New organisational leadership capabilities : transitional engineer the new designer?

Traditionally, design has been centred within the manufacturing and production areas of companies and or as a styling afterthought. Increasingly, design is viewed as a vital and important strategic business resource (Dell’Era, Marchesi & Verganti, 2010) and consequently companies worldwide look to design to help them innovate, differentiate and compete in the global marketplace. The role of the professional designer is evolving to a point where they are needed to work beyond being a specialist in the manufacturing and aesthetics of an artefact (Wrigley & Bucolo, 2011). This paper challenges the values held by academics and industry regarding the traditional role of designers in business. It investigates the emerging transitional engineering framework and puts forward a proposal for the next generation designer in the future era of design. Questions surrounding how designers will develop these new skills and how the Authors’ new framework of design led innovation can contribute to the future of design will be presented. This research is needed to better equip future designers to have a more central role in business.

Influencing innovation in SME’s : from designer to transitional engineer

The following paper presents insights found during an ongoing industry engagement with a family-owned manufacturing SME in Australia. The study seeks to unpack cultural, strategic, product opportunities and challenges available to the firm engaging in a design led approach to innovation. Design led innovation finds new market opportunities to innovate through a holistic perspective of both the internal business operations, focusing on the customer experience and external stakeholders. The action research based methodology consisted of 25 semi-structured interviews, a reflective journal and focus group, all of which were analysed thematically. This paper focuses on the resultant themes of the focus group data constituting a discussion around the best strategies to try and integrate design thinking as a fundamental skill across the company. The main thematic results included the participant’s limited views of themselves (in current roles) as being to create ‘buy-in’ to change initiatives, a preference to act as a group to gain traction in the firm, importance of better defining the problem before reaching a design solution and lastly the time required to implement versus the need for change. These findings are valuable in assisting other family owned firms in managing core growth activities with design and innovation initiatives, particularly in the area of new product development.

BlaqCarrie - Raw Shining (engineer/producer)

"Raw Shining", a song by Zimbabwean Australian artist Blaq Carrie, was recorded and produced as part of the Indie 100 research intensive project within the Independent Music Project (IMP). The IMP is an ongoing, interdisciplinary research arm within QUT.

Managing moose harvests by the seat of your pants

Moose populations are managed for sustainable yield balanced against costs caused by damage to forestry or agriculture and collisions with vehicles. Optimal harvests can be calculated based on a structured population model driven by data on abundance and the composition of bulls, cows, and calves obtained by aerial-survey monitoring during winter. Quotas are established by the respective government agency and licenses are issued to hunters to harvest an animal of specified age or sex during the following autumn. Because the cost of aerial monitoring is high, we use a Management Strategy Evaluation to evaluate the costs and benefits of periodic aerial surveys in the context of moose management. Our on-the-fly "seat of your pants" alternative to independent monitoring is management based solely on the kill of moose by hunters, which is usually sufficient to alert the manager to declines in moose abundance that warrant adjustments to harvest strategies. Harvests are relatively cheap to monitor; therefore, data can be obtained each year facilitating annual adjustments to quotas. Other sources of "cheap" monitoring data such as records of the number of moose seen by hunters while hunting also might be obtained, and may provide further useful insight into population abundance, structure and health. Because conservation dollars are usually limited, the high cost of aerial surveys is difficult to justify when alternative methods exist. © 2012 Elsevier Inc.

Portrait of the engineer and geneologist Robert Goldschmidt Portraits Men

Digital Image

Portrait of the engineer and geneologist Robert Goldschmidt Portraits Men

Digital Image

Part I. Hydraulics of tidal inlets: simple analytic models for the engineer

Inlets are common coastal features around the world. Essentially an inlet connects a lagoon, a bay or an estuary to the ocean (or sea), and the flow through the inlet channel is primarily induced by the tidal rise and fall of water level in the ocean. When speaking of the hydraulics of an inlet, one is interested mainly in determining the flow through the inlet and the tidal variation in the bay, given the following: (1) Inlet geometry (2) Bay geometry (3) Bottom sediment characteristics in the inlet (4) Fresh water inflow into the bay (and out through the inlet) (5) Ocean tide characteristics A combination of all these factors can produce a rather complex situation. (PDF contains 34 pages.)