RAPID prototyping, SCIENCE fiction, ROBUST control, DATA entry, SYSTEMS design, and BUSINESS research

Abstract: This paper blends an empirical case study with science fiction prototyping (SFP) to explore the current and future of design prototyping. Mixing methods in this way improves the robustness of the SF prototype and mitigates the criticism that SFP may be used in an insufficiently-grounded way. In addition to this methodological contribution the study makes a subject contribution by illuminating the impact of emerging technologies on creativity, and re-imagining design within a co-creation workspace. We explore the interplay between creative and business processes, often caricatured stereotypically as the ‘creatives’ versus the ‘suits’, and ‘magic’ versus ‘logic’. We use data captured during a collaborative case study between a highly-innovative design company and business researchers. The case focused on a designer as she completed a design brief for a simulated new product. The study surfaced areas of disconnect between the creative aspects and the drive for business efficiency in the design process. Two key areas; interaction between variables and concept transference were identified. The discussion considers issues related to how design might transform into a co-creative activity conducted in a technology-enhanced workspace where the distinctions between creative design and business processes are all but eradicated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

RAPID prototyping and DESIGNERS

This paper explores how designers’ core competencies relate to the emerging paradigmatic shift in design practice, and provides suggestions for design education. The shift is due to the increased interest from design in engaging with social and political contexts and issues the last fifteen years. Designers have several core competencies and in this paper prototyping and thereby the capacity to work with wicked problems are explored. More explicitly, we suggest that designers can design relevant propositions with the help of successive prototyping. Tightly integrating designing propositions with problem setting is necessary when dealing with wicked problems. This works well when designers deal with signs and things. However, in order to deal with increasingly complex contexts, we suggest that design students should get more relevant experience of prototyping in complex contexts and improved reflection by making use of theories from STS in order to deal with these complex contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RAPID prototyping and DESIGN

Digital Fabrication promises to revolutionize manufacturing, bringing both economic, social and environmental benefits. Combined with Computational Co-Design it can raise the creative potential of both designers and users. However, today the productive use of Digital Fabrication and Computational Design requires significant effort and specialised know-how, so valorising these practices calls for the identification of the application fields that benefit the most from them. This paper presents a tool for helping the discovery of design opportunities across comprehensive, ramified lists of product categories, where designers can identify possible points of intervention. The web-based tool allows the rapid evaluation of numerous product categories according to an extendable set of factors and inspiring questions related to the necessity of personalization, aiming to stimulate designers to consider unexpected frontiers of innovation. Beyond the scope of the research project, this tool has the potential to assist designers in finding applications also for other emerging technologies in a structured and scalable way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geometry has been a source of inspiration in the design of the manmade world for millennia; it also provides representational means enabling development of a concept into a built object. In the past three decades computing methodologies have provided the designer with unprecedented tools to explore highly complex forms, create digital models and fabricate them. This paper describes a computational methodology for the transition of forms from abstract geometric configurations to physical objects: a parametric design process assists from the initial ideation to the final prototyping with 3D printing technologies. The five regular polyhedra are used as a case study; this paper explores how parametric based procedures develop these geometric shapes into digital models of structures to be fabricated in different sizes and materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]