Arts and Design

The first part of this Bachelor-Thesis is about the basics and the application of High Dynamic Range- Imaging, that helps saving the whole dynamic range of a scenery. This fact leads to an increased quality of our videos we will take and HDR-videos will replace old standards like the widely used JPEG.
As a reason, not only photographers will profit of a better quality, but also video formats. There are already a couple of HDR-Vision sensors, but they are far away from being used in consumer cameras. The second part is about the experimental approach to set up a very basic HDR-Camcorder, built up of two Low Dynamic Range-camcorders and a semi-transparent mirror to produce a High Dynamic Range-video. The proceedings should be detailed enough so that every interested person can reproduce the results.
To get an idea of the result, the Tone Mapping technology will be used so that everyone with a usual display can see results.

My primary area of research is trying to develop, or at least contribute to, a language of interactivity. Central to this process is the notion that play and playfulness appear to be central features of interactivity along with the physicality of the interaction (even down to mouse movements).

The Design Management Programme at Lucerne School of Art and Design, a department of Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), aims to develop a thorough understanding of the overarching design process for the benefit of future designers. It also recognises the design manager's leading role as intelligence gatherer and strongly emphasises the importance of design aspects relating to research, ethnography and strategy. Design managers need to be able to influence the attitudes necessary for making good design decisions, as put forward by Herbert Simon in this model for gathering intelligence, designing prototypes, and making decisions. This approach is likely to facilitate design thinking and enhance the effectiveness of the design process within organisations, which often merge these elements to a single step, the one of decision making (Boland, 2002).

The Lost Cosmonaut is an interactive narrative based on digitally enhanced paper. This technology uses an electronic pen to mediate between paper and computer. Thus any actions of the pen on the paper can be captured and manipulated by a computer as well as we can map digitally controlled events onto paper. The story in this narrative environment reveals itself partially through written text and images on the paper surface just as any other printed story. However, additional information in form of digitally controlled outputs such as sound, light and projections can be accessed through interaction with pen and paper. Furthermore the audience is not only supposed to read and otherwise perceive information, we also want them to actively produce content for this environment by writing onto the paper. By doing so they also add content to the database containing the digital output at the same time. Hence we produce a complex multimedia environment that works on three levels: On paper, in a digitally controlled visual and acoustic environment and in the combination of both worlds. Last but not least this environment is an open system, which grows as a collaborative effort over time as each user adds his own entries to paper and database. We argue that using paper as an integrated part of a digital environment is a best-of-both-world approach that opens up new possibilities for producing and perceiving narrative.

E-commerce web sites that sell highly customized products tend to be very complex in terms of the underlying logical model of the customization process. We present a systematic approach to guide the design process of such complex web sites by providing a clear methodology that reduces errors and assists the web architect. We also describe our application that helps web architects go from the definition of the product's attributes to the generation of the finished web application that sells the product. The approach is presented in terms of a case study involving the development of a web site that sells customizable T-shirts.

Contrary to the belief of the Modern Avant-garde, at present there seems to be an agreement in the design community about the narrative qualities of artefacts. In spite of the undoubted communicative functions of products in the broadest sense, some proponents of product semantics and design semiotics raise objections insofar as "products cannot talk" and that the term "a product tells a story" is an imprecise expression. This paper discusses the appropriateness of terms such as product language, narrative design, etc. It draws on case studies from the area of product design and suggests a distinction between meaning and narration in product design. Furthermore, it differentiates between narration that is embodied in the product itself and narration and stories that are connected with products by users or through marketing.

Currently, the field of Smart Clothes is twofold: On the one hand Smart Clothes are driven by technology and on the other by art and Haute Couture. In both cases clothing neglects the needs and wants of customers and the requirements of daily use. Clearly, Smart Clothes are hybrid products. They afford interdisciplinary cooperation and an integration of reliable technology into socially and culturally acceptable pieces of clothing. Starting with a mapping of the state of the art this paper investigates, from the perspective of product semantics, the character of Smart clothes. A scheme for a detailed design briefing was set up and in collaboration with a product designer and a textile designer we developed designs that should overcome the gap between technology-driven and art-driven pieces of clothing.

Product semantics is well anchored in design fields such as industrial and interface design on the one hand and on the other semiologists, sociologists, socio-psychologists and even anthropologists have been analyzing the semantics of clothing and fashion from the viewpoint of their own disciplines. Nonetheless textile and fashion designers are still educated to design in a rather artistic and intuitive manner. In order to provide a theoretical foundation, that can be applied in textile and fashion design practice and that reflects the concerns of professionals this paper presents a model for description and reflection of product meaning in the fields of clothing and fashion.

Innovation is a much-discussed issue in design since it is considered to be a key element in highly competitive markets. Nevertheless, the specific contribution of design and designers in the context of product innovation is insufficiently understood and explored. Mostly, innovation is meant to be the achievement of science and technology, while design as the last element in this chain has the task to introduce the scientific and technological innovation into the life-world of the user. This concept underrates the fact that artefacts that are not new with regard to technology can be highly innovative in terms of symbolic expression of socio-cultural changes and the spirit of the time. The objective of the paper is an exemplary study of historical and current product innovation from the perspective of design semantics. The investigation is based on the Offenbach approach, the so-called theory of product language and its distinction between formal aesthetic functions, indication functions, and symbol functions.

The paper explores the interplay between disciplinary knowledge creation in basic and applied design research on the one hand and experimental design on the other. As part of my dissertation, several case studies were analysed among them a long-term research project which was conducted at the C_Lab for customization design at the Academy of Art and Design Offenbach, Germany. Subject-matter of this research were the various implications and effects, that digital technology will have on design, on product semantics, the role of the designer and the user as co-designer. It included questions and hypothesis basic for design as well as experimental furniture design. Firstly, the paper presents the case, which provides rich inside into research that combines a quest for fundamental understanding of the field with considerations of use and practice. In a second step it will be analysed how knowledge creation and experimental design practice takes place in iterative hermeneutic circles, mutually inspiring and correcting. Finely I will classify the case study within a conceptual framework set up by Donald E. Stokes, who argued for a dynamic model of use-inspired basic research.

Currently, the field of Smart Clothes is twofold: On the one hand Smart Clothes are driven by technology and on the other by art and fashion. In both cases clothing neglects the needs and wants of customers and the requirements of daily use. Clearly, Smart Clothes afford an integration of reliable technology into socially and culturally acceptable pieces of clothing. This paper investigates the character of Smart Clothes from the perspective of product semantics and from user's point of view. Based on a detailed briefing two experimental product designs were developed and presented to focus groups in order to overcome the actual shortcomings.

Souvenir products are probably as old as travelling. They materialize both personal memories and social encounters. In destination marketing, they may play an important role by word-to-mouth promotion. As emotional and narrative objects, they challenge designers’ ingenuity. However, design studies have neglected the topic and theoretical approaches from a design perspective are lacking. This paper proposes a framework for the design of souvenir objects based on product semantics. First, it briefly resumes the state of the art in souvenir studies as achieved in social science. In a second and main part, it analyses existing souvenir objects using product semantics models. Finally, conclusions aimed at the outline of a design brief are drawn and discussed.

In design practice and in design research the term ‘experiment’ is widely used and often misused. To some extent, this can be ascribed to the fact that the experimental method comes close to or partly overlaps the approaches of ‘trial and error’ and ‘reflection-in-action’, as defined by Donald Schön. Nevertheless, these methods or rather approaches differ in regard to their aims, results, and context of application.
Based on an investigation in design literature and various case examples from practice-led doctoral research, this paper attempts to highlight the differences between scholarly experiment,‘trial and error’ and ‘reflection-in-action’. The initial point of this investigation is from the perspective of the so-called New Experimentalism: a branch of the philosophy of natural science, and from the work of Ian Hacking that redirected and broadened the traditional conception of experiment. Hence, the role of creative practice in design research will be scrutinized from the perspective of New Experimentalism. The goal is to justify the role of artefacts in practice-led design research and in making and doing (action, intervention) as an experimental practice that contributes to the creation of knowledge and the construction of theory.

Commonly the term “experiment” is in the first
place associated with science, systematic methods
and strict principles for the sake of knowledge
creation. Nonetheless, the term is widely used
across the boundaries of science. The arts attribute
artworks likewise as experimental – a usage that is
often claimed to be metaphorical, since experiments
in the arts (including design) lack the essential
attributes that define a scientific experiment.
Currently, research in the fields of science studies
and literary science has revised these established
conceptions as well as the primacy of the scientific
experiment. The philosophical approach of New
Experimentalism relativizes the deductive
conception of hypothesis-testing experiments and
argues for a broader view. Studies in literary
science and cross-disciplinary comparison between
the arts reveal an age-long experimental tradition
and also common characteristics of experimental
work in these fields. Design researchers should be
aware of these developments in order to position,
theorize and argue for design experiments
accordingly.