Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2012

The ability to embody design intentions is critical to an industrial designer's studio practice. From the design sketch to 3D computer-aided design, an increasing variety of design tools are employed in the embodiment of design proposals. A literature review identified the implicit characteristics of tool use during design activity. These characteristics were employed in surveys of design practitioners and design students. Findings indicated a tendency for student design activity to be characterized by convergence and less exploration, early fixation and attachment to concept, in contrast to the practitioners' more divergent and iterative approach. A concern for conventional research dissemination, articulated through conference papers and academic journals, to engage a practice-orientated audience lead to the development of a digital resource (IDsite). The paper describes an interim pilot of the resource. Findings suggest, although IDsite requires further development, the approach has relevance in terms of the communication of design knowledge.

This article focuses on analysing the feasibility of using social tagging as a tool for knowledge collection and retrieval in the context of the product development process (PDP). This process is a social activity that involves groups of individuals who share a common goal: 'to design a product'. Traditional knowledge-based systems (KBS) are not very well suited to capture the tacit knowledge that is embedded in this process. Social tagging is proposed in this article as the mechanism to externalize the tacit knowledge about the best CAD modelling strategies between the design team members. This knowledge is especially relevant for the management of 'engineering change orders' because this process is closely related to the modelling methodology used to create the three-dimensional (3D) CAD models that have to be adapted to accomplish a specific design modification. In order to analyse the feasibility of this approach, an experimental study was conducted to understand the tagging process in this context and the benefit of using this information in the modification procedure of 3D CAD models. Preliminary experimental results show that tagging represents a feasible approach to support knowledge collection on best CAD modelling practices.

Much of the conventional approach to business and management education places a strong emphasis on a primarily rational approach. Yet, particularly at the senior levels of management, and in problematic areas, rationality needs to be complemented by a parallel intuitive approach to knowledge sharing and creation. Social and management sciences have traditionally drawn relatively little on arts, humanities and cultural domains. With a need for a more intuitive emphasis in extending management knowledge, this offers opportunities for drawing on well-established dimensions in these domains. This article draws on a particular experiment in the repeated use of a well-known art gallery for business and management meetings and educational purposes. This was part of a much broader decade-long series of initiatives in the use of cultural spaces to help address the intuitive 'gap' in management education. A number of conclusions are drawn from the analysis of experiences, in particular that the physical ambience of an arts-based physical environment can augment management learning, but also there is great importance in the event design and in the facilitation style applied.

Improvisation is a way of knowing that is experiential, pivotal to the body’s movement and growth in the world. It allows us to manage constraint and freedom in a rich world of possibility. Within this article we trace a trajectory from improvisation in life to improvisation in art. By focusing on practitioners who work with improvisation in precise ways in the fields of anthropology, ecology, visual art and music, we explore how improvisation and experiential knowledge are profoundly interconnected. To achieve this, we use the four characteristics of improvisation developed by anthropologists Ingold and Hallam as a framework for the evaluation of art practices of improvisation including the authors’ own project work. We expand the framework through Dewey’s analysis of art as experience. The article concludes with an evaluation of how the techniques and processes of improvisation from the case examples may be useful ways to shed light on the workings of experiential knowledge.

This article explores the role of the physical and virtual textile materials library as an effective multimodal learning and research tool in its provision of tactile, visual samples, technical data and project application information. The abundance of new materials and their increasing complexity is causing designers to rethink the traditional 'samples in a box' approach. The research uses a case study approach that includes consultation with industry, academia, and a review of four contemporary material libraries to explore the formats that future textile libraries may best take. In considering a future textile library, the authors also examine answers to the question: as the number of textiles available continues to expand, how can physical material, image and text-based library techniques best be combined with the web and digital information to make it possible for colleges, public institutions and companies to keep a textile library updated.

This article analyses the philosophical backdrop to the exclusion from academic exchange of situated, embodied and tacit modes of knowing, whereby conceptual/ propositional knowledge and textual articulation is presented as the gold standard against which these other types of knowledge are measured and found wanting. By way of counterbalance, this article questions the premise that these forms of knowledge are best understood as belonging to a completely separate epistemological category to that of conceptual/propositional knowledge. The lack of parity of esteem afforded to multimodal formats of dissemination is, it is argued, ultimately rooted in these disparities. The article focuses on a number of theories that posit a sub structural relationship of practical and tacit knowledge to conceptual/propositional knowledge. These include the work of Michael Polanyi as well as more recent work by Alva Noë, Mark Johnson, George Lakoff and Vittorio Gallese. In this context, the article focuses on the legitimacy of descriptive drawing as a knowledge-producing activity, with particular reference to Noë's work.

This article outlines the development, delivery and evaluation of a student project for visual communicators in a second-year teaching unit where students are learning about the communication contexts of product value and consumer attachment to commodities, shortening product life cycles and design's contribution to material and symbolic waste. The student exercise is part of a pedagogical strategy to seed education about sustainable design practices and was developed in response to an ongoing research project titled On Wearing. One of the recommendations of this project is to investigate the role of Visual Communication Design in supporting more enduring relationships with existing products. The students were asked to employ the visual strategy of 'recoding' to reconceptualize abandoned products, a strategy of manipulating signs to suggest new values more aligned with the interests of sustainability. Recoding is a political semiotic strategy that draws upon the practice of 'culture jamming', a form of aesthetic subversion that destabilizes the meaning of corporate branding through the clever manipulation of visual signs. Here, we explore recoding as a value-creation strategy that could model and support more enduring relationships between products and people. This article reflects on the students' creative responses to the challenges of recoding within a learning context and evaluates the project's ability to advance the research findings, namely the potential for visual communications to function as a form of symbolic salvage and support for practices of resource recovery and reuse.

This article aims to deepen our understanding of the embodied experience of space by means of observation and explorative analysis of how an individual interacts with space through movement. We focus on how architecture can be conceived by considering the embodied experience of space. We look at the level of spatial awareness and expression of the movements reached in dance. Architectural boundaries are explored by means of empirical methods. The subject experiences space, but can this embodied experience be handled and moulded by the architect, the so-called designer of spaces? Movements can be considered as expressions derived from the embodied experience in a particular space. Techniques of movement analysis were used in an attempt to capture this embodied experience through motion. Can the results of this assumption contribute to design-based architectural thinking by understanding the outcome of tacit knowledge gained from spatial visualizations? This is an ongoing research project, and thus this article describes a work in progress. The goal comprises the development of an architectural implementation with regard to the embodied experience of space in design.