How can design methodologies build strategic renewal in SMEs?

Many firms develop successful businesses around competencies and over time these competencies can become core rigidities and barriers to new ways of working. This paper investigates how firms respond to a design innovation program apply design methodologies to their business. Early findings from a study of companies engaged in a design innovation program indicate that applying design principles to multiple aspects of their business provides a new strategic focus, tools for a better understanding of their business and the marketplace, new economic activity, awareness of the need for an innovative culture and strategic renewal.

"Silly hours" : facilitating more effective part-time work arrangements through job design

Part-time employment presents a conundrum in that it facilitates work-life priorities, while also, compared to equivalent full-time roles, attracting penalties such as diminished career prospects and lower commensurate remuneration. Recently, some promising theoretical developments in the job/work design literature suggest that consideration of work design may redress some of the penalties associated with part-time work. Adopting the framework of the Elaborated Model of Work Design by Parker and colleagues (2001), we examined this possibility through interviews with part-time professional service employees and their supervisors. The findings revealed that in organizations characterised by cultural norms of extended working hours and a singular-focused commitment to work, part-time roles were often inadequately re-designed when adapted from full-time arrangements. The findings also demonstrated that certain work design characteristics (e.g. predictability of work-flow, interdependencies with co-workers) render some roles more suitable for part-time arrangements than others. The research provides insights into gaps between policy objectives and outcomes associated with part-time work, challenges assumptions about the limitations of part-time roles, and suggests re-design strategies for more effective part-time arrangements.

Delegation framework for federated systems

It is not uncommon for enterprises today to be faced with the demand to integrate and incor- porate many different and possibly heterogeneous systems which are generally independently designed and developed, to allow seamless access. In effect, the integration of these systems results in one large whole system that must be able, at the same time, to maintain the local autonomy and to continue working as an independent entity. This problem has introduced a new distributed architecture called federated systems. The most challenging issue in federated systems is to find answers for the question of how to efficiently cooperate while preserving their autonomous characteristic, especially the security autonomy. This thesis intends to address this issue. The thesis reviews the evolution of the concept of federated systems and discusses the organisational characteristics as well as remaining security issues with the existing approaches. The thesis examines how delegation can be used as means to achieve better security, especially authorisation while maintaining autonomy for the participating member of the federation. A delegation taxonomy is proposed as one of the main contributions. The major contribution of this thesis is to study and design a mechanism to support dele- gation within and between multiple security domains with constraint management capability. A novel delegation framework is proposed including two modules: Delegation Constraint Man- agement module and Policy Management module. The first module is designed to effectively create, track and manage delegation constraints, especially for delegation processes which require re-delegation (indirect delegation). The first module employs two algorithms to trace the root authority of a delegation constraint chain and to prevent the potential conflict when creating a delegation constraint chain if necessary. The first module is designed for conflict prevention not conflict resolution. The second module is designed to support the first module via the policy comparison capability. The major function of this module is to provide the delegation framework the capability to compare policies and constraints (written under the format of a policy). The module is an extension of Lin et al.'s work on policy filtering and policy analysis. Throughout the thesis, some case studies are used as examples to illustrate the discussed concepts. These two modules are designed to capture one of the most important aspects of the delegation process: the relationships between the delegation transactions and the involved constraints, which are not very well addressed by the existing approaches. This contribution is significant because the relationships provide information to keep track and en- force the involved delegation constraints and, therefore, play a vital role in maintaining and enforcing security for transactions across multiple security domains.

How novices design business processes

Process modeling is an important design practice in organizational improvement projects. In this paper, we examine the design of business process diagrams in contexts where novice analysts only have basic design tools such as paper and pencils available, and little to no understanding of formalized modeling approaches. Based on a quasi-experimental study with 89 BPM students, we identify five distinct process design archetypes ranging from textual to hybrid and graphical representation forms. We examine the quality of the designs and identify which representation formats enable an analyst to articulate business rules, states, events, activities, temporal and geospatial information in a process model. We found that the quality of the process designs decreases with the increased use of graphics and that hybrid designs featuring appropriate text labels and abstract graphical forms appear well-suited to describe business processes. We further examine how process design preferences predict formalized process modeling ability. Our research has implications for practical process design work in industry as well as for academic curricula on process design.

Engaging bodily with video in design

Video is commonly used as a method for recording embodied interaction for purposes of analysis and design and has been proposed as a useful ‘material’ for interaction designers to engage with. But video is not a straight forward reproduction of embodied activity – in themselves video recordings ‘flatten’ the space of embodied interaction, they impose a perspective on unfolding action, and remove the embodied spatial and social context within which embodied interaction unfolds. This does not mean that video is not a useful medium with which to engage as part of a process of investigating and designing for embodied interaction – but crucially, it requires that as people attempting to engage with video, designers own bodies and bodily understandings must be engaged with and brought into play. This paper describes and reflects upon our experiences of engaging with video in two different activities as part of a larger research project investigating the design of gestural interfaces for a dental surgery context.

New design rules for the shear strength of LiteSteel Beams

Abstract: The LiteSteel Beam (LSB) is a new cold-formed hollow flange channel section produced using dual electric resistance welding and automated continuous roll-forming technologies. The innovative LSB sections have many beneficial characteristics and are commonly used as flexural members in building construction. However, limited research has been undertaken on the shear behaviour of LSBs. Therefore a detailed investigation including both numerical and experimental studies was undertaken to investigate the shear behaviour of LSBs. Finite element models of LSBs in shear were developed to simulate the nonlinear ultimate strength behaviour of LSBs including their elastic buckling characteristics, and were validated by comparing their results with experimental test results. Validated finite element models were then used in a detailed parametric study into the shear behaviour of LSBs. The parametric study results showed that the current design rules in cold-formed steel structures design codes are very conservative for the shear design of LSBs. Significant improvements to web shear buckling occurred due to the presence of torsionally rigid rectangular hollow flanges while considerable post-buckling strength was also observed. This paper therefore proposes improved shear strength design rules for LSBs within the current cold-formed steel code guidelines. It presents the details of the parametric study and the new shear strength equations. The new equations were also developed based on the direct strength method. The proposed shear strength equations have the potential to be used with other conventional cold-formed steel sections such as lipped channel sections.

New design rules for the shear strength of LiteSteel Beams with web openings

Abstract: LiteSteel beam (LSB) is a new cold-formed steel hollow flange channel section produced using a patented manufacturing process involving simultaneous cold-forming and dual electric resistance welding. The LSBs are commonly used as floor joists and bearers with web openings in residential, industrial and commercial buildings. Their shear strengths are considerably reduced when web openings are included for the purpose of locating building services. However, no research has been undertaken on the shear behaviour and strength of LSBs with web openings. Therefore experimental and numerical studies were undertaken to investigate the shear behaviour and strength of LSBs with web openings. In this research, finite element models of LSBs with web openings in shear were developed to simulate the shear behaviour and strength of LSBs including their buckling characteristics. They were then validated by comparing their results with available experimental test results and used in a detailed parametric study. The results showed that the current design rules in cold-formed steel structures design codes are very conservative for the shear design of LSBs with web openings. Improved design equations have been proposed for the shear capacity of LSBs with web openings based on both experimental and parametric study results. An alternative shear design method based on an equivalent reduced web thickness was also proposed. It was found that the same shear strength design rules developed for LSBs without web openings can be used for LSBs with web openings provided the equivalent reduced web thickness equation developed in this paper is used. This is a significant advancement as it simplifies the shear design methods of LSBs with web openings considerably.

Numerical modelling of non-load bearing light gauge cold-formed steel frame walls under fire conditions

Recently an innovative composite panel system was developed, where a thin insulation layer was used externally between two plasterboards to improve the fire performance of light gauge cold-formed steel frame walls. In this research, finite-element thermal models of both the traditional light gauge cold-formed steel frame wall panels with cavity insulation and the new light gauge cold-formed steel frame composite wall panels were developed to simulate their thermal behaviour under standard and realistic fire conditions. Suitable apparent thermal properties of gypsum plasterboard, insulation materials and steel were proposed and used. The developed models were then validated by comparing their results with available fire test results. This article presents the details of the developed finite-element models of small-scale non-load-bearing light gauge cold-formed steel frame wall panels and the results of the thermal analysis. It has been shown that accurate finite-element models can be used to simulate the thermal behaviour of small-scale light gauge cold-formed steel frame walls with varying configurations of insulations and plasterboards. The numerical results show that the use of cavity insulation was detrimental to the fire rating of light gauge cold-formed steel frame walls, while the use of external insulation offered superior thermal protection to them. The effects of real fire conditions are also presented.

The philosophy and practice of water sensitive urban design : is it consistent with a whole system approach

This paper provides a critique of the Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) paradigm by discussing its congruence with an established sustainable design principle called 'whole system design'. It was found that WSUD is congruent with the whole system design approach as a philosophy, but not in practice. Future improvement of WSUD practice may depend on the adoption of a front-loaded, teamwork-based design and planning process that is embedded in the principle of whole system design.