A Designer’s Approach: Exploring how Autistic Adults with Additional Learning Disabilities Experience their Home Environment

Autistic adults with limited speech and additional learning disabilities are people whose perceptions and interactions with their environment are unique, but whose experiences are under-explored in design research. This PhD by Practice investigates how people with autism experience their home environment through a collaboration with the autism charity Kingwood Trust, which gave the designer extensive access to a community of autistic adults that it supports. The PhD reflects upon a neurotypical designer’s approach to working with autistic adults to investigate their relationship with the environment. It identifies and develops collaborative design tools for autistic adults, their support staff and family members to be involved. The PhD presents three design studies that explore a person’s interaction with three environmental contexts of the home i.e. garden, everyday objects and interiors. A strengths-based rather than a deficit-based approach is adopted which draws upon an autistic person’s sensory preferences, special interests and action capabilities, to unravel what discomfort and delight might mean for an autistic person; this approach is translated into three design solutions to enhance their experience at home. By working beyond the boundaries of a neurotypical culture, the PhD bridges the autistic and neurotypical worlds of experience and draws upon what the mainstream design field can learn from designing with autistic people with additional learning disabilities. It also provides insights into the subjective experiences of people who have very different ways of seeing, doing and being in the environment

Models of the user: designers’ perspectives on influencing sustainable behaviour

Influencing more environmentally friendly and sustainable behaviour is a current focus of many projects, ranging from government social marketing campaigns, education and tax structures to designers’ work on interactive products, services and environments. There is a wide variety of techniques and methods used, intended to work via different sets of cognitive and environmental principles. These approaches make different assumptions about ‘what people are like’: how users will respond to behavioural interventions, and why, and in the process reveal some of the assumptions that designers and other stakeholders, such as clients commissioning a project, make about human nature. This paper discusses three simple models of user behaviour – the pinball, the shortcut and the thoughtful – which emerge from user experience designers’ statements about users while focused on designing for behaviour change. The models are characterised using systems terminology and the application of each model to design for sustainable behaviour is examined via a series of examples.

Graphic design and modernisation in Greece, 1945-1970

The primary aim of this work is to give voice to the silent history of graphic design in Greece, long uncharted and undocumented in both the international forum and the local design community. This study focuses on the professional modernisation of graphic design and its role in providing the means for change in Greek society. The research is supported by interdisciplinary analysis of commercial advertisements, posters, leaflets and magazines, as well as other supporting documentation, in the historical and cultural context of Athens, Greece from 1945 to 1970. The time examined was a transitional and vociferous period in the history of Greece, one of intense and rapid economic modernisation during the post-Second World War decades from the mid-1940s to 1970. This was a time when, along with broader changes in the social, economic and political life of Greece, important developments in design education, print technology, and professional organisation marked a new age for graphic design, as a profession emerging from the broader ‘graphic arts’ field (inclusive of both technological and creative processes) and claiming autonomy over the more established fine arts sector. All four chapters deal with modernisation in relation to the assumed divisions of traditional/modern, continuity/change, centre/periphery. Main areas of investigation are: trade organisation, graphic design education, advertising and urbanisation, electricity and tourism promotion. This research offers a view of the ways the ‘modern’ and the condition of modernity were experienced in the case of Greece through certain applications of graphic design and its agents of influence: graphic designers, artists, managers, publishers, the state and private entrepreneurs. The research benefited significantly from a number of interviews with design professionals and related individuals. The present endeavour has a modest aim: to enable understanding of how and why Greek graphic design at the time came to be, and to stress the validity of the visual as a means of historical documentation.

Emerging Technologies

This book, written when Walker was Visiting Professor at the Technical University Munich in 2011, describes his research on the effects of digital technology on architectural design and construction, and on the development of ‘digital craft’. The primary example given is The Swarm, a digitally designed and manufactured pavilion, produced with students while Walker was at TU Munich. It now stands outside the Bayerischen Architektenkammer (Bavarian Chamber of Architects) in Munich. Through such research-by-design, Walker asks larger questions: what can designers craft without a master craftsman’s skills, and how can craft skills be recovered through digital fabrication? Another example in the book is the Swoosh Pavilion, one of two public-space-scale architectural pavilion prototypes Walker developed between 2008 and 2009 at the Architectural Association (AA), using applied digital modelling and CNC techniques to investigate methods of teaching and testing digital processes through making. Swoosh (2008) and a second AA pavilion, Driftwood (2009), were discussed by Walker and Martin Self, his co-investigator, in ‘Fractal, bad hair, Swoosh and Driftwood pavilions of Intermediate Unit 2, 2006–2009’, published in the AD reader, Manufacturing the Bespoke (2012), which includes essays by well-known critics and designers such as Mathias Kohler and Michael Stacey. Both AA pavilions were sponsored by FinnForest Merk, Arup, HOK and Building Design Magazine, and were seen by large international audiences in Bedford Square, London during the 2008–9 ‘AA Projects Review’ shows. The book Making Pavilions (Walker and Self, AA Agenda No. 9, Architectural Association Press, 2011) also discusses their work over seven years of teaching at the Architectural Association. At the same time, Walker collaborated on a series of Serpentine pavilions, commissioned annually by the Serpentine Gallery, London, co-designing these experimental structures with internationally renowned architects Daniel Libeskind, Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito and Alvaro Siza.

Piñatex, the design development of a new sustainable material

This is a research project by practice, which firstly develops a new material invention derived from natural fibres extracted from waste pineapple leaves; secondly it articulates the contemporary designer’s role in facilitating sustainable solutions through: Insights from my own material invention, PiñatexTM, which integrates the materiality of design with the immateriality of concepts and values Developing a visual model of mapping I began with these questions: ‘What are the challenges in seeking to make a new and sustainable material from the waste products of pineapple agriculture in the Philippines?’ and ‘How can a design practice link elements of materiality (artifacts) with immaterial elements (value systems) in order to improve sustainable social and economic development?’ Significant influences have been the work of Papanek1 (2003), Hawken2 (1999) and Abouleish3 (2008) and in particular the ethical business model initiated by McDonough and Braungart in Cradle to Cradle®4 (2002). My own research project is inspired by the Cradle to Cradle® model. It proposes the development of a new material, PiñatexTM which is derived from natural fibres extracted from waste pineapple leaves and could be used in a wide variety of products that are currently fabricated in leather or petroleum-based materials. The methods have comprised: Contextual reviews; case studies (SEKEM, Cradle to Cradle® and Gawad Kalinga); practical experiments in the field of natural fibres, chemistry, product development, manufacturing and prototyping, leading to an invention and a theoretical model of mapping. In addition, collaboration has taken place across scientific, technological, social, ecological, academic and business fields. The outcome is a new material based on the synchronicity between the pineapple fibres, polymers, resins and coatings specially formulated. The invention of the new material that I developed as a central part of this research by practice has a patent in the national phase (PCT/GB 2011/000802) and is in the first stages of manufacturing, commercial testing and further design input (Summer 2014). The contribution to knowledge is firstly the material, PiñatexTM, which exhibits certain key qualities, namely environmentally non-toxic, biodegradable, income-generating potential and marketability. This is alongside its intrinsic qualities as a textile product: aesthetic potential, durability and stability, which will make it suitable for the accessories, interiors and furnishing markets. The theoretical mapping system Upstream and Downstream forms a secondary contribution.

Computing, Design, Art: Reflections on an Innovative Moment in History

The paper is concerned with the role of art and design in the history and philosophy of computing. It offers insights arising from research into a period in the 1960s and 70s, particularly in the UK, when computing became more available to artists and designers, focusing on John Lansdown (1929-1999) and Bruce Archer (1922-2005) in London. Models of computing interacted with conceptualisations of art, design and related creative activities in important ways.