Design thinking - a critical analysis.

The latest buzz phrase to enter the world of design research is “Design Thinking”. But is this anything new and does it really have any practical or theoretical relevance to the design world? Many sceptics believe the term has more to do with business strategy and little to do with the complex process of designing products, services and systems. Moreover, many view the term as misleading and a cheap attempt to piggyback the world of business management onto design. This paper seeks to ask is design thinking anything new? Several authors have explicitly or implicitly articulated the term “Design Thinking” before, such as Peter Rowe’s seminal book “Design Thinking” [1] first published in 1987 and Herbert Simon’s “The Sciences of the Artificial” [2] first published in 1969. In Tim Brown’s “Change by Design” [3], design thinking is thought of as a system of three overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps namely inspiration – the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation – the process of generating, developing and testing ideas; and implementation – the path that leads from the design studio, lab and factory to the market. This paper seeks to examine and critically analyse the tenets of this new design thinking manifesto set against three case studies of modern design practice. As such, the paper will compare design thinking theory with the reality of design in practice.

The Ballets Russes connection with fashion.

This paper examines the influence that the costume designers of the Ballets Russes, many of whom were important artists from significant art movements of the day, had on contemporaneous fashion. It looks at why in particular the 'Ballets Russes' artists Leon Bakst and Natalia Goncharova went on to involve themselves in actual fashion production and the similarities between their work and the fashion designers producing work at the same time, principally Paul Poiret, Mariano Fortuny and Coco Chanel. Overall, this paper investigates the significance of the cultural times and of the distinct characteristics of the separate art forms, that may have encouraged avant-garde art and fashion to crossover and collaborate so unreservedly.

Evaluating the conservation of graffiti based on cultural significance.

Purpose – Graffiti, both ancient and contemporary, could be argued to be significant and therefore worthy of protection. Attaching value is, however, subjective with no specific method being solely utilised for evaluating these items. The purpose of this paper to help those who are attempting to evaluate the merit of graffiti to do so, by determining “cultural significance”, which is a widely adopted concept for attaching value to the historic built environment. The current Scottish system utilised to assess “cultural significance” is the Scottish Historic Environment Policy (SHEP) which shares many common features with other determinants of cultural significance in different countries. The SHEP document, as with other systems, could however be criticised for being insufficiently sensitive to enable the evaluation of historic graffiti due, in part, to the subjective nature of determination of aesthetic value. Design/methodology/approach – A review of literature is followed by consideration of case studies taken from a variety of historical and geographical contexts. The majority of examples of graffiti included in this paper have been selected for their relative high profile, previous academic study, and breadth of geographic spread. This selection will hopefully enable a relatively comprehensive, rational assessment to be undertaken. That being said, one example has been integrated to reflect commonly occurring graffiti that is typical to all of the built environment. Findings – The determination of aesthetic value is particularly problematic for the evaluator and the use of additional art‐based mechanisms such as “significant form”, “self expression” and “meaning” may aid this process. Regrettably, these determinants are also in themselves subjective, enhancing complexity of evaluation. Almost all graffiti could be said to have artistic merit, using the aforementioned determinants. However, whether it is “good” art is an all together different question. The evaluation of “good” art and graffiti would have traditionally been evaluated by experts. Today, determination of graffiti should be evaluated and value attached by broader society, community groups, and experts alike. Originality/value – This research will assist those responsible for historic building conservation with the evaluation of whether graffiti is worthy of conservation.

Thermochromic dyes and sunlight activating systems - An alternative means to induce colour change.

The general purpose of this work is to investigate the potential of a mobile phone to capture soil colour images and process them, returning the corresponding Munsell colour coordi- nates from the digital RGB captured images, and also estimate the tristimulus values from the same images. A mobile phone HTC Desire HD, which runs Android 2.2, has been used to take and process images of a Munsell Soil Colour Chart under fixed illumination conditions. To obtain tristimulus values of each sample a Konica Minolta CS2000d spectroradiometer has been used under the same conditions. Penrose’s pseudoinverse method has been used to compute relationship between RGB coordinates from digital images and tristimulus values. Once the model has been computed it was implemented in the mobile phone. Results of this calibration show that more than 90% of the samples used in the calibration (238 chips) were measured by our mobile phone application with accuracy below 2.03 CIELAB units and a mean correlation coefficient equal to 0.9972. In case of Munsell models mean correlation coefficient is equal to 0.9407. This points to the idea that a conventional mobile device can be used to determine the colour of a soil under controlled illumination conditions.