Professional Practice
(Asynchronous - Online Only)
What Design Can Learn From Collaborating With Indigenous Partners View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Simone O'Callaghan, Carl Morgan
This paper examines learnings gained from working with Indigenous partners on creative design projects through Studio Zed, a creative agency at the University of Newcastle which provides students with creative studio placements over the summer and Work Integrated Learning (WIL) opportunities throughout the year. The studio was established in response to local client demand for student led design work. The University of Newcastle is a regional university where there are limited local opportunities for Design students to gain professional industry placement experience before they graduate, so Studio Zed also fulfils that role. Students can either work on design jobs delivered through Bachelor of Visual Communication Design courses, or each summer they have the opportunity to work on completing fast turnaround industry level design jobs in 4 – 6 weeks, through the Studio Zed Summer Pop Up Studio. During this time, Studio Zed has collaborated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities to deliver design jobs, and both the studio directors, and students have found these projects enriching, learning much from being shown alternative world views and perspectives that can then be fed back into design processes. This paper introduces a general overview of learnings gained from design collaborations on projects with both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities. Detailed learnings are further discussed in a case study project called Where’s Our Water, which was a collaboration with Awabakal and Worimi communities, Hunter Water and Newcastle High School to produce an illustrated children’s book focusing on water conservation.
An Autoethnography of Dance-cription View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elnaz Sheshgelani, Serveh Naghshbandi
Drawing on Bhabha’s (2012) notion of “hybridity”, we explore a non-hierarchical collaborative inquiry through integration of intuitive and discursive language/knowledge as a critique of colonial knowledge structures. We propose an integrated framework, which is an interplay between theory/text and practice/performance. We identify the framework as “dance-cription”; we implement a gestural vocabulary for Naghali (an endangered, ancient Persian performing art form) and incorporate it into Western educational contexts. Naghali involves analysis of the underlying meaning of a text; we intend to apply this approach in educational contexts as socially-engaged art practice using movement and gestures to convey meanings. Drawing on autoethnography, we reflect on Rhizomatic Becoming (Deleuze, & Guattari, 1987) and unfold our collaborative process. We hope that it acts as a fertile environment to embrace multiple pathways to apply historical art forms in designing learning spaces, which can also lead to development of art-historical knowledge. As diasporic individuals, we tend to live and think in “in-between” spaces; our decolonized approach to connect storytelling and education also aims at finding ways to communicate and create more spaces for intercultural conversations, which leads to increased cultural and historical understanding of art in educational contexts and globalized societies at a larger scale.
Understandings of Professional Design Expertise: A Reflective Practice Account on the Lived Experiences of Communication Designers View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Grant Ellmers, Stella Tan, Marius Foley
By investigating communication designers’ lived experiences of design practice, we can develop an empirically informed understanding of the approaches and behaviours that have underpinned the development of their design expertise. Such insights can help to inform design pedagogy as we seek ways to close the gaps between education and professional practice. However, how designers and in particular communication designers, adapt and further develop their expertise during professional practice is still poorly understood and at best anecdotal. A case study research approach was employed using semi-structured interview methods. Five communication designers from Australia all with more than 10 years professional practice, took part in this study. Participants were asked to narrate their lived experiences while reflecting on their practice. Analysis of the interviews suggests that designers demonstrate socially dynamic behaviours that consist of a complex range of differing levels of expertise often involving critical reflective practice. This is a significant insight as it suggests that reflective practice plays a crucial role supporting expertise development. As such, an improved model of reflective practice applied in a structured manner and embodying critical thinking, may be key to bridging the gaps between education and professional practice, and support designers transition beyond beliefs they are passive recipients of expert routines. This has the potential to not only better prepare graduate students for professional practice, but also provide the necessary framework for continuous professional development of expertise throughout their careers in dynamic and transformative ways, positioning them for a world of change and diversity.
The Glue of Care: Beyond Empathy in Design and Design Thinking
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sally Cloke, Mark Roxburgh, Benjamin Matthews
Empathy, which gives its name to the first stage in the now-ubiquitous Ideo model of “Design Thinking”, has been described as an essential element in contemporary design and one of the most powerful tools designers can offer. In this paper, we question empathy’s privileged position and exaggerated claims and suggest that the concept of care may offer a humbler and more liberating way for designers to frame their relationship with – and responsibilities to – those for whom and with whom they design. Understanding design as a caring practice may also have significant implications for design for sustainability, the revaluation of craft and even design futuring.
Agile for Freelancers: Harnessing Client Collaboration in Small-scale Design Practice View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Dunbar
This paper explores the use of agile methods in small-scale design practice to close the distance between designer and client. Through a case study of a recent web design project in my professional practice, I examine the use of agile methods to facilitate cross-functional co-production with clients. With the goal of shifting from a linear, documentation-heavy process to an iterative process driven by collaboration, the project design borrows from agile practices such Scrum, an agile methodology. The main features being a cross-functional team comprising client staff and me, collectively responsible for delivering a working version of the website every two weeks. I articulate how these concepts were applied, and assess their impacts through the events and outcomes of the project. I find that the ways of working facilitated by the agile methods enabled the team to co-design, continuously balancing strategic outcomes against technical and financial constraints as responses to emerging information obtained through sketching, making and feedback. I also find that while focusing on the goals of each iteration, inconsistencies in the design can emerge, requiring designers to double back and develop systematic approaches. This project demonstrates lightweight and practical ways that small-scale design practices can harness collaboration with their clients, that are more adaptive to emergent situations. Furthermore, I suggest that educational experiences allowing designers to learn about facilitating collaboration and participating in cross-functional teams will deepen students’ abilities to apply design in diverse environments.
Visualization of Interdisciplinary Conversations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eugene Park
This paper considers the process and unveils the outcomes of a project that involves aggregating and visualizing the video conferencing interactions that took place in a series of Zoom meetings amongst design faculty from various disciplines. Beginning in January of 2021, the University of Minnesota's College of Design hosted a series of online dialogue and scholarly discussions amongst all of its design disciplines, which are Apparel Design, Architecture, Graphic Design, Interior Design, Landscape Architecture, Product Design, and Retail Merchandising. Led by faculty and all held syncrhonously over Zoom, the result was an interdisciplinary engagement where everyone can learn something meaningful from each other and initiate dialogues that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred at regular faculty meetings. At each dialogue session, zoom video recordings, audio transcripts, and chat logs were saved for archiving purposes. In addition to making these records available to everyone at the college, a series of visualizations were created to allow people to asynchronously engage with the ideas and resources that were shared at each meeting. The outcome was a combination of conventional and experimental visualizations that provide a visual overview of the meetings and help discover additional insights and connections that did not occur at the live sessions. We hope that this visualization project will be considered as one of many possibilities in how data visualization can help facilitate interdisciplinary dialogues and propose a graphical structure in how conversations are recorded, archived, and disseminated.
The Bridging Design Prototype Approach: Strengthening the Role of Design as a Strategic Resource in Small Organisations View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gloria Gomez
The Bridging Design Prototype (BDP) approach strengthens the link between design, technology, and business in small organisations that are developing products for enabling novel practices. A BDP is a rapid functional prototype built with features familiar to a user community and with novel features that a designer incorporates after careful analysis of relevant data. It capitalises on a user community’s prior knowledge and recognises their context realities. These characteristics bring users into a development process early because they accept to incorporate a BDP into their real activities. While a designer or R&D team use it for learning about the context, community, and practice. As an applied design researcher, the author has experienced first hand the little awareness of design as a strategic resource, the little trust small organisations have on the evidence we present, and how the late arrival of the role of design into a project brings issues to light. These issues are recognised as important, but often, small organisations say it is too late to resolve them in products soon to be launched. Through the implementation of BDPs, small organisations experience first hand how the role of design helps to shape strategy and establish the value of new product concepts before costly implementations are undertaken, as it should be done in ideal human centred development processes. Two cases are used to illustrate how BDPs were adopted as part of early product development and generative design research.
Planning for the Unknown: Case Studies of Design-driven Industrial Conversion in the Automotive Sector as a Way to Overcome Crises and Uncertainties View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eva Vanessa Bruno, Beatrice Lerma
This paper explores the role of a design-led orientation strategy for automotive companies. Specifically, the study examines the industrial conversion strategies of companies that have found new markets thanks to design. Indeed, the central thesis of this paper is that design can boost entrepreneurship, managerial procedures and be a source of competitive advantage. Industrial conversion has been studied by many researchers belonging to the research area of management. However, studies on the role of industrial designers in corporate strategies represent a growing domain in design. The research is based on three case studies of Italian companies that have been produced components for the automotive sector for years and used their expertise to move into different markets. The product space is the chosen tool to display the previous product portfolio and the new opportunities. The analyzed visionary companies could break away from one production sector and venture into new ones where design was a strategic lever. As the case studies show, industrial reconversion brings companies “back to life”, makes them flexible and resilient to sudden changes, thanks changing products and markets based on existing capacities. What emerges is that industrial conversion is a winning strategy in cases of corporate crisis where sunk costs are to be exploited to explore new opportunities, making the company resilient to sudden changes. Starting from this, we can assume and replicate comparable strategies in companies currently experiencing difficulties due to the changing technological paradigms in the automotive sector.
