Arts Design & Architecture

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 50
  • (2011) Ramirez, Mariano
    Conference Paper
    This paper investigates the engagement towards sustainability of graduating industrial design students in Australia. This was achieved by completing a content analysis of the entries in the Australian Design Award - James Dyson Award, focusing on the claims made in the product descriptions, their rationale for representing design excellence and why they believe their work is award winning. The findings were encouraging, as the overwhelming majority of finalists and winners had incorporated an environmentally responsive strategy or addressed an issue of significance to society. The analysis results provide evidence that sustainability issues are increasingly being tackled in Australian industrial design education. That graduating students choose to do final-year projects which reflect their sensitivity to these global issues suggest concern and readiness on their part in exploring real solutions to these problems, and perhaps a desire and optimism for a more promising world for future generations.

  • (2012) Ramirez, Mariano
    Conference Paper
    The imperative to teach future generations of industrial designers about the ecological and social sustainability aspects of their practice needs no argument. The profession has generally been blamed for promoting conspicuous consumption and stylistic obsolescence, and designers are considered indirectly responsible for the masses of discarded and short-lived objects in landfill. This paper examines how industrial design education is making up for past errors in design practice. It looks at the undergraduate and postgraduate programs of industrial design universities in various countries around the world, searching for evidences of both ecologically and socially sustainable design in the program descriptions, teaching and learning modules, and galleries of student works appearing on university websites. This research will be useful for industrial design course leaders and academics who are interested in benchmarking the extent to which they cover sustainability in their educational programmes, and help them gauge how they fare in educating their students to become more responsible practitioners in the future.

  • (2011) Ramirez, Mariano
    Conference Paper
    This paper looks for evidences of socially sustainable product innovations amongst the entries recognized in international industrial design awards. The winning designs for the last four years in three of the most popular mainstream accolades were investigated and profiled. The analysis shows that attention to socially sustainability in design is gradually picking up. Several special awards that pay special attention to social sustainability issues were found, suggesting that support for this type of innovation in the design profession is growing.

  • (2011) Ko, Kimmi; Ramirez, Mariano; Ward, Stephen
    Conference Paper
    Technological and fashion obsolescence continue to be concerns in the design of contemporary products. Research shows that consumers dispose of household items even though those are still fully or partly functional, for various reasons. One cause of premature disposal is the lack of emotional attachment between user and product. Lounge furniture was selected as the product area for this study. The research starts with a literature review on consumer-product attachment, and on design strategies which promote the optimization of product lifetimes, followed by an online survey and in-depth interviews among householders to determine behaviours in furniture usage, maintenance and disposition. The findings of this research add to understanding of product attachment and detachment stages as well as possible factors that would help designers foster long-term product attachment. The study is intended to add support to a new approach to sustainable design that seeks to extend product lifetimes by designing in the potential for continuation of positive experiences that could lead to the consumer’s enduring attachment to particular products.

  • (2011) Ko, Kimmi; Ramirez, Mariano; Ward, Stephen
    Conference Paper
    Technological and fashion obsolescence continue to be concerns in the design of contemporary products. Research shows that consumers dispose of household items even though those are still fully or partly functional, for various reasons including the lack of a stable emotional bond between users and products. This paper aims to explore how industrial designers, as a willing translator and initiator of the relationship between products and users, might facilitate the generation and continuation of positive experiences that could potentially lead to the consumer’s enduring attachment to particular products, thereby optimizing the product’s lifetime and detouring it from becoming landfill too soon.

  • (2011) Ramirez, Mariano
    Conference Paper
    Abstract: In recent decades, a growing number of those in the industrial design profession have shown concern for socio-ethical issues and pondering the impacts of their work on the planet and its peoples. While mainstream industrial design education and practice still clearly focuses on product-centric innovation, the increasing involvement of designers in activities that advance the betterment of humanity is undeniable. Some university design programs immerse students in developing countries and disadvantaged neighborhoods to learn to co-design appropriate solutions with communities. The professional design industry has also been supportive in engaging and contributing to this new area of social innovation. In line with this emergence of design for society, this paper reports on some of the studio projects at the Industrial Design Program at the University of New South Wales, which highlight design’s agency as a catalyst for social change. The studio briefs are discussed as case studies and the learning experiences gained and the reflections of students are analyzed and used as arguments for the continued and growing inclusion of social responsibility within the industrial design curriculum.

  • (2011) Ramirez, Mariano; Behrisch, Johannes; Giurco, Damien
    Conference Paper
    This paper presents the results of an empirical study, investigating the uptake of ecodesign by industrial design consultancies (ID consultancies) in Australia, China, Germany and the USA. Designing products for a low environmental load, usually termed as ecodesign, offers high potential to reduce the environmental impact of our society, aiming for a sustainable development. However, there still appears to be no widespread uptake of ecodesign into product development praxis by industrial designers, with most ecodesign activity focusing on the engineering phase. Especially seldom are the necessary radical interventions to significantly improve the environmental performance of products. The literature review revealed that ID consultancies might be in a position to improve this situation. This paper presents the findings of a website content analysis, investigating the extent of ecodesign uptake by ID consultancies in Australia, China, Germany and the US. Those four countries were chosen to see if different, country specific frameworks impact on the attitude of ID consultancies towards ecodesign. The paper verifies that ID consultancies have a high potential to improve ecodesign uptake by using their influence especially on early phases of the product development process and by addressing also non engineering related issues for ecodesign. This potential does not appear to be fully embraced yet. The paper concludes by identifying the highest representation of ecodesign on websites of Australian ID consultancies and the lowest on websites of Chinese ID consultancies. The way ID consultancies practice ecodesign is very country specific. Understanding the differences and developing recommendations how ID consultancies can better unfold their ecodesign potential requires deeper investigations in the case specific factors.

  • (2012) Watson, Karin; McIntyre, Simon
    Conference Paper
    The adoption and integration of online learning and teaching in higher education is becoming increasingly important in our rapidly changing digital society. While many teachers and academics acknowledge the importance of adapting their own teaching practice to this new approach, knowing how and where to get started can be a daunting task for many. There is an overwhelming amount of professional development information regarding online teaching available to educators through workshops, the Internet, books, technical demonstrations and academic papers. However time-poor teachers often find it difficult to invest time and effort into attending workshops, or analysing available theory and research (McIntyre 2011) to derive online teaching approaches relevant to their own situations. Similarly, many teachers first embarking on a new online initiative can find it an isolating and frustrating experience, with limited peer support (Bennett, Priest and Macpherson 1999) and practical pedagogical guidance while ‘learning the ropes’ or preparing course curriculum. So what approach can be taken to firstly connect with these teachers at the ‘coalface,’ and then support them through their initial investigations and subsequent development of online teaching practice? In 2009, COFA Online at The University of New South Wales won funding from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Competitive Grant Scheme for a project called Learning to Teach Online (LTTO): Developing high-quality video and text resources to help educators teach online http://bit.ly/d18ac5. The project’s aim was to produce a set of resources to enable more educators, particularly those with no online experience, to successfully adopt and develop online teaching practices, and to reach a diverse audience of teachers across different disciplines and institutions throughout the world. This paper discusses the strategies adopted by the LTTO Project to ensure the resources focused on pedagogy and were perceived as pragmatic, easy to use and readily adaptable. It also outlines how the adoption of social media as a dissemination method facilitated easy access to the resources by a wide audience of teachers both with and without online teaching experience, and promoted greater awareness and uptake across disciplines and institutions around the world. It demonstrates, through summative and formative evaluations, how this approach effectively encouraged teachers to get started with their online teaching and stimulated their interest in further research on the topic.

  • (2012) McIntyre, Simon
    Conference Paper
    A rhizome is a horizontal system of roots that grows underground, comprising a series of nodes and connecting shoots, that continues to expand and form new connections as it grows. The Internet, with its increasing number of servers and connections could be considered as an ever- expanding system that enables new types of rhizome-like connections between people, knowledge and communities to occur. These connections can often seem random, but those involved usually have an underlying, if not immediately obvious common interest or purpose. Web 2.0 tools and digital networks are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in many aspects of contemporary society, and are in many ways similar to the nodes of a rhizome - a place where connections may form. Yet understanding how to maximise the potential of being able to connect with a diverse range of individuals, professional entities and institutions via these mediums can be difficult. What is the purpose of such connectivity, and how can the design and implementation of professional development resources utilise the concept of a rhizome as an effective means to maximise the constructivist potential offered by the digital age? The Learning to Teach Online project http://bit.ly/d18ac5 is a free Open Educational Resource (OER), designed to offer educators proven advice from a wide range of colleagues in different institutions and disciplines, about the pedagogies, challenges and rewards of online teaching. Following its release in 2010 by COFA Online at The University of New South Wales, the spread of the resources around the world via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, institutional links and word of mouth far exceeded initial expectations. While the use of social media to promote the project was always considered from the outset, the extent of the spread within K-12, vocational, higher education and private consultancies, and the subsequent penetration of the resources into existing educational programs was not expected. In this respect, the dissemination of the Learning to Teach Online project mirrored the behaviour of a rhizome, being widely spread to seemingly disparate educational communities globally, in a manner that was neither precisely controlled nor predictable. This paper is a snapshot of ongoing research within the author’s doctoral thesis, into the behaviour and significance of the ever-growing digital rhizome surrounding Learning to Teach Online. It begins to unravel how the design of the resource enabled social media to be used for rapid dissemination on a global scale. The paper also explores how, as a result of some members of existing academic communities connecting with the project’s digital rhizome, the resources were able to benefit other teachers not familiar with online teaching or web 2.0 technologies. In these cases, the penetration of the rhizome into many different types of existing academic communities has enabled the transmission and acceptance of new ideas that have begun to positively effect perception and adoption of online teaching practices amongst their members.

  • (2010) Zou, Patrick X.W.; Sunindijo, Riza Yosia
    Conference Paper
    Safety culture has been widely accepted as a crucial aspect in construction organisations. Despite its popularity, there is confusion on the actual meaning of safety culture. Another concept called safety climate has been used interchangeably with safety culture and has fuelled more perplexity. This paper aims to clarify the meaning of both concepts and discuss the differences between the two through a literature review. It is argued that safety climate is part of safety culture, that is, it is the psychological dimension of safety culture. Furthermore, this paper has developed a framework to show the overall concept and contents of construction safety culture, which includes the cause, contents, and consequence of safety culture. Measurements are also proposed for construction organisations to measure their safety culture and improve their safety performance continuously.