IASDR

As user involvement becomes a necessary part of the product development process, various ways of accessing users' latent needs have been developed and studied. Reviews of literatures in user involvement and product development have revealed that accessing users' latent needs and transferring them into design process could be facilitated by effectively implementing user-designer collaboration during the early stage of the design process. In this paper, various types of user-designer collaboration were observed and then distinct characteristics of user-designer collaboration were classified into three categories. 1) Passive objectivity, 2) workplace democratisation, and 3) shared contexts were observed as strategies for better user-designer collaboration, which have been employed in the area of user-centred design, user participatory design and design for experiencing. Based on the literature review, this paper proposed a basic collaboration mechanism between the users and the...

Nowadays, children are attaching more and more importance to the learning of various cultural heritages. However, It is the nature of children to play. They can't concentrate for long on the cultural knowledge they are not interested in. "Game" has become one of the effective ways to change this situation. Persuasive game design, as one of the methods of behavior change design, aims to create a user experience game world by using gamification, in order to change the user behavior in the real world. Based on the Hunan Embroidery Museum’s cultural leaning project, this study explored the possibility of persuasive game design to promote the positive change of children's learning behavior, and combined with profound experience design, redesigned the traditional cultural learning course creating immersive learning experience for children through gamification. The results show that reasonable and interesting persuasive games can improve children's learning motivation...

Higher Education graduates have access to employment in the Knowledge Economy. Data suggests that competition for graduate jobs is currently fierce. Research suggests that understanding theory related to the construction of identities (i.e. ‘notions of the self’) may aid graduates in becoming employable in the Knowledge Economy. Worryingly however, when compared to other graduates, design graduates are at a disadvantage when it comes to finding graduate positions in the knowledge economy.

Identities are discursively constructed in relation to others. Consequently, this paper uses results from an international cross-institutional student project to propose that design students may benefit from communicating with students from such settings in order to gauge difference. We conclude by proposing that design students may benefit from understanding the importance of ‘notions of the self’ as a way to aid employability in the Knowledge Economy.

Literature suggests that exposing future designers to knowledge from other disciplines is beneficial. We refer to these as ‘non-traditional’ skills. One such area is the social sciences; in this paper we will be focusing on this area. First we outline the reasons why design students should be exposed to discourse from the social sciences. We refer to these as ‘non-traditional’ design skills.
We then describe an international project which illustrates how students were able to practice such skills alongside more ‘traditional’ design skills.
We conclude by stating that although the project demonstrated the possibility of enabling future designers to practice both ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ (wider) skills at module level is a good start, we believe that such ‘wider skills’ should be strategically incorporated at programme level in order to scaffold them through the programme.