2011internationalconference-track4

Breakout Title:
E-Waste: An Industrial Designer’s Perspective
WILLIAM BULLOCK, FIDSA
10-10:20 am, Wednesday

This session concerns the industrial designer’s role in creating much of the electronic waste (e-waste) generated by the developed nations of the world. It is industrial designer’s work that stimulates sales and creates attractive new products with newer features that customers desire. This has created our current wasteful paradigm where discarded electronics are dumped on developing nations. In a few short years the e-waste produced by these countries will exceed those of all Western nations combined so this will become our problem to solve. By using our talents and abilities more wisely, industrial designers can lead in the development of more sustainable solutions to the e-waste problem. Included in this session is a review of the Sustainable Electronics Initiative at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an industry and education partnership that conducts collaborative research and facilitates networking and information sharing on this growing international problem.

Breakout Title:
Can Industrial Design Education Turn the Corner?
JIM BUDD, IDSA
10:20-10:40 am, Wednesday

Why is there such a rift between design education and the growing needs of industry? How did we reach this state? Changes in the field over the past decade have forced designers in industry to rethink their approach to design to remain competitive in an increasingly complex marketplace while design education has lagged far behind. Industry has already recognized that no one designer can handle the scope of today’s “typical” design challenge in the timeframe required. In addition there is an extensive range of new disciplinary requirements. There are demands for a broader-based in-depth understanding of more diverse technical, social and cognitive fields of knowledge…and projects of this scope can only be handled by interdisciplinary collaborative teams. This session examines the inability of the “traditional ID studio model” to contend with the implications of these changes and describes in detail one school’s strategy to leap these hurdles.

Breakout Title:
Education and Industry: Working Together to Advance the Practice of Sustainable Design
ALEX LOBOS and ADAM MENTER
10:20-10:40 am, Wednesday

According to the UN Environment Program, 50 million tons of e-waste is created every year. In the US, only a fraction of our e-waste, less than 2 percent, is recycled. As demand for electronics grows, so does the issue of how to appropriately dispose of them. Companies carry the critical responsibility of designing new electronics that minimize, and ultimately eliminate, their environmental impact. Central to the solution is designing and engineering products for durability, disassembly, recycling, repair and upgrade. This session will showcase examples of "designing for product life" that have recently come out of academia and highlight the potential they have to affect future industry design decisions.

Breakout Title:
Experimental Materials: Integrating Green Chemistry in Product Design
KIERSTEN MUENCHINGER
10:40-11 am, Wednesday

In sustainability discussions, plastics tend to be demonized for toxicity and resource depletion issues. However, they do solve very difficult sustainability problems of weight and compatibility with other materials. To help clarify this dichotomy in sustainable polymer use, our Experimental Materials course is being used to understand and explain these issues. Through support from the Green Product Design Network (GPDN), a consortium at UO connecting product design with green chemistry, sustainable business practices and communications, this class has brought in laboratory chemists as part of the design experience. This session presents two dramatically different pilot courses in Experimental Materials, highlighting the differences found from easily procured to atypical materials, from normal to guerilla-kitchen production methods, and from explaining sustainability to the local television station to explaining sustainability to a panel of chemists. The successes have been surprising and not measured equally by chemists and designers alike.

Breakout Title:
Complexity and Community: The Relevance of the Design Community for Responsible Design Implementation by Consultant Industrial Designers
NORMAN STEVENSON
11-11:20 am, Wednesday

Today, a growing recognition of the profound topics affecting society calls for designers to address additional goals beyond those associated with profit making. But the real opportunity for industrial designers to affect positive change is determined by a myriad of elements, seldom regarded or accurately accounted for in the debates and rhetoric surrounding these topics. This session will present findings from an explorative study carried out in the UK and Ireland as part of a doctoral research project. Derived from analysis of interviews and workshops with consultants, industrial design firms and academics, we will describe the complex system of factors affecting the possibility for designers to address sustainable and responsible design goals within commercial practice. From this, the industrial design community’s influence on the factors identified is discussed, concluding with an assessment of the community relevance for the implementation of responsible design by industrial design consultancies.

Breakout Title:
Okala 2011: Building the Ecodesign Community
STEVE BELLETIRE, IDSA
11:20-11:40 am, Wednesday

This presentation discusses where the ecodesign community is being built within the profession and how this effort can be extended to an evolving, collaborative network of stakeholders with many diverse interests. The presentation content focuses on building networks that support ecodesign in practice, and provide a range of practical suggestions to enable and better sustain these community relationships. Specific guideline tools of communication that help develop partnerships between education, business, and the public around the urgent topics of ecodesign and sustainable development will also be presented. This paper presentation coincides with the 10th anniversary of the Okala team forming.

Breakout Title:
Tinkering - A Vehicle for Teaching Innovation in the University Industrial Design Studio
ANDY LOEWY, IDSA
11:20-11:40 am, Wednesday

One of the experiences that we hear students enthusiastically talk about as budding designers is the “happy accident.” They might talk of the discovery of some material property that they hadn't noticed before and that it was when they were intending to resolve another problem that they noticed something about a particular material they hadn't noticed before. Often where there occurs intentional, experimental manipulation of materials for some anticipated outcome, there results new unanticipated discovery. This intentional, experimental manipulation of materials is referred to as “tinkering.” Historically product design development has been laced with meagerly financed, innovators that stumbled into new ideas in garage or workshop environments. With the dropping of rapid CNC prototyping equipment costs and high-end computer accessibility it can be predicted that "tinkering" will become prevalent as a future design tool for our present students. This session describes various tools, activities and assignments used to promote tinkering and innovation in the university industrial design studio.

Breakout Title:
Design Methodologies for Social and Community Impact on E-Waste Reduction
WESLEY WOELFEL
11:40-12 pm, Wednesday

Today’s creative minds are making strides in battling our growing electronic waste (e-waste) problem via the design process. Interchangeable parts, reparability, lifecycle analysis and cradle-to-cradle analysis are all methods used to make an impact on helping to reduce e-waste through design. However, e-waste is strongly the result of a lack of consumer awareness of what it is and its implications. Through what community and social awareness methodologies can e-waste be reduced or prevented through integrating these parameters into the industrial design process? Imagine products designed to contribute awareness to the consumer by enhancing a community’s infrastructure after it would be normally thought of as e-waste. Or an app designed to show consumers the e-waste ingredients of their purchases with community ratings. This presentation explores several creative methodologies for integrating social and community attributes within the design process in an effort to reduce e-waste and promote e-cycling.

Breakout Title:
Parametric Assistive-Universal Furniture - Enabling products that are tailored to specific needs while preserving formal design intent.
KEVIN SHANKWILER, IDSA
1:30 -1:50 pm, Wednesday

This session discusses the development of a test-case model of parametrically driven assistive-universal furniture. The project aimed to produce a digital representation of furniture incorporating geometry that is variable for the purpose of accommodating a range of given users’ physical abilities and body types. The authors show how associative-mapping techniques were employed to understand and illustrate the inter-relationships between human and artifact geometry, and how manufacturing characteristics were substantiated through fabrication of full-scale iterative variations. Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial Design led this research effort in collaboration with the Digital Fabrication Lab and the Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access.

Breakout Title:
Front End Industrial Design (FE-ID) - Modeling Novel ID-Related Processes and Activities.
PAUL WORMALD
1:30 -1:50 pm, Wednesday

The practice of industrial design has developed and changed significantly over the past decade. From being largely artifact and technology-focused (downstream of a design brief), industrial design is now visible in upstream, strategic roles are significantly user-research and brand driven. These changes, although acknowledged in the design profession, are not well documented or modeled. This session reports research, grounded in university design education, but relevant to both practice and education, that investigates the relationship between industrial design and processes and activities of front end innovation in commercial new product development. This relationship has been modeled and called Front End Industrial Design (FE-ID). The session describes models, tools and processes that make up FE-ID. In Singapore there is much interest in the potential role of design in strategic innovation. This interest has manifested itself in the rise of design’s profile in education and interest in front end innovation practices.

Breakout Title:
Creative Community: Artifacts and Actions
HÉLÈNE DAY FRASER
1:50-2:10 pm, Wednesday

Transdisciplinary work for stakeholders within the creative economy can be problematic. One of the reasons for this is the differences that exist among creative occupational frameworks. These can range from open ended design research and art-based practices to the closed time frames of creative work driven by production constraints and demands at the retail level. Identifying a toolset that equips creatives with the means to negotiate divergent frameworks, as well as art-based insights that question the status quo, may trigger design outcomes that are relevant to the challenges of our time. Two university/industry-based collaborative projects that brought together a team of 49 university students, researchers, faculty and technical staff, and 10 designers from the Vancouver-based activewear company lululemon athletica will offer insight into the contextual role of artifacts and actions in enforcing and enabling communication across boundaries set by disciplines and working contexts; creating an effective creative community that merges art and design based practice.

Breakout Title:
Transportation Design Education - A New Direction
MARTIN SMITH
2:10 - 2:30 pm, Wednesday

Since the 1950s transportation design education has been almost exclusively about automobiles. Trains, taxis, planes and others have been an elective opportunity but largely a footnote in student portfolios with projects focused on getting a job with the car companies. The “love of cars” and the rather superficial approach (styling at the expense of functionality) that results needs to be replaced by a greater understanding of the context of transportation and with a fresh, rational, objective approach. It is proposed that a new approach to educate transportation design students be created that would emphasize the larger context of transportation, focusing on the complex system of mobility solutions within human settlements. Furthermore it will examine how modern industrial design processes such as design thinking, problem solving and prototyping will allow the designer to participate and contribute to the planning and creation of cities and it’s transportation systems, historically an urban planning process that has had very little participation from the industrial designer.

Breakout Title:
A Collaborative Effort: Integrating Interaction Design Evaluation into Product Design Process
CHERYL ZHENYU QIAN and STEVE VISSER, IDSA
2:10 - 2:30 pm, Wednesday

Formative evaluation plays an important role in the domain of interaction design (IXD). It occurs throughout the design and development processes, with the results of evaluation feeding back to revise the design. How important is formative evaluation in a product design process? Will this method obstruct creativity or can it inspire and promote better design? In the fall of 2010, students from a senior-level product design course and a graduate-level interaction design course were grouped together to work on a GE Healthcare sponsored design project: home-based health monitors for individuals with cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis and arthritis. Product design students led the overall process of design and IXD students designed the interactive design components of the concepts and ran formative evaluations iteratively to improve the outcome during the process. This session will report the structure and outcomes of these design collaborations, highlights the gains and losses in the process, and most importantly, illustrates a potential path to conduct such design education in the future.

Breakout Title:
OutReach Initiatives
CLAUDIA B. REBOLA and KEVIN SHANKWILER
2:30-2:50 pm, Wednesday

Awareness of the industrial design discipline among high school students still remains compromised. Even though efforts are made, they are understating the scope and broadness of industrial design. Real life experiences and the opportunity of practicing design with experts in the field can have a significant impact not only educating high school students but preparing them to respond to the needs of the profession. This presentation and publication discuss outreach initiatives undertaken to educate high school students about the industrial design profession. Moreover, it discusses the role of the Industrial Designers Society of America for academic and professional designers for getting involved in the K-12 educational system.

Breakout Title:
“Do You See What They See?” A New Approach to Video Ethnography
TSAI LU LIU
2:50-3:10 pm, Wednesday

Third-person point of view videography (POVV) has been the primary method used by designers to conduct video ethnography. It captures the activities of users from a third-person perspective with a video camera. Although third-person POVV is able to capture details of the user's activities, it does not provide designers with the user’s own visual perspective. Some of the user’s perspectives, such as line-of-sight and shift-of-view, are not precisely documented in third-person camera angles. First-person POVV, through video cameras worn by the user (as close to the user’s line-of-sight as possible), compensates for the lack of perspective found in third-person POVV. This session presents a case study in which designers used both third-person and first-person POVV in a portable generator design project. The designers found out that first-person POVV revealed many insights and perspectives that third-person POVV missed especially cognitive and emotional activities. The presentation recommends the inclusion of both first- and third-person POVV in a design process for a more comprehensive understanding of the user experience.

Breakout Title:
Designing Everyday Computational Things: Why Industrial Design will be the New Interaction Design
DAVID HOLMAN and ROEL VERTEGAAL
2-2:30 pm, Thursday

The art of user interface design is on the cusp of a revolutionary change, one that will require a profound reconsideration of the relationship between three-dimensional form and interaction. Flexible display materials dramatically alter how computer interfaces can be designed and, unlike before, encourage designers to contextualize interaction in an object’s physical shape. Instead of being constrained like the flat surfaces of present-day, these new displays will be wrapped around three-dimensional objects and, potentially, envelop the everyday things people use. This change represents the ascent of interaction technology’s maturation from electronic hardware to that of a computational material. This transformation raises fundamental questions, such as: With what design principles should a “computational thing” be designed? We will draw on our explorations in organic user interfaces, designing paper interfaces and prior work in interactive sketching to answer this and similar questions.

Breakout Title:
By and For the People: Design with the Community
CHRISTOPHER ARNOLD, IDSA
3-3:30 pm, Thursday

At a time when technology is narrowing the gap between customers and manufacturers, designers working together with members of the user community may hold the key to a more contextually appropriate and sustainable future. In anticipation of this brave new world, we must prepare students to facilitate work with those who stand to benefit or suffer most at its conclusion. This session will survey a number of participatory methods leveraged in disciplines such as service design and urban planning that focus on the involvement of non-designers, not simply as subjects of research or hackers, but as participants in the design process itself. These techniques promote collaboration between designers and the community experience. In addition, the concepts of user-customization and participatory co-creation will be compared in design education.

Breakout Title:
Designing Disaster-Resilient Communities
TAO HUANG and ERIC ANDERSON
3 - 3:30 pm, Thursday

This presentation discusses a collaborative project of designers and scientists to tackle one of the most pervasive and daunting tasks of humanity: designing disaster-resilient communities. It aims to reflect on the ongoing multidisciplinary conversations on global issues, such as climate change, that the industrial design community has begun to take a more important part in. This presentation is a catalyst to invite broader conversations on this topic. The design community understands that as designers we need to learn to speak languages other than our “design language.” We need to communicate with professionals in other domains to learn their paradigms and languages.

Breakout Title:
The Consummate Professional: Walter Dorwin Teague
JASON A. MORRIS, IDSA
4-4:30 pm, Thursday

Walter Dorwin Teague (1883 - 1960) is considered one of the founding fathers of industrial design as well as one of the most prolific American industrial designers in history. He established his industrial design office in 1927, which continues today as one of the most important design institutions in the world. Teague was the consummate professional. He established relationships with his clients that lasted for decades. So what can we learn from him today about a how to build and maintain a successful design firm? How did Teague deal with diverse and prestigious clients such as Ford, Kodak, NCR, US Steel, Corning and Steinway? What was the value proposition that he offered them that put him at the top of the design profession? How did he run his office in the 1930s and 1940s that kept his staff of talented designers, architects and engineers happy for their whole career?

Breakout Title:
From PhD to IDSA: Case Studies in the Evaluation and Development of Design Tools
DR. MARK EVANS

The use of design tools forms a central component of academic study and professional practice in industrial design, with applications ranging from 3D modeling software to color specification. This paper discusses two case studies in which PhD research was used to inform education and professional practice on developments in tool use. The first case study, supported by Hewlett Packard USA, evaluated the use of the Tablet PC as a mobile design studio that could integrate sketching with other core design activities, such as computer aided design and data collection via Web browsing. The second case study, supported by the Industrial Designers Society of America, developed a globally distributed card-based tool (iD Cards) to support understanding and communication in the use of design representations. While these studies have contrasting goals, they are linked through the use of substantive academic research and defined methodology to generate credible outcomes.

Breakout Title:
Design Brainstorming: An Electronic Platform to Enhance the Creative Designer
GARRETT MILLER
12 -12:30 pm, Friday

Designers are facing incredible amounts of pressure from development speed and innovative success due to the economic competitiveness. Efficient communication tools have been developed, but organizations still face scheduling issues for initial concept phases. Employee cross-pollination allows for the embracement of ambiguity and encouragement of new product directions. The use of crowdsourcing, as a modern idea generation method, creates new ways for designers to reframe opportunities through multiple perspectives. By digitalizing the process, larger quantities of fresh ideas as well as site-specific input can be employed. This session will discuss related literature, compare current crowdsourcing applications and identify common structures and challenges, such as mobility, location and connectivity.

Breakout Title:
Digital Storyboarding - Use of Digital Technology to Depict Use Scenarios
LARRY FENSKE
3 - 3:30 pm, Saturday

Digital Storyboarding - Use of Digital Technology to Depict Use Scenarios
As the purview of industrial design expands to less object-oriented and more experiential realms, the ability to communicate concepts related to process, product interaction, user interface and typical use scenarios becomes important. Designers have often used storyboarding; a process borrowed from the advertising and entertainment industries as a means to represent these concepts. Production of traditional storyboards can represent a significant amount of time and a fair amount of sketching skill to produce a clear and effective representation. This presentation describes the use of stop-motion video and other digital means to produce compelling depictions of use scenarios for both products and interface concepts. These techniques make use of fairly common consumer grade equipment and software. We will present examples demonstrating the use of this process.

Breakout Title:
Design to Live: Inclusive Design in the Majority World
RICARDO GOMES, IDSA

This session will outline a research project that is dedicated to developing and making accessible the late UCLA industrial design Professor Nathan Shapira’s archive, professional and scholarly works. A segment of Professor Shapira’s archive is housed in the Design and Industry Department at San Francisco State University. The research addresses the three topics that design education, practice and community development must encompass in order to facilitate the responsible development of our future society in the 21st Century: design for the majority, inclusive design and sustainability. These topics constitute three converging principles that formulate the framework of “Design for Living and Social Responsibility.” The project research seeks to reconstitute and reconnect the efforts and dynamic interests in the design community today with the “Design for the Majority” legacy that was established through ICSID and these great individuals at UCLA and the University of Nairobi. In this respect the learning outcomes from the research and session will seek to support a design retrospective, renaissance and resurgent call for “Design to Live in Our Emerging Global Societies in the Majority World!”

Breakout Title:
Community Engagement: Addressing Societal Woes Through The Lens Of Design
ANNA RABINOWICZ, IDSA
2-2:30 pm, Saturday

As the field of social entrepreneurship grows, designers are increasingly at the forefront of addressing pressing social issues through the lens of design. Using their expertise in ethnography and their abilities to analyze human needs and translate them into design opportunities, designers are going deep into local and overseas communities to discover ways in which to ameliorate social woes. Working in teams with engineers, nonprofit management experts, marketing gurus and lapsed anthropologist, designers are increasingly launching socially conscious ventures that address societal needs through physical or virtual products.

Breakout Title:
Impact of Image: Designers and Ageism
GLEN HOUGAN
3-3:30 pm, Saturday

Ageism, discrimination based on age, is widespread but one of the least addressed and challenged prejudices in our community. The problem is that this prejudice and stereotyping shows up in the products and environments that are designed for our older population. So how do designers respond to this growing demographic when they may themselves harbor ageist attitudes? How do designers start to design products and environments that don’t perpetuate ageism or reinforce an unhealthy model of our aging population? For designers, understanding their own ageist attitudes is essential before responding to the needs of an aging population. The session will discuss strategies and design activities that involve methods to get designers to understand the aging process, ageism, and how ageism can influence the design of products.
in
Submitted by askkurthow on June 1, 2011 - 3:44pm