Hilary Dalke

The influence of expertise upon the designer's approach to studio practice and tool use

ABSTRACT Industrial design is characterized by the embodiment of design intentions. From conceptualization through to design specification, the designer employs a variety of design tools to externalize and develop design solutions to often ill-defined design problems. Surveys of student and practicing designers synthesise existing theoretical and empirical studies of design practice to analyse designer attitudes towards tool use and effectiveness. The survey studies illustrate the influence of expertise upon the designers attitudes towards tool use during studio practice. Results indicate a relationship between limited experience and the designers perceptions of and approaches to iterative exploration and design divergence. The use of certain designerly tools appear to compound a tendency for design convergence and fixation.

A colour contrast assessment system: design for people with visual impairment

Visually Impaired People (VIP) encounter difficulties with the perception of products and environments in their everyday life such as a door in a wall or a column on a station concourse. Contrast can be an essential and vital aid for negotiating the world for people with low vision (Bright et al., 1997; Dalke et al., 2004b). The development of a colour contrast assessment system would enable the construction and design sectors to create more accessible spaces and objects.

Discovering Color Semantics as a Chance for Developing Cross-Cultural Design Frameworks

Chance Discovery aims at determining a rare event as a chance in the sense of an opportunity or risk for future decision making. Such opportunities or risks are of particular importance for a Web designer who designs for a cross-cultural audience. An on-going research program aims at developing a new method of deriving opportunities and risks for design frameworks from the semantic and context analysis of the culturally constrained use of color. As part of this program, this paper describes an experiment where two groups of Korean and English subjects were presented with colors that are preferred in these cultures. For each color the subjects had to write brief text about their feelings and associations. Then results confirmed the prediction that Korean subjects form more associations related to emotions and nature, while English subjects form more associations with artificial concept categories, such as man-made objects. These differences will inform the next step of the research program that is concerned with the discovery of chances from context analysis.

Visibility prediction software: five factors of contrast perception for people with vision impairment in the real world

The use of colour contrast in the built environment for people with low vision has been largely unsupported for architects, access consultants or designers, with little information available and no easy-to-use tools. Accessible environments assist everyone including vision impaired people (VIP); yet often people can be disabled by buildings, not directly by their impairment (Pullin, 2009); in 2002 a total of 0.6% of the world’s population were listed as blind (Harle and McLannahan, 2008). A recent critique of accessibility recommendations showed a lack of understanding of the five key factors we identified for predicting an object’s visibility (Dalke, 2011) namely, visual ability (VA) of the observer, contrast, lux level, dimension of the object and distance away from the observer. These were established as fundamental for the perception of objects, texts or elements for VIPs, contrast being one of those five interdependent variables (Dalke et al., 2010); they are fundamental to the software that has now been developed to predict object visibility. The research carried out revealed gaps in how to achieve contrast practically for the professionals who should be more familiar with the process. In the USA, the ADA Standard for Accessible Design makes reference to contrast but it is ambiguous and open to interpretation. In the 1991 standard, 70 points of contrast difference are prescribed for marking warnings on walkways (ADA, 1991). But how to gauge contrast, by calculating the difference between the light reflectance values (LRV) of two surfaces, is always missing. In the UK there is no advice on how to check and deliver on contrast for accessible buildings and products (DDA, 2004; EHRC, 2010).

Science fiction film as design scenario exercise for psychological habitability: production designs 1955-2009

3Scenario building presents a valuable tool for the development of design concepts for unprecedented long-duration space missions. Aside from quantitative modelling techniques, one medium that routinely illustrates scenarios through speculative but manifested design concepts is science fiction (SF) film. Set and prop design in such films are sometimes the product of consulting, research and development efforts by multi-disciplinary teams comparable to, or including experts from, technical groups conducting pre-concept studies in the field of human space exploration. This paper presents results from a study into the production design of SF films, with special focus on the psychological challenges of extended spaceflight. The aim was to provide preliminary insight into the potential validity and application of SF film design in the context of scenario building for space, in particular at pre-phase-A stage of the system development process. The study consisted of two parts: the focus of the first was the systematic identification of a relevant set of SF productions and the description of products, environments and interactions portrayed in the films according to habitability criteria set out in the literature. The second part involved an illustrative case study reconstructing, from previously unpublished archive material, the main conceptualisation stages of the design of the food dispensing system in one particular film from the sample set, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is suggested that, in the particular case examined, the process of film production design development can be regarded as a space design study. The findings indicate that SF films offer a set of rich and detailed cases of design concepts and design issues that are of possible interest in the planning of long-duration missions. Concepts can be situated at the periphery of the range of traditional bodies of reference available to the system development process; issues can act as critical impulse of debate into future user needs and wants, thus helping increase the robustness of traditional scenarios. However, for this fictional approach to be truly meaningful and effective in a space scenario building context, future exercises should be conducted based on agendas set by space mission, rather than film, planners.