DCS2 Group Blog

Week 4 Reading notes: Jefefrey F. Durgee, Visual rhetoric in new product design ,Advances in Consumer Research Volume 30, 2003   Pages 367-372  What is rhetoric, What is visual rhetoric? Hart (1996 ) calls rhetoric "The art of using language to help people narrow their choices among specifiable, if not specified, policy options" Scott calls it "an interpretive theory that frames a message as an interested party’s attempt to influence and audience" Foss calls it "the action humans perform when they use symbols for the purpose of communicating with one another" Different people have different opinions, but their common purpose is to influence the audience. In simple terms, "conveying information through visual aspects..rather than through verbal aspects. "  This paper analyzes focus on the design of the new Chevrolet SSR sports truck to illustrate the correlation between visual rhetoric and product design. Three forms o...

Week 3 Lecture notes:   Brown, T. & Wyatt, J. 2010, Design Thinking For Social Innovation , Stanford Social Innovation Review, Stanford University, Stanford. This article introduces what design thinking is, the source of design thinking and the three key points (Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation) in design thinking. The Origin of Design Thinking David Kelley, the founder of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, remarked that every time someone asked him about design, he found himself inserting the word “thinking” to explain what it was that designers do. Eventually, the term design thinking stuck. Inspiration Every design process begins with inspiration. Most design teams start with a well-structured brief. It's a step-by-step approach to finding out what people want. It's useful, but it's hard to breakthrough. Henry Ford said, "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said 'a faster horse. Alth...

Week 2 Reading notes: Crilly, Nathan, 'Fixation and creativity in concept development: The attitudes and practices of expert designers', Design Studies , May 2015, Vol.38, pp.54-91 The research studies designer’s attitude towards design fixation and processes they adopt to overcome it by interviewing 13 UK based designers working in consultancies.  The definition of few concepts are defined in the first part of the research. Design fixation is the over dependence on specific and unhelpful features of previous examples when designing something new. Creative design is “active modification or rejection of previously accepted ideas”.  The insights gained from the interview are put into 4 main themes: nature of fixation, factors that encourage and discourage fixation, and the effects of experience. The relationship between all the findings are organised in the mind map below.  Factors that encourage fixation include designer’s persistence, blame culture, project ...