The purpose of this study was to investigate the implications of additive manufacturing on industrial design profession and designers through an explorative study. Through a literature survey, implications of additive manufacturing technologies on industrial designers and industrial design profession were explored. Expanding literature survey with on-line searches, several experimental and commercial application examples of rapid manufacturing of products were identified. These identified examples were then used for a qualitative evaluation on the implications of additive manufacturing for the industrial design profession and designers through semi-structured interviews conducted with seven professional industrial designers having experience with rapid manufacturing in Istanbul Turkey. The research concluded with significant implications of additive manufacturing having the potential to cause paradigm shifts in industrial designer&rsquo / s role, definition of the profession and design process. The conclusions derived include suggestions to exploit the potential brought by these technologies and their applications.

This study aimed to investigate the factors affecting faculty intention to use course management systems (CMS). The study was conducted in a private university with a mixed-method approach. First, 260 responses to a questionnaire was analysed by using structural equation modeling technique in order to examine the provided model. Second, interviews with selected 14 faculty members were conducted to understand the interrelationships. The findings indicated that, faculty intention to use CMS is mostly related with seeing value in using CMS including both personal and task/course related issues. In addition, the use of CMS should be perceived as easy which is directly influenced by the computer self-efficacy of the instructors. Discrimination of perceived personal benefits and task/course related usefulness is found to be important. Course/task related perceived usefulness is found to be weak without perceiving them personally beneficial. Availability of training and support is found to be weakly related to initial intention, however it appeared as an important variable for continuing to use CMS. &lsquo / Communicating the vision through leadership&rsquo / , &lsquo / promoting CMS&rsquo / , and &lsquo / sharing experiences and real life examples&rsquo / emerged as powerful approaches to facilitate use of CMS. Institutional policies regarding issues like &lsquo / academic freedom&rsquo / should be considered carefully while supporting the use of CMS. Moreover, to support institutional change it is important to be aware of the existence of different faculty profiles, which should be considered separately in relevant decisions.

This study is an attempt for providing a socio-historical perspective to the smart home concept that is a proposal for the future domestic sphere by the application of intelligent technologies. For achieving this attempt, the smart home is investigated with its roots within the social history of domestic technology, by posing the question of a relation between the machine house idea of modern architecture and the smart home concept as the main question of the research. After an inquiry on the smart home concept and on the future private sphere that is envisaged within it, the emergence of modern private sphere, the transformation of private sphere under the impacts of industrialization, the appearance and the social consequences of the machine house idea, the introduction of mass produced appliances to the home and the impacts of it on private sphere, the development of communication and information technologies and their domestication processes are investigated. The coconstructive relationship of technology with the private sphere is pursued throughout this investigation. The research questions of the study are answered in the light of the gained knowledge and critical perspective throughout the investigations. At the end, it is revealed that the smart home has conceptual, technical, and ideological constructive roots within the histories of the modern private sphere, modern architecture and design, and domestic communication and information technologies. It is discussed that these roots constitute the smart home as a domain of social reproduction, which also provides the ground for its conceptualization and promotion as the future domestic sphere.

This thesis represents an attempt to explore critical issues in the national military literature and bring up findings for further studies by exploring military innovation,smart management of defense R&amp / D, critical and dual-use technologies concepts in detail. The study has two main components. The first part provides a conceptual and theoretical framework to discuss and understand military innovation, critical technology and dual-use technology. A military that fails to innovate when their contemporaries are innovating is destined to face its dire consequences. So the quest for change within military organizations is a rational and hopefully encouraged behavior. In this thesis the modes of innovation are at the center stage. However, the main intention focus is on technological innovation. As certain technologies are at the core of decisive military innovation, the initial step in innovation is normally to procure the new technology. A country that must purchase technology from abroad is arguably less likely to wield it as effectively as the country that is capable of inventing or manufacturing it, as the latter is usually better equipped to exploit and further refine technology. In order to insure the flow of technological innovations, a sound technology investment strategy must be formulated. A strategy built on a foundation of three integrated building blocks (optimal in-house R&amp / D, expanded collaborative efforts, and smart outsourcing) will enable the military to be an effective smart buyer and smart provider. The thesis proceeds with a brief discussion of critical technologies, specifically the ones that are critical for military and national importance, in order to provide guidance for identifying which technologies harbor the greatest payoff potential. Closely related to this discussion is the question of national economic growth based on technological developments in particular the development of technologies with potential for use in either the civilian or military sectors, and promotion of partnerships among actors / military, industry, academia. Such technologies are referred as dual-use technologies. The dual-use relationships among actors are spin-off, spin-on, venture capital model, and military support/pull model. The second part of the thesis develops a kind of empirical case study analysis based on a rotary-wing upgrade project about the importance of upgrade and system integration technology as a core capability. The last chapter concludes the thesis with the discussion of findings.