Designers, engineers, marketers, politicians, and scientists all craft motivating visions of better futures. In some of these, “better” will be delivered by science and technology; in others, the consumption of designed things will better us or the world. “Better” has become a contemporary version of progress, shed of some of its philosophical baggage. But better is not a universal good or a verified measure: it is imbued with politics and values. And better will not be delivered equally, if at all. “What is better?”, “Whose better?”, and “Who decides?” are questions with great implications for the way we live and hope to live. At a time when social, economic, and environmental conditions place in question the dominant paradigms of better defined by globalisation and technology, Better, a PhD by project, investigates some of the powerful dreams triggered by a banal word and develops critical design techniques to find new ways to ask better questions. This thesis contends that the “dream of better” is so influential in advanced technological societies that it is what science and technology studies scholars term a sociotechnical imaginary. The imaginary is used as a critical design tool to examine better, revealing links between design and the emerging technoscience of synthetic biology and other ideological spaces, like Silicon Valley. As a young field, synthetic biology offers a space to test and expand critical design’s potential. The practical research includes six critical design projects that engage with synthetic biology and its vision-making processes, using techniques from designed fictions to curation. The written thesis comprises six chapters informed throughout by commentary on the practice. The first chapter looks at the influence of dominant concepts of better on design, separating design’s intrinsic optimism from engineering and market-led ideas of the optimum and optimisation. It situates critical design practice as an optimistic activity, seeking alternative meanings of better. The next three chapters track how the imaginary of better has shaped synthetic biology and the field’s evolving culture of design. Meanings of better have proliferated since 1999, as synthetic biology’s visionaries promise to better biology, better the world, and even to better nature itself. But resistance has revealed the existence of alternative betters. Chapter Five explores critical design’s examination of synthetic biology’s dreams of betters. Recognising the mutual colonisation of critical design and synthetic biology, which is contributing to the emerging platform of biodesign, the chapter discusses how navigating imaginaries can improve future critical practice. It encourages framing technoscience within society, rather than placing society downstream of it. Chapter Six proposes that the social imaginary itself can be a critical design object. Designing “critical imaginaries” can open up our understanding of better, offering a process to reimagine the world. The critical imaginary is not a utopian effort to produce prescriptive visions of how the world ought to be. It is a heterotopian design technique to include diverse views and generate worlds that could be made, asking “what ought the world to be?”

Nesta dissertação estudamos o espectro dinâmico para fluxos 'skew-product' em um fibrado de Banach. Apresentamos uma caracterização para a existência de dicotomia exponencial para tais fluxos e provamos que esta não é destruída sob pequenas perturbações. A dicotomia discreta é uma ferramenta muito útil nesta análise.

This thesis describes the total synthesis of the thiopeptide antibiotic micrococcin P1. It unambiguously elucidates its structure, which has been subject to controversy for over thirty years. The centerpiece of the route to the target molecule is a facile one-pot construction of the central thiazole/pyridine cluster developed in our laboratory. This highlyconvergent route entails a delicate Michael addition to yield a Hantzsch dihydropyridine intermediate, which undergoes further oxidation to the fully aromatised heterocycle. The synthesis was completed by the coupling of this core with a highly-modified sensitive peptide chain. The modular nature of the synthesis can also accommodate modifications for SAR studies, contributing thereby to the fields of medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, and microbiology. At a purely chemical level, we remain confident that this work will serve as a valuable guide in the elaboration of other members of the thiopeptide family. / Science, Faculty of / Chemistry, Department of / Graduate

The research explored the role of personality traits and motivation in determining Brand Ambassador (BA) performance. Fragmentation in the media and consumers who are more aware of clever marketing, are turning to the more credible messages and advice on products or services spread by BA’s within their circle of friends, before making purchasing decisions. Marketers seeking to recruit high potential BA’s need to know what personality traits are required for a BA to be successful. By implication a BA is type of sales representative and using the sales literature as the platform, successful sales representatives require all Big Five personality traits of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness to Experience as well as Motivation.The NEO-FFI questionnaire was used to measure the Big Five personality traits, and was adapted to include a measure of Motivation. The questionnaire was completed by 120 BA’s from the South African Breweries (SAB) Egoli region, who had a performance record. T-tests, multiple regression and correlation were the statistical techniques employed to test the relationships between personality traits, motivation and BA performance.The outcome was that Conscientiousness was the only personality trait found tobe statistically significant. The results suggest that the BA rankings supplied by SAB were flawed. The reliability measures suggest that the NEO-FFI questionnaire needs to be adapted before being implemented in South Africa and a rating scale is a better indicator of performance proxy than ranking scale. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

Critical Design is a specific type of design activity that has emerged from within the field of product design. Based on the supposition that design is an ideological activity, it can either be critical or affirmative of the status quo and categorised as Critical Design or Affirmative Design. The intention of this study is to create Critical Design within the practice of graphic design. Critical Design was defined by identifying its key characteristics and then visualised into a diagram that maps the pathways, processes and consequences which distinguish Critical Design from Affirmative Design. The characteristics were used to generate criteria of Critical Design, which were then used to analyse case studies. The findings from this analysis suggested that both case study projects could be defined as Critical Design and served as a way of testing the appropriateness of the criteria. The practical component of this study used the characteristics of Critical Design to create a range of graphic design artefacts and then analysed them in relation to the criteria of Critical Design. The findings from this analysis determined the practical component as Critical [Graphic] Design and suggested that graphic design can be an appropriate medium for critique of its own role within society.

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The diploma thesis includes design of smart child lighting that takes into account the effects of colour spectrum changes on the human sleep regime.

"Product Placement" or "Brand Placement" is the paid inclusion of branded products or brand identifiers, through audio and/or visual means, within entertainment media. This dissertation is a collection of three essays that investigate factors affecting the effectiveness of product placements. The first essay focuses on two measures of product placement effectiveness - audience recall and attitudes toward the placement. Extant empirical studies that address the antecedents of these constructs were integrated through a meta-analysis. Some key findings are as follows. The prominence of placements is a controllable executional factor that was found to have a significant positive relationship with recall. Recall was also affected by modality - audio-visual placements had better recall than audio-only placements which in turn performed better than visual-only placements. Audience attitudes toward placements had a strong relationship with the nature of the product - products that had negative ethical connotations were found to be less acceptable to audiences. However, viewers who were avid consumers of entertainment media tended to have more positive attitudes. Essay 2 focuses on the effect of repetition of placements of the same brand within a single television program. The results from an experiment show that unlike advertising, there was no negative-U relationship between the frequency of placements and audience attitudes toward the brand placed. In the case of visual placements, attitudes actually improved with frequency as a result of the mere exposure effect. However, this effect was not observed in the case of audio placements. Essay 3 addresses "Need for Cognition", an individual level variable that was found to affect audience response toward the brand placed. Data were collected through an online survey and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The mood of the viewer and their parasocial attachment with the character in the program that was associated with the placement had significant positive relationships with their attitude toward the specific placement, which in turn had a strong positive relationship with the attitude toward the brand. However, the latter relationship was moderated by NFC, with the effect being significantly stronger for those viewers who did not engage in, or enjoy analytical activity. Limitations of the studies, the relevance of the findings to marketing practice, and the contribution to scholarly research are discussed.

FMCG companies use extensions to launch bulk of their new products. This trend is set to continue despite the growing literature which indicates that increasing number of extensions fail in the first 3 years of launch. Thus it is necessary for Brand Product Managers to understand factors of successful extensions. In this report a National Brands LTD (NBL) case study was conducted using 5 factors that were researched by Nijssen (1997), to analyse 7 extensions linked to 4 brands and that were launched in the last 3 years. Of the studied extensions, 4 have been found to have to have influence on the success of extensions. Findings of 1 factor were not conclusive. A factor that did not form part of the research propositions was also found to be key for the success of extensions. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science (MSc) in Pharmaceutical Affairs. / Lack of information has been identified as a major factor as to why patients do not take their medicines as the prescriber intends. Provision of appropriate information in a suitable form is therefore crucial. The package insert (PI) is the document that ensures the safe and effective use of the medicine under most circumstances. It presents a scientific, objective account of the medicine’s use as established by pre-clinical, clinical and often post-marketing studies. The patient information leaflet (PIL), which contains information for the consumer should be less scientific. South African legislation states that information contained in PILs must be aligned to PIs but the text must be readily intelligible for the patient. The study included a detailed comparison of prescribing information contained in the PI compared to the PIL in selected Angiotensin Receptor Blockers (ARBs). Findings of this comparative analysis revealed that key safety information was omitted from the PILs. An evaluation of the readability of the PILs was also performed by the use of Fry’s readability formula as well as applying elements of critical discourse analysis to determine if the texts in the PILs are suitable for its purpose. The results of the Fry’s readability assessments of all the PILs indicated that they had exceeded the recommended grade 7 reading level, which is in line with the adult literacy rate that qualifies anyone older than 15 years with a grade 7 qualification as being literate. Findings from the critical discourse analysis of the PILs show frequent use of medical jargon, complex sentence construction as well as ambiguity and slippage in the meaning of the texts in the PILs. The texts are not patient-friendly. Overall, the findings from this study indicate an urgent need to address the poor construction of PILs, to ensure that patients receive appropriate written prescribing information. This will ultimately ensure the safe and effective use of the medicine. / KP2020