Rita Assoreira Almendra

With a proper design, domestic furniture may enable a more flexible use of dwellings, helping to solve use conflicts that arise from household dynamics. But which are dwellers’ activities that face more use conflicts or constrains?
To answer this question, a comprehensive approach was used including interviews with dwellers and analysis of their dwelling space. Nine households of five different types were studied. All of them lived in small and congested houses. The interviews and analysis focused on dwellers needs and space use conflicts.
The main conclusions are that activities that face more constrains are (i) being in private, (ii) receiving guests and (iii) storage of personal objects & clothes. In cramped dwellings social areas are compromised, creating serious difficulties to daily life group activities. These results enlighten relevant challenges to furniture design.

ABSTRACT The current popularity of ‘design thinking’ in business and engineering presupposes an understanding of the decision-making process in design. However, knowledge about designing often does not go deeper than the superficial content of the process phases. In this paper we will discuss decision-making in design by showing the complexity of this hermeneutical process. How are decisions made in design which, first of all, has the nature of a dialogue, based on abductive reasoning in which both intuition and logic play a role? Even more relevant, designing is a multidisciplinary endeavor with players from several fields: designers, economists, lawyers, engineers, psychologists, anthropologists,and marketers. Hence, a designer must work effectively with a team composed of members of different disciplines. Every discipline will have its own way of decision-making according its educational tradition and type of problems to solve. To tune these different approaches in decision-making is the real challenge in developing innovative artifacts. The paper will be based on theoretical notions from literature and on empirical studies performed by the authors in the area of design and business.

Teacher and student interaction in a design studio setting has always been the basis of design education. A fundamental difficulty of design education is that the content of these one on one meetings between teacher and students remains remarkably implicit. In this paper we present an explorative study that uses the Design Grammar Model (DGM) as an observational framework for teacher-student interactions. The DGM is rooted on the concept of design grammar that can be broadly defined as the visual language used to design. The study focuses on the industrial design junior students’ meetings with their teacher; our research proceeds from a protocol analysis of the transcripts that are coded according to the DGM. The resulting data is then used to develop a series of diagrams that are employed as a visual analysis tool. The diagrams synthesize and convey large amounts of data that permit immediate analysis and elicit new interpretations. The study resulted in encouraging results regarding the DGM’s potential as an analysis tool for teacher and student interactions, as well as a diagnostic tool for teachers.

While sustainability in Design finds much attention in the literature, the education of sustainability inDesign courses lacks discussion regarding curricula and importance. In an attempt to map the waysustainability is taught in Design Bachelor and Master Courses in the European Union, we begananalysing faculties from a number of EU countries and present the initial results in the form of graphics, and, in addition to that, we discuss curricular contents. Furthermore, we looked at the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development 2005-2014 – an initiative thatcomprehends the UNECE region (that includes several EU member states), which has contributed to publications related to Design and sustainability, in order to understand how it has been (and can be)supporting the education of sustainability in Design. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the current practice in sustainability education in Design in the EU context and introduce the development of asustainabil...

This paper presents an analysis of software design protocols as one of the contributions to the 2010 international workshop ‘Studying Professional Software Design’. The aim of the study described here is to analyse the design process of software designers and to compare the results with that of product designers, an area familiar to the authors. Decision-making is the main focus of this study. A descriptive model of decision-making, developed by the authors, has been used to analyse the protocols of the three software design teams. The results give insight in how software designers process their activities, on the influence of individual or team differences, and what the consequences for their outcomes are.

The paper will describe an experiment done with Dutch and Portuguese design students working inside a company for one week. The central aim of this experiment was to observe the students' performance while developing a design process in a real context. Also the fact ...

Abstract: This paper presents a comparative study of the design processes of final-year industrial design students of two countries, the Netherlands and the Portugal, while conducting an individual design task. This task was identical for both groups making this comparison possible ...

This paper presents an analysis of software design protocols as one of the contributions to the 2010 international workshop 'Studying Professional Software Design'. The aim of the study described here is to analyse the design process of software designers and to ...

Luís Romão Faculty of Architecture, TU Lisbon Rua Sá Nogueira, Polo Universitário, Alto da Ajuda, 1349-055 Lisboa, Portugal; lromao@fa.utl.pt ... Rita Assoreira Almendra Faculty of Architecture, TU Lisbon Rua Sá Nogueira, Polo Universitário, Alto da Ajuda, 1349-055 ...

This paper presents the continuity of the studies previously described in another paper (Sampaio et al., 2014), which presented a model based on the abductive reasoning (Dorst, 2011) as an alternative to approach the problem of synthetic textile waste. To face this situation, the authors propose the creation of new materials from the synthetic textile waste, and specifically they propose design to be the driver of the innovation process. That was explored by the authors through the application of the model in a Brazilian exploratory research project, and a preliminary Research & Development (R&D) model based on design and sustainability issues and values previously identified. The next steps include the refinement of the proposed model, and its validation with two different research teams: a sample and a control one, as well as the development of a specific model for the research team management.

This paper presents the continuity of the studies previously described in another paper (Sampaio et al., 2014), which presented a model based on the abductive reasoning (Dorst, 2011) as an alternative to approach the problem of synthetic textile waste. To face this situation, the authors propose the creation of new materials from the synthetic textile waste, and specifically they propose design to be the driver of the innovation process. That was explored by the authors through the application of the model in a Brazilian exploratory research project, and a preliminary Research & Development (R&D) model based on design and sustainability issues and values previously identified. The next steps include the refinement of the proposed model, and its validation with two different research teams: a sample and a control one, as well as the development of a specific model for the research team management.

abstract new materials, synthetic textile waste, abductive process, design process keywords This paper presents a reflection on the applicability of abductive process, as proposed by Dorst (2011) for solving complex problems that involve the creation of value, and which are common to scientific research in the area of design. This reflection is performed in the context of the problem of synthetic textile waste from composite fabric made of polyamide 66, generated by apparel industries. Considering the abductive process-2, the object being developed includes new material obtained from recycled waste above, as well as products that can be created from the new material. The principle refers to the process of development of new material and product. The value to be created unfolds in three main aspects: environmental, social and economic values. As a methodological approach, we used literary criticism about the problem and possible solutions, including the creation of new materials and a case study of a Brazilian garment company. Literary criticism also included scientific approaches in design research: deductive, inductive and abductive, specially the work of Dorst (2011). As a result, it is presented a diagram with a framework model of the problem based on the abductive thinking – 2, which will be used later along the development of a doctoral thesis on the topic.

Part of designs’ essence is about being deeply committed to finding solutions for human problems. However, we can observe that, on the last century, much of this effort has been channeled to the design of products and goods for sale and consumption. At the same time, the arising of a critical culture of design, from the 1960’s, made a practical conscience of this field and its relation and impact on society emerge. Consequently, Social Design has emerged as an alternative to solving problems and issues related to survival and citizenship conditions, giving priority to certain groups of people, communities and individuals in vulnerability and poverty situations.
This paper aims to present impressions of a bibliographical research about Social Design, Codesign and Micro-Planning, related to the first year of doctoral research. It also understands how social design initiatives based on microplanning actions help participative projects sustainability in socially vulnerable communities.
The results were used in two workshops with residents of Alto da Cova da Moura neighborhood, Amadora municipality, Lisbon district and Desterro neighborhood, in the historic center of São Luis, state of Maranhão, Brazil.

This paper presents the continuity of the studies previously described in another paper (Sampaio et al., 2014), which presented a model based on the abductive reasoning (Dorst, 2011) as an alternative to approach the problem of synthetic textile waste. To face this situation, the authors propose the creation of new materials from the synthetic textile waste, and specifically they propose design to be the driver of the innovation process. That was explored by the authors through the application of the model in a Brazilian exploratory research project, and a preliminary Research & Development (R&D) model based on design and sustainability issues and values previously identified. The next steps include the refinement of the proposed model, and its validation with two different research teams: a sample and a control one, as well as the development of a specific model for the research team management.