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(2011)Conference PaperThis 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.
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(2012)Conference PaperThe 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.
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(2011)Conference PaperThis 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.
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(2011)Conference PaperTechnological 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.
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(2011)Conference PaperTechnological 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.
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(2010)Conference PaperUsing a cognitive load theory approach, this study was conducted to investigate the effects of training using multiple accents on perceiving foreign-accented English for EFL learners with different levels of expertise. Specifically, it explored the benefits of using multiple talkers during training compared to a single talker for Chinese EFL learners on perceptual learning of Indian-accented English. There were four training conditions for listeners with either high- or low- expertise levels of English language proficiency: 1. A low variability multiple-talker training condition in which the stimuli sentences produced by four Indian- accented speakers were presented in a fixed order;
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(2010)Conference PaperVietnam is an East Asian country which has been immensely influenced by Confucian ideology. This heritage has been transferred from generation to generation, and has greatly influenced the development of a valuing of, and love of, learning in Vietnamese intellectually gifted adolescents. The purpose of the present study is to construct and test a specific scale to reflect Confucian values endorsed by intellectually gifted adolescents and their age-peers not identified as gifted in Vietnam. A total of 352 high school students (intellectually gifted adolescents = 50.6%, and students not identified as gifted = 49.4%) participated in a survey containing 40 items that were selected from previous studies published in scholarly English journals on the adoption of Confucian values in various cultural settings. Those items were translated from English into Vietnamese by a NAATI (The National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters) registered professional and back-translated by two other translators.
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(2010)Conference PaperConfucianism is an amalgamation of thoughts initiated by a Chinese scholar Confucius (551?479 BC) and his followers. It emphasizes themes such as the hierarchical relationship among people, the family as a basic unit, benevolence, diligence, self improvement, and life-long education. Since China dominated Vietnam for more than a thousand years and most Vietnamese inhabitants were descended from Chinese who had settled in Vietnam and become Vietnamese, they inherited the Chinese historical and philosophical ideas from their fore-parents. In general, research with intellectually gifted adolescents in North America and Australia has a) indicated a certain degree of adoption of Confucian values in students from East Asian background, and b) identified their advanced levels of moral reasoning. The present study aims to examine the similarities and differences between Vietnamese intellectually gifted adolescents and their age-peers not identified as gifted in the adoption of traditional Confucian values and related
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