Redefinition design is a special case of speculative and critical design; it is intended to be used by designers in facing otherwise recalcitrant or refractory design situations. One subject that generates more refractory design situations than most is money. Thus, money will be the vehicle used to derive, articulate and apply the redefinition design methods. The future of money is heavily informed by ideas from its past. In this regard, the services and systems based around money, including industries focused on design, often embody a conservative culture that perpetuates old paradigms onto new technology. In this dissertation, I propose two research questions: RQ1: Paradigm Paralysis – what characterises the underlying assumptions that heavily inform the design and development of money? In the context of investigating the new methods associated with Redefinition Design, we firstly begin to examine and interrogate underlying and often tacit assumptions, taking the specific case of money. Though this question I elucidate the fundamental principles of money, which lie at the core of the longstanding mainstream monetary paradigm. The totality of money is broken down into four main constituents: monetary artefacts, currency systems, monetary mentifacts and finally the functional axioms of money. Revealing these core principles, and analysing them within specific cultural contexts, will inform the methods used in the development of the practical work. RQ2: Paradigm Breakout – What characterises a methodology that can facilitate designers to step beyond the underlying assumptions informing the development of money? This research has yielded strategies that allow the radical re-conception and design of currency systems and monetary artefacts, through the application of a redefinition design approach. The Redefinition Design methods developed in this research enable the designer to identify suitable alternative cultural contexts, such as historic or literary contexts. The methods prompt us to deconstruct these contexts, then reconstruct them with a design proposal that resonates with all cultural levels of the given context. Hence, in the case of entrenched social technologies like money, the resulting Redefinition Design proposals are harmonious with the alternative culture, but incongruous in the context of contemporary culture. These methods do not instigate a paradigm shift but rather a paradigm breakout.

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.

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?”

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.

In the current transport landscape, where chronic problems such as congestion, insufficient parking spaces and air pollution beset urban areas, car sharing has been suggested as an alternative to mitigate these issues. With the emergence and growing popularity of the sharing economy, a shifting perception towards car ownership has paved the way towards rapid growth in shared mobility. The car club – or car sharing – as a service, enables people to go without their own car, yet use one when they need to. This flexible transport option has grown rapidly in many metropolises around the world. In London, it is forecast that the total number of round-trips car club memberships will increase from 137,000 in 2013 to approximately 264,000 by 2020 (Frost & Sullivan, 2014). As car sharing’s popularity rises, it is critical to better understand car club users with their varied lifestyles and mindsets. Therefore, this research focuses on obtaining an in-depth understanding of car club users and exploring more deeply the role of the car club from the users’ perspective. Three key questions were asked: 1. What are the users’ perspectives towards existing car clubs? 2. What are their key suggestions as to how to improve the car club model? 3. What are the critical aspects of the proposed car club model, from the users’ perspective? The research adopts a multidisciplinary approach, with further contextual research and expert interviews with service designers in order to evaluate the role service design might play in enticing more people to consider the use of such mobility services in the future. The ultimate aim of this research is to provide a set of mobility service guidelines designed to enhance the overall level of user experience for car clubs. Advancing the operating models of car clubs should help existing operators fulfil their role as a more adaptable and reliable alternative transport mode in urban areas. The research outcome is expected to contribute to current car club operators’ future plans and provide guidance for vehicle OEMs when developing their own mobility models in the future.

This PhD by practice explores the possibilities of visible repair using a design-led methodology that aims to bring a new consciousness to the relationship between consumers and products, as part of an approach to 'circular' product design. Through a series of workshops in which participants repaired broken products, Do-Fix repair kits were developed and trialled; these kits combine new technologies such as 3D printing with traditional repair methods such as kintsugi, darning and patching, focused on making repairs both visible and engaging to carry out. Current economic systems depend on large quantities of resource and energy use that cannot be sustained with the planet’s finite resources. Producing long-lasting, purposeful and ‘circular’ products is essential in order to decrease the rate of consumption and its negative environmental impacts. Repair is an effective strategy for extending product lifespan and closing the material loops. However, increasing the product’s lifespan is also dependent upon the attitudes and behaviour of users. Therefore, the aim of this research is to explore the role of repair in user-product engagement and create a product or service that encourages people to repair products more for the purpose of awakening human sensitivity to environmental and societal problems. Conventional repair methods, such as kintsugi (a Japanese repair method using gold), darning and patching are combined with new technologies and materials, including 3D printing, with the help of ‘research through design’ methods. All the repair techniques were tested in workshops with users. The results were fed back into the research, which was then used to develop Do-Fix repair kits, providing users with the opportunity to give a second life to an object. Here the aim is not to disguise the damage, but to make something artful out of it. The Do-Fix repair kits include four different kits, namely (1) the kintsugi kit, (2) 3D-printed patches, (3) plaster patches for mending textiles, and (4) textile patches for fixing shoes and bags. The value of this research for design practice is in its exploration of potential methods and materials of product repair by providing concrete examples, as well as the creation of the Do-Fix repair kits. For academics and researchers its value lies in reframing the position of repair in the circular economy and developing design considerations related to product repair.

The principle objective of this study is to examine the conditions and contexts of critical design practice, specifically as it pertains to methods of identifying, presenting and producing critical design within the space of the museum exhibition. The analysis in this study seeks to reveal a better understanding of the working practices that underpin museums’ creative engagements with critical design practice while recognising the significance of critical design’s behaviours of questioning, possibilising, probabilising and activating that inform such engagements. A case is presented for combining several theoretical perspectives into a multi-layered conceptual framework for examining the ideas, approaches and conditions of both critical design and its circulation through the museum exhibition. In calling upon concepts from the art world as a means of developing a philosophical understanding of design, the concept of a ‘work of design’ is proposed to understand the shift in practice that has occurred over the past fifteen years. Furthermore, the emphasis on a ‘work of design’ is explicated through a conceptualisation of critical practice as both a design of reflexive modernity and a para-model of practice – a notable device for social and cultural research. Design’s circulation in the museum is problematised drawing upon theories of the curatorial to develop a model of the exhibition as a speculative activity that privileges critical thought, discourse, speculation and production. In this sense ‘the curatorial’ offers a space for multiple viewpoints and experiences which together create a collective endeavour that remains forever open to contestation and adjustment. Empirically, the study contributes insights into the diverse and contingent curatorial practices involved in communicating and disseminating critical design practice. The findings suggest that the new relationships that are being formed between critical design and the museum are reframing the exhibition as a tool for research – a transdisciplinary studio space whereby ideas are tested and projects take form through the performativity of multiple agents. Thus the museum is being approached as a context for experimentation; a space that exposes rather than displays, presents rather than represents, a performative space that points to a recoding of practice as production. In this way we can begin to consider the museum and its exhibitions as a model of emergence as they enter a discourse of performativity that actively engages with their subject rather than merely offering it for consumption. The result is a collective space for knowing and experiencing via the performativity of both critical design and the curatorial.

Possible changes in brain metabolites are associated with Motor Neurone Disease (MND). Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) has been performed on the brains of MND patients and control volunteers to acquire signals which contain information about brain metabolites from within the motor cortex area. Discrimination between JvThD and normal groups may help to understand the pathogenic mechanisms in MND and may be useful for monitoring the effects of future trial treatment regimens. The research described in this thesis presents the development of a pattern recognition system based on neural networks to correctly distinguish between motor neurone disease (MND) patients and controls when presented with a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrum. The NMR spectra are pre-processed to obtain consistent data, and statistical parameters are extracted and selected from each spectrum. Four statistical neural network classifiers are used to provide information and initial decisions (MND/normal). A neural network is then used to combine these to give a final decision. Experimental results indicate that the system can achieve high performance classification on the spectra, including spectra not seen by the system during training. The experiment was repeated on different training and test sets to validate the method and the repeated design shows that the final system was able to achieve high performance classification. A ifizzy rule-based system teclmique is applied to translate and extract rules encoded in weights of neural network classifiers. The neural networks are translated into a few comprehensible rules to understand how the network performs the final decision.

This thesis describes research in the area of automated industrial inspection using machine vision systems. It is anticipated that the algorithms described will contribute to the design of a machine vision system for the automatic surface inspection of cylindrical pellets. Firstly, the acquisition and segmentation of pellet tray images using area capture is described. Individual pellets are segmented from a pellet tray image by a novel system using the Radon transform coupled with data clustering. Subsequent to the segmentation, the linking of four pellet views depicting the entire circumferential area of the pellet is described along with a simple technique to compensate for intensity variations brought about by imaging the three-dimensional cylindrical surface of the pellet. The image processing techniques of filtering, edge detection, thresholding and morphology are used in the segmentation of grey level pellet defect images. The grey level pellet images are low-pass filtered and binary images formed using edge detection with thresholding. Binary morphology operators are then used in conjunction with a termination condition based on the number of objects in the image to ensure homogenous defect representations. The problem of overlapping defects is addressed, resulting in a second algorithm using the Radon transform coupled with data clustering. Prior to classification salient features are extracted from a set of synthetic binary defect images to form feature vectors. The novel idea of image object classification using 100% fuzzy inference is described, and results are shown to be superior to results obtained by feature space classifiers. The sub-classification of crack defects is carried out using a heuristic classifier, and the parameterisation of pellet defects is described.