Digital Design Practice Research Articles

CREATIVE MANIPULATION: A CASE STUDY OF CONFIRMSHAMING AS A DECEPTIVE DESIGN PATTERN

This research article explores the intersection between creativity and deceptive design patterns, focusing on the concept of confirmshaming within the broader framework of a creative society. Focusing on confirmshaming as a case study, this article explores how such deceptive design practices exemplify the dark side of creativity, where digital technologies are used to manipulate user behavior. The aim of this research is to explore the mechanisms and impacts of confirmshaming on user decision-making. By emphasizing the importance of ethical awareness and accountability in digital design practices, this study advocates for the preservation of user autonomy in digital interactions. Ultimately, this article should serve as a call to action for the design community to prioritize responsible and humane design of digital technology.

You Will Perish: A Case Study of Serendipitous Literacies and Novice Video Game Design

This study focused on the digital design practices of Raul, a 15-year-old participant at a summer video game design camp for adolescents. As Raul developed his original game, You Will Perish, I wondered what his design process might reveal about (a) the practice of affectively and procedurally literate video game design and (b) the literacy pedagogies that can support such design. Guided by the concept of serendipity, I describe Raul's design practice as an open process characterized by bouts of failure, chance, and discovery, and I examine how such forces shaped the emergence of his game. Using transversal analysis, I trace Raul's design through an account of frustration and failure, perseverance and pride, showing how the challenges of the game's creator become those of the game's players. The study highlights the generative potential of serendipitous literacies wherever and whenever literacy happens.

Fashion and game design as hybrid practices: approaches in education to creating fashion-related experiences in digital worlds

ABSTRACT Collaborations between fashion and digital game design practitioners are intended to provide new fashion-related experiences in digital worlds, yet often result in garment designs that resemble physical equivalents rather than constituting innovative experiences. This research aimed to investigate possible criteria for developing digital design practices in higher education in fashion design that are informed by industry experts’ experiences of fashion and digital game design. Specialists from both industries were interviewed to investigate how fashion design practices can create meaningful content for digital worlds. The findings suggest that fashion design practitioners in higher-education need to better understand the technical and socio-dynamic peculiarities of digital worlds to create meaningful fashion-related outcomes, rather than recreating physical fashion in the digital realm. The findings further suggest that fashion designers would benefit from learning about digital software, tools, and methods that are shared by digital-native design disciplines to allow for connected workflows.

Potential of Virtual Design Construction Technologies to Improve Job-Site Safety in Gulf Corporation Council

With the advancement of digital design practices in the global construction industry, different aspects related to the project lifecycle are extracting their benefits, including making improvements in safety. The objective of this paper is to ascertain the awareness of these technologies, their potential, and any barriers related to the use of different virtual design construction (VDC) tools, such as building information modeling, virtual reality, augmented reality, and geographic information systems, to improve job-site safety in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The paper presents an overview of the GCC construction industry and highlights current safety management practices and problems in the region. The potential of VDC tools for improving job-site safety is discussed and presented. The study has used a questionnaire survey to identify the drivers and barriers of using VDC tools in improving job-site safety management in the GCC region. The results indicated that “designing emergency and evacuation plans” and “fall-hazard prevention strategies” are the two best safety applications of these tools if used proactively. Similarly, “lack of knowledge about return on investment for VDC tools” was considered as the predominant barrier, preventing stakeholders from using these technologies to improve construction safety. These results will help the GCC construction industry to build a strategy for the digitalization of proactive constructability analysis techniques for improving job-site safety. Overall, due to the multilingual dynamics of this region, it is recommended that VDC tools should become more prevalent so that the transfer of safety information and hazard prevention becomes easier, mitigating safety risks.

Digital Britannia

Digital design practice is distinctive in its relationship to material and focus on fabricating that into interactive products and services. It’s a discipline that has evolved from significantly different disciplines: Product Design and Human-computer Interaction (HCI). The foundational role that HCI played in the growth of digital design is largely hidden, as is the secret world of design practice. These two shrouded phenomena have evolved from early user interface research, through user experience, to today’s post-agile world and tomorrow’s open design. We report ten years of first-hand accounts to create a grounded, contextualised and evidence-based account of design in the real-world from the 1980s to today. This condensed history of digital design in the UK forms the basis of the concluding sections. The first traces the evolution of design practice over the last ten years. The concluding section presents a first-hand account of practice. This case study shows how design is now deeply permeated by business and development ideas and practices. The paper concludes with some ideas of how digital design practice might progress beyond this presently constrained condition.

Organizing Architectural Atmospheres

The article outlines an alternative type of digital drawing technique for architecture called chromatic mapping. This new procedural drawing technique redefines the theoretical frameworks of digital design practice by manipulating the formal and spatial capacities of data captured in the image. The ensuing discursive and practical changes to architectural design practice deliberately leverage the ability of image-based software to gather, collate and modify real-world data. The pixel is central to chromatic mapping because it is the medium that translates form and space into color. This alterative definition of form as visual data contests the orthodoxy that only the line can delineate form and reactivates the issues surrounding the role of the image in architectural production. While maintaining digital architecture's ambition to reduce the procedural and formal consequences of postmodern semiotics, this new drawing technique recalibrates the part images play in architectural production by activating image data to foreground drawings that simulate architecture's atmospheric qualities.

Building indeterminacy modelling \u2013 the \u2018ZCB Bamboo Pavilion\u2019 as a case study on nonstandard construction from natural materials

If unprocessed natural materials are the most environmentally friendly construction materials available, how do we develop and communicate design model and construction information that allows dealing with their volatile indeterminacies?This paper discusses the design and development of the ‘ZCB Bamboo Pavilion’, a 30-metres-spanning, light-weight, bending-active gridshell from hand-tied bamboo poles, as a case study for the computational design and building information modelling of nonstandard architecture where both applied materials and employed craftsmanship are highly unpredictable in terms of accuracy and precision.Reflective practice and participatory action research are used to extract knowledge on and challenge the environment of practice, and improve design and construction strategies. The project is used to discuss how traditional construction can be augmented through the strategic injection of computation in the design and construction process, how computation allows for a different mode of collaboration with increased impact for the designer, and how bespoke building information models enable an expanded architectural design solution space.The paper concludes by arguing for a mode of digital design practice that more proactively operates within a field of real-world indeterminacy. The risk and ambiguity of working with indeterminacies are to be strategically balanced out against idealised digital set-ups and onsite opportunities.

Freaks of Fancy, Revisited: Nineteenth-Century Ornamented Typography in the Twenty-First Century

This article offers a historical analysis of 21st-century American engagements with 19th-century ornamented typography, demonstrating how this form of historicist practice constructs purposeful continuities between past and present by aligning 19th- and 21st-century modes of production. These alignments, balanced on fraught cultural divisions between handmade/machine-made and authentic/artificial, are resolutely ahistorical yet speak volumes about the dynamics of information capitalism, deindustrialization, and recession in recent US history. The analysis focuses upon two genres of neo-19th-century typographic revivals: heritage letterpress fetishism, which invokes an imagined return to authentic handcraft, and revivalist authentications of digital design practice, in which designers use the old to confer legitimacy upon the new.

Design editorial e publicação multiplataforma

O artigo identifica, apresenta e problematiza aspectos que perpassam a atividade de design editorial na contemporaneidade, tendo em vista a introdução das tecnologias digitais e em rede, os processos de convergência e a publicação multiplataforma. Os tópicos levantados estão relacionados às pesquisas realizadas no âmbito do Grupo de Pesquisa Laboratório de Edição, Cultura e Design (Lead). Conclui-se que à medida que o design digital consolida-se e desdobra-se em diferentes camadas, que conhecimentos próprios do campo da informática tornam-se necessários para implementar publicações em plataformas digitais, tem-se o tensionamento de saberes e práticas que conduzem a um redesenho do meio profissional e acadêmico no âmbito da produção editorial, particularmente da atividade de design vinculada ao campo. Este abrange as esferas institucional, editorial e comercial, incidindo sobre a produção e o consumo, alterando práticas de leitura e contratos de comunicação.

Construction safety and digital design: A review

Abstract As digital technologies become widely used in designing buildings and infrastructure, questions arise about their impacts on construction safety. This review explores relationships between construction safety and digital design practices with the aim of fostering and directing further research. It surveys state-of-the-art research on databases, virtual reality, geographic information systems, 4D CAD, building information modeling and sensing technologies, finding various digital tools for addressing safety issues in the construction phase, but few tools to support design for construction safety. It also considers a literature on safety critical, digital and design practices that raises a general concern about ‘mindlessness’ in the use of technologies, and has implications for the emerging research agenda around construction safety and digital design. Bringing these strands of literature together suggests new kinds of interventions, such as the development of tools and processes for using digital models to promote mindfulness through multi-party collaboration on safety.

Services in Digital Design: New Visions for AEC-Field Collaboration

The objective of this paper is to describe contemporary digital building design from a service provider aspect. The constrained framework of this work is digital architectural design practice. When design is seen in the context of the AEC field, a process oriented approach is commonly used in describing collaboration and evolutionary progress of the design work as a project. Design projects are scheduled chains of activities which result in design delivery or actual physical buildings as the end products of the project. Recently developments in building information modelling (BIM) have presented fundamentally new ways for collecting, exploring, and sharing design information. This study develops the novel digital approach: BIM as design services. The key finding of the study is that parts of the design domain can be described as services in the changing digital environment. The scientific contribution of this paper is in describing contemporary digital design practice with an alternative service approach. A framework for such services is also presented. This work will expand the authors' contribution to research on preliminary architectural design using building information models.

Elegance in the Age of Digital Technique

AbstractAli Rahim and Hina Jamelle of Contemporary Architecture Practice introduce this issue of AD by exploring how elegance represents a maturity in digital design practice. In order to undertake this new level of formal sophistication, mastery of technique and innate creative ability have to be combined with a multilayered design complexity. It is only then that the architect is able to fully tackle the multiple constraints and external demands of a project in gestation. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.