Papers by Theodore Zamenopoulos
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe)
Ambient displays allow physical space to be transformed into a dynamic and ever-changing environm... more Ambient displays allow physical space to be transformed into a dynamic and ever-changing environment in which boundaries are dissolved. However, it is likely that the incorporation of such digital elements affects people's perception and understanding of space. In this particular study, a series of experiments were conducted to examine how a skewed perspective projection via an ambient display influences people's navigation in public spaces. The findings are then presented showing how the participants' responded to the presence of the skewed projection and the effects on the movement patterns. This study discusses the ability of an ambient display to influence navigation paths and suggests that a projection with skewed perspective can determine the creation of new movement patterns.
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe (eCAADe)
This paper outlines work in progress that seeks to support and develop online distance design edu... more This paper outlines work in progress that seeks to support and develop online distance design education for adult learners. At the core of this paper is the belief that design thinking is fragile and the systems we create to support design thinking are fragile. This has important implications for those seeking to implement immersive environments for teaching and learning in disciplines such as engineering, product design, environment design and architecture. This paper suggests we need to look backwards in order to look forwards; that by examining the characteristics of the traditional 'atelier' model of art and design education we might observe clues to a framework of teaching and learning in design that can embrace the opportunities presented by new digital technologies. The paper focuses on the use of Second Life as a component of a wider virtual design atelier and explores how Second Life might potentially offers a means of addressing fragile collaborative learning.
Sheffield Hallam University, Sep 4, 2020
The paper provides an overview of a co-design research project organized in collaboration with a ... more The paper provides an overview of a co-design research project organized in collaboration with a mental health charity. Clients with mental health problems volunteered to help explore how engaging in design activities may impact them. Often adapted to respond promptly to the context, a series of workshops aimed to engage people with mental health problems in exploring matters of concern, defining issues and responding to these through design within a frame of layered participation. For 10 weeks, activities took place once a week for approximately 2 hours, although participants could drop in and out at any time. Four participants engaged quite consistently throughout the process, working with the researcher/facilitator. Under the general notion of co-designing for wellbeing, the project was organized around 5 stages, called 5 I’s: Identify, Ideate, Invent, Initiate and Implement. The project concluded with interviews, and an event to showcase the process and design outcomes to others. The paper discusses the challenges and opportunities that emerged in the process and provides a short summary of participants’ insights on their experiences. Their accounts variably suggested that the project helped with thinking, coping with loss or grief, reflecting on one’s past, or adversely prompting hidden anxieties. The paper ends by discussing how this experience may help inform future projects within mental health and reflects on the potential role of co-design as an activity that promotes recovery in its own right
A snapshot of Empowering Design Practices Live, a conference celebrating community-led design in ... more A snapshot of Empowering Design Practices Live, a conference celebrating community-led design in historic places of worship. Delivered by the Empowering Design Practices research project on 12 February 2020.<br><br>
Throughout this book creative citizenship is explored theoretically and empirically as a concept ... more Throughout this book creative citizenship is explored theoretically and empirically as a concept that intrinsically leads to value generation. Acts of creative citizenship bring personal, cultural, economic, social and civic benefits, not only to individuals and communities directly involved in these acts, but also to the wider public. The Creative Citizens project is concerned not only with understanding and capturing current practice and its value, as enacted through the use of different media, but also exploring how this pursuit of value can be supported and advanced. One of the instruments we used to explore questions of value was asset mapping. Asset mapping in a methodology used with community groups and organisations to help unearth, capture and visualise existing resources and capacities. Drawing from the strengths of different existing approaches, asset mapping was innovatively used in the Creative Citizens project as an analytical research tool for capturing people's v...
Theodore Zamenopoulos and Katerina Alexiou discuss the field of co-design and its underpinning th... more Theodore Zamenopoulos and Katerina Alexiou discuss the field of co-design and its underpinning theories and methods. They argue that Design as a process is always concerned with addressing a challenge or opportunity to create a better future reality, and explore how co-design has evolved as a process of ensuring that those with the life experiences, expertise and knowledge are actively involved in these making new tools, products and services. They observe how the participatory turn in this field has been concerned with both changing the objects of design – whether this is services or objects – and with the changing processes of designing itself. They highlight four major traditions and their distinctive approaches, before exploring the politics and practices of co-design through case studies of work.
This paper describes an experiment in ‘contextual transposition’, a mobile, inventive method deve... more This paper describes an experiment in ‘contextual transposition’, a mobile, inventive method developed from conversations between the authors during an interdisciplinary research ‘sprint’, where our interests in alternative mobilities and ‘designing’ socially just futures generated productive creative friction. The idea of ‘hitching a ride’ in automobility systems was mobilised and we embarked on a journey of ‘contextual transposition’. Could one hitchhike in other contexts? To explore this question, we designed an experiment. In this paper we describe it and discuss how we have used contextual transposition as a method for design research.
Introduction In this presentation we discuss the idea of a plan for the configuration of the buil... more Introduction In this presentation we discuss the idea of a plan for the configuration of the built environment, which is generated in real time covering a wide range of scales and multiple users demands. The basic concern is in challenging traditional properties and tools that regard design as a static object which has to be completed all in once, before the realization of space [21], [43]. Another conventional practice wants the architect to have a unique authority on the design of individual architectural objects. But the reality of the city requires a more global and collective design that completes a dialogue among individual parts and the whole structure of the city [10], [13], [33]. We will present therefore an inference construction, which generates proposals for the configuration of space by reproducing a weighed expression of users knowledge. The plan is a Neuro-Fuzzy controller which can learn and reproduce, in general, relations of the form IF (original suggestions and i...
This paper is a report from a one-day workshop with the title 'Design out of complexity' ... more This paper is a report from a one-day workshop with the title 'Design out of complexity' that was held in London on July 2 2005. The workshop was organized as part of the activities of the EPSRC/AHRC funded research cluster Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) and with the occasion of the Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management Conference (CUPUM05) organized by CASA in UCL. The ECiD cluster is one among 21 diverse interdisciplinary groups, which were awarded funding for a year to work towards identifying research priorities for design in the 21 century. CUPUM on the other hand is an international conference which showcases contemporary advances in computer technologies and methodologies in the area of urban planning and management. The synergy developed between the two for the purpose of the workshop produced some very interesting insights.
Nordes 2013: Experiments in Design Research, 2013
Asset mapping, a method for unearthing and visually representing an individual’s or a community&#... more Asset mapping, a method for unearthing and visually representing an individual’s or a community's assets, has been used in the context of planning and creative industries.
Objective: One of the most challenging problems in science is to identify whether there are certa... more Objective: One of the most challenging problems in science is to identify whether there are certain common principles that characterize how organization at a microscopic level leads to the formation of complex structures, behaviours or functions at a macroscopic level. This is the very quest of complexity science. Within this quest, there remains one special issue that has received little attention: the 'problem' or 'phenomenon' of design. In this thesis, design is perceived as a capacity that arises because of certain characteristic organizational conditions. In line with complexity research, design is studied as a 'universal' property of organization without making assumptions as to whether this is a biological, cognitive or social organization. The thesis can be summarised as follows: Research problem: What entails the capacity to recognize and carry out design tasks Hypothesis: Design is a function of the complexity of organization. Objective: A mathemati...
About the book: If we are to capitalise on the potential that a design approach might bring to in... more About the book: If we are to capitalise on the potential that a design approach might bring to innovation in business and society, we need to build a better understanding of the evolving skill-sets that designers will need and the contexts within which design might operate. This demands more discourse between those involved in cutting edge practice, the researchers who help to uncover principles, codify knowledge and create theories and the educators who are nurturing future design talent. This book promotes such a discourse by reporting on the work of twenty research teams who explored different facets of future design activity as part of Phase 2 of the UK’s research council supported Designing for the 21st Century Research Initiative. Each of these contributions describes the origins of the project, the research team and their project aims, the research methods used and the new knowledge and understanding generated. Editor and Initiative Director, Professor Tom Inns, provides an i...
Valuing interdisciplinary collaborative research
International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, 2017
This study explores to what extent technical execution and aesthetic appeal may be related to ass... more This study explores to what extent technical execution and aesthetic appeal may be related to assessments of graphic design creativity. These new research findings build upon Jeffries' 2015 publication in the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, and further underpin the caveats identified in relation to the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT). Eight professional graphic designers rated thirty-two artworks for a creative typographical task. Individual artworks were created by novices who had no experience of graphic design, through to professional graphic designers with 35 years of full-time experience. Written instructions to judges emphasised artwork be rated on creativity only (without considering technical execution or aesthetic appeal), and this "creativity only" feature was verbally re-emphasised to judges by the researcher. Inter-rater agreement for creativity was a Cronbach's alpha of 0.92; considerably higher than in previous studies, with implications that may relate to the use of the CAT as a measure of design creativity more broadly, and beyond graphic design.
Futures, 2020
Design and anticipation are two closely related concepts. While previous research has focussed on... more Design and anticipation are two closely related concepts. While previous research has focussed on exploring this relationship, less attention has been paid on uncovering the collective nature of design anticipation. The paper offers a theoretical framework to account for collective design anticipation and the conditions that make it possible. In specific, the paper discusses the notion of a design anticipation space, which embodies temporal and semantic dimensions, and discusses conditions for collective design anticipation through the concept of boundary objects. The results are derived through an abductive methodology that combines theoretical investigations with reflections on empirical work in the wild.
CoDesign, 2019
Phillips (2019): Types, obstacles and sources of empowerment in co-design: the role of shared mat... more Phillips (2019): Types, obstacles and sources of empowerment in co-design: the role of shared material objects and processes, CoDesign,
Compass: Journal of Learning and Teaching, 2012
The development of e-learning platforms is fundamentally changing the nature of education across ... more The development of e-learning platforms is fundamentally changing the nature of education across all disciplines. Art and design education has traditionally taken place within a studio environment and its model of teaching and learning has been informed by the ‘atelier’ approach which has a distinctive educational and cultural history. Signifi cant pressures arise today in undergraduate art and design education and partly these drive the need to establish an effective and viable modern studio experience. Not only must any new studio support student learning of practice and principles, for example, by allowing students to work alongside experts, it must foster the community and culture of the creative industries. As if this wasn’t diffi cult enough, any innovation in teaching and learning must not incur the huge costs and resource demands of our current models of art and design education and it must be scalable to provide a stimulating experience for large numbers of students with di...
Practical Design Patterns for Teaching and Learning with Technology, 2014
Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age, 2011
Cities are perhaps the larger and most complex artefacts created by human activity. The character... more Cities are perhaps the larger and most complex artefacts created by human activity. The characterisation of an object or system as an artefact assumes the existence of some form of intentionality behind its creation. Complexity science has been used to understand the formation of cities as products of self-organization and evolution, but it has paid little attention to the role of intentionality and design in the formation of cities. So in what sense are cities artefacts? Who is the design agent behind the creation of cities? Can societies be characterised as design agents? Here, we unravel a view of design as a capacity that is derived from certain organisational principles, irrespective of whether these are realised in a brain, a cognitive system or a society. The essay brings together insights from design research, cognitive neuroscience and complexity to propose a theory of design intentionality that can be applied to cities.
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Papers by Theodore Zamenopoulos