Online Lightning Talks
Design and Appropriation in Cognitive Capitalism
Virtual Lightning Talk Tomas Laurenzo
This paper analyses the relationship between capitalism, technology, and design. Technological advances have always had a very strong impact on design and society. However, although technology-propelled changes in social structures do exist (for example the industrial revolution and the consolidation of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class), technology often reaffirms and exacerbate existing social orders. On of the most salient features of capitalism is its ability to reformulate itself, adapting to changes and being able not only to maintain its basic structures. It is in this way that in the restructuring of capitalism that took place in the 70s, the new information and communication technologies played a fundamental role, allowing capitalism to include the possibility of an economy based on knowledge. In this new economy, knowledge not only plays a fundamental role but also becomes an exchange currency. After the crisis of labour, a new iteration of capitalism appeared: cognitive capitalism reedits existing structures, forcing an operation that protects them. Thus, if ownership of the means of production has traditionally been the key to placing oneself in a dominant position, in cognitive capitalism it is the control of knowledge that plays a fundamental role. The design practice has tried to reacted proposing alternative solutions, however, we argue that the forceful taming dynamics of cognitive capitalism have homogeneized contemporary design languages. We end by proposing that design can subvert this by appropriating the scientific and technological knowledge and creating new, original, design languages that escape the endogamic dynamics of utilitarian problem-solving.
Cultural and Consumer Relations of Editorial Design in the Digital Age
Virtual Lightning Talk Vagner Basqueroto Martins
This article searches through a survey in the specialized literature, researches companies and research groups about reading, books, readers and their particularities, to bring a collection of information that can contribute to the development of the publishing market, as well as to discuss the changes which have been happening in the production and consumption process of this sector. The main motivation is that professionals can have more and more aspects related to users as being of prime importance for future projects and business models, in the idea that reading liberates and helps the growth of a people. With the advent of new technologies and business models and interaction, in addition to easy access to an increasing amount of information by readers, design professionals. and publishing companies, have to be prepared to generate projects and models that can captivate the new generations of readers.
Traversing the Replication-Collaboration Continuum: Designing for a Decentralized Studio Learning Experience
Virtual Lightning Talk Lisa Hammershaimb
Due to financial concerns and shifting learner demographics, in many institutions, the hallmarks of studio pedagogy (small course sizes, dedicated unique learning spaces and extended course-meeting times) are eroding. The new reality for many programs is one where educators are expected to balance an increase in learners with a simultaneous decrease in contact time. There is an gap between what once was and what is now. One way many educators are choosing to navigate this gap is through using the internet to augment, extend, or otherwise decentralize studio-learning practices. This constructivist grounded theory study endeavored to investigate how design educators are using the internet to augment and extend studio pedagogy. The primary research question was, how are design educators using the internet to extend and augment studio pedagogy? The Replication-Collaboration Continuum, the theory created from the study, posits that how educators use the internet to augment and extend studio pedagogy can best be conceptualized as a continuum, with replication as one terminal and collaboration as the other. This theory has broad relevance for all educators curious about how to implement greater decentralization into their learning spaces. This presentation will provide a fast-paced romp through study findings, concluding with several practical next steps and provocative questions to help art and design educators think critically about their own studio pedagogy practice.
Effects of Color of Lights on Emotions in Learning Environment
Virtual Lightning Talk Junghwa Kim Suh, Elizabeth K Park
The purpose of this study is to examine how colors of light have an impact on people’s emotion in a learning environment. Considering 83% of learning takes place by the sense of sight in the learning process (Gilavand, 2016), color and lighting are the design elements that significantly influence visual quality and clarity in a learning environment. Recent research also indicates that these design elements have an impact on human emotions (Kuller, 2017). Notably, the use of color and light has an impact on the motivation and engagement of students based on their state of mood at the time (Choi & Suk, 2016). Instead of looking at color and light separately, this study focuses on how colors of light affect quantitative measurements of lighting quality and pleasantness and energy levels of students in the learning environment. This exploratory quasi-experimental study took place over four weeks, and the data of lighting condition changes and emotional responses were collected. The outcomes of the study present how colors of light in learning environments affect participants' pleasantness and energy levels. The results are discussed through a visual map between lighting and emotional changes which will inform the way designers integrate lighting within the learning environments.
Evolving Graphic Design from Serving Industry to Fulfilling Fundamental Human Needs
Virtual Lightning Talk Gareth Fry
In the same way that discussions about critical issues in our society’s past were once buried and eventually found a foothold in public discourse, graphic design must be shaken from its hypnotic focus on serving industry and refocused on the fulfillment of fundamental human needs. Graphic design has the potential to achieve highly-positive outcomes, but we need to initiate a dialog through which designers and educators examine the impact our work has on others, and then refine our practices. Research of design psychology and anthropology reveals that the heart of the problem is our natural propensity to view the world in terms of “us” and “them,” and to divide our loyalties accordingly. For designers, our clients are our “us,” whereas our audiences are a distant, passive, and easy-to-forget “them.” Previous scholarship that expounds ways to lift graphic design to a higher plane has tended to focus on superficial and transient factors such as industry issues, political agendas, and cultural trends. A far more powerful approach to finding a solution, however, is to re-code our “us” and “them” thinking, build a framework for graphic design that rests on the bedrock of our humanity, and make enlightened changes to our practices and output. No doubt we can all think of numerous reasons why we should maintain the status quo, but maybe we should be brave enough to ask ourselves why we should not. What, or who, are we afraid of? What do we stand to lose? What do we stand to gain?
Crime Reduction by Design: Interior Design to Assist in the Successful Recovery of Homeless Individuals in U.S. Shelter Environments
Virtual Lightning Talk Adam Nash
The United States’ economy is constantly in flux; the unemployment rate is high and there is stiff competition for jobs. Home foreclosures have steadily increased and many more Americans have been required to deal with housing issues more seriously than in the past. The number of Americans that have experienced or are currently experiencing homelessness is increasing daily and the design of homeless shelter environments is a growing issue of social justice. Homelessness is explored in this context as being “without a permanent home” and the psychological need for “home” is discussed in relation to the physiological need for shelter. Issues of homelessness that are addressed by this research into the interior design of homeless shelters includes the reduction of criminal activity, the ability for environmental factors to impact the homeless in psychological and social aspects, benefits of utilizing sustainability, as well as increased efficiency when conducting intake and assessments. Criminal activity among the homeless is a serious issue as many of this population lack traditional protections of permanent shelter and require other means of personal protection. The interior environment has a responsibility to the homeless in the U.S. to provide a safe and secure environment. In order to explain the ability of the shelter’s interior space to reduce or prevent criminal activity, research methods utilized include a comprehensive literature review, individual interviews with design project members, and observational analyses of two contrasting homeless environments along with a case study of a transformational homeless shelter.
ABCs of Design and its Thinking: A Tool that Helps Young Design Learners Understand the Complexities of Execution and Thinking
Virtual Lightning Talk Sugandha Gaur
In today’s oversaturated design scene, it has become a need of an hour for a design instructor to guide students on the thinking part of design. In the flow of making great design, many a times design learners tend to skip the ideation part of their projects and directly jump onto the execution. Realizing it as a threat, inspiring from design thinking and lateral thinking pedagogies, I created an ABC tool to make sure in the process of design-making, thinking never goes missing. It is the only way a designer in the coming time would be able to differentiate from the other designer. This tool helps young designers to break the complexities involved in design making process in a very simpler way and helps them to identify the main components of design process. This pedagogy encourages every designer to stay connected to the ideation part of any design-making process. I have been using this tool since 2016 and it has helped with class projects tremendously.
Imagine Me: A Tangible Speech from the Imaginary World of the Unheard Voices in the Most Dangerous Reality
Virtual Lightning Talk Luca D'Elia
My thesis research focused on a study carried out with the collaboration of different realities on Roman territory, that came up with a collection of sculptures made in Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printing process, depicting the three-dimensional reworkings of drawings made by refugee children in Italy. These intelligent sculptures bring with them, their personal and fantastic story, told by their little creators. Thanks to radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags implanted in the structure itself, those creations give the possibility of being followed and found through the smartphones of the same people who decide to host such artifacts in their homes. The goal is to create an emotional cohabitation with the person who no longer receives a negative and demeaning message from refugees or people who speak for them. The little refugee, who is most afraid and misunderstood, no longer asks for help, although he may desperately need it, but he gives the host population a new carrier for awareness and compassion. A story that gives its owner a secret shared with him and him only, which indirectly approaches the guest through this "mediator". Through the study of collective intelligences, the manipulation of learning models, the deconstruction of childish drawings, 3D modeling and prototyping techniques, Imagine Me, is proposed as a new tone of voice, a different vector of sensibilization for those who may need help and who need to understand the importance of his help.
Academic Conceptualization of User Centered Designing : A Consumer Textile Designer Perspective
Virtual Lightning Talk Asna Mubashra
Design is recognized as a problem solving activity. Recently investigations of design philosophy, design methods, and design processing graduated as scientific studies in social sciences. All activities associated with design evolved in diversifying ways; among most recent evolution is user-centered design approach which emphasizes that the purpose of any design is to serve user, not to use a specific technology or not to be an elegant piece. User-centered designing involves extensive attention to needs, wants, and limitations expressed by the ultimate end users of product or service throughout the development stage of design process. In contemporary complex socio-technical systems of human society, activities of design have a varied range of applications. Textiles are among basic human needs hence holds a large-scale design implication. This research explores user need assessment as the primary component of textile design process for consumer textiles using collaborative workshop outputs. Moreover, design research focusing on user needs at the initial stage of consumer textile design is currently lacking. User centered designing approach of all kinds pays more attention on re-purposing of existing technologies instead of the invention of new ones without real life applications. Thus it is of much importance to understand the academic conceptualization of consumer textile designing as a user centered design activity. User need assessment as a primary component of the textile design process may provide textile designers with rich skills, knowledge, and experience on material handling thus enhancing the problem-solving component of material design
Can We Design Culture?: A Theoretical Account of Interventions into Cultural Processes
Virtual Lightning Talk Jeffrey Colgan
In the post-industrial era, more and more cities and regions are embracing cultural planning policies in their attempts to achieve economic growth and political relevance. These plans and the bodies behind them see culture as something that can be bolstered, directed, and even substantially altered. The methods used and particular goals held by various statecraft practitioners vary greatly; however, most have taken for granted certain key assumptions about the potential for the cultural apparatus to be designed and directed. But what does it exactly mean to design culture, especially when culture is treated holistically as a dialectic between mass media and various sites of avant-garde experimentation? Does the ‘design’ of underground or avant-garde culture pose unique problems and ethical quandaries? Furthermore, how can we scholars of cultural design develop a theoretical system that allows for experimentation and free expression as well as meaningful cultural policies? This paper references the historical examples of New York City’s mid-1970s re-organization and expansion of its Department of Cultural Affairs and Chicago’s 2012 Cultural Plan under Mayor Emmanuel, but primary concern is given to broad theoretical and philosophical issues with the potential to design and direct underground and avant-garde culture. This paper goes on to argue that any sort of ethical or successful design of cultural processes must focus on the conditions of cultural expression and strive to employ organic and living designs.
Integration and Mobility for an Elderly Population: Siting and Design of Community Facilities for the Elderly
Virtual Lightning Talk Andreas Savvides
The proposal is for a concept of providing the elderly segment of the population with an enhancement of their places of socialization in the form of neighborhood community centers for the elderly. These centers are viewed as an integral part a neighborhood's community infrastructure and as such they should be located in multiple locations in a city at regular intervals and frequencies. The relationship between the distance that may be covered by an elderly person to reach any of these centers either by walking independently or with assistance or with the use of specialized service vehicles is examined. The catchment area for the population of the elderly in a neighborhood is also examined to estimate the occupancy for this piece of community infrastructure. The program to be found in these centers is also examined in ways in which it may provide this segment of the population with a one stop shop for addressing some of their most basic needs in terms services related to them. Also important is the provision of meals and of themed and organized activities that may enhance quality of life and socialization amongst groups of the same generation but also activities of an intergenerational nature. These centers are also conceived of as places where an elderly person may outsource some of their living spaces for individual or group occupation and as an effort of mitigating loneliness and exclusion for this segment of the population.
Manifestation of the Constructivist Object: Reconstructing Alexander Rodchenko's Designs of the 1920s
Virtual Lightning Talk Alexander Lavrentiev
Not a single exhibition of modernist art, including architecture or design, is complete without the reconstruction of objects created by the legendary masters of the 1920s. Both physical and digital reconstructions, full-scale reconstructions of models and prototypes based on works by Malevich and El Lissitsky, Rodchenko and Tatlin, Klutsis, Popova, and Stepanova are often created specifically for exhibitions, opening new pages of design history. From graphic and conceptual works of art, this heritage passes into the category of physically existing, tangible objects. Realizing the nature and strategy of reconstruction one has to consider the special character of most of the designs of the 1920s: manifestation of the design and architectonic principle (Rodchenko’s newspaper kiosk of 1919 representing the use of surfaces both as graphic and constructive elements), agitation for multifunctional and folding principles of furniture in Rodchenko’s sets for the play “Inga” of 1929 and furnishings of the room of a protagonist of the scientific organization of labour (sets for film “The Journalist”, 1928) announce the object as an instrument in the intellectual profession, for which the Swedish-American office furniture served as a prototype. In all these examples structural elements of these objects were as if unfolding into space from the two-dimension origin of a draught. Both the theater and the cinema for Rodchenko and his colleagues, the pioneers of the design of the 1920s, turned into a place for the manifestation of new relations between a man and an object, between the unique the person and the industrial product.
The Era of Smart Products and the Artificial Intelligence: The Role of Technology Inside Post-Industrial Design
Virtual Lightning Talk Dario Allotta
This paper focuses on post-industrial design, especially the Internet of Things and the comfortable behaviour behind systems. People's behaviour is constantly changing according to the new technologies, which, in turn, are changing to better satisfy human needs. In this specific contest, people, communities, rules and lifestyles move into new paradigms, that convey habits and new situations within different fields (Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity). In the last two decades, as the innovation has changed the communication, the products hve become smaller and portable, therefore people learned new wayd to use them. As applications of technology have increased, things have gained new modalities of use, which are permeated in all the objects of daily life, transforming them and consequentially our perception of the world. Nowadays we communicate, we see and discover the world through the screen of our smartphone; we talk with it to interact with our homes; we entrust with internet to do almost everything and making smart devices as an intrusive partner. This perspective is inducing to wander several questions: what is the threshold that could lead to addiction? What is the role of the comfort in this system - and how can we not surpass it? What scenarios are we going to match? (Andrea Signorelli, Rivoluzione Artificiale) In order to find the right answers to the questions above, it is necessary to deeply investigate the relationship between humans and devices, allowing us to understand how to split them and, as a consequence, how to preserve our identity.
