Design for Living Complexities

Over the last 40 years, many approaches to design have been put forward by various researchers, designers and engineers, both in academia and industry, on how design ought to and might be carried out. These proposals on design have tended towards what has come to be regarded as design philosophies, design models and design methods. The thesis of this paper is to discuss various aspects of generic research in design, within the above classifications in the light of the work that has been done in the last four decades. Discussions will focus on various definitions of design, design theory and methodology, the nature and variety of design problems, design classifications, philosophies, models, methods and systems.

Information abstraction and modality significantly affect its interpretation, so it is important that feedback given to the design engineers should be in the language understandable to them and is able to convey necessary information with minimal interpretation. An experiment has been designed to evaluate performance and workload differences between expert and novice design engineers when they conduct design tasks in feedback modalities.

The five theoretical categories characterizing design attitude that arise from the data are: 'Consolidating multidimensional meanings', 'Creating, bringing to life', 'Embracing discontinuity and open-endedness', 'Embracing personal and commercial empathy' and 'Engaging polysensorial aesthetics'

Who is allowed to shape our cities, and how do they do it?

While play in museums for children is not a new concept, there is little research on what play looks like for the adult visitor. This study investigates adult play in museum exhibits designed for family learning, using Stuart Brown’s (2010) typology of play.

However, Koster's definition is only a part of his aesthetic judgement concerning games. In his justly acclaimed book A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2005), pictured above, Koster provides a definition of fun in which he expressly excludes all manner of experiences as fun. For instance, rollercoasters only provide "visceral fun" and are thus 'not fun' according to Koster's approach. Here we can see value judgements coming to bear on the aesthetics of play not from the conceptual approach to 'game' but from the conceptualisation of 'fun'. That Koster excludes all kinds of "visceral fun" as being fun is one of the strangest value judgements in the entire discourse of game studies, since to a great many players these kinds of experience are the very essence of fun. Instead, Koster positions learning as the central experience of fun, stating: Games are puzzles to solve, just like everything else we encounter in life [and] serve as very fundamental and powerful learning tools.