̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - design

Newly-developed image guidelines will improve mobile shopping experience worldwide

sc604 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 02:53:29 +0000

̽��ֱ��concept, known as ‘mobile ready hero images’, was designed to make shopping for grocery products faster, by making it easier to quickly spot key information about a product, such as size, type or flavour.

For example, searching for ‘soap’ on Amazon or other retail websites will bring up hundreds of images, and most customers will scroll quickly through the list on their phone in order to find the particular item they want. However, based on product images alone, it can be difficult to quickly spot the differences between items: whether an item contains one, three or ten individual bars of soap, for instance.

“While traditional pack photographs can be effective on desktop screens, different flavours and sizes of products can look identical when these photographs are displayed on mobiles, reduced to the size of a postage stamp,” said Dr Sam Waller from Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, who led the project. “This is especially problematic for older consumers with age-related long-sightedness.”

To date, mobile ready hero images have been adopted by over 80 retailers in more than 40 countries. India – where 65% of all online shopping transactions take place on mobiles – has been one of the fastest countries to adopt these images.

In addition to making the mobile shopping experience easier for customers, mobile ready hero images have also been shown to have a positive impact on sales. “Magnum ice cream is one of our billion dollar global brands that has adopted hero images,” said Oliver Bradley, e-commerce director at Unilever. “During an eight-week A/B split test with a retailer, Magnum’s hero images led to a sales increase of 24%.”

In order to meet retailers’ demands for consistent product images across all brands, Unilever commissioned Cambridge to develop a website for hero image guidelines, with freely available templates to help brands create improved product images.

To date, some brands have created mobile ready hero images using the Cambridge templates, while others have developed hero images in a different way. Some retailers have chosen to accept all kinds of hero images, while others will only accept some kinds of hero images, resulting in an inconsistent experience for consumers.

GS1, a global non-profit organisation which sets standards for consumer goods, has recently established a working group to focus on mobile ready hero images.

“We spotted the opportunity to improve the current situation using our Global Standards Management Process,” said Paul Reid, head of standards at GS1 in the UK. “ ̽��ֱ��aim of the working group is to get agreement between competing brands and retailers, leading to a single, globally applicable set of guidelines for mobile ready hero images. These guidelines will help brands and retailers make the shopping experience better and more consistent.”

“Inclusive design can help improve the visual clarity of hero images, making them more accessible to a wider range of consumers,” said Waller. “In particular, our SEE-IT method can estimate the proportion of the population who would be unable to discern the important information from e-commerce images. We have joined the GS1 working group in an advisory capacity, and we are looking forward to contributing our expertise to help inform the critical decisions.

“Grocery products are just the start: we want to improve the e-commerce images used for every product, at every retailer, in every country in the world.”

Inset image: Examples of mobile-ready hero images. Walkers is a trademark owned and designed by PepsiCo and used with permission.

A new type of online product image, developed by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge in collaboration with global consumer goods company Unilever, could improve the mobile shopping experience for the world’s 2.5 billion smartphone users.

We want to improve the e-commerce images used for every product, at every retailer, in every country in the world.

Sam Waller

Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash

Man on a smartphone

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Breathing new life into asthma treatment

Anonymous — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 17:57:59 +0000

I don’t think I will ever forget the moment I sat at the bedside of a six-year-old patient and watched the consultant hand over a 13-year-old student’s design to help with the patient’s asthma treatment. It has been the culmination of a long journey that started eight years ago with the belief that children can solve real world problems as part of the mainstream Design and Technology curriculum.

Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) is an initiative that puts authentic challenges like this at the heart of the learning experience. Asthma treatment is the epitome of such a challenge. With 5.4 million people in the UK with the condition, the NHS spends about £1 Billion on treatment, and yet 1,468 people died from asthma in 2015. Tragically, it is believed that 90% of these deaths involve preventable factors and similarly 75% of A&E admission are thought to be avoidable.

We set the challenge in schools for students to design a packaging solution that will help co-ordinate the initial treatment for young asthma patients, to put the patient and their carers on the right path to controlling what is typically a long-term condition. A recent survey highlighted that over 80% of people, of all ages, feel that their asthma is not under control. Crucially we wanted students to address the anxiety that a child feels the first time a spacer mask is placed on their face. Students watched a video of a real instance of this, where the child recoils backwards each time the mask is placed over their mouth.

This is a complex, messy problem requiring solutions that are not only effective but cheap, simple to use and scalable. When I first saw the monkey mask design, where the child becomes a monkey and the inhaler and spacer becomes a banana to feed to it, I knew we had something special. It is so simple, so elegant as a design solution, and gets to the very heart of the child’s initial anxiety. Changing that moment from fear to fun for the patient as well as other family members makes it a better experience for all.

Alongside this we have worked with students to develop posters that remind patients to always use their spacer. In addition, we have developed a simple traffic light system explaining the narrowing of airways in the lungs and why and how it can be controlled. ̽��ֱ��credit card-sized printout can be easily clipped to a healthcare professional’s ID badge so it is always to hand.

This is a significant moment in our journey as engineers and educators, and we are so grateful for all the people that have partnered with us on this journey. ̽��ֱ��list of names would be too long, but I do want to mention the organisations that have walked the journey with us. ̽��ֱ��Healthy London Partnership, Children and Young People’s programme (a collaboration of the health and social care system across London), whose passion and skill around asthma has been an inspiration. On the packaging side the British Printing Industry Federation (BPiF) and ̽��ֱ��Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) who have guided us in the realities of packaging design and production; DS Smith who turned around amazing designs in such short timescales; Peter Brett Associates who believed in the project when it was just an idea; and last, but by no means least, the teachers and students who brought it to life in the classroom.

This was perfectly timed to fit with the Healthy London Partnership #AskAbout Asthma campaign and our pledge is to run the ‘Unpacking Asthma’ challenge in schools again in this academic year. We are confident that students will come up with more ideas that can help with this vital work.

It’s hard not to sound corny, but Churchill’s words come to mind for the vision we had for DOT eight years ago, “now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”. We hope that this work will go on to play a part in transforming asthma care and help us towards our goal of equipping future generations to be creative problem solvers. In other words, for young people to design a better tomorrow.

Ian Hosking from Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre is co-founder and co-leader of Designing Our Tomorrow, a collaboration between the Department of Engineering and the Faculty of Education which brings real-world problems into classroom design and technology sessions. Here, he describes the culmination of a year-long project in which secondary school students designed packaging solutions for the treatment of childhood asthma.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Student-led designs could help prevent childhood asthma deaths

sc604 — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 07:31:51 +0000

̽��ֱ��programme, called Designing Our Tomorrow, was founded by researchers at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and brings real-world problems into classroom design and technology sessions in secondary schools, and encouraging the next generation of UK designers and engineers.

As part of their classroom curriculum, students from different secondary schools have been learning about what makes an effective and useful design. Their goal was to design a type of packaging which would contain everything a young child with asthma would need, whether they’re at home, at school or elsewhere; and one which would help reduce anxiety of children with asthma by using child-friendly design themes. “In other words, we want to make it fun,” said Ian Hosking of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who co-leads the Designing Our Tomorrow (DOT) programme, in collaboration with the Faculty of Education. “We want to re-frame what education can be – projects like these start to form a broader evidence base of what’s possible.”

Five of the best designs were presented by students from Wimbledon High School GDST at the British Paediatric Respiratory Society conference last Friday (30 June) in Cambridge.

Students were not merely designing packaging but an experience. Themes included a monkey character where the inhaler and spacer become a banana that the child can ‘feed’ the monkey with and then copy themselves. Other themes include a pack shaped like a cat where the inhalers become mice that are stored in a smaller box shaped like a wedge of cheese; and a folding pack that can hang on a door for easy access at home but can be quickly zipped up and put in a bag to take out.

“Seeing how people were scared of asthma…this affects and could benefit a lot of people. ̽��ֱ��child wanted it to be fun, the gran wanted emergency instructions, the parents wanted it to be compact and small and the nurse wanted it to be organised – so we took all of that and designed our packs,” said Charlotte, aged 11 from Wimbledon High.

Several of the designs have been made into initial corrugated cardboard prototypes by UK packaging company DS Smith, with the aim of piloting them in partnership with the NHS in London through the Healthy London Partnership.

“It has been great doing something which is able to change and improve children’s lives and help them get better,” said Sascha, aged 12 from Wimbledon High, one of the students who presented her design at the conference. “I am so happy and glad that they have decided to take mine to the next stage and it could appear in people’s homes.”

Asthma affects one in 11 children in the UK. On average, there are three children with asthma in every classroom in the UK, and a child is admitted to hospital every 20 minutes due to an asthma attack.

This DOT project has focused specifically on asthma in children under six years of age. It addresses the anxiety that a child feels in the early stages of treatment and the co-ordination of the equipment and their instructions to help ensure compliance with their treatment plan.

“DOT is a fascinating project which aims to bring real-world problems into classroom design and technology sessions in secondary schools,” said Sara Nelson from the Healthy London Partnership. “It’s one of the more rewarding pieces of work that I have had the pleasure of being involved in during the last year, the one I have learned the most from, and it involved collaborating with an unusual partner for the NHS.”

Each of the students was given all of the tools which a child with asthma or their carer would need to manage their condition, including inhalers, spacers, and emergency instructions. Through a set of classroom lessons, the students’ way of thinking was developed in order to help them understand how to be creative by breaking fixation through the use of stimulus.

Fixation is a common problem in design – for example, if you’re trying to design a new type of chair and all you’re shown are other chairs, you’ll just end up designing a variant of what already exists. “If I want to design a new chair, the last thing I should look at is a chair,” said Bill Nicholl from Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, who co-leads the DOT programme.

“Children and young people are terribly creative, and the NHS should involve them more in co-designing what we do,” said Nelson. “We should not be afraid to put our heads above the parapet and should look outside the NHS to what partnerships might be out there to help us solve some of our tricky problems – I know that we can learn an awful lot from engineers.”

̽��ֱ��students from Wimbledon High also gained valuable industry experience working with DS Smith, who will help refine the students’ concepts into something that can be manufactured in large volumes. “By working with industry, it takes the project beyond a competition to something that can make a difference to patients and help prevent avoidable asthma deaths in children,” said Hosking.

“This project has shown yet again the potential of young people and their ability to engage with, and ultimately solve, complex design problems. We underestimate their creativity at our peril. Solving real problems like this should be at the heart of all young people’s educational experiences,” said Nicholl.

Wimbledon High Head of Design & Technology Marcia Phillip has been deeply involved in the project: “It puts authentic challenges and engineering practice at the heart of the learning experience and this appealed to me, particularly working in a girls’ school. We know there is a shortage of engineers in the UK – particularly women – and I thought we should get our girls inspired from an early age. ̽��ֱ��girls have been highly engaged and excited – after all, they are playing a part in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s research and their ideas will potentially be implemented within the NHS.”

“I feel like I am doing something for a purpose and it makes me feel happy that I am helping people,” said Charlotte. “I feel accomplished and proud of what I have done because it was a long process but it was all worth it.”

DOT is funded in part by engineering design consultants Peter Brett Associates and ARM Ltd.

Solutions designed by secondary school students as part of an innovative classroom design and technology programme could help reduce the number of unnecessary deaths from childhood asthma.

I feel like I am doing something for a purpose and it makes me feel happy that I am helping people.

Charlotte, aged 11

Lloyd Mann

Students from Wimbledon High School at the British Paediatric Respiratory Society conference

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Yes

Keeping patients safe in hospital

cjb250 — Tue, 15 Nov 2016 09:39:09 +0000

In November 2004, Mary McClinton was admitted to Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, USA, to receive treatment for a brain aneurysm, a potentially serious swelling in a blood vessel. What followed was a tragedy, made worse by the fact that it was entirely preventable.

McClinton was mistakenly injected with the antiseptic chlorhexidine. It happened, the hospital says, because of “confusion over the three identical stainless steel bowls in the procedure room containing clear liquids — chlorhexidine, contrast dye and saline solution”. Doctors tried amputating one of her legs to save her life, but the damage to her organs was too great: McClinton died 19 days later.

Nine years on, an almost identical accident occurred at Doncaster Royal Infirmary in the UK. Here, the patient, ‘Gina’, survived, but only after having her leg amputated.

Professor Mary Dixon-Woods is one of Cambridge’s newest recruits, and she is on a mission: to improve patient safety in the National Health Service and in healthcare worldwide. She has recently taken up the role as RAND Professor of Health Services Research, having moved here from the ̽��ֱ�� of Leicester.

It is, she admits, going to be a challenge. Many different policies and approaches have been tried to date, but few with widespread success, and often with unintended consequences.

Financial incentives are widely used in the NHS and in the USA, but recent evidence suggests that they have little effect. “There’s a danger that they tend to encourage effort substitution – what people often refer to as ‘teaching to the test’,” explains Dixon-Woods. In other words, people focus on the areas that are being incentivised, but neglect other areas. “It’s not even necessarily conscious neglect. People have only a limited amount of time, so it’s inevitable they focus on areas that are measured and rewarded: it’s an economy of attention as much as anything else.”

In 2013, Dixon-Woods and colleagues published a study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, evaluating the use of surgical checklists introduced in hospitals to reduce complications and deaths during surgery. ̽��ֱ��checklists have become the most widely used patient safety intervention in the world and are recommended by the World Health Organization. Yet, the evidence shows that checklists may have little impact, and her research found that in some situations – particularly in low-income countries – they might even make things worse.

“ ̽��ֱ��checklists sometimes introduced new risks. Nurses would use the lists as a box-ticking exercise rather than as a true reflection of events – they would tick the box to say the patient had had their antibiotics when there were no antibiotics in the hospital, for example.” They also reinforced the hierarchies – nurses had to try to get surgeons to do certain tasks, but the surgeons used it as an opportunity to display their power and refuse.

Problems are compounded by a lack of standardisation. Dixon-Woods and her team spend time in hospitals to try to understand which systems are in place and how they are used. Not only does she find differences in approaches between hospitals, but also between units and even between shifts. “Standardisation and harmonisation are two of the most urgent issues we have to tackle. Imagine if you have to learn each new system wherever you go or even whenever a new senior doctor is on the ward. This introduces massive risk.”

One place that has managed to break this pattern is Northern Ireland, which has overcome the problem of poor labelling of lines such as intravenous lines and urinary catheters

Even when an institution manages to make genuine improvements in patient safety, too often these interventions cannot be replicated elsewhere or scaled up, leading to the curse of “worked once”, as she describes it.

One place that has managed to break this pattern is Northern Ireland, which has overcome the problem of poor labelling of lines such as intravenous lines and urinary catheters. A sick patient may have several different lines attached to them; these were not labelled in any consistent way – if at all – so a nurse might use the wrong line or leave a line in place too long, risking infection. Over 18 months, the health service in Northern Ireland came up with a solution. Soon, whether you are in a hospital, a nursing home or a hospice, every line will be labelled the same way.

“I’m interested in how they managed to achieve that and what we can learn that can be used in the next place that wants to standardise their lines.”

Dixon-Woods compares the issue of patient safety to that of climate change, in the sense that it is a “problem of many hands”, with many actors, each making a contribution towards the outcome, and where it is difficult to identify who has responsibility for solving the problem. “Many patient safety issues arise at the level of the system as a whole, but policies treat patient safety as an issue for each individual organisation.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than the issue of ‘alarm fatigue’. Each bed in an intensive care unit typically generates 160 alarms per day, caused by machinery that is not integrated. “You have to assemble all the kit around an intensive care bed manually,” she explains. “It doesn’t come built as one like an aircraft cockpit. This is not a problem a hospital can solve alone. It needs to be solved at the sector level.”

Dixon-Woods has turned to Professor John Clarkson in Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre to help. Clarkson has been interested in patient safety for over a decade; in 2004, his team published a report for the Chief Medical Officer entitled ‘Design for patient safety – a system-wide design-led approach to tackling patient safety in the NHS’.

We need to look through the eyes of the healthcare providers to see the challenges and to understand where tools and techniques we use in engineering may be of value
John Clarkson

“Fundamentally, my work is about asking how can we make it better and what could possibly go wrong,” explains Clarkson. It is not, he says, just about technology, but about the system and the people within the system. When he trains healthcare professionals, he avoids using words like ‘risk’, which mean different things in medicine and engineering, and instead asks questions to get them thinking about the system.

“We need to look through the eyes of the healthcare providers to see the challenges and to understand where tools and techniques we use in engineering may be of value. I have no doubt that if you were to put a hundred engineers into Addenbrooke’s [Hospital], you could help transform its care.”

There is a difficulty, he concedes: “There’s no formal language of design in healthcare. Do we understand what the need is? Do we understand what the requirements are? Can we think of a range of concepts we might use and then design a solution and test it before we put it in place? We seldom see this in healthcare, and that’s partly driven by culture and lack of training, but partly by lack of time.”

Dixon-Woods agrees that healthcare can learn much from how engineers approach problems. “Medical science tends to prioritise trials and particular types of evidence, whereas engineering does rapid tests. Randomised controlled trials do have a vital role, but on their own they’re not the whole solution. There has to be a way of getting our two sides talking.”

Only then, she says, will we be able to prevent further tragedies such as the death of Mary McClinton.

Healthcare is a complex beast and too often problems arise that can put patients’ health – and in some cases, lives – at risk. A collaboration between the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research and the Department of Engineering hopes to get to the bottom of what’s going wrong – and to offer new ways of solving the problems.

Standardisation and harmonisation are two of the most urgent issues we have to tackle. Imagine if you have to learn each new system wherever you go or even whenever a new senior doctor is on the ward. This introduces massive risk

Mary Dixon-Woods

Toshiyuki Imai

Intravenous drip

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Building from the ground up: participatory design in Kenya’s oldest slum

jeh98 — Wed, 05 Aug 2015 07:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��community of Mathare 3A, built along a small river valley in Nairobi, is located in one of Kenya’s oldest and largest slums. It is lacking in most basic services such as sanitation and electricity. There are few permanent structures, with most people living in temporary shacks made of wood and corrugated iron.

Now a team of Cambridge researchers and students has been working on a project under the UN-Habitat-coordinated Global Network for Sustainable Housing (GNSH) to build a community centre in the heart of this impoverished area, and they are doing so using a model that makes the community’s involvement central to the process – participatory design.

This is the first time that UN-Habitat has worked with a university on a project like this, and it is hoped that it will provide a scalable model for future projects with other communities and institutions.

Project Manager Dr Maximilian Bock, from the Department of Architecture, explains: “the aim of participatory design is not to change the rich culture that already exists in Mathare, but rather to understand it deeply enough to design a space that is useful to and reflective of the community.”

̽��ֱ��first residents started arriving in the Mathare Valley in the 1920s, and by 2012 the population was estimated at 188,000 – with around 1,500 living in the informal settlement of Mathare 3A. ̽��ֱ��Kintaco community hall currently consists of a temporary structure with a capacity for less than 100 people. At present, it is mainly used by the men.

Ana Gatóo and Elizabeth Wagemann, also from the Department of Architecture, have now produced construction drawings that will enable the residents of Mathare 3A to build a new, more useful community centre for themselves. ̽��ֱ��structure consists of replicable units so that, with some training, the residents will be able to learn quickly how to build the hall under the guidance of an onsite engineer.

One of the crucial steps in the redesign of the hall saw Gatóo travel to Mathare in January 2015. As Gatóo explains, “engaging with each sector of the community was essential to ensuring that the preliminary designs reflected the input of all those who would use the hall in different capacities and at different times of day.

“ ̽��ֱ��women who participated in the focus group commented that this was the first time they had been specifically asked for their input in the design process of a community construction project.”

With only a limited period in Mathare to find out what the community members wanted from their new facility, the team adapted the often time-consuming participatory design model into a very visual process. “Using wall charts, pictures, models and coloured stickers,” lead designer Elizabeth Wagemann explains, “we were able to find out what residents thought of other community centres, the potential risks to the hall, how they hoped to use the facility, and what skills they could contribute to constructing and managing it.”

“There are instances, for example in the neighbouring settlement of Kibera, where community construction projects aren’t used by the residents. ̽��ֱ��participatory design process is essential for fusing the community’s ambitions for the space with the material and organisational resources necessary to realise the project. Involving the community from the beginning is important in ensuring that, once it is built, they will manage, maintain, and above all make use of it,” says Bock.

Supported by the UN-Habitat programme, the project draws on the expertise of the Department of Architecture’s Natural Materials and Structures group where the Cambridge team is based. Led by Michael Ramage, the group focuses on adapting natural materials and traditional methods to contemporary architecture. ̽��ֱ��design team formed by Maximilian Bock, Ana Gatóo and Elizabeth Wagemann was also supported by Research Associate Thomas Reynolds, Masters students Bob Muhia, Katherine Prater, Anna Rowell and Thomas Aquilina, and undergraduate Chloe Tayali, who have each been volunteering around six hours a week on the project.

Bock explains how they have learned that local acceptance of the building materials is of great importance. “From an environmental perspective, wood is a good sustainable material, but among the local community in Mathare, wooden structures are seen as a fire hazard. In contrast, concrete buildings with multiple floors are seen as aspirational,” he says. “One of the challenges for us was to balance the need for environmental sustainability with the need for local acceptance.”

In their completed design for a 15x30m building, made out of gabions filled with local or recycled stone and a floor and roof structure made from bamboo, they have managed to match what the community had imagined as well as what the complex network of other stakeholders want.

One female resident of Mathare 3A commented: “I really like the design as it includes everything our community needs under one roof.”

̽��ֱ��team has also struck up a unique partnership with the Kenyan Forestry Services to provide the sustainable materials for around $20,000 instead of the team’s original estimates of $100,000. “ ̽��ֱ��design could serve as a model for other community centres using locally sourced sustainable building materials,” says Samson Mogire from the Kenya Forestry Research Institute.

As an experimental project, the team feel it has so far been a great success. ̽��ֱ��residents of Mathare are already very engaged and their feedback sessions have been lively with questions about the hall and the construction process. And now as the project moves from phase to phase, it also moves further into the ownership of the community.

Despite its size, Bock states, Mathare 3A has been identified as an area that has previously been overlooked when it comes to development initiatives. It is hoped that projects such as this one will draw attention and further successful development projects to the settlement.

Back in Cambridge, the team has learnt a lot to apply to participatory design projects in the future, and acquired experience designing with materials that will be important for future research. In two years’ time they will carry out an analysis of how the materials are performing and how the hall is being used to see what else can be learned from this process of building from the ground up.

̽��ֱ��project is also part of the EcoHouse Initiative, which drives sustainable urban development in the developing world. EcoHouse was funded by the AngloAmerican Group Foundation. ̽��ֱ��research has been enabled by the Higher Education Innovation Fund.

Inset images: video courtesy of Roadmap to Mathare; a participatory design session in Mathare 3A (Ana Gatóo); the design for the new community centre (Maximilian Bock, Ana Gatóo, Elizabeth Wagemann, Department of Architecture); Mathare 3A (Ana Gatóo).

In a landmark project with UN-Habitat, a team of Cambridge researchers has designed a community centre in one of Kenya’s biggest and oldest slums, and its future users are now raising funds to build it.

̽��ֱ��women commented that this was the first time they had been specifically asked for their input in the design process of a community construction project

Ana Gatóo

Mathare, Nairobi

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Yes

Thinking inside the box

sc604 — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 08:03:18 +0000

It’s a common occurrence: when faced with a problem which is similar to one which has been faced before, most people will default to what worked in the past. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But while this approach often works, it can also limit thinking and prevent alternate, and possibly better, solutions from being considered. In psychology, this phenomenon of being ‘stuck in a rut’ or failing to ‘think outside the box’ is known as fixation, or the ‘Einstellung’ effect.

Fixation occurs in all sorts of settings, such as with the interpretations that scientists make of their data, the decisions that managers make in organisations, and in the diagnoses that physicians make. It’s is also an issue in design and engineering, where knowledge of earlier solutions can inadvertently narrow the range of answers that designers explore when responding to new problems.

Since the phenomenon of design fixation was first demonstrated in experiments over 30 years ago, researchers have worked to understand how it is influenced by the types of example solutions that designers are aware of, the design methods that they use and the interactions that they have with other team members.

“Whether designing a new toy, a new bridge, or a new piece of software, fixation can stop the creative process cold: severely limiting the way in which we see a problem and the variety of solutions we explore,” said Dr Nathan Crilly of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “However, there is still a lack of in-depth research on fixation in the real-world settings that experimental research is meant to simulate. In particular, we have little knowledge of how fixation occurs in professional design projects that have conflicting objectives, long timescales and experienced team members.”

To address this gap in knowledge, Crilly recently conducted a qualitative study with designers working in innovation consultancies about their awareness of fixation and the strategies they use to overcome it. ̽��ֱ��study found that although various formal methods are used to promote creative thinking, reflecting on prior episodes of fixation is the most effective way of guarding against such episodes in the future. ̽��ֱ��analysis may help to build a framework for new strategies to combat design fixation – developing tools and training that help designers to avoid becoming fixated in future. ̽��ֱ��results are published in the journal Design Studies.

What causes fixation varies from person to person, and from project to project, but common factors include a commitment to initial ideas, project constraints that prevent exploration, and organisational cultures that give people ownership of their ideas, which gives them the incentive to defend them.

Common factors that prevent fixation include diverse teams, making and testing models and facilitation of the creative process by people who are familiar with fixation risks. However, experience can be a both a blessing and a curse when it comes to preventing fixation. As designers gain more experience, they learn how certain approaches succeed or fail, with the experience of failure particularly prominent in their minds. This accumulated knowledge can cause designers to become increasingly conservative, with experienced designers sticking to a restricted set of solutions that are known to work.

While experience of failure can lead to fixation, other forms of experience can help to prevent it. For example, by working on a variety of different projects, designers are exposed to the many ways in which any given problem can be solved. This experience of variety acts to remind designers that the current problem they are addressing must have multiple possible solutions too, even when they are seemingly stuck on one way of looking at it.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, as designers accumulate design experience, they also accumulate experience of fixation, either in themselves or in those they interact with. These episodes of blindness might only be recognised in retrospect, but by reflecting on them, designers can learn to recognise their biases and learn to resist them. Over time, designers become better at identifying the situations in which fixation is a risk and better at implementing countermeasures. For example, one of the participants described their own thought process as they work: “You always think your idea’s good, there’s psychology in that … And then you push other ideas to the side, mentally. … [But] the more projects you do then the more you … self-analyse.”

Despite their awareness of the risks of fixation and the steps they take to guard against it, designers also recognise that fixation is a difficult problem to control. In the creative process of developing new products, systems or services, designers must show commitment and persistence in the face of ambiguity and repeated setbacks. This makes it difficult to maintain the levels of openness and flexibility that are required to challenge previously accepted ideas or even ideas that are only just emerging.

This tension between persistence and openness is characteristic of many creative activities, whether in the sciences, the arts or in business. According to Crilly, to tackle this conflict it is important to gain a better understanding of the various creative behaviours that people exhibit and the barriers that block that behaviour.

“By understanding the nature of fixation, we’ll be able to develop the tools and techniques that effectively address it in the contexts where it occurs, and understand how these tools should be presented to the people who will use them,” said Crilly.

̽��ֱ��research has been funded by the UK Physical Sciences & Research Council (EPSRC).

New research into the phenomenon of design fixation – allowing prior experience to blind us to new possibilities – may help in the development of new tools and strategies that help to stimulate the creative process without inadvertently limiting it.

Fixation can stop the creative process cold: severely limiting the way in which we see a problem and the variety of solutions we explore

Nathan Crilly

Ars Electronica

Brain Art

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“You’ve got a friend in me” Bringing designers and animators together

lw355 — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 09:53:13 +0000

̽��ֱ��adventures of Woody and Buzz Lightyear have been charming children – and adults – worldwide for 20 years this year. As well as a razor-sharp, hilarious script, Toy Story was the first full-length feature film made entirely using computer-generated imagery, marking the arrival of a new way of creating visual effects in three dimensions.

But the underlying mathematics that brought the toys to life, and continues to be used by a thriving visual effects industry, has actually been around since the 1960s. It’s embedded in how the automotive, aeronautical and other manufacturing industries design their products.

̽��ֱ��two branches of design – called subdivision surfaces (used by animators) and Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS, used by the manufacturing industry) – have the same mathematical roots, but they have evolved in different directions.

Recently, however, researchers at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory have found a way to reconcile the two divergent paths, enabling product designers to access the easier and less-constraining tools used by the animation industry.

This all sounds like good news for the product designers. But, as lead researcher Neil Dodgson, Professor of Graphics and Imaging, explained, “there is understandable caution. Although the method used by designers gives greater freedom and increased usability, manufacturers have a back catalogue of existing models and around 45 years of experience. A move away from the method used by the manufacturing industry has to be sufficiently advantageous to warrant making.” Dodgson believes that current research is providing that advantage.

̽��ֱ��NURBS method was developed at a time when computers were very limited in their capabilities; by the time the subdivision surface method was commercialised, in the late 1990s, computers had vastly increased memories and processing power.

Essentially, the two methods address different priorities. When animators model three-dimensional surfaces, they want ease of design and their ‘product’ lives only on the screen. An engineer, by contrast, needs a design tool that is mathematically able to handle a wide range of requirements, including specifying cutting paths, mould shapes and objects that can actually be manufactured.

Dodgson’s team’s first breakthrough was to demonstrate, in 2009, a mathematical framework that made NURBS compatible with subdivision methods. Like a ‘bolt-on’ application, NURBS-based design could be imported to subdivision methods at the press of a button.

“It had been thought that the two methods had diverged so much as to be incompatible. Suddenly, we had a method that theoretically offered the manufacturing industry the flexibility the artists enjoy in subdivision. But the ‘theoretically’ is important… in practice there were two stumbling blocks.”

With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, his team has spent the past few years ironing out the problems. Ironically, one of the problems was to make creasing possible.

Take the Mercedes car. Part of its distinctive shape is the presence of two furrowed creases running the length of the hood. In fact, almost all cars have a crease somewhere. ̽��ֱ��NURBS method can accomplish this, and so can the animators’ subdivision method, but the researchers’ NURBS-compatible subdivision method had cases that just did not work. Now, however, the problem of creasing has been solved by Dr Jirí Kosinka.

̽��ֱ��second challenge was to enable ‘trimming’. In NURBS design, holes and complicated joins are often made by mathematically trimming away part of the NURBS surface, which adds a further layer of mathematical complexity on top of the basic NURBS method. Subdivision does not need trimming, because it has the flexibility to allow holes and complex joins within its basic mathematical structure.

PhD student Jingjing Shen has tackled this problem by developing a method that will convert a trimmed NURBS surface to an ordinary, untrimmed, subdivision surface. Her current challenge is to extend this work from ordinary subdivision to NURBS-compatible subdivision.

“So will the industry take up our method? Well, a new piece of research might help persuade them,” said Dodgson. While the researchers in Cambridge were perfecting their conversion method, researchers in Europe and the USA have spent a decade developing a computational approach called isogeometric analysis (IGA) that would allow manufacturers to carry out design and simulation using the same tools.

New designs of products such as cars, planes and ships have to be rigorously tested using simulation software to be sure they will work – and work safely – once manufactured. At the moment, it is necessary to convert data from NURBS into a different geometrical representation for the analysis and testing phase. ̽��ֱ��engineers carrying out the analysis have to take the NURBS designs and then spend weeks or months creating new models that can be fed into the simulation system.

“Although IGA would enormously speed this process up, it cannot be used by product designers because it hasn’t been able to handle trimming,” said Dodgson. “We think we offer a way to avoid this problem.” Dodgson’s Austrian collaborators have recently developed IGA for subdivision surfaces and Dodgson suggests that the trimming problem can be completely avoided with Shen’s method for converting trimmed NURBS to untrimmed subdivision for analysis.

Dodgson points towards the example of a leaky teapot as an indication of how important the link between design and analysis is. When a teapot is designed using NURBS, the cutting and trimming needed to fit a spout to the body of the teapot leaves a tiny gap at one edge of the join. ̽��ֱ��same would be true for fitting the nose of an aeroplane to the body.

“At the production stage, these gaps don’t matter because the gaps are truly tiny. At sub-micrometer in size, they are smaller than the machining tools can cope with, so they simply vanish in the actual product,” he explained.

“But before you get to the production stage, when the design is going through simulation testing, they do matter. Any gap in a teapot would cause it to leak, in theory, and so the software throws up errors.”

Dodgson believes that his conversion method can solve these difficulties: “When you convert from trimmed NURBS to subdivision, the gaps vanish: there is a true mathematical join between previously disjointed surfaces.”

He added: “This, combined with IGA, and subdivision’s increased flexibility and usability, all look very promising for being able to design and analyse automatically, and quickly feed the results back into re-design.” ̽��ֱ��researchers believe that the new process they are developing could make a vast difference to manufacturing design. Or, in the words of Buzz Lightyear, to infinity and beyond.

Inset images: credit: Jirí Kosinka

Aircraft designers and animators use different digital technologies to achieve the same goal: creating a three-dimensional image that can be manipulated. But a new method that links the two could vastly speed up how product designers create and simulate the performance of their products.

Suddenly, we had a method that theoretically offered the manufacturing industry the flexibility the artists enjoy in subdivision

Neil Dodgson

Jirí Kosinka

Reflection lines on a creased structure

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Designing our Tomorrow: Resources to inspire the next generation of engineers

sjr90 — Thu, 08 May 2014 09:16:55 +0000

Designing our Tomorrow (DOT) is a joint project of the Department of Engineering and the Faculty of Education at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Working in partnership with leading engineering companies and local schools, DOT has developed a distinctive teaching approach and a unique set of resources, ‘DOT in a Box’, for teachers to use in Key Stage 3 Design and Technology classes.

̽��ֱ��three boxes being launched today are: Inclusive Design, Sensor Circuits and Picture Holders.

Each box includes a complete set of teaching resources, which would normally cover 12 D & T lessons.

“Inclusive Design” sets the challenge of designing more inclusive cutlery. ̽��ֱ��BOX includes a set of gloves and glasses that mimic the effects of human aging - the gloves restrict dexterity in a similar way to arthritis; while the glasses mimic the way vision declines from the age of 47.

Immersion in these and other creative/analytical tools contained in the BOX become the starting point to authentic engineering design challenges.

To help ensure that the case studies and challenges are authentic, leading engineering companies helped to develop the teaching resources:

Cambridge Design Partnership contributed real-world industry case studies to inspire the students, including the design of Dulux PaintPod, a self-cleaning powered painter; and the Waterpebble, a small device with complex electronics to measure water usage in the shower. “We enjoyed the opportunity to demonstrate how interesting product development and engineering work can be, and share this in the classroom,” a spokesman said.
Heba Bevan, PhD Researcher in Low-power Wireless Sensor Networks at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction, said: “Engaging with students in a creative and relevant way at the age of 13 and 14 is critically important to develop analytical skills and a lifelong love of problem solving. These workshops create a different atmosphere for learning, encouraging teamwork, innovation, and thinking about problems in a multi-dimensional way rather than in a linear input-output manner. I believe that widespread implementation of DOT will lead to an significant increase in the number of students that pursue careers in science and engineering.”

BT, Marshalls and Chesapeake also supported the development of DOT in a Box.

̽��ֱ��project has been piloted in a range of schools, including a number from Cambridgeshire to make sure that the resources work for teachers and pupils.

̽��ֱ��most recent pilot was funded by the Royal Academy of Engineering through its Ingenious grant scheme.

Ian Hosking, Senior Research Associate at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Engineering Design Centre, said: "Everything is designed. It is how we shape the world around us. Designing Our Tomorrow is about equipping students to design their futures and in particular address the global challenges of population ageing and environmental sustainability."

Bill Nichol, Lecturer in Design Education at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education, said “Although 71% of 13 and 14 year olds interviewed for the project said that engineering was ‘cool’, less than half felt challenged by their lessons and only 38% said they were considering a career in design and technology.

“By developing and delivering inspirational resources for teaching Design & Technology at Secondary level, DOT hopes that all Key Stage 3 students will enjoy challenging lessons and be inspired to consider design as a real and rewarding career path.”

New resources designed to inspire the next generation of engineers by bringing authentic engineering challenges into the classroom have been launched today by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

These workshops create a different atmosphere for learning, encouraging teamwork, innovation, and thinking about problems in a multi-dimensional way.

Heba Bevan, PhD Researcher in Low-power Wireless Sensor Networks, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction,

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