Are we under too much pressure to be healthy?

Today’s first round of dissertation seminars with 3rd year students proved as interesting as ever and it was good to get an idea of the topics that seem to be of most concern this year. Each year it seems a particular topic is popular – in the past this might have been the First Things First Manifesto, design ethics or manipulation of images in design. This year it’s sustainability, and that to me is a Good Thing.

A couple of students want to look at how sustainability can be made “sexy”, rather than constantly being rammed down people’s throats as a do or die attitude.

Coincidentally, when I got home, I read this press release about research being carried out by a PhD student at the University of Nottingham:

Are consumers under too much pressure to be healthy? Has the global financial crisis sidelined the promotion of sustainable food? And how much do consumers actually know or care about the subject?
These are some of the questions being asked exclusively of people in Nottinghamshire in a major new study, by a researcher at The University of Nottingham.

PhD candidate Angie Clonan, from the Division of Nutritional Sciences, will send out 2,500 questionnaires in an unprecedented survey that will find out what consumers really think about sustainable foods.

‘It’s accepted that food choices are difficult enough,’ said Ms. Clonan. ‘There are so many things consumers have to weigh up when food shopping, from cost to convenience.

‘Sustainability is justifiably important, but issues like the drive for more organic foods and ethical trading are placing even more pressure on consumers. For this reason it’s important to find out what people actually think of sustainability in order to better achieve it.’

The official definition of food sustainability – set out by Sustain – is food that is accessible, healthy, nutritious, respects the environment and biodiversity, promotes the use of fair trading practices and respects the rights of workers throughout the food-chain.

‘Understanding sustainability is clearly important, and no less so than in food production and consumption,’ said Ms. Clonan. ‘It is important to assess the environmental impact of various processes, but you can’t do all of that without taking people’s attitudes into account.’

The research will delve into several key issues including the current level of awareness people have about sustainable food, the importance of socio-demographic issues, links between shopping habits and attitudes to sustainability and the perspective of healthy eaters.

‘This is the first survey of this kind that takes as its lead people’s experiences and views on sustainability. For that reason it’s very important that people fill it in if they receive one.’

The surveys will be sent out to a random sample of people taken from the electoral roll. One of the respondents will win a £100 Marks & Spencer voucher.

The questions are simply laid out and easy to answer. They cover shopping habits, attitudes, dietary information, shopping behaviour and socio-demographic information.

For more information visit:
http://www.fcrn.org.uk/featuredOrgs/features/index.htm

To listen to a full University of Nottingham Podcast interview with Ms. Clonan follow the link below. The audio is available to listen to from

Educational Software Bargains

MacUpdate have released their latest software bundle and it focuses on tools of use to students.

Among the titles of particular interest to anyone writing or researching essays and dissertations are DevonAgent, which is quite a useful tool for online research (I’ve found it great for finding links between different topics) and BookEnds which helps compile bibliographies.
A word processor, Mellel, offers an alternative to Word that promises to be helpful in compiling long documents with different sections.

As more bundles are sold, other programs get unlocked and MacJournal has just become available – another useful tool this time for keeping notes and ideas.

Highly recommended – all these titles would cost $600 (£300+) but are available for just $49.99 (£25+)

Click the ad below for more details or visit the MacUpdate promo page.

var mu_affiliate = 5321;

Understanding research methods

If you’re developing a proposal for a report, dissertation or design project at university, you need to think about the research methods you’ll employ. Will you need to use questionnaires? Observe people? Conduct interviews?
And what about the question itself? Is it do-able in the time you’ve got? Does it go in to the right depth?

These three books are worth taking a look at. Each is about 100 pages long and gets straight to the point. “Developing A Questionnaire”, for example, highlights the pros and cons of this often misused method, and helps you draft and refine questions based on what it is you’re hoping to find out.

Having seen many badly written questionnaires and surveys, I can’t recommend this book in particular highly enough. The Gillham books have been written based in part on feedback from students at Glasgow School of Art, so their application to design is assured.

All three books should be available from your library (there are several copies of each at The University of Dundee, for example) or you can buy them from Amazon or order them from your local bookshop. If you’re looking in the library, the Dewey reference is 0001.433 G479 for “Developing a Questionnaire” and “Case Study Research Method” (both by Bill Gillham) and 001.433 A 569 for “Research Questions” (by Richard Andrews).

Don’t start a research-based project without checking these out.

• Andrews, Richard (2003) Research Questions, London (New York), Continuum Books
• Gillham, Bill (2000) Case Study Research Methods, London (New York), Continuum Books
• Gillham, Bill (2007) Developing a Questionnaire (2nd Edition), London (New York), Continuum Books

Also look out for Action Research, Ethics in Research, Using Focus Groups in Research, and The Research Interview, all from Continuum

Indie Fever

Michiel van Meeteren has published a study of the Macintosh independent programming community as a PDF. It looks like it might be interesting to anyone involved in programming, but also has wider implications for the studies of communities of practice and how people share knowledge to improve their own skills – in other words ‘design thinking’ in general.

Excerpted from Michiel’s website: “
 

‘Indie Fever’ is the first result of a multi-year human geography research program to investigate the social and economical world of so-called ‘Indie’ developers on the Macintosh platform.  ‘Indie’ is the self-chosen nickname of software developers that serve worldwide markets from the Internet, hold their artistic values in high esteem and celebrate their ability to make high quality software as small companies.  [...]

Indies have organized themselves informally but strongly in a virtual community.  Although they are scattered over several continents, they continuously interact over the Internet, share rumors and code, and discuss business and private interests as if they were coworkers while –technically– they are competitors.  They share a common culture which is intertwined with the history of the platform they develop for and the Cocoa programming environment in particular. [...] it analyses how Indies sustain and reproduce their particular culture primarily through online means, something that is argued to be rather difficult in the social-scientific discourse.

Almost 50 hours of interviews were recorded for Indie Fever.  These interviews were combined with the results of extensive data mining of blogs and other online resources.  The resulting thesis focusses on both the cultural and economical aspects of the Mac Indie world and the ways these reinforce each other by applying theories of, amongst others, Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Porter, Norbert Elias, Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell.”

Check out the site for a link to the PDF (I would link here but I suspect Michiel would like to track numbers)

Are you an undergraduate researcher?

Many undergraduate students undertake research – in fact it’s a defining feature of degree-level study. But I know from talking with colleagues that we often find it frustrating that so much of this work, whether it be looking at new techniques in the studio or surveying a field of knowledge for a dissertation, goes unseen by anyone except the student and their tutors.

I’ve read many dissertations that, with a little editing, would be publishable either in a magazine/newspaper or even in an academic journal. Despite my best intentions each year to gather the best bits together in some online collection, it never gets done.

But if you are an undergraduate, or teach them, there’s a new outlet for this work:

Reinvention: a Journal of Undergraduate Research is a new, online, peer-reviewed journal, dedicated to the publication of high-quality undergraduate student research. The journal welcomes academic articles from all disciplinary areas.

All articles in this journal undergo rigorous peer review, based on initial editor screening and refereeing by two anonymous referees.

The journal is produced, edited and managed by students and staff at Oxford Brookes University and the University of Warwick. It is published bi-annually and only houses papers written by undergraduate students. The launch issue of the journal contained only papers from the Reinvention Centre’s two host institutions, Warwick and Oxford Brookes Universities. Volume 1, Issue 1 includes a ‘guest’ paper from an undergraduate student studying outside the Reinvention Centre’s two host institutions and from Volume One Issue Two, to be published in October 2008, the journal will be open to submissions from all undergraduate students in the UK and overseas.

Reinvention is published through the Reinvention Centre for Undergraduate Research, a collaborative Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning based at the University of Warwick and Oxford Brookes University. The aim of the Reinvention Centre is to put research at the heart of the undergraduate curriculum and to integrate undergraduate students into the research cultures of their subjects and universities.

I took a look at the contents list for the first issue and it’s an interesting (and impressive) mix:

• Prostitution and the Nineteenth Century: In Search of the ‘Great Social Evil’
• The Educational Experiences of Gypsy Travellers: The Impact of Cultural Dissonance
• Rape and Sexual Assault in Japan: Potential Gender Bias in Pre-Trial Procedures
• The Elusive Search for ‘Truth’: Oliver Stone, Postmodernism and History
• Overspill Policy and the Glasgow Slum Clearance Project in the Twentieth Century: From One Nightmare to Another?
• The Reception of Literature in France during the Revolution: An Analysis of Reviews of Women Writers in the Mercure de France, 1791-1795
• Governmental Reform in Developing Countries: External Conditionality versus Peer Pressure. The Case of Kenya
• Representations of Reality in a Court of Law

It would be great to see some undergraduate research in there from the fields of design, craft etc…

Colour Conference

Colour is one of those subjects that annually comes up as a design dissertation topic. Trouble is, I’ve never read a good one – there’s something about it that seems to encourage people to go no further than quoting some self-help books and repeating the information that red is lucky in China and that green is very calming. No mention anywhere of semiotics, which is odd given that it’s one of the core underlying theories of visual communication.

So if you’re thinking of tackling colour (it’s an interesting subject, after all) and are near Edinburgh in October, here’s an event you might want to go to:

Colour in Art, Design and Nature takes place on Friday October 24th 2008 and brings together leading speakers from the worlds of both art and science. It is to be held at the James Clerk Maxwell Science Centre, Edinburgh Academy (Maxwell’s school), followed by a reception at Maxwell’s birthplace, 14 India Street. The programme for the meeting can be found here.

In addition to the oral presentations there will be posters from visual artists, designers and scientists, describing their work. To just register for the meeting contact the conference secretary Leanne O’Donnell L.O’Donnell@ed.ac.uk or Tel 0131 651 7067. The registration fee is £35, including lunch, refreshments and reception.

According to the organisers, summaries of the posters will be published, together with the papers for the oral presentations, in a full colour special issue of Design and Nature.

Fantastic New Google Spreadsheet Feature: Forms

If you’re wanting to do a survey and want to collate the result in a spreadsheet, apparently

Google Docs now have a forms feature that looks rather useful (and free!)

Google Docs Blog:

Create a form in a Google Docs spreadsheet and send it out to anyone with an email address. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. Creating the form is easy: start with a spreadsheet to get the form, or start by creating the form and you’ll get the spreadsheet automatically. Responses are automatically added to your spreadsheet.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes:

I just gave it a shot, and it’s amazingly simple. I’m not sure it could be any easier than this to create surveys or signups. This sort of collaborative feature simply isn’t possible with desktop spreadsheets like Excel and Numbers.

He also says

Using Firefox, if I keep the spreadsheet document open, I can watch the results come in live.

More comment from technology writer Ian Betteridge.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Longitude – product design from the 18th century

In a seminar today I recommended the book ‘Longitude’ as a good example of how a real problem (the deaths of sailors and the risks involved in ocean travel) was solved through what we would now call ‘design thinking’.

As well as being a fascinating account of a problem we probably never really thought of before, it’s also a very good book – highly readable and enjoyable, as well as being informative.

In particular, I was trying to steer students away from the usual examples of ‘social technology’ (internet-based ones) because it distorted the idea of what we mean by ‘social’ – there’s a difference between sociable and social, and it was the former they tended to talk about.
I suggested thinking about the telephone, the telegraph, railways and so on. But the concept of a ‘social technology’ is one that generates its own set of practices and behaviours, bodies of knowledge, mini cultures. It’s not necessarily to do with linking people together.

In a way the internet and so-called social networking distort our idea of social technology and focussing on things we take for granted (printing, say) is probably a bigger help in understanding things like Facebook, Twitter and so on than trying to understand them directly.
And the job for designers, and design thinkers, is to think beyond the product or service, beyond the hype, and focus instead on the very real social and cultural effects that design has on people.

You can purchase the book from Amazon using the link below or clicking on the cover image above. Highly recommended if you want to get away from talk of MySpace and the iPod and think about something a little bit different.

Essay writing advice

I haven’t looked at all these so can’t verify their usefulness, but they may be worth a look.

Essay and study skills advice videos

This one has some good advice:

VideoJug: Essay Writing

Using Word to write essays

VideoJug: How To Use Office 2007 To Write A Great Essay

None of this guarantees a good grade, but those of you using Word 2007 on Windows or Word 2008 on a Mac (due for release this week with similar features) may want to check out some of the tools mentioned here.
The citation tool is particularly useful.