Browsing by Subject "Design research"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Assisted Lows: Collaboratively Finding Ways to Support T1D Patients During Hypoglycemia Episodes
    (2017) Semidey Capriles, Lisa M.; Eby, Chad; Napier, Pamela; Ganci, Aaron
    This research focuses on how hypoglycemia episodes -- low blood sugar events -- spark specific communication needs in Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) patients. As a 22 year T1D veteran, I've personally faced challenges when needing, requesting and receiving an adequate response to help me overcome an episode. This research is born out of the knowledge that other people want to genuinely help, and aims to close the gap between a failure of knowing 'what to do' and effective actions.
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    Change Step: Improving Social Support for Women Veterans Through Participatory Design
    (2016) Wessel, Robert; Napier, Pamela; Eby, Chad; Wada, Terri
    This thesis discusses a participatory design project that focused on improving social support for women veterans in Indianapolis, Indiana. Using a series of design research methods to capture the voice of local women veterans, and by visually representing the outcomes of each phase of the project, the participant group and design researcher identified the needs of women veterans, considered existing social supports, and co-created a conceptual model for a social support network. This prototype network aims to make finding support easier, reduce overlap in existing social supports, and foster communication between partner support organizations. It is the first step in integrating social support for Indiana women veterans.
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    Design Leadership and Development with Mid-Level Leaders
    (2017) Stevens, Madison; Eby, Chad
    Design Leadership provides the needed skill set to thrive in this quickly changing world. The core competencies of a Design Leader enable strategy to become tangible, and also offer a way to look to the future and quickly iterate possible solutions of what could be. Design Leaders also have the ability to create shared understanding with all people in an organization. By creating this shared understanding -- where staff understand the goals and values of the company, and the company understands the individual goals and values of their staff, the Design Leader can help to align these values, and integrate possibly opposing ideas. By enabling people to practice their individual values at work, this can help to cultivate a positive work life. This design research addresses the question: How might mid-level leaders leverage the core competencies of a Design Leader in order to initiate a personal leadership change?
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    Emotional communication in instant messaging
    (2015-10-29) Pirzadeh, Afarin; Bolchini, Davide; Voida, Stephen; Stolterman, Erik; Wada, Terri
    Emotional communication is fundamental to everyday interaction. How well emotions are communicated is crucial to interpersonal relationships and individual well-being. Emotional communication in instant messaging (IM), however, can be challenging because of the absence of visual and aural nonverbal behaviors. Despite the growing number of technologically-focused solutions for supporting emotional communication in IM, limited design research has been done to study the actual users’ behaviors in communicating their emotion in IM and strategies they use to adapt emotional communication in this medium, with the purpose of establishing design solutions to support users' emotional communication. Connecting several bodies of HCI, design, and communication literature in the context of IM, this dissertation critically examines how users communicate emotion in IM and accordingly establishes user-centered multi-touch gesture based design solutions to support emotional communication in this medium. Understanding how users communicate their emotion in IM, the design issues, and corresponding design solutions help researchers and designers to support the user's emotional needs, resulting in the improvement of emotional communication strategies in IM.
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    Envisioning Art and Design Education Through the Lens of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Herron School of Art + Design
    (2021-05) Datta, Amrita; Ganci, Aaron; Napier, Pamela; Shekara, Archana
    As the U.S witnesses the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin in the murder of George Floyd, communities nationwide are embracing the historical inequities spanning race, gender, religion and disability benefits. Higher education is equally rife with these inequities. Widespread implementation of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) can be a catalyst for peace, acceptance and equality. Despite the requirement for educators to provide aptitude on DEI efforts in order to adhere to growing student needs, resources allocated for such endeavors remain low. Of course, this further increases the barriers for faculty tasked with familiarizing themselves with a wide range of DEI ‘topics’. Articulation and commitment to DEI remains a challenge for educators. This is especially true in design education and the People-Centered Design process is perfectly poised to address these underlying issues. Implementing a people-centered design approach that puts the needs of people first can be the change in our education system that addresses complex social inequalities. Design educators can lead this social paradigm shift within academia. However, before educators can make a commitment to diversity they must first engage in foundational learning of DEI terms and definitions. This case study, conducted at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design provides a novel strategy for how this can be accomplished. Since educators have systematically transitioned into the digital world -- the outcome of this case study proposes a prototype which characterizes the need of identifying DEI strategies through a digital experience.
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    Movement and Divergent Production: Understanding opportunity for strategic kinesthetic movement during participatory ideation sessions
    (2013) Miller, Cara; Ristau, Jacob; Napier, Pamela; Hong, Youngbok
    With strategic kinesthetic movement making its way into education and business, and design thinking also edging into those same fields, it seems natural that the two could be integrated and referenced by facilitators who are responsible for leading a group through participatory ideation sessions. Design Thinking is a human-centered innovation process, which ultimately influences innovation and business strategy. It refers to applying a designer’s sensibility and methods of problem solving to an innovation process.1 Designers reach out to stakeholders within an opportunity space through design research methods. Often times, the designer will take on the role of a facilitator and conduct meetings with the stakeholders in order to gather information, generate ideas, or evaluate specific concepts.2 Facilitated sessions in which all stakeholders have to opportunity to contribute equally are referred to as participatory design process facilitation sessions. Participatory ideation sessions are meetings focused on one stage in a design process; the ideation stage. This research project is focused on the stage in a human-centered innovation process, referred to as the ideation stage, in which ideas are generated with stakeholders. During participatory ideation sessions, facilitators lead groups of participants through organized and strategized agendas, utilizing design research methods with the sole purpose of generating ideas for improving specified opportunity spaces.3 Generating ideas with the stakeholders allows the designer to gain insight into the stake-holder’s point of view, which ultimately aids the designer in creating a meaningful solution to a design problem. The purpose of this design research project is to develop a framework from which facilitators may gain insight and understanding of how to develop their own participatory ideation sessions utilizing strategic kinesthetic movement customized to specific contexts. The development of these participatory ideation sessions will involve the making and manipulation of generative methods and tools revolving around strategic kinesthetic movement. Designers working as facilitators utilize movement for many reasons. Movement increases productivity, confidence, creativity, and focus during facilitated sessions. Movement elevates the average body temperature which is a sign of greater blood circulation, which means more oxygen is arriving at the brain, making concentration easier.4 Movement has also been proven to improve self esteem,5 potentially enabling participants to contribute more ideas without fear of being judged. The absence of judgment allows for an increase in divergent production during participatory ideation sessions. Divergent production is defined as producing from one’s memory storage a number of alternative items of information to meet a certain need, either in exact or in modified form, as in thinking of alternative tools that might be used in opening a package.6 How might designers harness the power of movement during their facilitated sessions?
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    Understanding User Experience Through Sensemaking Processes
    (2016) Carrion Andrade, Galo; Eby, Chad
    This research explores users’ experiences, a significant component of service design, which in recent years has gained value within the business and public sectors. Today, we cannot even imagine some products without their service component, and, because of that, brands are increasingly concerned with understanding user experience. Using public transportation in Indianapolis as the context to examine the sensemaking process, this research intends to develop a procedure to understand user experiences in service design, which can be applied to other problem spaces. This research has been organized into four parts; the first one, Initial Explorations, discusses the motivations that have led me to choose this specific topic, its importance, the role of user experience as the cornerstone of service design, and concludes with a justification of the use of public transportation as the study context. The second part illustrates the research conducted in public transportation as the context to use different methods and tools for understanding user/commuter experience; in first place, collecting data that will be analyzed and later synthesized using a sensemaking process. The third chapter identifies key points of the procedure looking for ways to improve the application of methods and tools to develop a procedure that could be applied in other contexts. Finally, chapter four concludes with some thoughts and recommendations about the role and importance of the sensemaking process in service design.
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    Using the Co-design Process to Build Non-designer Ability in Making Visual Thinking Tools
    (2020) Shope, Wendy; Hong, Youngbok
    This research is a case study of using co-design as a way of assisting the capacity building process for an Indianapolis-based community organizer. The community organizer seeks to develop a visual thinking tool for enhancing her engagement with community participants. Community organizers face a wide array of complicated challenges, addressing these kinds of challenges and social issues calls for innovative and inclusive approaches to community problem solving. The author hopes this case study will showcase itself as an example of leveraging design thinking and visual thinking to support and equip more first-line workers who are non-designers to do their community jobs with a more creative problem-solving approach.