Design Studies

ABSTRACT Cet article pose un regard sur l’entraînement à l’intervention professionnelle en design numérique dans le cadre d’un cours de 2e cycle universitaire. Premièrement, nous présentons l’évolution de ce cours ainsi que ses caractéristiques actuelles. Par la suite, nous décrivons et portons une réflexion sur 3 moments-clés, particulièrement cruciaux dans le contexte de l’enseignement du design, soit 1) la recherche, la négociation et la préparation des mandats, 2) la délimitation des problèmes à aborder et 3) la définition de la solution et la présentation des livrables. Nous insistons particulièrement sur les enjeux relatifs à la démarche des étudiants, à la relation entre l’étudiant et les enseignants ainsi qu’à la relation entre l’étudiant et l’organisation mandante.

Stan Ruecker is an associate professor of design at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. He can be contacted at sruecker< at> id. iit. edu. Ali Shiri is an associate professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He can be contacted by email at ashiri< at> ualberta. ca.

Abstract: This paper reports on the design of a visual user interface for the UNESCO digital portal. The interface makes use of the UNESCO multilingual thesaurus to provide visualized views of terms and their relationships and the way in which spaces associated with the thesaurus, the query and the results can be integrated into a single user interface.

Wikis are designed to support collaborative editing, without focusing on individual contribution, such that it is not straightforward to determine who contributed to a specific page. However, as wikis are increasingly adopted in settings such as business, government, and education, where editors are largely driven by career goals, there is a perceived need to modify wikis so that each editor's contributions are clearly presented. In this paper we introduce an approach for assessing the contributions of wiki editors along several authorship categories, as well as a variety of information glyphs for visualizing this information. We report on three types of analysis: (a) assessing the accuracy of the algorithms, (b) estimating the understandability of the visualizations, and (c) exploring wiki editors' perceptions regarding the extent to which such an approach is likely to change their behavior. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed automated techniques can estimate fairly accurately the quantity of editors' contributions across various authorship categories, and that the visualizations we introduced can clearly convey this information to users. Moreover, our user study suggests that such tools are likely to change wiki editors' behavior. We discuss both the potential benefits and risks associated with solutions for estimating and visualizing wiki contributions.

This article discusses a set of prototypes currently being designed and created by the Interface Design team of the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) project. These prototypes attempt to supplement the user experience in reading digital scholarly editions, by supporting a set of tasks that are straightforward in a digital environment but in a print edition would be sufficiently more difficult as to be prohibitive. We therefore offer these experimental prototypes as a collection of new affordances for the scholarly edition, although they may reasonably be extended, with some variation, to other kinds of digital text.

The objective of this paper is to report on the design of semantically–rich and dynamic visual user interfaces to support exploratory interaction with the UNESCO digital library materials. The UNESCO multilingual thesaurus, which supports English, French, and Spanish, has been utilized to provide a semantic and multilingual environment where users can browse the thesaurus using word buckets, formulate queries, explore the conceptual space of their query terms and view results in a dynamic and highly interactive ...

Abstract: This paper reports on the design of a visual user interface for the UNESCO digital portal. The interface makes use of the UNESCO multilingual thesaurus to provide visualized views of terms and their relationships and the way in which spaces associated with the thesaurus, the query and the results can be integrated into a single user interface.

The past few years have seen a proliferation of collaborative writing and editing projects using wikis, which are a class of online tools designed for fast production and publication of digital text. The word “wiki” is in fact from the Hawaiian word for “fast.” The most well‐known wiki is arguably Wikipedia, but wikis are also widely used in educational and corporate settings (Majchrzak et al. 2006; Giordano 2007; Arazy et al. forthcoming). In these environments, the generally anonymous nature of wikis can be at odds with the ...

Wikis are designed to support collaborative editing, without focusing on individual contribution, such that it is not straightforward to determine who contributed to a specific page. However, as wikis are increasingly adopted in settings such as business, government, and education, where editors are largely driven by career goals, there is a perceived need to modify wikis so that each editor's contributions are clearly presented. In this paper we introduce an approach for assessing the contributions of wiki editors along several authorship categories, as well as a variety of information glyphs for visualizing this information. We report on three types of analysis: (a) assessing the accuracy of the algorithms, (b) estimating the understandability of the visualizations, and (c) exploring wiki editors' perceptions regarding the extent to which such an approach is likely to change their behavior. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed automated techniques can estimate fairly accurately the quantity of editors' contributions across various authorship categories, and that the visualizations we introduced can clearly convey this information to users. Moreover, our user study suggests that such tools are likely to change wiki editors' behavior. We discuss both the potential benefits and risks associated with solutions for estimating and visualizing wiki contributions.

The paradigmatic situation in which the design disciplines are immersed as part of the human-driven global crisis – environmental, social and economic – demands responses coming from innovation and radical change. In this context the discipline of Biomimicry emerges as a response and a new design paradigm, and can be a powerful tool for design for sustainability, and furthermore, for ‘resilient design’. Biomimicry inspires designers to learn from nature rather than use it as resource for materials and disposal. Natural systems are the playground for an astonishing amount of living forms in perfect balance with natural forces, living in a network of mutualism and synergy, in a sort of perpetual cycling loop. We can learn from nature not only how to design better materials and artifacts, but also how to design better processes,  systems and conducts that lead to better behavioral patterns. This paper explores the emerging discipline of Biomimicry as both an evolutionary and revolutionary step for design and a necessary path to a sustainable future, from an epistemological standpoint, within a paradigm model. It presents main points which make Biomimicry a substantial set of ideas that can lead to product and material innovation and a paradigm shift in design, and explores different perspectives to provide theoretical frameworks to the discipline. Finally, this paper discusses the prospect of biomimicry for building resilient and sustainable futures, linking biomimicry to the concept of ‘resilient design’.