For the Record

As this issue of the Design Journal is going to press, the research centre I work in is coming towards the end stages of its submission to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2021. Many countries across the world have similar systems they work within, and so many will know about the huge workload involved in such assessment processes. For those that don’t know, REF2021 is the current version of a process which occurs every six or seven years or so, and involves an independent assessment of the quality of research in all academic disciplines across all Higher Education Institutions in the UK over the period since the previous assessment, and importantly, the impact that that research has had outside of academia. The aim is for a level of transparency on the value to society of research funded through public monies, and the results inform the distribution of research funding from the government until the next assessment, so the stakes are high—for the majority of institutions measuring in the millions of pounds over the course of the next assessment period. The pressure is on, then, for every institution to present their work to the highest possible standard.

This process used to be a physical one, involving the collation of books and journals, and for the fields of art and design, exhibition catalogues and physical samples of art and design work, ranging from copies of films, individual pieces of art and one-off pieces of craft through to examples of mass-produced print and production runs. It was an onerous task, and one which resulted in the physical transportation of research work around the country. For art and design practitioners, knowing an assessor would open their boxes and see finished pieces in all their glory was a great way to demonstrate the value of practice-led research. After the assessment process was finished, the physical works were returned to the institutions they came from and everyone continued their practice, creating works that would contribute to the next such assessment. The downside of this process was that there was no centralized record of the physical research work submitted that could be accessed. The publicly available results of the REF2014 exercise, for example, are in the form of mostly anonymized records in a database for each institution, with only a 300-word written description of each submitted piece of work. It is possible to go through these and read them, noting the title, and if interested then search for the work outside either on institutional websites, via Google or possibly on the personal websites of researchers, but that is not an ideal way to view a record of the work submitted.

This time round, the submission is largely a digital one. Only a small number of physical items will be submitted. The vast majority will be in the form of digital presentations of one kind or another, including collections of photographs and videos of finished objects and pieces of art, video recordings of exhibitions, copies of conference presentations, films, and electronic copies of articles, book chapters and even whole books. It will be an impressive collection of artistic research. While the reviewer might not be presented with the work in the most impressive form, at least everyone’s work will be presented the same way, and for the reviewers the process should be more manageable. The huge advantage of this form of the process, of course, is that following the confidential assessment procedure, the whole collection of submissions could certainly, and indeed should, be made publicly available as an easily accessible, centralized record of the incredible art, design and media research being carried out throughout the country, open to all, and hopefully inspiring future researchers in a way that an anonymized 300-word narrative could not hope to do. It is a great opportunity, and one that should not be missed as it is completely in line with the current moves towards fully open academic publishing in journals.

Of course, some of the articles in this issue may well turn out to be early submissions presented as part of the next assessment, forming part of the huge variety and wealth of research submitted. As will, hopefully, many more Design Journal articles over the next six or seven years. If they are eventually presented in a centralized archive, they could be accessed and seen in the full context of the larger projects of which they usually are part, rather than being viewed in isolation.

In this issue, Yoon, Potilmeyer, Desmet and Kim’s article ‘Designing for Positive Emotions’ asks how can designers be supported in provoking positive emotional responses from users? Existing literature on this topic is seen as too limited in informing a systematic process due to the literature’s lack of specificity, although they admit that some, possibly overly detailed typologies of user responses are available. The aim then, the authors conclude, should be to try and strike a balance between these extremes to develop specific tools which design practitioners would find more usable.

Similarly involving emotional attachments between products and their users, Dyer’s article ‘An investigation into the product attachment between athletes and their sports equipment’ used an online questionnaire to explore the user relationship of cyclists to their racing bicycles. If it can be shown that an emotional attachment exists in this context, then it follows that designers and manufacturers can exploit that attachment in tailoring the product to the individual user—a move away from the typical approach in this product group of sporting equipment that usually concentrates on functional performance. This leads to an interesting research question—could product attachment be used to enhance an athlete’s performance in any way?

The function and appearance of sportswear is also the focus of Wickramarathne and Al Mahmud’s article ‘Considerations for Designing Sportswear for Low-income Tropical Countries’. The authors consider the particular requirements of endurance cycling athletes in extreme climatic conditions. Here, sportswear has to dissipate heat effectively while simultaneously blocking external heat from the sun. Focus group workshops revealed that the usual approaches of wicking sweat from the body and using airflow to evaporate sweat and so cool the body do not work so well in very humid environments. In this instance, these problematic climate conditions are also compounded by a particular cultural environment that favours collectivist rather than individualistic identity, and by economic conditions where expensive wearable cooling systems common in other countries are outside of the affordability of these athletes. The authors conclude with a list of attributes to consider when designing cycling wear in this particular context.

Suoheimo, Vasques and Rytilahti’s article ‘Deep Diving into Service Design Problems’ compares Buchanan’s orders of design problems (simple, complex and wicked) and the framework that social workers use to understand the world (micro, meso and macro level), drawing a parallel between design’s ‘wicked’ problems and macro-level societal challenges. A literature review identified studies linking wicked problems with service design, with an analysis of the content of that review pointing to a particular gap in extant research. The authors used the study to produce a useful ‘iceberg’ model of design problems.

Another article examining complex societal issues is Broadley’s ‘Advancing Asset-based Practice’. An asset-based approach to design practice takes into account the assets—such as the physical spaces, buildings, materials, equipment, relationships and networks and so on—that stakeholders have access to when proposing design solutions. The theory is that such an approach supports communities in recognizing their available resources and mobilizing them to co-produce outcomes. In this respect there is a strong parallel to participatory design practice, especially in engaging with communities. The case study, Curated Care, investigated the relationship between wellbeing and volunteering, co-designing new forms of volunteer recruitment employing an asset-based approach. The model of asset-based practice this produced consists of appreciative exploration, collaborative articulation, and creative activation, which is potentially adaptable and transferable.

Collaborative design is also the context of Hornbuckle’s article ‘Mobilizing Materials Knowledge’, which looks at the role of material samples in collaborative design work. In the same way that cultural probes, toolkits and prototypes are considered invaluable to co-design practice, the author argues that material samples play a crucial role within multidisciplinary collaborative design projects, where they can act as vehicles of knowledge exchange and understanding between widely different disciplines, and help break down existing barriers between knowledge silos. The European funded ‘Trash-2-Cash’ project used co-design workshops to underpin ethnographic research, revealing that the role of material samples in multidisciplinary projects is a very complex one —not only in mobilizing different forms of knowledge, but also in providing knowledge about the collaboration itself and the different interactions within it.

A different type of collaboration is the focus of Stirling and Bowman’s article ‘The COVID-19 Pandemic Highlights the Need for Open Design not just Open Hardware’. The pandemic has seen the development of numerous open design projects, most notably open-source ventilators, which served to highlight a number of problematic issues in that the designs produced were mutually incompatible, due to parallel development without interaction or communication. The authors argue that the model used in open-source software development could have been employed, allowing remote teams to collaborate on a single design, providing the relevant provenance to support regulatory approval for the final design. Comparing the pros and cons of two open design approaches—Open Design Hardware and Open When Ready—the study concludes that there are a number of lessons to be learned and further developments that need to take place to enable us to better prepare for future pandemics.

Finally, this issue concludes with two PhD Study Reports. Firstly, McSwan’s ‘Exploring Animation and Virtual Reality to Represent the Perceptual Experiences of Art-practitioners with Sight-loss’, which is a practice-based PhD exploring how technology can best represent the creative practice of artists with sight-loss to sighted people. Secondly, Yang’s ‘Paradigm Shift in Chinese Information Design (2009–2019)’ is a study which examines the huge changes in information technology which have brought with them changes in communication methods, and an emerging, unique paradigm of Chinese Information Design.

Paul Atkinson
Art, Design & Media Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield S1 1WB, UK
Email: [email protected]