This thesis explores the process of ethical fashion purchasing through a qualitative research approach, to find insights to improve the provision and purchasing of socially responsible fashion on the UK high street. This was achieved through the investigation of both the consumers that purchase womens wear at a mid market level, but also the retailers who provide the merchandise. The relationship between these two parties was explored, with the communication methods also being investigated. Furthermore, the influence the communication of retailer Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) messages had on the final purchasing behaviour was also a key research area. This distinctive two-sided perspective was utilised to contribute to the creation of new knowledge in the area of ethical fashion purchasing behaviour, and consequently provide new perceptions of how positive, social changes can occur in the fashion industry. Much of the previous ethical fashion purchasing research has been criticized for several reasons including methodological weaknesses, survey instruments potentially overstating the importance of ethical issues, as well as participants having little to no incentive to answer truthfully (Auger and Devinney, 2007). As a result, researchers in this field have suggested that broader, more rigorous data collection tools need to be developed in order to advance this area of research (Dickson, 2011). With this in mind, a mixed method or bricolage approach (Kincheloe and Berry, 2004) was used to not only overcome the methodological issues identified, but to also address the knowledge gaps in a creative and innovative way (Bremner and Yee, 2011). As a consequence of using this approach, the interplay of data collection and analysis has resulted in an iterative process throughout the research undertaken. This iterative nature facilitated a five-stage data collection process, which included an ethnographic style case study with a major high street retailer, a consumer focus group and additional retailer, semistructured interviews. Between each of the five research stages, analysis and reflection took place, facilitating the development of the next data collection method. When addressing the study’s over-arching question: what influences ethical fashion purchasing, several factors were identified from both a consumer and a retailer perspective. It was found that whilst consumers do have a certain level of knowledge regarding social issues in the garment supply chain, they rarely implement this knowledge during their purchasing behaviour. The retailers surveyed, being evidenced in several of the additional interviews with CSR representatives, also identified this. However this lack of cohesion between consumer intentions and actual behaviour was found to be heavily influenced by the communication of CSR information from retailers to their customers. As a result, consumers were found to have a lack of understanding of social issues within the garment supply chain. Thus, it was concluded that the contribution to knowledge that this work makes is that an increase of retailer CSR communication, will aid in the development of a relationship between the consumer and supplier to increase connectivity, understanding and empathy, in order to influence ethical fashion purchasing. However, it is paramount that this CSR information is delivered in a simple way, in order for it to be understood by consumers. This was identified as an important factor due to a fundamental misunderstanding found in consumer understanding of the term ethical, and distinguishing this from closely related sustainable connotations. The approach and methodology utilised in this study was designed to address the problems identified in a new and innovative way, in order to lead to a series of new insights. The study of both the retailer and consumer simultaneously and the utilisation of creative methods attempted to provide a unique approach in dealing with the methodological issues previously mentioned. Due to the nature of the research, it has in the past been approached from a business or marketing perspective, however this study used creative skills and tools commonly used in design research. The value of this research has been evidenced in a results table, where the problems identified were addressed through a series of incremental stages towards change. These have been broken down into long and short-term changes, with the aim to gradually move the industry towards a more socially responsible future.

Understandings of, and objectives for, Interaction Design have been extended over the last few decades. Firstly, a single user-centred focus for Interaction Design is no longer regarded as adequate where any single central focus for design is now questioned. Post-centric approaches such as Balanced, Integrated and Generous (BIG) Design propose to achieve a broadened worth-focused content scope for Interaction Design, where worth is the balance of increasing benefits over reducing costs and generosity of choice. Secondly, there has been a broadened scope for disciplinary values in Human-Computer Interaction research, with the initial engineering and human science values of User-Centred Design and Human-Computer Interaction now complemented by the rapidly maturing creative field of Research through Design (RtD). Thirdly, RtD as a form of creative reflective practice does not have a sequential process, but needs parallel activities that can achieve total iteration potential (i.e., no restrictions on iteration sequences). Structured reflective tools such as the Working to Choose Framework may reveal this potential. An important opportunity remained that a complete challenging case study that integrated these domains (worth-focus) and tools (RtD, structured reflection) was carried out. The case study addressed the challenging social issues associated with supporting care circles of individuals with disabilities. It is original in completely tracking the combination of RtD with worth-focused Interaction Design, supported by established user-centred practices. The resulting research has made contributions through the tracking of the RtD process to: worth-focused design and evaluation resources; structured reflection; demonstration of innovative parallel balanced and integrated forms of iteration; and to future social innovation for disability support.

This research study builds an understanding of the relationship between storytelling approaches and their impacts at a design pitch, where concepts are presented to external clients. Storytelling is an integral part of design, with evidence of storytelling techniques found throughout the design process: from the use of digital media such as videos and animation during design pitches, to the use of personas and scenarios during research and evaluative phases. In building this understanding, a literature review was conducted to explore storytelling from a broad societal perspective and more specific organisational and design perspectives. A series of semi-structured interviews were conducted with employees from Unilever’s Household Care and Laundry departments, and Accenture’s Innovation Centre. Discussion centred on identifying storytelling approaches used by designers when pitching product and service concepts, and their relationships to various impacts, with student projects (at Unilever) and consultancy work (for Accenture) focusing the interviews. Thematic analysis was employed to establish themes in approach, building a framework of relationships with their determined impacts. The study’s contribution to knowledge is the presentation of a framework, entitled ‘Design Pitch Storytelling: The Impact-Approach Framework’. It builds on the current understanding of storytelling in design theory by identifying the important role that storytelling approaches play in the presentation of design concepts whilst offering insights into how designers use storytelling approaches in a design pitch. It serves as a descriptive tool offering an alternative viewpoint of the cases that may have a wider relevance to comparable large scale, internationally facing organisations and designers involved in similar design projects. In terms of an analytical process, this research study contributes further original knowledge in that it can be replicated to better understand existing working relationships between organisations and designers working on design projects in different contexts.

In this PhD research by thesis, the author documents his journey that explores modes of operations beyond those predominantly applied at NASA. Specifically, he is looking at designerly and artistic modes of operation, with a research goal to show demonstrable value to enhance NASA’s capability to innovate. This exploration is built on cybernetic perspectives and goal-seeking focused on human centered design within NASA’s space exploration paradigm. The author uses a performative approach through real world examples to highlight and substantiate the benefits of novel perspectives, conversations, and boundary objects, which shows their demonstrable value to NASA. The significance of the research findings is discussed in relations to the state of practice, which is derived from interviews with practitioners across NASA’s organizational hierarchy, combined with personal experiences, and independent research on the topics. The two primary application examples examine strategic level organizational conversations in support of strategic decision-making, and a human centered approach to space habitats that utilizes conversations and boundary objects aimed towards higher-level needs of the astronauts. Secondary examples, as added material, explore designing the design environments through human centered conversations with stakeholders, storytelling, multi-nodal and multimodal conversations, designerly modes of operation in engineering-focused environments, and explore the potential benefits of a design education program to change the organizational culture on the long term. These examples are grounded and substantiated using specifically created boundary objects, which are used as communication tools across multiple disciplines. This research is timely, because expanding humanity into space is an ongoing and inevitable step in our quest to explore our world. Yet space exploration is costly, and the awaiting environment challenges us, the human explorers, with extreme cold, heat, vacuum and radiation—among other conditions—unlike anything encountered on Earth. As a consequence, today’s space exploration, both robotic- and human-exploration driven, is dominated by objects and artifacts which are mostly conceived, designed and built through technological and engineering approaches, to support basic physiological, psychological, and safety needs. NASA’s activities, products, and processes are controlled by rigid procedural requirements, and are highly dependent on government funding. Since the Apollo era, the annual budget decreased by nine fold and remained virtually flat. Resource constraints, funding uncertainty, and changes in the organizational culture gradually led to innovation barriers, and formed a temporally and spatially coupled cyclical wicked problem for NASA. Yet, the aging workforce, still remembering the golden age of space exploration, is hoping and planning for large “fire and smoke” type missions, which puts NASA on an unsustainable path, while perpetuated by technology and management focus to overcome obstacles. Finding new directions may require a second-order cybernetic transformational change, starting with a changed paradigm, which in turn will impact the Agency’s mission and culture, and influence the core processes. In this research the author makes a case to broaden NASA’s worldview today, which is dominated by science, engineering, technology, project and resource management considerations. This can be achieved through novel perspectives gained from cybernetics, and other modes of operation through human centered design and art. While the proposed performative approach is applied to NASA, it is not bounded by it. These perspectives and modes of operation can be applied to any other field, discipline or hierarchical structure within scientific, technological, and social developments. Cybernetic mapping of any environment can provide insights to the connections and the potential for interactions between the various actors within. Understanding the complexities, non-linearity, and competing and often misaligned influences is important to set goals for the system and navigate towards preferable outcomes. Controlling and regulating the variety of these dynamic and responsive systems, in line with the set out goals and objectives, also require considerations and guidance, where cybernetic mapping, conversations and novel shared languages between the actors (in the form of commonly agreed understanding of the meaning), and human center design may play a role. When people are involved in these circular interactions and conversations, human centeredness can lead to transformative psychological impact on a personal level, and strategic advantages at an organizational level.

The textile selection is a crucial part of the design process, for which there is no systematic understanding and no support in place from the designer experience perspective. In the selection, designers need to synthesise technical information, their sensory and affective experience around textiles, and its related meanings. However, currently the textile industry just provides methods to describe, measure, or predict the properties of textiles perceptible to hand manipulation: methods that only partially support the designer. Hence, designers’ selection still relies heavily on experiential knowledge, that is, through processes that remain implicit or inaccessible to conscious articulation. The thesis addresses this gap by contributing new understanding of when and how the textile selection happens in the design process, uncovering tacit processes and embodied aspects integral to it, and secondly, by developing a toolkit to support the designer experience when selecting. The Design Research Methodology (Blessing and Chakrabarti, 2009) was taken as the overarching methodological approach, and was enriched by a further selection of methods. This approach enabled the description of the textile selection in the design process by investigating diverse sectors (fashion, interior and vehicle design), and led to the development of a support for this activity reflecting the reality of designers’ practice. To understand the textiles selection processes, four qualitative exploratory studies were conducted. Study one investigated the textiles selection by designers, taking a Grounded Theory approach, which revealed when (in the design process) and how textiles selection happens (through four emerging themes - ‘Collection’, ‘Interrogation’, ‘Projection’, and ‘Transformation’). These processes were articulated to propose the ‘Quad-core Textile Selection Model’. Study two investigated a facsimile design process, of sports shoes customisation in a retail setting. Through this study the tacit processes were confirmed and better understood, and ‘Projection’ was further elaborated as a phenomenon. Study three investigated an intense moment of selection in the context of a textile fair to understand what sensorial information underpins the textile selection processes. This study revealed the importance of the multisensory experience to textile selection, and the complexity of remembering and communicating such experiences in the design process. Study four explored the embodied aspects of textiles selection emerging as significant through the tactile experience in more depth, using the ‘Elicitation Interview’ (Petitmengin, 2006) method to obtain a first-person verbal description of experiential processes. The latter revealed 3 types of touch behaviour and 3 tactile-based phases of the textile selection process, and their dynamics. These findings enrich the proposed model including experiential and embodied components of the textiles selection that go well beyond ‘textile hand’ (AATCC Test Method 202-2012), and highlight the dynamics and interactions between the textile, the body and the product to be, which emerged as crucial for these processes. Finally, these findings were used as input for designing ‘The sCrIPT Toolkit’, comprised of instructions that facilitate focus and elaboration of the textile experience in the textiles selection. To conclude, a reflection on the pedagogical potential of this tool is presented, based on explorations within various sectors in academia.

No description available.

The production of acoustic music bridges two senses - touch and hearing - by connecting physical movements, gestures, and tactile interactions with the creation of sound. Mastery of acoustic music depends on the development and refinement of muscle memory and ear training in concert. This process leads to a capacity for great depth of expression even though the actual timbral palette of each given acoustic instrument is relatively limited. By contrast, modern modes of music creation involving recorded music and digital sound manipulation sacrifice this immediate bridge and substitute more abstract processes that enable sonic possibilities extending far beyond the acoustic palette. Mastery in abstract approaches to music making doesn’t necessarily rely on muscle memory or ear training, as many key processes do not need to happen in realtime. This freedom from the limits of time and practiced physical manipulation radically increases the range of achievable sounds, rhythms and effects, but sometimes results in a loss of subtlety of expressiveness. This practice-based PhD asks whether it is possible, and if so how, to achieve an integration of relevant sensor technologies, design concepts, and formation techniques to create a new kind of musical instrument and sound creation tool that bridges this gap with a satisfying result for musicians and composers. In other words, can one create new, multi-dimensional interfaces which provide more effective ways to control the expressive capabilities of digital music creation in real-time? In particular, can one build on the intuitive, logical, and well-known layout of the piano keyboard to create a new instrument that more fully enables both continuous and discrete approaches to music making? My research practice proposes a new musical instrument called the Seaboard, documents its invention, development, design, and refinement, and evaluates the extent to which it positively answers the above question. The Seaboard is a reinterpretation of the piano keyboard as a soft, continuous wavelike surface that places polyphonic pitch bend, vibrato and continuous touch right at the musician’s fingertips. The addition of new realtime parameters to a familiar layout means it combines the intuitiveness of the traditional instrument with some of the versatility of digital technology. Designing and prototyping the Seaboard to the point of successfully proving that a new synthesis between acoustic techniques and digital technologies is possible is shown to require significant coordination and integration of a range of technical disciplines. The research approach has been to build and refine a series of prototypes that successively grapple with the integration of these elements, whilst rigorously documenting the design issues, engineering challenges, and ultimate decisions that determine whether an intervention in the field of musical instrumentation is fruitful.

The aim of this thesis is to give an alternative insight to the existing concept of individuality in visual art through an examination of the meaning of being individual for visual art practitioners, particularly for those who operate in an artists’ group setting. This research project is a critique of the seemingly unchallenged emphasis on the individuality and its strong association with creativity in the current British art schools. Cultivating individuality is one of the most important aims in both British and Japanese institutions where I have trained as an artist. Nevertheless, my group-oriented cultural background and my membership of an artists’ group studying in an individually-oriented environment raise questions challenging the meaning of being an individual itself. This thesis has no methodology set up at the beginning, which would usually be the case in a conventional academic thesis. Instead, the thesis develops thought experiments to examine what ‘individual’ means in order to arrive at methodology towards the end. Moreover, this piece of practiceled research is not about the contents of my practice but about the group feeling underlying my practice as an individual fine art practitioner. The investigation into the relational idea of the self of Zen, followed by Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics of the Universe of Three Categories, provide the research with a useful visual thinking tool: the triadic diagram. The investigation into the meaning of the individual develops further through an exploration of the concept of ‘groupness’. Definitions of the term are carefully unfolded until the terminology allows us to contemplate different senses of the individual: singularity- and groupness- oriented individual. As a result of the thought experiments examining different ideas of one’s individuality, there emerge several action research practice-led methodologies for the fine art practitioner working in a group situation. One methodology brings groupness into my individual practice, and another introduces groupness situations to other practitioners. The contribution of this thesis is to provide a basis for fine art practitioners like myself to revalue their individuality in harmony with their group membership.

During thesis brings second-order cybernetics into design research, in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT) and ‘smart’ homes. My main proposition is to question and critically analyse the embedded epistemology in IoT technology in relation to human centred activities. I examine how human lives are represented within the quantified approaches inherent in current notions of ‘smart’ technology, derived from Artificial Intelligence (AI), and characterise this as the Algorithmic Paradigm. I explore questions of how complex, lived, human experience is oversimplified in the IoT. By adopting an epistemology derived from second-order cybernetics — acknowledging the importance of the observer — combined with my ‘IdIoT Proposition’, a way of ‘slowing down’ research on a fast-paced topic, I explore designing reflectively. The IdIoT is a methodological framework characterised by the process of slowing down and asking ‘What are we busy doing?’ in order to become aware of algorithmic oversimplifications. This methodological approach provides self- awareness and self-reflection on ‘the way of knowing the world’ to the researcher and to the participants, in the context of the Algorithmic Paradigm applied in IoT. Through a series of practice-based projects, I use the figure of the ‘SMART’ fridge to examine the implications of the Algorithmic Paradigm in the ‘smart’ home. The consideration that ‘smartness’ is relational is investigated in Becoming Your ‘SMART’ Fridge, in which I position myself as the algorithm behind a ‘smart’ fridge, using quantitative and qualitative data to make sense and ‘nonsense’ outcomes, and exploring householders’ interpretations. In the ‘SMART’ Fridge Session, I developed scripted dialogues characterised by active, reflective users, and assigned roles in which the ‘smartness’ of the algorithms is explored via professional performances and fictitious roles taken on by members of the public. The findings reveal the value of second-order cybernetics, acknowledging an unpredictable observer and embracing ‘smart’ as relational in interaction with IoT technology. They suggest that a shift in perspective is required to create more meaningful interactions with devices in the ‘smart’ home, questioning the current technological path, challenging the dominant epistemology and proposing alternatives. My methodological approach demonstrates how design research and 1 second-order considerations can work together, asking novel questions to inform disciplines with an interest in the IoT, both from a design perspective and in terms of broader implications for society. The work has value for design, HCI, Critical Algorithm Studies, and for technical developers involved in the creation of IoT systems.

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.