Posters
Exploring How People Interpret Interactive Wearables with Biophilic Movement View Digital Media
Poster Session Neda Fayazi, Lois Frankel
Applying bio-inspired strategies in the design of products may enhance user-product interaction and create a positive and pleasurable experience. One of these strategies is the application of ‘biophilic movements’, these are movements that are inspired by nature and could create a positive emotional impact. For designers to identify the value of applying these movements in the design of products, it is necessary to understand how people interpret and possibly respond to different bio-inspired movements. Currently, there are no guidelines to assist designers in incorporating biologically inspired movements in wearables that respond to people’s subjective interpretations. Therefore, to explore this, certain kinds of tools and methods are needed. As a result, this study introduces a method for developing a biophilic semantic differential scale and a step-by-step pilot method for understanding how people interpret biophilic movements in biophilic body-worn artifacts.
Cemeteries Resurging as Park-like Education Campuses: A Design-led Study via Research by Design Strategy View Digital Media
Online Poster Qing Luo
Traditionally, cemeteries were used for burials only. In the nineteenth century, rural cemeteries began to be used as public open spaces after the success of Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA. Besides being burial grounds and public open spaces providing green space values, there haven't been discussions about a cemetery being an educational facility in modern history. The question is - can a cemetery have the attribute to provide valuable learning opportunities as an outdoor education campus? In this study, a 150-acre site in Oklahoma, potentially designated to a future national veterans cemetery, was used as a design-led study to answer the above question. The design research process was carried out in four stages and followed the design guidelines of: a) the National Cemetery Administration, b) open spaces, and c) campus outdoor spaces. A series of vigorous design, charrettes, presentations, reviews, and redesign activities have taken place. The proposed master plan turned into not only the place to pay respect for the deceased veterans, but also an education campus in a park-like setting, where children can learn multiple subjects including patriotism, history, natural resources, birds, wildlife, stormwater, hydrology, and sustainability. This design-led process has proven that a cemetery can have a dual function beside burials - be an outdoor educational facility and campus. This type of cemetery development will provide profound benefits for a broad public, the veteran communities, the municipal, students, and youth communities. This study will lend insights for design professionals, cemetery development, and city officials.
Design Thinking and Civics Education: A Collaborative and Creative Approach to Empowering Young Change-Makers with The Creative Citizen Project View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Willhemina Wahlin, Cymbeline Buhler
The Creative Citizen Project is a pilot research study that aims to creatively engage young people in impactful civic participation in their local community. In this presentation, we discussed some of the findings of this pilot program, particularly from the perspective of design as a tool for promoting social engagement among young people as citizens and democratic agents. We explain the research aims, the Creative Citizen pedagogical model that informed the pilot workshop program, and in particular, focus on how the collaboration of Design Thinking with Civics and Citizenship education supported the participants to develop and utilise empathy, uniting political knowledge with problem-solving skills to encourage what we have called critical creativity.
Connections: Transdisciplinary Multimodal Collaborative Design View Digital Media
Poster Session Mary Anna La Fratta
Students enter university art and design schools with ever-increasing technical skills as makers and as consumers. Their interests cross disciplinary boundaries. Although conceptual content can be immature. “Connections” is a multimodal, multimedia, and transdisciplinary collaborative project. It involves three different groups of students working together: students enrolled in an entry level two-dimensional design class, engineering students enrolled in a special topics class, and young people with autism spectrum disorder living within the local community. The media includes a Touch Board™, similar to an Arduino microcontroller, with 12 electrodes that can trigger sounds through its MP3 player, special electric paint that functions both as an electrical conductor when touched, and as a design element, as well traditional and or digital drawing media. The objectives for the two-dimensional design students is to consider the spatial, aural and interactive relationships among form, meaning, and behavior and apply them to a two-dimensional work. The engineering students focus on expanding the scope of the computer code to explore integrating image, touch, sound and kinetics. The ASD students are exposed to alternate possibilities for expression, and to make connections between media and forms of communication. While this research is concerned with integrating human interaction, sound, image, and computer technology in several contexts, it is also concerned with experiential learning, expanding conceptual possibilities, and encouraging transdisciplinary collaborations on a larger scale within art, design, and engineering.
(Re)design (Re)search: The Ever-changing Design Brief of the Maker/User - a Case Study View Digital Media
Poster Session Meghan D. Lancaster
An increasingly visible subset of the set of designers today is the Maker/User, who designs, engineers, and constructs objects for personal use. Close to the Craftsperson in terms of aesthetic freedom, the Maker/User’s designer-self has literally no one to answer to but her or his own client-self. The client-self has no compunction about making radical changes to a design brief at any stage for any reason. Some of these changes will stem from the constant stream of new ideas contributed by the designer-self who should, therefore, not complain. This Maker/User was well into the design phase of a complex, fifteen-piece, fantasy stage costume, when the brief was significantly self-revised. I gave an open-ended, anything goes project a due-date certain and a huge new specification: it has to fit into a large Pullman bag on a plane to Ireland; to the extent possible all pieces must be made to lie flat and be constructed without metal. In addition to these new constraints, continuing research on the design inspiration (honey bees), added to the redesign requirements. Then, as construction began, the comments of a trusted advisor led to a complete reconceptualization of the headdress, which meant lots of new research but led to a far simpler engineering/construction approach. This poster visually plots the design evolution of this project, Queen of the Killer Bees, from first inspiration through final design decisions. Notes, drawings, test samples, and two pieces of the actual costume are included.
The Ligatures of Life: The Design and the 'Difficult' Exhibition View Digital Media
Online Poster Willhemina Wahlin, Leora Kahn
The role of the designer within exhibition design is one of 'double-ended' interpretation - we interpret materials that are provided to us, as well as those we create with the design process. In the case of 'difficult' exhibitions - this is, those that contain information related to genocide, gender violence, contested histories, war or death - the interpretive role of the designer must also address the representation of vulnerable people and communities. In this paper, I discuss my research in this field, which has included the development of the Critical Hermeneutics, Social Semiotics and Multimodality (CHaSSMM) Model of Analysis. I explain how this method of interpretation has supported the design of the exhibition, "Ferguson Voices: Disrupting the Frame", a Moral Courage project by PROOF: Media for Social Justice and the University of Dayton's Human Rights Center.
The Book as an Idea - Conception, Process, and Agency: Research and Exhibition on Editorial Design View Digital Media
Online Poster Danne Ojeda
The book as an idea is the core of an educative project held at the School of Art, Design and Media, Singapore. First, participants are invited to collaboratively research several definitions of “book”. Second, participants are then encouraged to individually propose what their definition of a book is, based on their own personal interests and understanding of the subject. All the process is documented and shared in a gallery setting. The study engages case studies of the outcome of this pedagogical and curatorial project with emphasis on its significance for the individual creative development. Case studies also involve a look at the relevant international exhibition thread of this educational project such as the 11th Biennale Internationale Design Saint Etienne, France; and the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Australia, where this pedagogical project was exhibited.
Paper and Plastic: Flapper Style Reimaged in the 1960s Fashion Zeitgeist View Digital Media
Poster Session Amanda J. Thompson, Marcy L. Koontz, Brian E. Taylor
In the 1920s, the silhouette of women’s dress became more tubular in design, shorter in length and worn loose as the corset was no longer de rigueur. The style reflected the zeitgeist of a changing world as women were asserting their independence in a new and modern way. Ironically, the woman of the 1960s was quite like her 1920s counterpart not only in her quest for equality but in her fashion as she donned the decade’s iconic short, dropped waist shift dress. During both decades the optimistic youth culture embraced consumerism, mass production, and the liberating temporary idea of fashion. This study explores the process of reimaging three 1920s flapper dresses from The Fashion Archive within the context of the op-art and pop art design movements, coupled with the paper dress fad and the use of PVC fabric to create futuristic fashions, during the 1960s. Using a custom adapted zone grid system developed for systematic color sampling of objects of dress, color readings for each 1920s dress were taken using a NIX™ Pro mobile spectrophotometer and app. The reimaged paper dresses were constructed entirely out of Oce 6007 7.5 mil DuPont™ Tyvek® printed with each dresses’ true color value on a Mimaki JFX200 wide-format flatbed printer. The PVC dresses were constructed out of four-gauge clear vinyl adorned with 3” Tyvek® squares printed with the individual CIE L*a*b* color measurements systematically taken from the color readings for each of the 1920s dresses.
Moving from Foundation to Concentration : Understanding the Fashion Design Student’s Transitional Experience from Foundation Year to Program Major
Poster Session Steven Faerm
This qualitative study examines the cognitive and emotional development of undergraduates as they transition from freshman-year “foundation” design programs into sophomore-year fashion design “major” programs. It examines this transition through the lenses of design school undergraduates, alumni, educators, directors, scholars, and current program structures. Using the theoretical frameworks of William Perry’s Scheme of Epistemological Growth and Robert Kegan’s Order of Consciousness, this research study seeks to understand the undergraduates’ transitional experience. Through a literature review, interviews, focus groups, survey, and the evolving industry, the transitional experience is contextualized. Additionally, this study also considers the future of design education and what kind of experience might best prepare design students for the transition into their elected “majors” or concentrations. The goal of this study is to provide undergraduate design programs, educators, and directors with awareness for how they can improve their students' transition into fashion design programs.
Urban Fiction : The Visionary Architecture of Designers, Filmmakers, and Writers View Digital Media
Online Poster Jennifer Shields
Critiques of contemporary culture - and ideas about how we could live differently - have been explored through a variety of media, including drawing, collage, film, and literature. While these images and texts may seem implausible, "Visionary projects cast their shadows over into the real world of experience, expense and frustration. If we could learn what they have to teach, we might exchange irrelevant rationalizations for more useful critical standards. Vision and reality might then coincide," according to Arthur Drexler, Director of MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, 1951-85. This paper describes the methodology and outcomes of a course taught for both architecture majors and non-majors in which we examine alternative realities and their representations as visualized by architects, landscape architects, urbanists, filmmakers, and writers throughout history, with an emphasis on the twentieth century. The concept of montage – assembling fragments of images and/or text from various sources into a new entity with new meaning – underlies most visionary work, as it layers existing conditions with alternative possibilities. There are four typologies through which these urban fictions (graphic and written) are manifested, which provide the structure for the course content: IDEALIZATION: creating geometricized urban forms 2. AGGREGATION: hybridizing existing forms 3. SUPERIMPOSITION: layering new forms on existing urban contexts 4. SUBSTITUTION: inhabiting alternative or hostile contexts The diversity of modes of communication in the precedents being studied necessitates a multi-modal analysis. Students employ analytical writing extensively, but augment their writing with sketches and collages to produce a more thorough analysis.
Communicating Universally Through the Visual Narrative for Beginning Level Graphic Design Students : A Project Based on Ellen Lupton’s book, Design is Storytelling View Digital Media
Online Poster Robert Gilbert, Elizabeth Corinne McCormack-Whittemore
Universal Storytelling is an ongoing project that was collaboratively developed by colleagues, Associate Prof. Robert Gilbert and Lecturer Corinne Whittemore at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Based off the adopted book, Design is Storytelling, by Ellen Lupton, it has been taught to beginning level graphic design students at UTRGV for the past two semesters. AIGA Design Futures identifies several areas for continuing education that will sustain viable practices. One of those is Complex Problems… “Linear approaches that address one component or factor at a time are inadequate in addressing dynamic conditions.” We took this literally in the sense that we can no longer step students through solving one design problem at a time. In our pedagogy, we believe that we must allow students to confront multiple problems within any given project, especially at the beginning levels of education. As problems get more complex and our intent is to successfully communicate on a global level, design educators need to expand their processes of evaluation and teach students to be interdisciplinary, collaborative, and culturally sensitive in seeking solutions. By teaching from the position of Lupton’s book, Design is Storytelling, and presenting the complex problem of telling a personal story that communicates on a universal level, we hope to expand processes of evaluation to go beyond aesthetic and form and encourage young designers to resist working from the position of the lone designer. We hope to develop creatives who draw from inner, personal resources to conceptualize and design effective communication.
Design Factors Affecting the Uptake and Implementation of Nature-based Solutions in Mixed-use Urban Spaces: A Qualitative Case-study Analysis Between Three Cities
Poster Session Judit Zita Boros
Nature-based solutions (NBS) is an umbrella term for interventions mobilizing nature to advance human well-being through the delivery of ecosystems services (ES). Used intentionally, they can offer an approach to tackling urban sustainability challenges. In a practical sense, NBS in cities are instruments for urban revitalization and transformation, pushing beyond sustainability to regeneration using the built environment. In a theoretical sense, NBS are part of an agenda that imagines new scenarios for urban environments and ways of urban living. Still, at present, NBS are often ephemeral, fragmented, and used in an ad-hoc way. They can be lost in translation between the scientific assessment of ES and the practicalities of local, socio-cultural context, implicating a lack of understanding and management to deliver the most value for the urban sustainability transition and transformation agenda (Kabisch et al. 2016). This dissertation research examines NBS cases 'as a design consequence,' considering them as design interventions in complex urban environments, where the interplay between technology, nature, and humans influence how urban nature (i.e., NBS) performs. Through a multidisciplinary case study analysis, based on qualitative data collected from three cities (Milan in Italy, Győr in Hungary and Melbourne in Australia), the research highlights how the design framework can enable the use of NBS in the domain of urban development, and how the understanding of citizens’ usage, needs, values, and perception change the design outcome and implementation of NBS, as a starting point for using regenerative or transition design approaches in general planning more systematically.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights - an Interactive Experience: Thirty Articles Come to Life
Poster Session Michele Bury
My study focuses on my work on a one of a kind typographic interactive book of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), designed to help foster a deeper understanding of the thirty different articles of this declaration. These hands-on interactivity feature each article, inviting viewers from reading age to become active participants, by bringing the text to life. Additionally, the interactivity attempts to match the meaning of its article. My goal for this interactive experience is to foster awareness and dialogue on our universal human rights. https://www.dropbox.com/s/05ud6a18k51bxiw/UDHR_movie02.mov?dl=0
Nudge for Good: A Criteria for the Ethical Use of Nudges View Digital Media
Poster Session Valerie Joly Chock
Findings in cognitive and behavioral science are of interest for designers because they show that the way options are designed and presented influences people’s choices and behaviors due to cognitive biases. Based on this data, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein came up with the idea of a nudge, which they define as a small change in the way options are presented that steers people towards certain choices without coercion. Designers are, then, capable of incorporating the use of nudges as a strategy in their work to influence target audiences. Central to the debate on nudging is the question of whether it is ethical to intentionally nudge others. My work answers this question in the positive and offers a criteria for the ethical use of nudges. That is, for a nudge to be ethical (i) it must be easy to resist, and (ii) it must be aimed towards the welfare of those being nudged. By exploring what these conditions involve, my work contributes to the debate on design ethics. Particularly, it advances the conversation about the morality of nudging as a design strategy by offering a standard with which nudges can be categorized as ethical/unethical. In addition, I describe and evaluate practical examples of nudges with an emphasis on their social and economic effects. A central implication of my project is that a designer’s responsibilities include recognizing the impact of their work and “nudging for good”. That is, nudging according to proposed criteria.
Knowing The Unknown: Humanizing Transgender People View Digital Media
Online Poster Mirza Amir
Transgender persons do not have the same level of rights as other Pakistanis, and are routinely harassed, face discrimination, and in some cases subjected to violence. Gender Interactive Alliance (GIA) is a non-profit organisation working for the equality and civil rights of transgender people in Pakistan. Their aim is to increase the visibility and acceptance of this gender by facilitating education and employment and providing medical aid and legal counselling. Our goal was to collaborate with GIA in revamping the organisation’s identity and creating public awareness about their work and services such as the emergency helpline. The campaign included identity rebranding, literature design, personal stories, and easy-to-access helpline posters. The project’s aim was to create awareness about GIA and spread its work beyond the transgender community, to the general public as well. The personal stories especially served to humanise transgender persons by highlighting their struggles, hopes, and dreams. Similarly, increased awareness about the emergency helpline service sought to provide immediate aid to transgender persons facing violence and harassment.
Graphic Designers Help Build HIV/AIDS Awareness: Giving Back Through Design View Digital Media
Online Poster Nicole A. Beltran
Design students registered for my Poster course at Barry University joined forces with local designers to help AIGA-Miami, the Wolfsonian–FIU museum and the Florida Department of Health (FDH), create posters to educate the public on the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Florida. As a proponent of community service, I took steps to obtain a Service-learning designation for this class, allowing me the opportunity to teach students how to use their talents in ways that benefit the community. This semester, the poster research process began by attending the AIGA-Design for Empathy workshop. Attendees learned a great deal of information about HIV/AIDS and the stigma surrounding the disease. Participants also took part in brainstorming activities and viewed the collection of historic HIV/AIDS posters at the Wolfsonian-FIU for inspiration. During the next few weeks, students explored design concepts/techniques in order to produce a meaningful poster. They then submitted their posters to a panel of judges consisting of representatives from the Wolfsonian-FIU, FDH and the local design community. Judges narrowed down submissions (which included professional and student designers) to 10 finalists. I was ecstatic to learn that 5 out of the 10 finalists were from my poster class, as well as 3 honorable mentions. This Service-learning project concluded with the class and myself volunteering during the AIGA-PosterFest:Design For Good event at Wolfsonian-FIU. A day-long event revolving around HIV/AIDS education. Upon arriving to volunteer, student finalists were happy to see their posters printed/framed, and learned they would be on display at the museum for several weeks.
The Effect of the Physical Environment Design on Teachers' Comfort in Schools: A Critical Literature Review View Digital Media
Online Poster Rouaa Atyah
Teachers spend over two thousand hours annually either teaching in their classrooms or working in their offices at schools, playing a critical role in the educational progress. A large body of evidence supports the connections between the design of the physical environment in schools and teachers workplace comfort. Therefore, it is vital to maintain—or in many cases increase— teachers’ workplace comfort in order to maintain motivation, performance, and efficiency, which will decrease burnout and increase retention rates. The “Habitability Pyramid” model of environmental comfort defined by Vischer (2007) was applied to the context of this critical review to investigate the effect of the workplace in general, and specifically on workplace comfort and well-being, physical comfort and health, functional comfort and productivity, and psychological comfort for teachers in schools. These aspects are related to their control over the physical environment and privacy, and thus their effectiveness as educators. The interrelationship between the physical environment and teachers comfort is not only affected by their classrooms physical environment, but also as employees by the physical environment of the workplace where they conduct work outside of teaching time. This critical review provides an understanding of the design issues and physical environment attributes that mostly affect teachers’ workplace comfort in prototype public schools, which will aid stakeholders in the future of schools’ design and construction in the twenty-first century.
The Designer as Agent : The Book as an Object of Artistic Mediation in a Museum View Digital Media
Online Poster Tiago Sousa, Ana Lúcia Silva
The book is an object that adopts many forms to serve necessities. Assuming this desire of fullness inspired by books, we want to question about the possibilities of the same as an object of mediation between the public and the museum. The museum appears as a prolongation of artistic education, and it is a space where several publics go, for all sorts of reasons. Although, it is also necessary for the museum to find different publics, making the visit interactive and appreciated; instead of a simple observation. Focusing on these museum’s desire-duty ‘tasks’, we believe that the design could help the approach between the museum and the public to create a relationship space with expanded knowledge, instead of a punctual and uni-directional occurrence. Therefore, we inquire about how a can designer help in the construction of an object of mediation in a museum. We believe that the public thinks that going to the museum once is already enough to become familiar with the pieces of the museum. Consequently, we pretend to create an object capable of demystifying that, in a way to amplify the public’s knowledge and to diffuse artistic education, which is the museum. The mediation spaces become the focus of our problem as an extension of the knowledge - to approach the individual with the artistic education. The objective is to find new perspectives of mediation, and communication hypotheses between the museum and the public, and contribute through design and through the book for an exercise of artistic education.
Public Library as a Cultural Hub: Approaches to Enhancing Cultural Sustainability View Digital Media
Online Poster Eman Sabry Abowardah, Manal M. Osama Khalil, Mohamed Al Rafei
Cultural sustainability is counted now as the fourth pillar within sustainable development plans, equal to social, economic, and environmental concerns. Public libraries play a unique role within cultural sustainability by representing a significant part of the communities’ history and heritage. This study raises an important question; how can cultural sustainability be assessed in library design? The research problem emerges from the fact that most of the public libraries that were established before the information and digital revolution are now inactive and works as books’ repository. Therefore, this study highlights and discusses the development of traditional libraries to focus on the importance of redesigning their spaces to accommodate the local community’s needs. The research aims to shed light on the important role of public libraries in achieving cultural sustainability, by proposing a model for dealing with public libraries based on knowledge activism and revitalizing different paths of knowledge to achieve cultural sustainability. The research methodology follows an analytical approach to consider case studies for traditional library redesign, to come out with a framework-involving a group of indicators for redesigning the traditional library to accommodate new requirements of the knowledge commons, then testing the validity of the proposed model with a local case study. The research comes out with criteria and indicators for assessing the process of redesigning the traditional public libraries to transfer them to an active state to achieve cultural sustainability.
Is Materiality a Prize Winner? View Digital Media
Online Poster Hala Sirror, Salma Dwidar
There is a very wide range of new materials that are innovations from existing traditional building materials that come forward as skins for building to express architectural concepts of architects. This is very obvious in the creative way of building envelopes used to cover contemporary buildings to solve problems of heat, pollution, sun glare, etc. There are several international, regional, national, and local awards that are awarded to projects to appreciate these efforts. Nevertheless, these prize-winning projects were not analyzed in-depth to get feedback about the coating choices of prize-winning projects that best express their designers' creative ideas. The main objective of this paper is to recognize the issues of materiality as implemented in the world’s foremost buildings that celebrate architecture. This paper considers awarded projects during the last ten years in order to see which building skins best succeed in expressing the ideas of architects who designed them. Another objective is whether winning materiality or its designers has a home. That is to say, whether the materiality of prize-winning projects and architects have a certain geographical allocation. Another issue is the modeling programs that help designers to achieve their brainwaves. Prize-winning projects can be a good resource for research about architectural new trends including new materiality in the coating of buildings.
Transdisciplinary Engagement of Transition Design and Indigenous Knowledge towards Sustainable Futures View Digital Media
Poster Session Najeeba Ahmed
To address the pressing issue of the sustainable welfare of the planet as ‘wicked problems’, scholars have proposed a radical shift in design epistontological approaches while critiquing the dominant hegemonic paradigm that engender current environmental degradation. This literature review examines the transdisciplinary engagement of systems thinking, Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Transition Design to highlight their contribution towards designing a future of mutualistic wellbeing for society and the environment. Insights gleaned from literature suggest that collaborative participation of various disciplines within transdisciplinary discourse and the recognition of the complex nature of these problems require reorientation in the way in which conditions, identification, and validation of design knowledge take place and how that can be reconfigured towards sustainable futures.
Design Knowledge(s): Reflections on Decolonizing Design, Looking at the Role of Institutions in the Construction of Design Knowledge in Uruguay View Digital Media
Online Poster Lucia Trias
This research considers the role of institutions in the formation of design knowledge. Through exploring the relation between Uruguay's current dominant design discourse and the notion of ‘design for development'. It is an invitation to look further into how design has played a role in countries of the global south, related to economic and social structures rather than those of academic disciplines. Current global south design discourses stress the importance of broadening perspectives to address the complexity of design education problems, from the stance that, it is normal to approach content as a means of "customizing" studies through the implementation of localized curricula. This paper presents a decolonial design stance as a means of understanding that institutional structures have the same importance as the content, attempting to answer the question: What was the role of educational institutions in the construction of the current dominant design discourse in Uruguay? What is the impact of progress and development as socio-political discourses on the projection of the Center of Industrial Design? The use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as methodology, was presented to me, as a researcher, as a way of positioning myself inside the problem addressed, taking a decolonial worldview. Re-reading history -by means of critically addressing different discursive design formations- is presented as to disentangle the political intentions which had been pursued through the notion of development. Showing how Uruguayan culture(s) and people(s) are dependent on Europe through certain sociopolitical structures which remain modern/colonial.
Homelessness by Number : Toward Creative Dialog among Design Professionals
Poster Session Radmila Lazarevic
The current number of homeless people is a record high in New York City history. Every tenth child in the public school system is homeless, totaling more than 100,000 homeless students. One in 125 New Yorkers is homeless. New York City accounts 14 percent of nations homelessness and 85 percent of New York State homelessness. 4,000 people sleep on the streets and other public spaces while others are in shelters. The main focus of this poster is to bring awakening and alarm around the catastrophe that we are facing every day on the streets, and to start creative dialog among design professionals. We consider how this problem can be addressed creatively.
Nourish - a System to Identify Nutritious Foods : Educational Materials to Support Behavioral Change and Improve Health View Digital Media
Poster Session David Wang
A community partnership between a regional food bank and a four-year, public undergraduate university gave rise to a practical design solution that helps define and track the nutritional quality of everyday food items. Initiated by organizational need to support procedures and policies with technology, nourish highlights a stop-light approach for recognizing foods to encourage with use of a visual aid to help make decisions at a glance, while maintaining an empirically validated analysis of nutrient density. Nourish (http://nourish.us.org), an integrated web application released in April 2019, represents a four-year progression of academic research and integrative learning. The overall impact of this community-based project aims to inform decisions about food purchasing in a food bank environment and provide opportunities to educate the public. The design process for nourish is highly collaborative. Collaborators include students, faculty, researchers, alumni, and community partners with expertise within a variety of professional disciplines, including dietetics, health sciences, media art and design, and computer information systems. Iterations of this award-winning, grant-funded research have been presented to key stakeholders, including Feeding America, the largest hunger-relief organization in the United States, as part of ongoing efforts to increase access to nutritious foods through the use of technology. Our partnership maintains an open dialogue with public audiences as a tenet of this valuable community-based project. This poster demonstrates how collaboration and problem solving can be applied to areas of informatics and design for society.
Quantification of “Order” in 2D Closed Curved Shapes View Digital Media
Online Poster Takeo Kato, Yoshiyuki Matsuoka
Designing by computer, such as generative design, has become common and attracted attention. The computer can optimize the shape on the basis of the engineering metrics (e.g., mass, stress, stiffness) but cannot easily evaluate human emotional characteristics (e.g., “beauty” and “preference”). Our study aims to construct the quantitative index to objectively evaluate the emotional characteristics of product shapes. As a preliminary study, we proposed an “order” index of 2D shape because “order” is an important factor to evaluate “beauty” and “preference”. The proposed index evaluates mirror/rotational symmetries and is calculated using the curvature plot of the closed curved shapes and their autocorrelation function. To confirm the effectiveness of the proposed index, we conducted the experiment using the silhouettes of humidifiers and confirmed the correlation between the sensory evaluation values and proposed index (the coefficient of determination exceeds 0.70).
