Design for the Creative Industries

The Design Policy group investigates strategic use of design and innovation in both commercial and social contexts. Recent research projects (AHRC, EPSRC, industry) explore design policy for innovative manufacturing, co-design in the third sector, strategic design in elementary education, and design strategy for business direction. Current and future research includes comparative design and industry policy analysis and models, and measuring the impact of design and innovation.

Members: Busayawan Lam, Youngok Choi, Stephen Green, Graeme Evans

PhD students:

• Stephen Green: Predicting design impact
• Koog Han: Design leadership regarding communicating design to non-design team members at the fuzzy front end of new product development
• You Lee: Contemporary visual art into luxury fashion flagship store
• Rafael Mello
• Jea Hoo Na: Corporate Level Design Policy for Innovative Manufacturing in the UK
• Maha Shams: Elevating The Perception of Design-led innovation for Saudi Arabia Airlines
• Hadeel Silsilah: Guidelines for using Islamic art & Culture in branding to deliver a distinctive customer experience

The Open Design and the Digital Economy group was established in 2011 and develops tools and methods to enable non-experts to participate in the design process. It is aligned with the emerging age of participation, where consumers no longer need to be on the periphery of development, and companies are increasingly finding that ideas and innovations originate from outside their organisations. 'Crowd-sourcing' is gathering pace, as companies seek to tap into the global knowledge base through their 'open innovation' strategies. Brands need to develop new relationships with Prosumers in which they may become a substantial part of the design and development process. Open design sits within the broader context of open innovation, where people outside of companies can participate in the innovation process. Digital open design tools and fabrication technologies enable consumers to have design conversations with brands or organisations about products or services.

Much of this work is and has been supported by the RCUK Digital Economy Programme: Baurley was PI on ‘Digital Sensoria’, which developed design methods to gain insight into sensor perception of materials to develop interactive digital tool for e-retail; Baurley is a spoke of University of Nottingham's Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute, which funds PhD work on open design and citizen science, and open design and wearable technology; Baurley is PI on ‘User Innovation Communities: Digital Tools for Cultural Production’ ('Research in the Wild') which is deploying digital tools that enable design conversations between brands and consumers; Baurley was a CI AHRC Connected Communities ‘Community Web 2.0 Creative Control through hacking’; and Baurley is PI on EPSRC Prototyping Open Innovation Models for ICT-enabled Manufacturing in Food & Packaging, which is about designing and developing a new crowd sourced food and package design and innovation platform comprised of a suite of ICT tools for state-of-the-art manufacturing processes and implementing "customers in the loop" co-creation product development processes. Evans lead research into DE clusters in London’s Tech City/Digital Shoreditch, presenting keynotes at successive DS Festivals (2011-13). Baurley and Evans are members of RCUK DE Research Networks+ (Sustainable Society and Communities & Cultures).

Members: Sharon Baurley, Sarah Silve, Stephen Green, Shengfeng Qin, Graeme Evans, Stephen L Smith (Brunel Business School), James Tooze (RA), Edwin Foote (RA), Grit Hartung (RA)

PhD students:

• Rob Phillips: Open design & citizen science, how can the accessibility of open technology enable new insights
• Priti Veja: An exploration of multi functional woven electronic textiles by design practice
• Bruna Petreca: Development of a method to assess users’ preferences and expectations to feedback in the design of textile products
• Leo Wood: From consumer’s actionable ideas into manufacturing, a new design management model to integrate design and production

Kang, Qin and Silve, specialise in advancing the use of computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) in the design process. Their research is aligned with the RCUK research priorities of Creative industries, and High Value Manufacturing. To facilitate the participation of both design professionals and the public in product development, virtual prototyping, digital design methods and tools needs to be researched. Under the EPRSC project ‘Interpreting Freeform Surfaces from On-line Sketching’ research on freehand sketch based product design and figure animation has been investigated by Qin. Under the HEFCE SRIEF 2 project ‘Intelligent Virtual Modelling’, a laboratory was established (2004-2008) with a motion capture system, 3D body scanner and a 3D object scanner. Following this, two University funded projects and two EPSRC projects (Dorothy Hodgkin’s Awards for two PhD students) on ‘Creative Virtual Design’ and ‘Emotional Virtual human’ were conducted and supervised by Qin and Kang respectively. Qin and Kang have developed an International network of researchers from academia and industry covering the UK, USA, China, Japan and Chile under six Royal Academy of Engineering projects with fifteen overseas funded projects and two industry consultancy projects.

Silve has investigated the use of ‘desktop’ lasers for laser forming with additional consideration as to this being a method of pre-production prototyping. With a PhD student she has developed a Paste Deposition Modelling process which can deposit a number of materials for creating prototypes, bespoke and functional products. Applications are in medical, electronics, textiles, product and jewellery sectors. The latter is supported by The PMC Studio (Precious Metal Clay). The research extends the range of RP materials and opens up a low-cost alternative method of ‘rapid manufacture’ that could be targeted at SME’s. The future direction of the research is depositing multi-materials, machine and software development.

Members: Shengfeng Qin, Jinsheng Kang, Sarah Silve, Dr Wenke Kang (Visiting researcher), Prof Guofu Ding (Visiting Professor RAE)

PhD students:

• Ding Wang: Application of the semantic features of Chinese traditional paintings and patterns to the modern design
• Yu-han Wang: Design principles of product design with cultural elements
• Islam Gharib: Sketch-based Interface for modelling for Conceptual Product Design
• Ji-won Song: Interface Design for Connecting Multiple Devices
• Jie Hong: Human gait analysis
• Woods Leo: From consumer’s actionable ideas into manufacturing, a new design management model to integrate design and production.

Research in materials mechanics is currently being redeveloped and re-invigorated. The recent appointments of Bonser and Xu have brought in new and complementary expertise supporting the wider research activities in Design. The research area has received significant funding from EU FP7, Industry, TSB and EPSRC. Xu won funding from EU FP7 Advanced textiles for the energy and environmental protection markets. Bonser brings expertise in biomimetics (design inspired by nature). Bonser’s research in biomimetics allies with other staff within Mechanical engineering and also with international collaborators, through the Ocean Design Research Association. Further funded projects include a TSB grant to Rakowski, which seeks to make metal machining more energy efficient, by reducing friction losses. Further work by Rakowski involves the development of sensor technologies whilst Rees’ research examines strain measurement in engineered materials and structures from processing.

Members: Richard Bonser, David Rees, Sarah Silve, Richard Rakowski, Yanmeng Xu

PhD students:

• Helen Paine: Investigation of Advanced Joining Methods for Textiles and Related Materials (with TWI)
• Nico Nelson: Multi-layered nano-structured diamond and diamond like carbon coatings for the machining of aluminium
• Esteban Schunemann: 3D Deposition of Silicone and Metals: An exploration into real world applications

• Digital Sensoria, RCUK Digital Economy Programme, £775K (2009-2012) (Baurley)
• Voice Your View, RCUK Digital Economy Programme, £43K (total £1m) (2009-2012) (Lam CI)
• Smart and Effective Engineering Manufacturing (SEEM), TSB (£1.2M total) (2009-2013) (Rakowski)
• 'Open design and the digital economy' spoke of University of Nottingham's Research Hub, Horizon, RCUK Digital Economy Programme, £187K (2009-2014) (Baurley)
• Community Web 2.0 Creative Control through hacking, AHRC Connected Communities Programme, £40K (2010-2011) (Baurley)
• User Innovation Communities: Digital Tools for Cultural Production, RCUK Digital Economy Programme 'Research in the Wild', £300K (2012-2013) (Baurley)
• Bridging the gap between academic rigour and community relevance, AHRC Connected Communities Programme, £34K (2012-2013) (Lam CI)
• Unearth Hidden Assets through Community Co-Design and Co-Production, AHRC Connected Communities Programme, £125K (2012-2013) (Lam)
• Scaling up co-design research and practice: Building community-academic capacity and extending reach, AHRC Connected Communities Programme, £125k (2012-2013)  (Lam CI)
• Prototyping Open Innovation Models for ICT-enabled Manufacturing in Food & Packaging, EPSRC Future ICT-enabled manufacturing – cross-disciplinary research clusters, £1.3M (£4M in total, including funding from industry) (2013-2018) (Baurley)