The rising demand of teamwork during Design for Social Innovation (DfSI) projects has created a need for professional development to be able to work cordially within teams. Traditionally, reflective practices have been considered most effective for the development of professional practice in the field of Design. However, enactive cognitive science points to the practice of Awareness-based Meditative Techniques (AbMT) as an alternate way for such development. Such AbMTs have been extensively studied by different disciplines. This research borrows from: • Social science and positive psychology perspectives, where the act of becoming aware has been associated with an inner value system that guides behaviour. Theoretical perspective from many authors from various backgrounds in AbMT research have been reviewed to propose a model of inner values which could affect teamwork during DfSI project as well as be influenced positively by the practice of AbMT intervention. • A physiological perspective, to measure Heart Rate Variability (HRV) as an indicator of the physical stress which is known to e reduced by AbMT due to an improve ability to deal with such stress. • A psychological perspective, using the Mindful attention and awareness scale (MAAS) questionnaire for quantitative research on the practice of AbMT intervention by participants. Taking a post-positivist stance, this research focuses on creating a depth of information utilising these inter-disciplinary methods. Therefore, three teams working on three similar social innovation projects have been studied for eight weeks- one team populated with all meditators, another with all non-meditators and a third team with both. Analysis of reflections by team members on their own teamwork led to conclusion that- AbMT intervention could lead to improved teamwork during a DfSI project, especially with regard to the responsibilities perceived as the leadership of the team. This is because the meditators in this research reflected that, because of AbMT intervention they could • share responsibilities which they perceived as pertaining to leadership of their team not only with other members of their team but also with the wider community of stakeholders, • prioritise reflective action over unproductive debates for the better functioning of the team rather than satisfaction of own ego and • change their perception from ‘goal oriented’ to ‘people oriented’ approach. Further it was observed that, teams with meditators could use ‘framing’ and ‘reflecting’ activities to work in multi-disciplinary setting of their team and utilise strength of knowledge of their team. It was also observed that teams with meditators got overly focused on social innovation aspects while working with the community of stakeholders and users, and the team temporarily lost focus of financial viability until the client (sponsor) helped the team to regain their focus. However, the relationship between such findings and the effect of AbMT intervention could not be conclusively asserted, though the intervention is one of the key influences on the teams during their DfSI projects. Thus, the key contributions to knowledge from this research are: the model of inner values, the development of the inter-disciplinary hybrid research methodology and evidence of the positive influences that AbMT intervention can have on the teamwork during DfSI projects.

This thesis presents a study of transcendent experiences (TXs) — experiences of connection with something greater than oneself — focusing on what they are, how artefacts support them, and how design can contribute to that support. People often find such experiences transformative, and artefacts do support them — but the literature rarely addresses designing artefact support for TXs. This thesis provides a step toward filling that gap. The first phase of research involved the conduct and analysis of 24 interviews with adults of diverse spiritual perspectives, using constructivist Grounded Theory methods informed by relevant literature and by studies performed earlier in the PhD programme. Analysis found that TXs proceed in three phases — creating the context, living the experience, integrating the experience — and that artefacts support two phases and people desire enhancements to all three. This TX framework supports and extends experience structures from the literature: it recognises the top-level categories as phases in a cycle where integration may alter future contexts, and it extends the structure of TX by incorporating the relationships of artefacts and of enhancement desires to the phases of these experiences. This extended structure constitutes a grounded theory of transcendent user experience (TUX). The second phase involved the design and conduct of three “Transcendhance” game workshops for enhancing transcendence, which incorporated themes from the grounded theory and aimed to elicit design ideas in an atmosphere of imagination, fun, and play. Participants sketched 69 speculative ideas for techno-spiritual artefacts, and analysis mapped them to TX phases and identified possible extensions inspired by relevant research. The great majority of ideas mapped to the phase Creating the Context, with very few mapping to Living the Experience, which suggests that context may be easier than lived experience to understand and address directly. This point is especially important for experiences such as TX that are tricky to define, impossible to arrange or anticipate, and thus unsuitable for straight-forward “classic” user experience methods. The final phase involved the elaboration of workshop ideas to explore the extension of design fiction for TUX. Analysis related design fiction to the TX phases and suggested features that affect design ideas’ potential for TUX design fiction. This phase ended with the proposal and analysis of three new forms of design fiction — extended imaginary abstracts, comparative imaginary abstracts, and design poetry — using workshop ideas to illustrate the forms, their construction and use, and their benefits to TUX design. Transcendhance workshops and TUX design fictions approach techno-spiritual design peripherally, “sneaking up” on lived experience by addressing context and enabling the consideration of ineffable experience through storytelling, metaphors, and oblique imagery. This thesis combines the grounded theory of transcendent user experience with the Transcendhance workshop process and new forms of design fiction, presenting peripheral design as a promising strategy for facilitating design to enhance transcendent experience.

The primary aim of this work is to give voice to the silent history of graphic design in Greece, long uncharted and undocumented in both the international forum and the local design community. This study focuses on the professional modernisation of graphic design and its role in providing the means for change in Greek society. The research is supported by interdisciplinary analysis of commercial advertisements, posters, leaflets and magazines, as well as other supporting documentation, in the historical and cultural context of Athens, Greece from 1945 to 1970. The time examined was a transitional and vociferous period in the history of Greece, one of intense and rapid economic modernisation during the post-Second World War decades from the mid-1940s to 1970. This was a time when, along with broader changes in the social, economic and political life of Greece, important developments in design education, print technology, and professional organisation marked a new age for graphic design, as a profession emerging from the broader ‘graphic arts’ field (inclusive of both technological and creative processes) and claiming autonomy over the more established fine arts sector. All four chapters deal with modernisation in relation to the assumed divisions of traditional/modern, continuity/change, centre/periphery. Main areas of investigation are: trade organisation, graphic design education, advertising and urbanisation, electricity and tourism promotion. This research offers a view of the ways the ‘modern’ and the condition of modernity were experienced in the case of Greece through certain applications of graphic design and its agents of influence: graphic designers, artists, managers, publishers, the state and private entrepreneurs. The research benefited significantly from a number of interviews with design professionals and related individuals. The present endeavour has a modest aim: to enable understanding of how and why Greek graphic design at the time came to be, and to stress the validity of the visual as a means of historical documentation.

No description available.

This thesis investigates how British women since the 1970s have used dress to resist dominant ideals of femininity and womanhood. I focus on examples of subcultural and alternative style as anti-fashion, as a rebuke to and also as the manipulation of the fashion system. The research is based on oral interviews with women in four case studies: punks in the 1970s, women who lived at Greenham Common Peace Camp in the 1980s, black women in hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, and Muslim women in the hijab since 2001. Participants were found using a combination of opportunity or volunteer sampling and snowball sampling techniques to gather a sample of approximately five interviewees per case study. The case studies are deliberately disparate, but they have been chosen because each one represents an important turn in British gendered identity politics of the last forty years, since punk style was interpreted by subcultural theory as resistance. They offer a wide range—from subcultural to religious dress—of cross-cultural examples to explore gender in terms of ethnicity, class, and nation, and to explain the ways in which these notions interact and overlap within contemporary British culture and history. Through my juxtapositions I provide an alternative narrative, a ‘new’ analysis of style as gendered to challenge any empiricist logic of conventional scholarship and to expose the fashion system as cyclical. This is a post-postmodern interdisciplinary investigation. I analyse the postmodern techniques of collage, bricolage, mixing and sampling in women’s style, where appropriation and customisation act as revolutionary practices of deconstruction of 5 meaning and interrupt grand historical narratives, However, I move beyond any postmodern focus purely on image and spectacle, or on simulacra and representation to locate women’s behaviour in situated bodily practice, and within their extended biographies. My interviews focus on women’s material and experiential views of their dress and style with an emphasis on their interpretations of style as lived experience. In this way I offer a turning out of fashion history; one that analyses the agentive action of each group’s style which I define as the punk ‘cut’, the Greenham Common ‘layer’, the hip hop ‘break’ and the ‘fold’ of the hijab. My emphasis is on the analytics of construction as displays that reveal the structures behind the fashioning of gender and identity, and I explore how these create new temporal and spatial subjective positions for women such as deterritorialisation for punks, utopianism for women at Greenham, reality for women in hip-hop, or a heterotopia in the case of British women in hijab. This study throws into crisis essentialist ideas: about the body, gender, a fashion object or the fashion system and its ideals to question the performativity of identity and history. Through its multi-layered discussion and interdisciplinary breadth, the thesis pushes at the boundaries of conventional design and fashion history scholarship in its exploration of embodied style as intertextual, and women’s fashion histories as shifting and mutating.

The focus of this thesis is on the internal and external environments of retail stores, and their contribution to retail branding from marketing and design perspectives. The retail industry in the postwar period and in particular since the 1980s has grown rapidly creating new store formats, new locations and new markets; retail brands have become some of the most powerful in the UK. The retail store now forms a visually engaging, three dimensional material and symbolic environment, where the brand merges with detailed store design. Both marketing and design initiatives have had a significant role in these developments, and consequently informed the distinctive interdisciplinary approach to the research journey. The body of work draws on nine publications, from an initial exploratory paper in 2003 to the final piece of work in 2010. The journey is characterized by its critical engagement with qualitative methodology, and an increasing awareness of the value of visual methods in the field. This contributed to a different understanding of the internal spaces of the store from a consumer perspective and the co-creative possibilities of retail design. As the research journey progressed, the contribution of the store to the retail brand was extended to its place in the external, urban environment. This contributed to understanding the significance of the building to the retail brand, through prestigious new buildings but also the re-use and regeneration of commercial buildings and their meaningful connections with the past. It is in this context that the body of work contributes new knowledge of the relationship between design, branding and experience in retail environments in which the design of the building, both internally and in its local context provide new opportunities to communicate to, and create experiences with consumers.

In recent decades, scholars have begun to substantially reassess the economic and political significance of the craft guilds of sixteenth and seventeenth century London. Revisionist work by economic historians (Epstein and Prak, 2008), has convincingly overturned the notion that guilds were unanimously restrictive of commercial growth, opposed to innovative practices and exploitative of their members. Several political and social studies (Rappaport, 1989; Archer, 1991; Gadd and Wallis, 2002) have demonstrated the dynamic and philanthropic nature of these corporate bodies, which provided avenues for occupational mobility and charitable support; ensuring that London remained stable despite the extraordinary demographic, financial and social pressures of the final decades of the sixteenth century. The longstanding interpretation of ‘guild decline’ in the early modern era has thus been widely problematized and shown to be anachronistic. This thesis proposes a new methodology for examining the craft guilds of late sixteenth and early seventeenth century London, and suggests that the established scholarship has overlooked the significance of artisanal knowledge, skills and identities in the construction of meaningful communities of workshop practitioners, small-scale merchants, and the regulators of the crafts and trades. In this study, the built environments and material artefacts associated with London guilds are considered as active cultural and social agents (Appadurai; Kopytoff, 1986) which both reflected, and in turn reinforced identity formation, and the ritual and political boundaries of communal life. The changing structure of livery halls, their internal configurations and external designs, and the material furnishings and collections gifted, displayed and utilised within these institutional homes, are shown to be essential means through which guildsmen established competing claims for civic authority and professional artisanal accomplishment. Using textual, visual and material evidence from a range of London craft guilds - primarily, but not exclusively, the Goldsmiths’, Armourers’, Carpenters’ and Pewterers’ Companies - this work examines the physical and epistemological place of artisanal cultures, c.1560-1640. It considers the collaborative processes through which workmanship was evaluated by master craftsmen on early modern building sites, and the political and social value of such artisanal skills, techniques and knowledge within their associated livery halls. It is demonstrated that through the donation of visual and material artefacts to company buildings, and their subsequent use in the convivial, political and religious rites of the guilds, craftsmen were able to shape their reputations and post-mortem legacies. Their material gifts and bequests reveal that guild halls were simultaneously sites of memorisation (Archer, 2001), sociability, craft regulation and artisanal innovation. Within communities of living guildsmen, freemen wished to be remembered as affluent civic philanthropists, guardians of illustrious histories and, crucially, as masters of their respective artisanal practices. The changing spatial and material environments of guild halls are shown to be social products of complex organisations, which honoured both commensality and hierarchy; fraternal values and political and epistemological distinctions. The rebuilding projects of the London livery halls are considered in juxtaposition to the strained spatial and political relationships between guild halls and city workshops, and contemporary efforts to uphold the authority of liverymen to inspect artisanal standards and material quality within the wider urban environment.

For many, design is the production of useful artefacts. Designing can however also provide a basis for exploration, speculation or critique. This thesis develops this conception further by providing a theoretical framework for conceiving designing and design objects as a mode of and media for philosophical inquiry. Design is regarded as a material philosophy that explores and reflects philosophical issues by situating them in the concrete and particular reality of human life rather than in a generalised and abstract realm. Design objects are equipment and media that can be understood in terms of their contextual references and consequences as well as the way in which they mediate human action, thinking and existence, and thus in terms of the worlds that they open up. As media for reflection they allow one to gain an experiential understanding of these contexts and worlds. Design thus relates to philosophy in terms of ethics and concepts; that is, in terms of exploring possibilities of existence and new forms of thinking. Since design objects can cre-ate new experiences and interactions they can lead to new values and concepts. These objects can be used to reflect on philosopical issues and to thus see the world from a new perspective. These new perspectives may be brought about through three approaches: First, through fictions that render possible worlds experienceable or show the existing world in a new way. Second, through models that serve as tools for understanding and mediation between the general and abstract and the concrete and particular. Third, through situations, simulations and re-enactments that facilitate a direct and bodily experience of a new per-spective. These approaches can make abstract ideas experienceable, as they materialise these issues in concrete situations and thereby allow one to judge them in a real world context, including possible consequences. The activity of designing is accordingly considered an exploration of philosophical questions that uses design objects both as media for conducting an inquiry and communicating its outcome.

This thesis describes a sociocultural study which addresses the question of how New Product Development (NPD) practices in small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) are influenced by obscure practices, deployed to meet emerging challenges that enable SMEs to remain relevant to their markets. Prior research in this area has assumed that a company’s innovation potential can be objectively explained by looking at critical factors such as peoples’ skills (e.g. leadership), company resources, capabilities, and its external orientation. However important, these variance-based approaches are generally discussed in isolation from the dynamic and idiosyncratic contexts where they emerge (such as the NPD process). As a result they fail to provide a holistic view of the phenomena that promote agility and innovation. This study’s purpose was to develop a methodological approach to explicate obscurity in SMEs’ innovation practices. To achieve this, the study employed a design-led qualitative research strategy to bring to the forefront the underlying contextual, situational and relational phenomena impacting a common core practice in manufacturing SMEs, their NPD process. The aim was to increase our knowledge of the notion of obscure practices in their effort to meet their emerging challenges. The research began by developing a theoretical model to consolidate ideas derived from: 1.Strategic management variance literature, which led to a multi-level theoretical framework (people, firm, and external levels). 2. Models of NPD processes, which led to the adoption of a generic process-model (Initiation, Development and Implementation) used as periods to study organisational practices. 3. Sociocultural literature, which led to the adoption of Activity Theory (AT) to guide analysis of NPD activities. The study approached its methodology in order to meet two key requirements. With regards to the sensitivities of the SME context (such as the disruption to participants’ day to day practices), the study developed a design-led process-mapping tool for data collection that provided rich insights in an engaging and fast way, whilst it allowed the triangulation and visualisation of the data, which was collected from staff members across different expertise and positions. In addition, an Activity Theory framework was adopted as a means to analyse the data and make sense of its complexity in line with the need to capture multi-level phenomena across different periods of the NPD process. The thesis provides a number of contributions to contemporary design research and beyond. First, it demonstrates the value of integrating variance and process-based research approaches and the richness of insights gained by applying them to organisational settings. Second, it argues for the usefulness of ‘obscurity’ as a term to describe the not-well-articulated practices that take place in the day-to-day business, as opposed to terms such as hidden, invisible, silent, and/or tacit. Third, it shows the value of the adopted research method (i.e. the Pytheas tool), to surface obscurity in innovation practices in a non-prescriptive, fast and engaging way by enabling participants to self-reflect on their own practices and by visualising organisational contexts in such a way that the richness and the depth of the practices can be captured and better appreciated. Consequently, the contributions of the study primarily concern design practitioners and strategists who need to find ways to better construe the organisational settings to which they are called to offer their expertise. Businesses may also benefit by this method as it provides a platform through which members can develop a greater awareness of their respective strengths and weaknesses and, through the visualised outcomes, it offers a legacy that businesses can use, revisit and refer to during their efforts to achieve agility and increase their innovation potential.

This thesis is an investigation into woven textile structures and weave construction methodologies. The main question at the heart of this research is what are smart textiles and what role/s can weaving play in the creation of such textiles in the future? A critical review of the literature led to a grammatical investigation and interpretation of the term smart textiles, and as a result a key differentiator between superficial and deep responsivity in textiles is made: the latter is henceforth used to describe the uniqueness of smart textiles (chapter 3). The thesis proceeds to explore the fundamental engineering of textiles as material systems, and by doing so, provide clues as to how fabrics could themselves be considered smart. Through this exploration, an original ‘textile anatomy’ mapping tool is presented with the aim to enhance and deepen current understanding of textiles and represent them as material systems instead (chapters 4 and 5). The hybrid research methodology that governed this investigation is unique. It relies on the creative tools of Design while also inherently applies the investigative methods of Science, Technology and Engineering (chapter 2). Weaving is explored through processes of making as an approach to develop smart textiles following an extensive historical review revealing that although methods of weave production have much evolved, the weave structures themselves have not changed at all for thousands of years (chapter 5). A series of experimental case studies are presented, which therefore seek to explore and challenge current limitations of weaving for the creation of a new generation of material systems (chapter 6). As part of this practical work the alternative fabrication technology of additive manufacturing was considered, but its role as substitute manufacturing technique for textiles was accordingly rejected. This research finds that since weaving has become solely dependent on its machines, the structures produced through these processes of manufacturing are governed by such same specifications and limitations. As a result, in order to step away from current constraints, new assembly methodologies need to be revised. This is particularly applicable within the context of future (smart) material systems, and micro and nano fabrication techniques (chapters 7, 8 and 9).