Charles and Camilla Chair

The seat is an externally fixed seat for the public located at the entrance to the Prince Charles Hospital. The form of the seat is designed specifically for two, to celebrate the marriage of Charles and Camilla. The design of bench structure represents the Southern Cross which is predominant in our night sky, distinguishing us in location from Charles and Camilla, the night of their wedding. The design also incorporates references to undulating forms of the Queensland Landscape.

Older adults, interface experience and cognitive decline

This paper describes an experiment undertaken to investigate intuitive interaction, particularly in older adults. Previous work has shown that intuitive interaction relies on past experience, and has also suggested that older people demonstrate less intuitive uses and slower times when completing set tasks with various devices. Similarly, this experiment showed that past experience with relevant products allowed people to use the interfaces of two different microwaves more quickly and intuitively. It also revealed that certain aspects of cognitive decline related to aging, such as central executive function, have more impact on time, correct uses and intuitive uses than chronological age. Implications of these results are discussed.

Emotional experience with portable health devices

This paper reports on a six month longitudinal study exploring people’s personal and social emotional experience with health related portable interactive devices (PIDs). The focus is on emotions and how health PIDs mediate this experience in everyday contexts. The study reported here is an extension of a previous experiment conducted by the authors exploring media related PIDs [1]. The findings identified interesting aspects of health device interaction. Findings revealed people interact with health PIDs emotionally both at a personal and a social level. However, in contrast to media PIDs, participants reported significantly less social experiences than personal experiences. Nevertheless, the social level plays an important role such that negative social experiences had a significant influence on the perceived emotional experience over the course of six months. When no negative social experiences were reported the emotional experience over the course of six months became neutral. The findings are discussed in regards to their significance to the field of design, their implication for future health PID design and future research directions.

Bushfire sustainability : Strategies for reconciling bushfire and biodiversity with daily life

This exhibition and catalogue provides a visual record of student work exhibited at the Australian Institute of Architects offices in Brisbane from November 15 to 29, 2010. The exhibition features the final design outcomes of the inaugural Bushfire Sustainability unit conducted at QUT in semester two, 2010. The core objective of this unit was to develop our students’ skills in collaborative practice in design, research and presentation. The theme of ‘bushfire sustainability’ was chosen because living sustainably in bushfire prone landscapes presents a number of problems, the nature of which might only be resolved via multidisciplinary collaboration among the design disciplines. The students involved represent the disciplines of Interior Design, Landscape Architecture, Industrial Design, Architecture and Sustainability – all from within the School of Design at QUT. 55 students, mostly in their third year of study, worked in teams of five (one from each discipline) to design one of a number of homes in highly bushfire prone sites in either Western Australia or SE Queensland. This year level and the interdisciplinary mix are perhaps the best placed to resolve these problems: being unrestrained from the burdens of professional practice and technical overload they retain the potential for innovative, lateral thinking across the range of spatial scales and philosophical perspectives associated with inhabitation of bushfire prone landscapes. It is envisaged that, through the ‘vehicle’ of this design research, that the students’ work will contribute to understandings of how creative design disciplines might respond to this significant national problem, which hitherto has been attended to primarily by engineering and the sciences.

Computing in performing arts education and practice

The performing arts have traditionally made limited use of and showed limited acceptance of computing technology. There are cognitive, physical, environmental, and social influences on the use of computers in performing arts. This paper will examine those influences on the practice of computers in the performing arts and their implications for education in those areas. These implications for the learning environment include infrastructure, interface design, industrial design, and software functionality. Although many of the issues raised in this paper are common to all visual and performing arts, there are significant differences between them which require abstraction of the concepts presented in this paper beyond the more practical focus intended. In particular there are differences in the ways humans are involved in the presentation of a work, and the transitory verses static nature of time in art products.

Innovation strategies for developing the traditional souvenir craft industry

This paper describes the concept of innovation strategies for traditional souvenir craft industries. There are many traditional souvenir craft industries in Indonesia, and they have to compete in today‘s global markets. The craftsmanship and uniqueness of traditional crafts must be developed to attract a larger market. This competition is not easy for craftspeople, neither financially nor culturally. The authors propose some innovation strategies to facilitate craftspeople in generating ideas based on their traditional value, to ensure their sustainability in global context. However, even though there are a number of studies about the craft industry and souvenirs, there is little research focused on the souvenir product development process, especially in the traditional craft industry. Considering that souvenirs are products for pleasure which require hedonic value more than utilitarian value, the offered innovation strategy refers to the strategy applied in existing industries that produce hedonic products. Innovation strategy in the fashion industry is selected as a reference, which is discussed by considering the context of the traditional souvenir craft industry. This investigation will support further research about knowledge sharing systems to enable collaborative learning within traditional craftspeople.

Diversity in product familiarity across younger and older adults

This paper reports on the findings of a completed experiment examining levels of familiarity in younger and older adults. Research has shown that older adults use products less intuitively than younger adults, and that familiarity is an essential element of intuitive interaction. This finding influenced the decision to focus on familiarity and to investigate why older adults use products less intuitively than younger adults. By identifying and understanding the differences in familiarity, it is hypothesised that designers will be able to design more usable products for older adults. An empirical study was conducted, investigating the differences in familiarity between younger and older adults with contemporary products. Younger adults demonstrate significantly higher levels of familiarity compared to older adults, and the three groups of older adults demonstrated no significant differences between them. The implications of this finding is discussed.

Using visuals to explore the contextual aspects of user-product interactions

Experience underlies all kinds of human knowledge and it is dependent on context. People’s experience within a particular context-of-use determines how they interact with products. Methods employed in this research to elicit human experience have included the use of visuals. This paper describes two empirical studies that employed visual representation of concepts as a means to explore the experiential and contextual component of user- product interactions. One study employed visuals that the participants produced during the study. The other employed visuals that the researcher used as prompts during a focus group session. This paper demonstrates that using visuals in design research is valuable for exploring and understanding the contextual aspects of human experience and its influence on people’s concepts of product use.

General characteristics of anticipated user experience (AUX) with interactive products

Providing a positive user experience (UX) has become the key differentiator for products to win a competition in mature markets. To ensure that a product will support enjoyable experiences for its users, assessment of UX should be conducted early during the design and development process. However, most UX frameworks and evaluation techniques focus on understanding and assessing user’s experience with functional prototypes or existing products. This situation delays UX assessment until the late phases of product development which may result in costly design modifications and less desirable products. A qualitative study was conducted to investigate anticipated user experience (AUX) to address this issue. Twenty pairs of participants were asked to imagine an interactive product, draw their product concept, and anticipate their interactions and experiences with it. The data was analyzed to identify general characteristics of AUX. We found that while positive AUX was mostly related to an imagined/desired product, negative AUX was mainly associated with existing products. It was evident that the pragmatic quality of product was fundamental, and significantly influenced user’s anticipated experiences. Furthermore, the hedonic quality of product received more focus in positive than negative AUX. The results also showed that context, user profile, experiential knowledge, and anticipated emotion could be reflected in AUX. The understanding of AUX will help product designers to better foresee the users’ underlying needs and to focus on the most important aspects of their positive experiences, which in turn facilitates the designers to ensure pleasurable UX from the start of the design process.

Researching intuitive interaction

Intuitive interaction is based on past experience and is fast and often non conscious. We have conducted ten studies into this issue over the past ten years, involving more than 400 participants. Data collection methods have included questionnaires, interviews, observations, concurrent and retrospective protocols, and cognitive measures. Coding schemes have been developed to suit each study and involve robust, literature based heuristics. Some other researchers have investigated this issue and their methods are also examined. The paper traces the development of the methods and compares the various approaches used over the years.

Generation workshop 2010

The Generation Workshop Program 2010, a part of the Queensland Government Unlimited: Designing for the Asia Pacific Event Program, consisted of two one-day intensive design thinking workshops run on October 7-8, 2011 at The Edge, State Library of Queensland, for 100 senior secondary students and 20 secondary teachers self-selected from the subject areas of Visual Art, Graphics and Industrial Technology and Design. Participants were drawn from a database of Brisbane and regional Queensland private and public schools from the goDesign and Living City Workshop Programs. The workshop aimed to facilitate awareness in young people of the role of design in society and the value of design thinking skills in solving complex problems facing the Asia Pacific Region, and to inspire the generation of strategies for our future cities. It also aimed to encourage the collaboration of professional designers with secondary schools to inspire post-secondary pathways and idea generation for education. Inspired by international and national speakers Bunker Roy (Barefoot College) and Hael Kobayashi (Associate Producer on "Happy Feet" film for Australia's Animal Logic), the Unlimited showcase exhibition Make Change: Design Thinking in Action and ‘Idea Starters’/teaching resources provided, students worked with a teacher in ten random teams, to generate optimistic strategies for the Ideal City of tomorrow, each considering a theme – Food, Water, Transport, Ageing, Growth, Employment, Shelter, Health, Education and Energy. Each team of 6 was led by a professional designer (from the discipline of architecture, interior design, industrial design, urban design, graphic design or landscape architecture) who was a catalyst for driving the student creative thinking process. Assisted by illustrators, the teams prepared a visual presentation of their idea from art materials provided. The workshop culminated in a video-taped interactive design chatter to the larger group, which will be utilised as a toolkit and praxis for teachers as part of the State Library of Queensland Design Minds Project. Photos of student design work were published on the Unlimited website.

Designing radical business model innovation : a case study

“The process of innovation is often seen as being very linear, with research results, new technologies or user insights being channelled, often prematurely, into specific products and process” (Kyffin and Gardien 2009). It is precisely this perception of innovation-as-linear-process which this paper seeks to challenge. While there are many current theories and much contemporary literature available which discuss the management and catalysts of innovation, what is missing are examples of how innovation occurs from the application of these theories and literature (Wrigley & Bucolo 2010). This paper addresses both this gap and perceptions of the viability of linear innovation by presenting a case study for the commercialisation of a core technology (a cleantech, semi-portable mass-energy generator posited as a direct competitor to conventional energy provision systems), within an 18-month timeframe by the use of the Design-Led Innovation approach: “a process of creating a sustainable competitive advantage by radically changing the customer value proposition” (Bucolo & Matthews 2011).

Categorising emotional experiences with portable interactive devices

This paper reports on a six month longitudinal study exploring people’s emotional experience with two categories of portable interactive devices (PIDs); media and health related PIDs. The focus is on emotions and how PIDs mediate these experiences in everyday contexts. Previous findings presented by the authors (Gomez 2009, 2010) revealed that people’s emotional experiences with PIDs over time are influenced by whether interactions were at a personal or social level. This paper presents four categories of activities identified and their relationship to emotional experiences with PIDs that have been developed through further analysis of the data. It concludes with a discussion of the findings and their implications to the field of Design on the design of future PIDs.