Leon Cruickshank

The Innovation Dimension: Designing in a Broader Context

Context The term “innovation” has become increasingly prominent in debates in government policy through the establishment of the new UK government department, Department for Innovation, Universities, and Skills (DIUS) and through reports such as “Innovation Nation.”1 National funding bodies, such as research councils and the Leverhulme Trust, are emphasizing innovation through the “digital economy” and a corresponding prioritization in the design establishment through the activities and publications of the Design Council. These converging activities have highlighted the complex, overlapping, inconsistent, and incompletely understood relationship of innovation as used in design and innovation in the broader literature of innovation studies. Concentrating on the UK, this paper provides an indicative review of these fields and aims to achieve three goals: 1) describe the wider academic field of innovation and relate this to a design perspective, 2) examine the connections, tensions, and synergies that emerge as these fields converge, and 3) propose active areas for contributions between fields. Many disciplines are active in innovation research, including management studies, economics, entrepreneurship, psychology, sociology, and, starting to emerge in broader innovation studies, design. The velocity of research, especially in the area of design and innovation, is increasing, driven by the developing needs of the digital or knowledge economy. Specifically, the UK government has committed to spending £3.5bn on innovation through the Technology Strategy Board (TSB). These initiatives were shaped in the UK by a series of policy papers, including: Competing in the Global Economy—The Innovation Challenge,2 Creativity, Design, and Business Performance,3 Innovation in the UK: Indicators and Insights,4 The Cox Review of Creativity in Business: Building on the UK’s Strengths,5 The Race to the Top: A Review of Government’s Science and Innovation Policies,6 Innovation Nation,7 and Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy.8 In a European context an engagement with innovation is seen in an ongoing manner through the activities of Euro-Innova,9 the EU’s innovation portal. This portal sponsors an ongoing series of activities, from conferences to innovation panels, that look at sectorspecific innovation issues ranging from textiles to space to gazelles (fast-growing small and medium enterprises (SMEs)). There has

Designing creative frameworks: design thinking as an engine for new facilitation approaches

This paper documents implications and opportunities for the design profession offered by the rise of the knowledge society and digital economies. Within this we show the value of applied design thinking in the creation and delivery of business development and facilitation. Two case studies document the design and delivery of contrasting consultancy projects where the design of problem-solving frameworks (rather than conventional facilitation of events) resulted in new understanding and business development. These approaches were underpinned by a common conceptual model that describes our philosophical underpinning for the application of design thinking across disciplines both within and beyond traditional areas of professional design engagement. Finally, we discuss the implication for design practice of using design thinking as a mode of interdisciplinary interaction and cocreation of problem-solving approaches between designers and others (rather than an activity just for designers) which represents a step beyond conventional participatory design approaches.

NETS: a design tool for activating social networks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address social network theory from the perspective of design research and propose a new conceptual approach to understanding and developing social networks. These ideas are embodied in a new strategic tool to help companies appreciate, proactively develop and exploit their social networks through visualisation.Design/methodology/approach – The authors illustrate how design‐inspired approaches can transform the understanding of social networks through a practical tool to foster innovation and transformation in and between firms. This was developed through an action‐research process and tested with 22 high‐tech, small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs).Findings – Entrepreneurs are found to benefit from their network by activating the most useful nodes to solve a problem. Conceptually a sub‐group of contacts exists that are activated at different times to extract different resources, that is nodes operate depending on the use they are put to. The authors call these N...

Open Design and Innovation : Facilitating Creativity in Everyone

Contents: Part 1 Open Design in Context: Introduction to open design Innovation and design in context Mass creativity: design beyond the design profession Design responses to mass creativity Open design futures. Part 2 Open Design Case Studies: Introduction to case studies The .NET Gadgeteer: open design platform La Region 27 and the open design of public services Silver=Gold: professional designers working in open creative processes Educating open designers PROUD: beyond the castle: open designers in action. Part 3 The Future: The future for open designers. Bibliography Index.

Facilitating the Evolution of a User Driven Iconotextual Internet Patois

In this paper the authors propose an open system of communication that allows its users to produce Internet-based icon / textual communication that is particular to their own culture. This culture could be as broad as the whole Internet or it could be linked to a much smaller community. This iconotextual language or patois will not be the product of a single author who determines what icons represent like a latter day Esperanto. The system will be open in that it will be up to its users to construct their own meanings in negotiation with those they want to communicate with. To achieve these aims this work will be looking at alternative systems of representation as well as the theoretical and practical implications for such a project.

Rapid prototyping and fast user trial of multimedia broadcast and cellular services

This paper presents the results of fast user trial of multimedia services that are enabled when a mobile terminal has access to converged services over digital broadcast and mobile telecommunications networks. It first describes the motivations behind developing this system and describes the service scenarios that benefit most from it. It then provides an overview of the service components of the test case scenario. Finally, it presents the results of fast user trials on end users of the services that were developed. This work was conducted as part of the EU-funded CISMUNDUS project.

Closing in on Open Design

ABSTRACT Open design has become an umbrella term for a wide range of approaches to design and creativity where professional design is challenged. These range from seeing designers as simply irrelevant (in democratized innovation) to an active and creative collaboration between designers and non-designers (co-design) to the dissolution of the distinction between designer and non-designer altogether. While supporting open design in general, we argue that there are important instances where open design approaches may not be appropriate and that there will be a polarization between casual design activity (for cups, T-shirts and so on) and critical designs (medical equipment, very complex systems like mobile phones).

Applied Imagination - Designing Innovative Knowledge Transfer Approaches

This paper describes a new approach to the creation of innovative knowledge transfer (KT) activities. This is achieved through the close collaboration of three business schools with a strong record of excellence in KT research and application (Lancaster University, Manchester University and Liverpool University) together with one of the UKs leading centers for design research (ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University). Operating under the name of IDEAS (Innovation Design Entrepreneurship and Science) this collaboration is active in a wide range of innovation and KT activities. Here we describe how we have applied creative thinking research to the creation (design) of new KT activities and processes. This is achieved through the presentation of a conceptual model; two cases studies of the application of this model and a discussion of future projects and applications.

The Function and Future of the Folder

Folders are a commonplace metaphor in computing environments, constituting a link to physical work materials and are a key means for individuals to impose order on their digital work materials. This paper presents the findings of a novel qualitative study examining folder use by 12 information workers, using logging to accurately capture how folders were used in individual everyday work over 6 weeks, and challenging participants to work without using folders. Through observation and interviews, the study provides new descriptions of how folders are used and the dependence some study participants had on their folders to think and create, as well as to access files. The findings call into question whether search and recency-based lists of files could fulfil the functional role of folders, identified as key means for individuals to construct and specialize their work environments. Implications are discussed for document management tools, and more generally for operating system design.

When Your Toaster is a Client, how do you design? Going Beyond Human Centred Design

Abstract This paper does not argue that artificial intelligence will make objects truly intelligent but it does make the case that within the sphere if the Internet of Things (IoT) objects will increasingly have agency, be making their own decisions responding to data they have collected beyond the direct control of humans. As such these networks and objects can be regarded as actors or stakeholders. There has been an assumption that humans should be at the centre of the creative process since Normans seminal texts , ‘UserCentered System Design: New Perspectives on HumanComputer Interaction’ (Norman & Draper, 1986) and ‘The Psychology Of Everyday Things’ (Norman, 1988). Here he maps out a new direction for good design that has been incorporated into the design mainstream (Sanders and Stappers 2008, Markopoloulos et al. 2016, Coleman and Clarkson 2016). In an age of automated Bots and IBM`s Watson (Baker 2011) the bedrock of this assumption is being eroded daily. Kortuem et all define the Internet of Things as ‘a loosely coupled, decentralized system of smart objects — that is, autonomous physical/digital objects augmented with sensing, processing, and network capabilities’ (Kortuem et al 2010). They draw a distinction between sophisticated but ‘dumb’ systems that for example track the movement of goods through warehouses and systems that use ‘smart objects’ that have a level of understanding built into them. Its these smart objects that characterize a move to the true Internet of Things. Kortuem et al define smart objects as having the capacity to ‘sense, log, and interpret what’s occurring within themselves and the world, act on their own, intercommunicate with each other, and exchange information with people’ (Kortuem et al 2010). In this paper we argue that rather than trying to humanise technology considering everyone as a ‘smart object’ offers some interesting and provocative challenges to design that help get beyond human centred approaches. There is an extensive body of literature examining the idea that everything (including us, ideas, smalls…everything) can be classified as an object or a thing. With a few notable exceptions, for example Ian Bogost`s Alien Phenomenology, or, what its like to be a thing (2012) and Levi Bryant`s, Onto-cartography (2014) the connections between this area of philosophy and design are not well developed. In this paper we use this materialist or Object Orientated Ontological (OOO) perspective to explore the implications for design practice. Specifically we look at the fundamental principles of Human Centred Design as laid out by Norman (1988), for example ‘Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head. By building conceptual models, write manuals that are easily understood and that are written before the design is implemented’. We apply an OOO perspective to this, challenging notions of knowledge, the average user, the visibility or explanation of actions and designing for error.