This practice-led PhD explores ‘how highly specialised and innovative new design practice is made accessible to new audiences in the context of the museum’ (AHRC CDA Award call, RCA, 2010). Innovative new design was further specified as ‘highly academic, speculative, critical and experimental, often dealing with new technologies or ways of working, developing design as an agent of social or cultural change.’The call challenged designers to ‘articulate their processes and practices in ways that can be understood by, and influence, the general public.’ This PhD consists of a case study in the form of a six-month residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in 2013, entitled ‘The Department of Seaweed’ (DoS), as well as a design theoretical contextualisation of its framework, methods and outcomes. Among these are insights into how to co-develop design outcomes and knowledge by working with natural resources. This led me to propose a new method for cospeculative design that integrates open ended material exploration and systems level speculation through participatory critical practice in a museum residency. The outlook of design thus shifts from critical speculation towards design for transition, set against the challenges of the 21st century and beyond. The setting for this thesis is the interrelation of the following three subjects: Methods of Making, Transition Design and Museum Residencies. I established the DoS as a community of practice (CoP) around the development of seaweed as a material for making. Our approach connected making, practice-based research and generative material development with participatory methods and speculation — exploring perspectives from critical, speculative and transition design — and enabling multiple, interlinked forms of participation through dialogue, speculation, making and reflection, both on design practice and the museum. The museum, in the context of this PhD, is understood as a public place of sensemaking and knowledge sharing. As a cultural node, both analogue and digitally networked, it enables the community it is embedded within to access its own past. This thesis proposes that by means of resident and mobile CoP, museums also present ideal places for shared knowing, speculation about and actively shaping preferable futures. I propose using museum residencies as public research and development labs for nonnormative practices, enabling participants to develop a field of visions, identify the inherent potentials of a project and link multiple projects up into an infrastructure by growing a community of practice. Museum residencies can be ideal settings for practice-led research projects that are informed by — and inform— the museum and its community and can link up individual ideas and concepts into communities of practice intent on collaborating to pursue the next steps. The thesis also outlines how ethical, value-based frameworks may govern co-operation — particularly important relating to the use of natural resources such as seaweed. Suggest a system of departments in flux for integrated practices, that can dock on and off existing institutions. This PhD is aimed at practitioners who want to engage with a community in a participatory design process or wish to work with natural materials such as seaweed. It is also aimed at theorists engaged or interested in practice-led design research, participation, generative material innovation, museum residencies, reflexive practice in immersive environments and critical- and transition design.

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Diss. (sammanfattning) Linköping : Linköpings universitet, 2005. / Härtill 5 uppsatser + 4 appendix.

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?”

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.

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

The way we consume music is changing, but not the reason why. Music plays a big role inour lives and connects us on several levels.This master thesis was about finding new waysof experiencing music together within thedigital ages.The result is a new remote concert experience,which is focused on connecting people throughaudio. It consists of a combination of a serviceand headphones. The overarching service providesthe core functions, while the open backheadphones turn this into an immersive remoteconcert experience.

A great challenge for a future sustainable society is to create a new design culture protecting environmental value. A new product’s language is determinant not only for marketing success and public acceptance, but also for a new understanding of the conflict between aesthetics and ethics that haunts the development of this new design language. The designer’s approach to the new trends will certainly deal with the relationship between industry and society, form and function, package and architecture, and it is an opportunity to create new and coherent design.

This doctoral research project was directed towards the economical and cost-effective production of three-dimensional multi-layer textile preforms which provided the reinforcement for composite components with automotive and engineering applications.

This work describes the development of a technique for the evaluation of the performance of a product's physical user interface. The technique is intended to combine the best features cat conventional user group testing with those of computer based biomechanical modelling. A requirement for the new technique exists as social pressure demands that consumer products he optimised for users with a wide range of physical capabilities, while shortening product lifecycles leave less time for extensive user evaluation programmes. A demonstration system was developed, based upon the use of an electromagnetic tracking system to gather upper limb motion data and a two segment, rigid link biomechanical model. Experimental work was carried out to test the effectiveness of the system at following limb movements and average error in reconstruction of hand position from segment angle data was 62mm (Standard deviation 41 mm) The modelling system was applied to the assessment of two types of product: cutlery and drinking vessels and the effectiveness of various statistical techniques in allowing the rapid identification of important design parameters was assessed. The use of Taguchi's smaller-the-better signal to noise ratio was found to be effective for the measurement of the effect of product design on shoulder and elbow forces. Cutlery with enlarged handles designed to reduce grip strength requirements tended to increase forces at the shoulder. The method was also applied to an interface optimisation problem involving the design of a lever mechanism. Partial factorial design was used to minimise experimental cost during the assessment of multiple factors, but strong interactions were detected between interface parameters, reducing the value of the analysis. The overall height of the lever handle relative to the user's shoulder was found to be the most significant design factor, with an optimum operating situation existing where the lever was low enough to require almost full extension of the elbow during use. The work concludes that biomechanical analysis holds further promise for the optimisation of interface parameters, provided the high experimental cost involved with present techniques can be reduced.