Marianella Chamorro

The education-to-work pathways for young people with disabilities are becoming more diverse and lengthier in our post-industrial economy. Furthermore, it is recognized that a multitude of barriers still remain in securing employment at the end of these pathways. In this paper, we focus on Australia’s Disability Employment Services (DES) to understand how views of transition in DES policy may be influencing program rules in supporting secondary and tertiary students with physical and/or neurological disabilities in their employability and employment. We do this through critical policy analysis of DES and in-depth interpretive accounts from service providers and advocacy organizations.

Relevant to the study of people’s attitudes towards public transport use is the consideration to the role of technology as part of the travel experience. Technologies aim to enhance daily tasks but tend to change the way people interact with products and can be perceived as difficult to use. This is critical in the context of “public use” where products and services are to be used by the population at large: adults, children, elderly, people with disabilities, and tourists. From different perspectives, the topic of users and the use of technologies have been studied in the social sciences and human computer interaction fields; however, earlier approaches fail to address the ways in which experiential knowledge informs people’s interactions with products and technologies, and how such information could guide the design of future technologies. This paper describes a pilot study, part of a larger ongoing exploratory research that investigates people’s experiences with infrastructure, systems, and technologies in the context of public transport. The methodological approach included focus groups, field observations, and retrospective verbal reports. At this stage, the study found that four context led factors were the primary source of reference informing participants’ actions and interactions; they are:
(i) context >> experience,
(ii) context >> interface,
(iii) context >> knowledge,
(iv) context >> emotion.

Student engagement tends to be viewed as a reflection of learning processes, and in the context of first year university studies, it is a crucial means of an educational process that establishes the foundations for successful later year studies (Krausse and Coates, 2008). In the context of first year design studio teaching in higher education, fostering students’ positive engagement poses challenges to design educators as current trends set these design studios to be large size classes that makes difficult to manage and follow up students’ individual learning experiences. At QUT’s first year industrial design studio classes we engage in a variety of teaching pedagogies from which we identify two of them as instrumental vehicles to foster positive student engagement. Concept bombs and the field trip experience provide such platform as shown in student responses through a learning experience survey.

The increasingly recurrent open-plan design of modern workplaces leads to a t lack of privacy and provides limited opportunities for individuals to find spaces for refocusing. Open-plan offices can thus impact ones’ performance due to long term exposure to external noises, aggressive conversation or frequent interruption by others. The purpose of this paper is to explore wellbeing in the context of open-plan workplaces from an environmental interaction point of view through a transdisciplinary approach. The ultimate goal is to propose a solution for to facilitate office workers’ emotional recovery and wellbeing while in the workplace. More specifically, our study proposes a developmental concept of the “Aerie”, a bespoke portable and collapsible structure that can be empirical tested in different workplace areas. Its modular design accommodates a range of interactive technologies aiming to improve and maintain personal wellbeing in workplace with minimal lose in working time or productivity. A preliminary literature review has provided some cues about features of an ideal regenerative space; drawing from this existing knowledge, we have developed a conceptual space to test participants’ response to a combination of these features. The aim of this experiment was to evaluate which combination of features could calm individuals through a multi - sensory experience combined with a guided relaxation exercise. Findings from this pilot projects have provided an insight in the design of the “Aerie”. Out of 38 participants, the majority reported that blue/purple lights and rain as white noise were very relaxing features. The mindfulness mediation audio was also well received. Most participants preferred to sit in a small cosy space (such as a corner or bean bags), rather than larger more exposed arrangements, for example chair or sitting-ball. Drawing from these findings, an initial prototype of Aerie was developed; this will be displayed at the Wellbeing conference to demonstrate the principle and verify its feasibility. In the next stage of the project, a working prototype of the Aerie will be built.

What is genuine participation in the context of design practice? Genuine participation is often considered the missing element that differentiates a successful participation project from an unsuccessful participation project. But what, exactly, does genuine mean and, more importantly for research purposes, how can the ‘genuineness’ of participation be measured? The present study is a first step to explore a possible metric for genuine participation. To begin, a questionnaire developed from six key topics of focus within participatory design research was created and administered to university design students. The results, analysed by a principal component analysis, yielded statistically reliable, strong, and otherwise clear and coherent patterns. These patterns were then qualitatively interpreted. The results indicated that intrinsic motivation, participation self-efficacy and positive group affect can serve as reliable metrics for measuring the quality of the participation experience. It is proposed that future research into genuine participation consider the impact of these three variables.

Community engagement projects for social innovation are increasingly happening across the globe and show a trend that involves communities in participatory approaches for the resolution of a variety of social needs. However, little has been discussed about how this type of projects could possibly lead to the production of viable futures as design innovations, and how social and cultural factors influence people’s engagement and participation in community-based projects. We argue that making viable futures by design requires a bottom up approach where ideas depart from the community itself, where the co-production of knowledge takes place through a process that is collaborative, participatory and engaging. From this perspective, in this paper we discuss insights gained through a Study Tour Project in which we explored the various aspects of the concept of engagement as a key component of design innovations in people’s everyday activities. The Study Tour Project took place at a Faculty Creative Industries in Australia and comprised two different design explorations: Mutant Piggy student project involving students from Australia, Chile and Peru; and the InstaBooth research project involving Brisbane’s Australia community. From our experiences we establish the concept of viable futures by design as the enabling of new endeavors that are made possible within particular contexts and within local people’s knowledge. Finally we propose that the making of viable futures by design is an engagement process that requires co-production of knowledge and suitable tools to facilitate democratic and true participation; and that this process can prompt social change as a by-product of these community-engagement experiences.

Studio teaching is a long standing tradition and a signature pedagogy across a broad range of art and creative disciplines, from arts to architecture and design. However, the practice of studio teaching varies across disciplines and practitioners. Do these variances indicate different signature pedagogies in the creative disciplines? An exploratory study was conducted to examine how studio teaching is practised at a Faculty of Creative Industries in Australia, and whether those studio practices suggest distinctive signature pedagogies and creative transfer. In this article we describe the study and offer insights into studio teaching practices in the creative industries disciplines. We argue that nuances and differences among studio practices in creative industries reveal different signature pedagogies. Our findings offer a unique lens on current approaches to creative disciplines education, where interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to teaching are encouraged in order to support and prepare a highly educated and flexible future workforce.

... A sample adult population comprising staff members and students from different cultural backgrounds recruited from Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia participated ... Participants were divided into two groups: 20 product users and five product designers. ...

Numerous disruptions and barriers are encountered by persons with mobility-related disabilities in their daily’s experience of going to work and the pressure these exert on gaining and maintaining their employment. The nature and extent of their difficulties to workforce participation entails a requirement for extensive planning and also strategies to address problems of being stranded (for example, when the bus they are waiting for is not accessible). This paper presents the conceptualisation and methods of understanding workforce participation as a journey, and a discussion on the role digital technologies play in helping people with mobility-related disabilities in their journeys to work and mitigating disruptions when these occur. This is presented through an initial case study that helped identify the sequence of supports needed to be in place to make the work journey possible. Importantly, the paper also highlights points of intervention for the use of digital technologies and where design can potentially help to enhance accessibility to work for people with mobility-related impairments by making journeys to work seamless

This project began in 2013, with the award of an internal QUT Teaching and Learning grant. The task we wished to undertake was to document and better understand the role of studio teaching practice in the Creative Industries Faculty. While it was well understood that the Faculty had long used studio pedagogies as a key part of its teaching approach, organizational and other changes made it productive and timely to consider how the various study areas within the Faculty were approaching studio teaching.
Chief among these changes were innovations in the use of technology in teaching, and at an organizational level the merging of what were once two schools within different faculties into a newly-structured Creative Industries Faculty. The new faculty consists of two schools, Media, Entertainment and Creative Art (MECA) and Design. We hoped to discover more about how studio techniques were developing alongside an ever-increasing number of options for content delivery, assessment, and interaction with students. And naturally we wanted to understand such developments across the broad range of nineteen study areas now part of the Creative Industries Faculty.
This e-book represents the first part of our project, which in the main consisted in observing the teaching practices used in eight units across the Faculty, and then interviews with the unit coordinators involved.

The third wave of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) involves more ubiquitous and embedded forms of computing. Making these useful, usable and even delightful for people needs design research. The more technologies become enmeshed in our lives and the more dependent upon them we become, the more essential it is that they are simple for everyone to use and they do not let us down in those annoying ways we have become used to tolerating. Embedding computing into more and more of the objects and environments we interact with makes them less visible but more ubiquitous, making their usability essential but challenging at the same time. Design research is a mechanism which can help researchers, programmers and designers to understand how to create better twenty-first century computing systems and environments. This chapter discusses how design research can contribute to allowing third wave HCI to benefit the lives of all citizens rather than frustrate them.

While cities increasingly attest to plans to make their resources accessible for people with disabilities, the realities of achieving the travel considered integral to urban life continue to be frustrating and prohibitive for this group. Accessing the basic opportunities of contemporary urban life now presupposes the supports and resources afforded by new mobilities, combining virtual and actual travel and communication in negotiating our work, leisure, connections with families and culture. For the researchers applying the new mobilities paradigm, this requires a focus which is suited to capturing movement and its spatial and temporal coordinates and should also turn to illuminate the darker side of these relationships: coerced immobility experienced by people with disabilities. This chapter discusses an approach to research and the development of design scenarios – concepts emerging from research that may inform design - that take seriously the role of movement, time and space in the achievement of valued connections by individuals with disabilities with particular reference to the journey to work. In particular we apply, in a case study, concepts of time and space that are relevant to the in situ experience of getting to work; raising questions regarding the way getting ready and travelling are experienced in the context of risk and contingency and the actual and potential role of the technical, material and social environment. We then respond to the analysis of this case with a discussion about the way emergent scenarios can imagine “possible or preferable futures” for the mobile citizenship of people with disabilities.

Creative industries such as industrial design, architecture, interaction design, and fashion embed design disciplines, methods and processes with the intention and focus on designing with and for people. While there is a myriad of methods to help designers work with people of all backgrounds and demographics, engagement is a critical aspect of such a human centric focus. From this perspective, engagement means the critical involvement or participation of people with the content (i.e. object, problem, question) being developed or explored. Depending on the design discipline or the approach, the content and context may vary. Key theories that underpin a design discipline’s approach to community engagement processes come from participatory design, place theory, and design for social innovation. In participatory design and in place theory, engagement is a process driven by the direct involvement of people, the end users or the people that will be affected by the design intervention; a ‘process’ where people provide their input by engaging with the problem being discussed, or by providing input through their lived experience with the problem they are interacting with.
Extant literature on community engagement in a design process offers descriptions of methods and approaches, discussions of the challenges of such collaborative and participatory approaches and of maintaining sustainable and ethical practices (Ehn, Nilsson, & Topgaard, 2014; Hillgren, Seravalli, & Emilson, 2011). An aspect requiring further exploration is the identification of the social and cultural factors shaping and influencing the ways people engage in community-based projects. In this chapter we explore these issues through two design projects and other examples of community engagement involving design projects for social innovation, where the process was intended to facilitate the creation of viable futures through design. It is within this scope that we define ‘community engagement’ as a participatory process that is led with a bottom up approach and that is distinguished by the sharing of knowledge as an indispensable component for community participation in social innovation projects. This process is stimulated by the co-production of knowledge among all participants, and where the forms of community engagement and of community participation is determined and shaped by its context. From this perspective the notion of community engagement is a dynamic one, and is redefined in every project according to the multiple factors that contribute to the context of the project. These different elements depend on the content being explored, the questions being asked, the people involved and the location of the community. Altogether, these aspects constitute the social and cultural fabric of the participatory process in which people engage with.
This chapter presents an exploration of the notion of engagement from the perspective of design disciplines; specifically focusing on the topic of community engagement where social innovation driven projects are constrained by social and cultural factors. Through the examples presented in this chapter, we explore and further describe the four aspects observed in these design-led projects that are comprised in our definition of community engagement. The three questions guiding our exploration are: What does engagement look like in design-led projects? What does it mean to the participants? and How is community engagement re-defined through these processes?