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- Title
- DESIGNING SMART ARTIFACTS FOR ADAPTIVE MEDIAT~ON OF SOCIAL VISCOSITY: TRIADIC ACTOR-NETWORK ENACTMENTS AS A BASIS FOR INTERACTION DESIGN
- Creator
- Salamanca, Juan
- Date
- 2012-10-10, 2012-12
- Description
-
With the advent of ubiquitous computing, interaction design has broadened its object of inquiry into how smart computational artifacts...
Show moreWith the advent of ubiquitous computing, interaction design has broadened its object of inquiry into how smart computational artifacts inconspicuously act in people's everyday lives. Although user-centered design approaches remain useful for exploring how people cope with interactive systems, they cannot explain how this new breed of artifacts participates in people's sociality. User-centered design approaches assume that humans control interactive systems, disregarding the agency of smart artifacts. Based on Actor-Network Theory, this research recognizes that artifacts and humans share the capacity of influencing society and meshing with each other, constituting hybrid social actors. From that standpoint, the research offers a triadic structure of networked social interaction as a methodological basis to investigate how smart devices perceive their social setting and adaptively mediate people's interactions within activities. These triadic units of analysis account for the interactions within and between human-nonhuman collectives in the actor-network. The within interactions are those that hold together humans and smart artifacts inside a collective and put forward the collective's assembled meaning for other actors in the network. The between interactions are those that occur among collectives and characterize the dominant relational model of the actor-network. This triadic approach was modeled and used to analyze the interactions of participants in three empirical studies of social activities with communal goals, each xiii mediated by a smart artifact that enacted – signified – a balanced distribution of obligations and privileges among subjects. Overall, the studies found that actor-networks exhibit a social viscosity that hinders people's interactions. This is because when people try to collectively accomplish goals, they offer resistance to one another. These design experiments also show that the intervention of smart artifacts can facilitate the achievement of cooperative and collaborative interaction between actors when the artifacts enact dominant moral principles which prompt the preservation of social balance, enhance the network's information integrity, and are located at the focus of activity. The articulation of Actor-Network Theory principles with interaction design methods opens up the traditional user-artifact dyad towards triadic collective enactments by embracing diverse kinds of participants and practices, thus facilitating the design of enhanced sociality.
PH.D in Design, December 2012
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- Title
- Conceptual Model of Design Creativity: Fostering Creative Cognition in Architecture and Design Pedagogy
- Creator
- Fakhra, Ahmad Jasem
- Date
- 2012-12-02, 2012-12
- Description
-
Creativity in architecture and design disciplines is highly commended, considered essential in design processes, and regarded as invaluable to...
Show moreCreativity in architecture and design disciplines is highly commended, considered essential in design processes, and regarded as invaluable to the prosperity and survival of design organizations. Creativity is also considered a vital learning outcome in architecture and design pedagogy. Many teachers strive to cultivate creativity in their students and consider it as essential for shaping successful architects and designers. This research proposes a Conceptual Model of Design Creativity based on a synthesis of knowledge from architecture and design pedagogy and creative practice, and understandings of creativity from cognitive psychology and neurocognitive science. The purpose of the proposed model is to articulate the constituents necessary for conceptualizing design creativity and creative design processes. The model also provides the means for understanding how creativity emerges and what is involved in fostering creative cognition in the context of design pedagogy for architecture and other design disciplines. The research also proposes a Design Creativity Cards tool. The purpose of the tool is to help design students stimulate cognitive mechanisms and styles commonly associated with the production of creative results. This research adopts a mixed-methods qualitative research approach for a crossdisciplinary synthesis of creativity research between the literature on creativity from cognitive psychology and neurocognitive science and the literature on architecture and design pedagogy and practice. The development of the Conceptual Model of Design Creativity was informed by an extensive and critically framed literature review. The model was also informed by insights from Grounded Theory analysis of published interviews and reflective writings of twenty eminent creative individuals and xi organizations that identified influential elements of creativity in art, architecture, and design creative practice. The Conceptual Model of Design Creativity informed the development of the Design Creativity Cards tool deployed in the empirical research. The cards were informed by creativity methods from cognitive psychology. The research employed both the tool and the model to frame the development of a design experimental study and the data analysis and findings. The purpose of the design experimental study is to investigate the role of the Design Creativity Cards in stimulating creative cognition. The experiment was conducted with thirty-one undergraduate and master-graduate students from three architecture and design schools. Participants from each school were divided into control and experimental groups and were engaged in a simple design task. The experimental groups were introduced to the Design Creativity Cards in a preliminary workshop and were then asked to use the cards during the design task. The data collected were analyzed in relation to seven divergent thinking abilities; the seventh ability of “ideation leap” emerged through analysis as a contribution from and of this research. The data were also analyzed in relation to the Conceptual Model of Design Creativity. The findings provide a proof of concept for the Conceptual Model of Design Creativity and the Design Creativity Cards tool that suggests support for their role in enhancing creative cognition.
PH.D in Design, December 2012
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- Title
- THE CONTEXTUAL-SCENARIO FRAMEWORK FOR REPRESENTING SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE
- Creator
- Swanson, Eric
- Date
- 2013, 2013-05
- Description
-
No abstract
PH.D in Design, May 2013