Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Högskolan för design och konsthantverk (2012-2019)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://gupea-staging.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/30629

Browse

Now showing 1 - 12 of 12

Design for Service: A framework for articulating designers’ contribution as interpreter of users’ experience
(2014-03-11) Wetter-Edman, Katarina
During the past approximately 15 years designers have paid increasing attention to service and changes in our society, resulting in a new design discipline – service design. In parallel, designers’ contributions to service development and innovation have been brought forward, often emphasizing designers’ capability of involving users, acting in and through multidisciplinary teams and using visualization skills in these situations. Previously, most knowledge about development of new services has been treated within the service marketing and management discourse, where emphasis is put on customer integration in the process, and the co-creation of the value proposition - the service. Despite both knowledge spheres, design and marketing/management, have been deeply involved in the development of new service they have hitherto essentially remained unconnected. The overall aim of this thesis is to further explore and develop the connections between design and service logic through development of the Design for Service framework. In addition, this thesis takes specific interest in designers’ contribution as intermediaries between users and organizations in service design and innovation. Pragmatist inquiry was used for interlacing theoretical comparisons and explorations in the field to advance the inquiry. A field study of a 10-month collaboration between a design firm and an industrial company, focused on a service design workshop with customers and the outcomes thereof. It was found that the designers worked with users’ stories as design material and rematerialized them as scenarios, instead of through anticipated visualization techniques. Narrative analyses brought forward how designers organized the users’ different accounts into coherent stories and in so doing they highlighted conflicts experienced in the users’ value creation practices. The capacity to propose possible futures is generally argued to be core in design practice, this was however not the strongest contribution in this case. Instead the re-materialization of existing situations was the real contribution. Through interpretation the users’ experience was made relevant and actionable for the industrial company. This thesis connects research in design practice, user centered design and service logic through development and refinement of a framework - Design for Service. The framework articulates designers’ contribution in terms of value creation. Through this connection designers’ contribution and service design are repositioned from a specific phase of service development to an interpretative core competence for understanding users and value creation in service innovation.
Embodying Openness: A Pragmatist Exploration into the Aesthetic Experience of Design Form-Giving
(2017-06-12) Ariana, Amacker
This thesis explores the tension between a reflective view of design and design as an embodied, aesthetic experience. Most research exploring the nature of design follows a tradition of practice-based design research, which aims to empirically establish what constitutes design by studying what designers do and say. The challenge with this observational approach is that it depends on design as an object of study and can therefore only deal with its rational or cognitive dimension. The inherently aesthetic and subjective dimension of the immediate perception of designing remains largely unexplored in design research. To address this lack of research, this project builds on the Classical Pragmatist non-dualistic view of experience and knowledge. In particular, drawing on Dewey’s thesis in Art as Experience, I explore the embodied, aesthetic dimension of design through investigating in detail my experience of the activity of form-giving. This methodological perspective maintains continuity between thinking-feeling in action and in terms of subject-object relations. From this non-dualist view, I critique the specific claim made by researchers and design practitioners who advocate that designers exhibit an attitude of openness that contributes to creativity. Assuming that openness is a quality that can be felt, I ask how this quality is felt in my experience of designing, and what openness means practically with regard to direct sensory and physical engagement and what it conceptually means in the way a designer approaches the world. To explore an integrated experience of designing in the present, I follow an artistic method of movement improvisation called Butoh. Butoh provides a specific context of inquiry for exploring perceptual and physical engagement in the present through a heightened state of somatic awareness. The empirical work is comprised of four direct experiences from my Butoh training that are examined through the lens of Pragmatism and embodied cognition. Together, they show how I actually engage my ‘self’ through concrete sensory, emotional, and feelingful frames of experience of form-giving in the present. This research makes theoretical and methodological contributions through developing an embodied, aesthetic perspective of practice-based and artistic approach to design. It suggests the potential of openness-capacity as a concept for understanding and actually practicing the type of creative approach attributed to a designer’s attitude of openness. It provides a critique of rational mechanisms underlying the contexts of design inquiry, as well as having practical implications for design education and the kinds of teaching and learning that support the creative, self-directed, exploratory capacities of designers.
Exploring pitfalls of participation and ways towards just practices through a participatory design process in Kisumu, Kenya
(2018-04-12) Kraff, Helena
It is my belief that participatory processes can lead to positive transformations for the people involved. However, I do at the same time recognize that participation is inherently ambiguous and complex, and that this makes it vulnerable to unjust practices. It is this view of participation that led me to a focus on challenges that can emerge in participatory processes, or as they will be referred to in this thesis: pitfalls. The purpose is to explore pitfalls of participation, especially regarding when, how and why participatory practices lead to unjust forms of participation. My experience of being engaged as a Swedish researcher in a participatory design project in a Kenyan context, and critical reflections on this experience serve as the foundation for this exploration. The project concerns small-scale ecotourism development in a fishing village on the shores of Lake Victoria in Western Kenya, where I worked with the development of ecotourism-related products and services in a participatory manner with a local guide group and residents, and with PhD student colleagues from Sweden and Kenya. A number of pitfalls are highlighted as particularly problematic, which are connected to either abstracted and simplistic conceptualizations of participants and their participation, or to an unjust role distribution in projects. The terms community, empowerment and ownership are used to exemplify how the use of vague and elusive words to describe participation tends to hide participant diversity or lead to overstatements regarding the benefits derived from the project. I discuss how an unjust access to knowledge resources between actors who are to collaborate closely together hinder co-production of knowledge, and I acknowledge how designers’ and design researchers’ prejudices and a cultural unawareness can lead to some groups not being recognized as important. The aim is to contribute with methodological guidance regarding how researchers and practitioners can identify and work against the pitfalls that they come across in their practice, and towards achieving just participation.
Händelser på ytan – shibori som kunskapande rörelse
(2016-05-11) Laurien, Thomas
In present times, shibori, though originally a Japanese word, is an international umbrella term for craft techniques related to the dyeing of textiles. In an artistic context, shibori signifies the act of (e)laborating by way of compressions – in order to create patterning and/or three dimensionality. In and through a practice-based artistic research project, the question: What is shibori, and what does shibori do? acts as my guide, where the initial focus is on the introduction and development of shibori as an artistic practice in a Swedish context. Here, Japan takes on a main role, albeit in the form of a backdrop – subtly but noticeably influencing the events being staged. Shibori comes to take the shape of a vehicle, and I, the researcher, have set the vehicle and myself in a knowledge-forming motion, where interviews are conducted with artists in Sweden, courses in shibori are observed and taken part in, group shows are performed in Japan and Sweden, as well as addressed through the written work that comes into being. Curatorial experiences are also reflected upon in a number of closely-connected essays. A space, in the format of an essay, is created as part of the final stage – where shibori meets concepts such as wonder, affect and sensation, and where questions on the role and impact of discursive language in art-making and art experience are raised. Answers to the research question “What is shibori, and what does shibori do?” gradually surface and highlight an abundance of aspects and insights. These include: discovering that artists approach shibori in independent ways, whilst still safeguarding Japanese material and immaterial cultural heritage; shibori becoming a space of possibles, characterised by the presence of strong intention and the appreciation of chance, side-by-side, in mutual interaction; and curatorial experience acting to highlight shibori in its role to enhance the experience of plenitude. Shibori thus comes to signify the forming, as well as the experiencing, of knowledge – in motion between theory and practice – where broader issues, such as the construction of identity, the creation of acting spaces through performative negotiations, as well as curating as both an artistic research method and an artistic act of making, are also revealed. Beholding and reflecting, I perceive that the envisioning and staging of Events on the Surface have enabled, and continue to enable me, in my quest to find a way into the conceptual, bodily and material constituents of shibori-making, in particular, and artistic practice, in general.
Lerbaserad erfarenhet och språklighet
(2016-11-22) Medbo, Mårten
During the course of the twentieth century, a doubt emerged – first within visual arts, and later also within crafts – where the relevance of the traditional way of making art was addressed, as were thoughts on what was termed ‘empty shape’. The notion that shape in itself was no longer artistically valid is closely linked to notions of materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom – all of which have had a major influence on contemporary visual arts and crafts, in general, and, more specifically, on what I term ‘theory-practice’ within the field of crafts. During the past few decades, increasing proof of this influence on the field of crafts as a whole has also been experienced. As a ceramist expressing myself through clay, form has never been empty, and clay never a hindrance, and my dissertation is an attempt to put materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom, in context, as well as to reflect upon questions related to their emergence and what impact they have within the field of crafts. My point of departure here is my own experience as an artist and ceramist, where inquiring and exploring takes places through practical knowledge. I argue that there is no such thing as immateriality in art and that all artistic expression requires bodily-situated craft skill of some kind in order to be materialised and communicated, as well as to take place in the world. I also argue that art should be seen as what I term ‘language-practice’. Through this practice I craft the concept of ‘clay-based language-ness’ and ‘language- like-ness’ in order to come as close as possible to describing, in words, the kind of communication I wish to create as a ceramist, as well as what art-making (‘art-crafting’) constitutes when conceptual artists create their art. Regarding crafts as a language-practice, however, conflicts with the theory that is setting the tone as well as leading the field of crafts today. I therefore wish, and propose, to find a way out of this conflict-ridden situation. As part of this endeavour, I present the text-based part of the dissertation and the clay-based part of the dissertation – side by side.
Light Shapes Spaces: Experience of Distribution of Light and Visual Spatial Boundaries
(2012-11-14) Wänström Lindh, Ulrika
Light enables us to experience space. The distribution of light is vital for spatial experience but has not been the main focus of previous research on lighting. The lighting designer’s professional knowledge is to a great extent experience-based and tacit. With design practice as the point of departure, this thesis aims to explore spatiality and enclosure in relation to the distribution of light – with the intention of increasing subjects’ understanding of what can be regarded as a space, and to show how spaces can be shaped by the distribution of light. By focusing on users’ experiences and interpretations, relationships between the distribution of light and perceived spatial dimensions and experienced spatial atmosphere have been investigated. The main contribution of this thesis is to widen the base of knowledge that lighting designers, architects and customers can use as a common reference. This thesis is based on three studies: the Scale Model Study, the Auditorium Study and the Church Park Study. The thesis includes concept- and method development. The mixed methodologies comprise a range from introspective phenomenological observations to deep interviews and questionnaires. The experimental setups have also shifted from scale models to real-life interior and exterior settings. Consequently, a quantitative approach has complemented the mainly qualitative approach. Through artistically based research, patterns and relationships are dealt with in complex real spaces. The findings of these studies lead to a discussion of when, why and how patterns of brightness and darkness influence spatial perceptions of dimensions. The findings also show that brightness not only contributes to our experiencing a space as more spacious than it really is, but in certain situations brightness can actually have the reverse effect. Furthermore, darkness can contribute to a spacious impression, which has hardly been discussed in previous research. What subjects regard as a space may shift between the clearly defined physical space and the perceived space, which include light zones. Light zones can create a sense of inclusion or exclusion for subjects, which affects their sense of community and their feeling of safety. Light topography, e.g. the height of luminaire positions, as well as light direction influence the way we experience the private and the public. Enclosure can, if related to visible spatial boundaries, facilitate reassurance and safety.
Linjer. Musikens rörelser – komposition i förändring
(2013-07-15) Hedås, Kim
Lines: Music Moving – Composition Changing is a dissertation that focuses on relationships in music. The main question posed in this dissertation is: How does music relate to what is not music? Through an artistic inquiry, where a reflexive movement between the different parts produces the method used, the dissertation addresses the act of composing with particular focus on how music moves and how relations in music change. Results are also in motion, and traces – lines – move, change direction, and connect the music with what is not music. This inquiry embraces the following five themes: movement, identity, time, memory and space – which all relate to each other, and which, through composition, change, transform and reshape meaning as well as expression. The aim of this study is to demonstrate the changes that arise as a result of the relationships that are activated between music and what is not music, since an understanding of how these relationships work enables opportunities for the composition of new music.
Meaning in the Making: Introducing a hermeneutic perspective on the contribution of design practice to innovation
(2013-07-08) Jahnke, Marcus
In recent years interest has grown in how design can contribute to innovation in business and society, such as through the management concept of design thinking. However, up-close studies on design’s contribution to innovation are still scarce. This may be one reason why rhetoric arguing the benefit of design in innovation contexts is often related to pervasive innovation concepts, such as idea generation and problem-solving, rather than to concepts that capture tacit and embodied dimensions of design as an aesthetic practice. The purpose of this study is to develop an understanding of the contribution of design practice to innovation. This has been achieved through an experimental research-approach in which five designers, through different interventions, involved multi-disciplinary groups of non-designers in experiencing design practice “hands-on” in five "non-designerly" companies. The aim of the interventions was to strengthen the innovativeness of the organizations. The interventions have been studied through ethnographically inspired methods and an interpretative and reflexive methodological approach. In the interventions established product understandings in the companies were challenged, initially leading to friction. However, the immersion in design hands-on meant that established meaning-spaces were gradually expanded through processes of entwined conversation and hands-on making. In these processes new product understandings were developed through aesthetic deliberation and material practice, which in three cases lead to innovative concepts that could not have been developed within the meaning-space in the organization before the interventions. This study thus sheds light on how the emergence of innovative concepts can be understood as processes of meaning-making, and how design practice may provide processes for such innovation work in multi-disciplinary contexts. It also suggests that when design practice is abstracted away, as is common in design thinking rhetoric, relevant dimensions of design’s contribution to innovation may be lost. The main theoretical contribution is to show the relevance of hermeneutics as an explicit concept for understanding the contribution of design practice to innovation. This can be seen as establishing a missing link between design theory, design management studies and innovation management theory. Beyond articulating the contribution of design practice to innovation, this thesis also supports the relevance of understanding meaning-making as central to innovation.
(re)Forming Accounts of Ethics in Design: Anecdote as a Way to Express the Experience of Designing Together
(2016-09-20) Whitcomb, Andrew
Designers and design researchers routinely engage other people in shaping preferred futures. Despite a growing recognition of designing as a social practice, however, the ethics of engagement often only appear ‘between the lines’ of the accounts design researchers provide about their experiences designing together. In a practice that often dances between exploration and exploitation, design researchers who overlook the ethics permeating their work can easily perpetuate systems that do more harm than good. To tackle perils that often appear subtly and ambiguously in designing together, the design research community needs to enhance ethical learning. On the ground, ethics does not present itself as dilemmas of principle, but as part of experience. Common forms of accounting for experience, however, often leave out the qualities, feelings, and emotions that play an essential role in guiding the conduct of design researchers. Through this research project, I highlight potential for the artistic — as a form communication that brings forward the qualitative dimension of experience through expression — to open up new avenues for reflecting on the ethics of designing together. The investigation addresses the ethics of everyday conduct — ethics in practice — and how to account for experiences of it. Based on three practice-based design research projects, I use creative writing to develop a series of anecdotes that express the interconnections among experience, engagement, and ethics in designing together. Building on the work of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, I develop an approach to accounting that emphasizes qualitative experience in practice and in communication. The outcomes of the investigation contribute to design research by showing that, if designers want to communicate experience, they need to express it. Three parts of the thesis support this overall contribution. First, I show that the design research community has neglected the expression of experience. Second, I make a pragmatist theoretical framework accessible to design researchers, who can use it as support for maintaining the unity of experience in their own expressive accounts. Third, I make a methodological contribution by providing concrete examples of how to express experience through the development of anecdotes based on particular moments. Ultimately, this research investigation shows that matching the unruly ethics of designing together requires communicating experience through expressive forms that can broaden the ethical sensitivities of design researchers.
Treåringar, kameror och förskola – en serie diffraktiva rörelser
(2017-09-12) Magnusson, Lena O
The aim of this thesis is to examine what happens when three-year-olds are given access to digital cameras, and what shape and form children’s photographic capacity takes within the framework of everyday pre-school activities. The notion that young children in pre-school rarely get to use cameras themselves, and that they take part in photographs produced by pre-school educators as part of an ongoing documenting practice rooted in the curriculum is the point of departure. The study has been conducted through an ethnographic approach further strengthened by post-qualitative thinking, where the research material was produced together with children in two different pre-schools. This material includes the children’s intra-actions with the cameras as well as the photographs that emerge during the course of the study. The thesis moves within a posthumanist theoretical framework, with a special focus on new materialism and agential realism, where humans and non-humans are seen as mutual performative agents. The theoretical perspective permeates the entire study, and does not, therefore, only serve as a support for analyses. Through diffractive readings, the results show that children and cameras approach pre-school and its visual events in a manner that is not recognisable in previous experiences of how pre-school and the life of children have formerly been made visible. In this study, the children use the cameras to create resistances and to look back at the educators, as well as to show what relations come into being with materials, peers, places, spaces and knowledge formation. The children, together with the cameras, also make visible the power of the eye to direct and display, where the cameras also come to be an aesthetic tool with the capacity to both see and make visible in everyday life. This, in turn, also brings to light aspects of ethics and leads to the breaking up of more traditional and normative photographic actions and expressions.
Vems hand är det som gör? En systertext om konst/hantverk, klass, feminism och om viljan att ta strid
(2019-01-25) Hållander, Frida
Whose hand is making? And how can we understand craft practices in dialogue with society through making and objects? How do we understand objects that manifest resistance? This dissertation in artistic research explores craft practices within the fields of ceramics and textile, through the method and form of autoethnography, and on the basis of an intersectional perspective. It understands making as embodied experience and knowledge, conditioned, but not always bounded, by societal structures, and it documents the resistance against, and the resilience of, repressive structures, in dialogues and struggles where objects gain agency. It is an examination that moves between the bookishness of libraries and historical trajectories on the one hand and making as collective practice on the other, the latter represented in what this study defines as case studies of making. The study creates the term “together-making” to describe and analyse collective craft practice as simultaneously a method of research and of making as a potentially political and socially-conscious act. Through two case studies of making the study assembles an archive of willfulness. In the first case study of making, ceramic practice and historical objects emanating from feminist and anti-slavery movements, are explored through a process of together-making, putting together the exhibition From Pottery to Politics in 2016. In the actual exhibition, further ceramic objects from Swedish twentieth century come into play to re-direct the shape of the exhibition, exemplifying the ways in which this study understands objects as manifest, material politics inciting response. The second case study of making, takes off from the geographical area known as »de sju häraderna«: a centre for Swedish textile manufacture and home-based industry since the seventeenth century. Focusing on a group of local seamstresses who organized Sweden’s first women’s football series in the 1960s – Öxabäck IF – the study investigates textile objects in dialogue with society reflected through the textile history of labour and feminist political movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This case study also documents the process of research through together-making, and the exhibition Öxabäck IF – Without You no Tomorrow, 2016.
World Wide Workshop: The Craft of Noticing
(2019-10-15) Cheng, Nicolas
In my research, I consider craft as a discipline that is extremely elastic in terms of propositions and positions. Today craft exists in a highly dynamic space — what I will refer to as the World Wide Workshop — and is essential for noticing, caring, mending and negotiating the complex relationships that individuals and communities have with their sociopolitical, economic and natural environment. By moving away from the self-reliance implied by traditional studio-based craft practice, I use situated making and situated learning together with and in response to others, as methods that enable me to pay attention and respond to my surroundings, and to observe connections and entanglements offered by craft — what I will refer to as a craft of noticing. This thesis considers craft’s role and potential in a world that is interconnected, globalised, and disrupted by human-caused phenomena. The research focuses, firstly, on understanding how craft can be both a connector and a method for noticing, and for problematising complex global production and economic issues in today’s postindustrial society. I approach craft as both a physical but also a virtual entity and explore where and how craft-based disciplines are learned, passed on, practised, and shared. Secondly, I look for ways craft can play a strategic role in revealing hidden histories and behaviours. In the process, I have observed how the awareness of entanglement in a complex world system, where it is no longer possible to think in terms of opposites or dichotomies, challenges an anthropocentric worldview and decentralises the human in our relationships to nature and to material resources. Through my own methodological propositions and personal reflections on making within the realms of contemporary craft and jewellery, the thesis aims to build from the craft of noticing (Tsing 2015) to propose actions of response-ability (Haraway 2016) in the service of a praxis of care and resurgence in a time of environmental crisis. My practice questions our roles and response-abilities as makers in an entangled, damaged world and attempts to move away from a linear extract-produce-discard model to a more circular approach (Tsing 2005, 2015; Haraway 2016), thus testing the possibilities offered by a harvest-care-remediate model.

Browse

Browsing Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Högskolan för design och konsthantverk (2012-2019) by Title