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)

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The role of visual communication design continues to increase in importance around the world. In Bahrain, organisations are increasingly considering visual communication design as a means of accomplishing organisational goals. The research aims to understand the process by which design managers in organisations in Bahrain manage and evaluate visual communication designs to gain strategic advantage. Even though the management of visual communication design has not yet been recognised as a separate category of design management in Bahrain, its processes and approaches may differ from other management applications. This research opens with a contextual overview of the visual communication design management field, before presenting an understanding of how visual communication design can be utilised as an innovative approach to the strategic structuring organisational thinking. Methods have been developed for investigating how Bahraini client design managers manage visual communication design projects. Observational studies and interviews with client design managers and creative directors have been conducted to obtain an understanding of the visual communication design process, together with evaluation procedures in the Bahraini context. These empirical investigations have led to the development of a conceptual framework that describes the visual communication design management process and the evaluation procedure that is carried out by client design managers in Bahrain. The remainder of this thesis explains the outcomes of each phase of the research. The unique contributions of this study are embodied in a discussion of the findings together with reflections and recommendations for those involved and interested in design management in Bahrain.

This investigation’s origin is one born of pragmatism. It seeks to improve the teaching and learning of illustration, a visual communication design discipline. The specific focus is text adaptation and the process involved in interpreting the written word into a visual image. Common characteristics of poor interpretation, identified after many years of teaching illustration, are the creation of images which are either based on relatively insignificant details from a text, or so removed from a text’s theme, that decoding an image’s intended meaning becomes extremely difficult. This study therefore seeks to provide insight into the process of interpreting written text into an illustration and offer some suggestions as to how novice illustration students can improve their skills in this process. The chosen methodology of this study is action research, and within a constructivistinterpretivist framework, work carried out with three groups of novice students, during three linked cycles of investigation has been analysed. Two separate, but linked learning strategies were developed incrementally. These can be thought of as thinking tools. The first one relates to comprehension of text while the second strategy focuses on analogical reasoning as an idea generation method. The data suggests that these learning strategies were successful, allowing students to develop more awareness of their design process and also create concepts which captured the essence of a text. This suggests that, while designing does involve tacit, intuitive thought, explicit methods of thinking can also assist design creativity. Much of the literature on design suggests that a paradigm shift is taking place within the field, in education as well as design practice. One of the characteristics of this change is a call for design educators to develop an epistemology of what constitutes design knowledge. This thesis is an addition to that ongoing search for understanding.

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<p>Accessibility often isn’t recognized to the abled-bodied. The objects, systems and tools of access aren’t even noticed until those without disabilities need it or become disabled themselves. Building on my initial academic and scholarly research, I conducted a case study at The Wabash Center; a facility that serves people with disabilities in the local West Lafayette and surrounding communities. I spent three months observing, journaling, and identifying key patterns that revealed the tensions in food access issues at the facility. These patterns included community, agency, dependency and assistance, and accountability. The issues I identified at The Wabash Center all fall under the overarching issue of power and control. Power and control describes the notion that is often exercised by abled-bodies in the presence of people with disabilities. In this context, food and food access is used as a form of power and control. It is commonly found that the issue of power and control is embedded in design and the way that designers conduct their processes. To better understand the systemic relationships and issues of food access, it was imperative to analyze the internal interactions of how disabled people negotiate in an institutionalized setting. This thesis discusses the reflection process of my efforts to look critically at my own assumptions about disability, food access, and its relationship to design.</p>

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