Poor Attention to Detail – Northern Rail
It’s very easy to be a grouch and a designer will always home in what can be changed for the better. So I’m imposing a small discipline on myself that I will only criticise something that does not work when I have found something to praise first. That way only half my design commentary posts will be negative. This is the first of those. It’s about a company kidding itself that it is offering a helpful service. Read the rest of this entry »
Leonardo da Vinci is credited with saying, “Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.”
This seems to be self-evidently true, the most interesting design thinking often emerges from difficult situations where the designer’s freedom is constrained by circumstance. I would like to offer Lukas Brunner as a particularly pointful example of this. Read the rest of this entry »
You might notice that it’s more than 3 years since I posted in this blog.
Around that time I moved from my previous role running the Art & Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University to running our teaching as Head of the Art and Design Department (being a New University it’s a dual economy so the two run in parallel) and I was also heading for retirement. So I decided that I would put my own research aside, focus my efforts on supporting my colleagues who were building up our programme of courses, and start thinking what I would do next after I retire.
“Next” has been here for a year now, I’ve become involved in much more personal local stuff including music and community based design and social action and I’d like to use this blog now to publish some commentary on design in action. Up till now I’ve tended to comment on research issues and been very aware of the problem of rigour, from now on I’ll give myself permission to let more of my personal values creep in but of course, once you are an academic it’s hard to forget your duty to truth.
My first post will come from my renewed interest in music, I’ve started playing and singing again after a 30 year layoff (since I learned to be a designer in fact) and one of the reasons I’m enjoying it so much is the unique and beautiful work of the Swiss luthier, Lukas Brunner. More soon.
Transmitting craft knowledge: designing interactive media to support tacit skills learning.
Nicola Wood’s PhD Thesis, November 2006
This is a rather late entry as the thesis was examined in 2006. I’m posting it now as Nicola has recently updated her website to make the work more accessible. It’s a very engaging piece of work that has value whether you are interested in practice-led research methods, the use of video and interactive media in research and design or craft skills and how they are learned.
Download full thesis from Nicola’s website which contains a great deal of other interesting material as well. The site is also a good example for any academic or professional who wants to build their public profile.
Theft or Public Right? Can publishers or manufacturers retain rights over something they don’t want to use?
I’ve been very interested in the subject of public right of access to research publications for a long time but the wider implications of this topic came to the fore for me recently through a debate in a different arena. Read the rest of this entry »
The importance of revealing your practices in “practice-led” research
Originally posted to the PhD-Design email discussion list on 20 November 2008
image from Graham Whiteley’s PhD thesis
David Balkwill’s comments (in a previous message to PhD-Design) about students missing the point of their task, which is designing not drawing, is very relevant to research and doctoral studies. One of the key issues to be resolved in any “practice-led” project is how the quality and validity of the methods are to be made clear Read the rest of this entry »
Grounding the validation of investigative designing in the experience of stakeholders
RUST. C, (2009) In the Eating: Grounding the validation of investigative designing in the experience of stakeholders, International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference, Seoul, Korea, October 2009
I wrote and presented this paper as part of a special session at the IASDR conference, organised by Stella Boess of TU Delft. Stella wished to explore the question of how knowledge arising from the use of designed artefacts in research might be validated.
A designer’s framework for delivering personalised media
RUST, C. BLYTHE, M. MCKAY, A. BAGGOTT, J. WRIGHT, P. (2009) Designing with Values: A designer’s framework for delivering personalised media in an unencumbered interactive environment. International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference, Seoul, Korea, October 2009
Abstract
This paper describes the evolution of a design and development process for a museum exhibit that delivered unencumbered or ambient interactive media using personal values as the main framework for customising interaction and thus for selecting and developing content. The context of the work is the developing field of products and systems that incorporate rich digital content. Read the rest of this entry »
RUST, C. BLYTHE, M. MCKAY, A. BAGGOTT, J. WRIGHT, P. (2009) My Exhibition: Personalising Unencumbered Multimedia Content in a Museum Environment in Inns, T. (2009) Designing for the 21st Century Vol 2, London, Gower
This book chapter described the interdisciplinary collaboration that developed in this project, the complexity of the work might be seen in this diagram
Download pre-print from archive.org
NB the preprint copy incorrectly shows Chris Rust as sole author, the correct authors are given in the citation above
A Tacit Understanding: The designer’s role in capturing and passing on the skilled knowledge of master craftsmen
Wood, N. Rust, C. Horne, G. (2009) A Tacit Understanding: The designer’s role in capturing and passing on the skilled knowledge of master craftsmen International Journal of Design (online) 3.3
Download full paper from The International Journal of Design
From 2007 to 2009 Nicola and Grace explored the practical application of methods and theories developed in Nicola’s doctoral research into transmitting craft knowledge Read the rest of this entry »
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