Crossing Cultural Chasms: Towards a culture-conscious approach to design

This thesis concerns specifically the discipline of product design, and the main question is how can designers be supported in understanding the culture of their intended users. The reason for this study is that designers are experiencing difficulties and uncertainties with regard to their intended users, as these users live in cultures with...

Cultural study in design: In search of a meaningful approach

Does the Circuit of Culture help design students to do a cultural study that is meaningful for their design project? Indeed, it provides a good view on the phenomenon culture, its complexity and how contemporary cultures can be studied, providing an overview and structure of the processes that influence cultural change. However, there are...

Method Usage in Design: How methods function as mental tools for designers

Methods are means to help designers achieve desired change as efficiently and effectively as possible. Methods can be used to do so in the context of learning - to help teach students how to design on a professional level. Methods can also be used in the context of performance - to help designers perform better at what they already do (well)....

Found in translation: Bringing reversal theory to design for play

In the design of objects for children’s play, support from psychology is often sought in general developmental overviews, typologies of play, and age-related performance and preference descriptions. These sources may give an insight into global aspects of child development but have limited utility for understanding the situated motivations of an...

Make space, make place, make sense

a problem due to a lack of space, a group of 50 design students had to move to another building. Having a dedicated space in an historical building turned the initial setback into an opportunity. Design students usually do not have the luxury of having their own design studio. By observing and interviewing the students over a period of 5 months,...

Socio-cultural dimensions to sharpen designer's cultural eyeglasses

This paper answers the question, how the dimensions that have been developed by anthropologists to typify cultures, can support designers in user-centred design processes. An analysis and evaluation of the use of cultural dimensions in design projects was performed. Although many of the dimensions found in the literature appear relevant for...

Touching Materials Visually: About the Dominance of Vision in Building Material Assessment

Designers’ visual way of knowing and working tends to be highly valued in design research. In architecture such an approach is increasingly criticized. Since people experience buildings with all their senses, architects’ visual focus is said to the run the risk of disregarding non-visual aspects. This study focuses on the visual and tactile...

Service design: Tuning the industrial design profession

Design is not only about the design and production of goods, but is increasingly addressing complex social issues nowadays. Roles of designers are becoming more and more varied, and at the same time other professionals are increasingly using design tools in their business, organizational or other innovation projects. New terms such as ‘service...

Forming a mindset: Design students' preconceptions about the usefulness of systematic methods

Teaching students to use systematic design methods effectively is not straightforward. While method teaching often focuses on the procedural aspects of method usage (e.g., what steps to take and in what order), effectively using a systematic method entails more than following its ‘instructions’. As noted by Andreasen [1], students need to be...

Designers coping with culture in an educational setting

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study about how design students cope with culture in the i-do (international design opportunity) series of international design workshops in Hong Kong. We wanted to learn three things. (1) To what extent do the design students from different nations share common cultural values? (2) what...

Living climate change: Design thinking and learning in complexity

As the world moves into an era of significant changes predicated by the challenge of sustainability, the future holds many questions, with serious consequences depending on the answers. Given the implications of these changes, the world’s design community needs to be constantly challenged to respond. To support conversations on what life will be...