study, using questionnaires and interviews, with product design students and professional product designers in New Zealand was carried out with the purpose of determining the role, use, usefulness and usability of the generated design guidelines for designers. As a consequence, valuable insights into the role of the guidelines as practitioners� design tool for professional designers and noteworthy findings about the role of the guidelines as educational tool for novice designers were obtained. The findings suggested that the use of guidelines as a tool in the design process is generally not very prevalent due to the designers� lack of knowledge about the benefits, location and accessibility of useful product design guidelines. Furthermore, it has been found that the designers used the generated guidelines sporadically and driven by their interest or demand in the design aspects applicable to their projects. In terms of the guidelines� usefulness it has been identified that the guidelines evaluated were generically applicable to different projects and provided a specific in-depth content. The guidelines have also been found to be quite useful as educational, planning, management and evaluation tool for novice and professional designers. However, in terms of the guidelines� usability, several problems were determined that made the generated guidelines too inefficient to be beneficial for the participants, especially for the professional designers. Accordingly, it has been concluded that a change of the guidelines� format into a digital interactive format, is likely to solve most of the identified problems and provide a useful and usable tool for product designers respectively.