Emma Jefferies’s research while affiliated with Northumbria University and other places

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Publications (8)


Transformations: 7 Roles to Drive Change by Design
  • Book
  • Full-text available

September 2017

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3,323 Reads

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33 Citations

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Emma Jefferies

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Kamil Michlewski

Design is now the key driver of innovation and change within organisations across the globe. Learn how, when and why to use design to drive change in your organisation. TRANSFORMATIONS: 7 Roles to Drive Change by Design documents how design is being used to support change across different organisations, countries and sectors, sharing the stories of experts in their fields at varying stages of their transformative journeys. We feature 13 organisations including Steelcase, Spotify, Deloitte Australia, SAP, Telstra, US Department of Veterans A airs and Accenture & Fjord.

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Brave New Worlds: Transitions in Design Practice

April 2014

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221 Reads

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3 Citations

This paper describes transitions currently happening in design practices engaged in service innovation, service design and service futures. It is the result of an empirical research investigation into how design practice is changing and offers insights into four key transitions that have emerged arising from the research. The research imperative is to understand how the roles of design and designers are responding to shifting societal, economic, political and ecological needs. The research investigation involved interviewing and drawing insights from three different communities. In total we interviewed 25 design agencies, five organisations embedding design and 12 design academics. Nine out of the 25 are service design companies, ten are working in the related field of strategy and design innovation and the rest are in other related design disciplines. Although service design companies only form a third of the case studies, it is important that service design looks outside its (blurry) professional boundaries to inform how their own practices can remain relevant to our times. The originality and richness of the research investigation lies in investigating transitions happening in innovative practices that are diverse in terms of disciplines, geography and their approaches, in order to capture how design is changing within different contexts. This research is significant in that it highlights four key transitions happening in both developed markets as well as in emerging markets. These transitions are: 1) The expansion of the designer’s role to include new positions as facilitators, educators/capability builders and entrepreneurs. 2) More prominent collaborations by designers with end-users, other designers and professionals from other disciplines. 3) The diversification of business models of a design practice away from a consultancy model. 4) The expectation and requirement of designers to externalise and demonstrate value quickly, clearly and convincingly. The case studies have been compiled into a book, Design Transitions, recently published in 2013. The focus of this paper is to articulate these four transitions in more depth and explore their implications for service design practice.


Design Transitions

September 2013

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55 Reads

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7 Citations

Design Transitions presents 42 unique and insightful stories of how design is changing around the world. Sixteen countries are represented from the perspectives of three different communities: design agencies, organisations embedding design; and design academics. Our journey has taken us across the globe in search of the most innovative design practitioners, and their answers to the question 'How are design practices changing?' From small practices to vast corporations, the renowned to the lesser known: these are the stories of people working at the fringes of the traditional disciplines of design. They have opened up their design worlds to reveal the methods, tools and thinking behind their inspirational work.


Helping design educators foster collaborative learning amongst design students

July 2011

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6 Reads

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1 Citation

Iridescent

This paper discusses the development of online teaching resources that enable design educators to foster collaborative learning amongst students in the design disciplines. These online teaching resources will be made available through the Design Collaboration website (http://www.designcollaboration.org). This website was recently set up by Northumbria University, a UK based institution, to provide an online resource for design educators wishing to develop collaborative pedagogies in design education. It currently contains case studies of collaborative student projects but lacks practical teaching resources. As a result, a research project was set up to compliment the current case studies by creating a suite of design-specific tools and resources that will help foster team management and development. Although various institutions have addressed the subject of group work and collaborative learning, there has been no online resource dedicated to the development of practical teaching tools to help design students work and learn together. This paper focuses on showcasing the range of teaching tools and resources developed through classroom-based trials. These resources have been developed specifically in consultation with Northumbria University's design educators and trialled with undergraduate and postgraduate students from different design disciplines. In addition, issues surrounding the translation of these tools into a practical, easy to use and accessible in an online format is discussed. The ICOGRADA World Design Congress 2009 Education Conference is the ideal international platform to share these tools with the wider design education community. More importantly, we hope to grow the website by encouraging other design educators to submit case studies to the website, using it not only as a means of sharing good practice but also as a tool for reflection. The research value is two-fold (a) translating implicit knowledge of collaborative learning into a practical teaching resource and, (b) helping tutors improve their teaching practice, by linking the teaching resource to real experiences through case studies and interviews.


Helping design educators foster collaborative learning amongst design students

January 2010

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74 Reads

Iridescent

This paper discusses the development of online teaching resources that enable design educators to foster collaborative learning amongst students in the design disciplines. These online teaching resources will be made available through the Design Collaboration website. This website was recently set up by Northumbria University, a UK based institution, to provide an online resource for design educators wishing to develop collaborative pedagogies in design education. It currently contains case studies of collaborative student projects but lacks practical teaching resources. As a result, a research project was set up to compliment the current case studies by creating a suite of design-specific tools and resources that will help foster team management and development. Although various institutions have addressed the subject of group work and collaborative learning, there has been no online resource dedicated to the development of practical teaching tools to help design students work and learn together. This paper focuses on showcasing the range of teaching tools and resources developed through classroom-based trials. These resources have been developed specifically in consultation with Northumbria University's design educators and trialled with undergraduate and postgraduate students from different design disciplines. In addition, issues surrounding the translation of these tools into a practical, easy to use and accessible in an online format is discussed. The Icograda World Design Congress 2009 Education Conference is the ideal international platform to share these tools with the wider design education community. More importantly, we hope to grow the website by encouraging other design educators to submit case studies to the website, using it not only as a means of sharing good practice but also as a tool for reflection. The research value is two-fold (a) translating implicit knowledge of collaborative learning into a practical teaching resource and, (b) helping tutors improve their teaching practice, by linking the teaching resource to real experiences through case studies and interviews.


Devising a Method for Improving Design Education of Digital Visual Skills

January 2007

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7 Reads

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4 Citations

Journal of Visual Literacy

Digital tools have given designers greater flexibility in design practice. However, it is argued that the development of the visual skills required to work on a screen-based medium is being overlooked. This may be due to a tacit assumption by design educators that their students already possess these skills. The intention is to describe the initial stages of a Doctoral investigation, giving an account of the development of a method to improve design education for visual skills. It is anticipated that the study will lead to an improved method for fostering visual skills in design education.


Fig. 1. Digital experiment material assessing visual discrimination ability by asking participants to select a suitable contrast for the image.
Fig. 2. Digital experiment material assessing visual association ability by asking participants to select a suitable contrast match to the image provided.
Fig. 3. Paper experiment material assessing visual discrimination ability by asking participants to select a suitable contrast for the image.
Fig. 4. Paper experiment material assessing visual association ability by asking participants to select a suitable contrast match to the image provided.
What visual literacy is not!

66 Reads

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1 Citation

This paper intends to help design educators reach a more informed understanding of visual literacy by stating what we already know it is not, in order to promote discussion on how it can be fostered. This paper is based on Jefferies' PhD research from an empirical visual experiment carried out on a wide range of design practitioners, design students and the general public. Specific terms of influence such as 'fixed', 'cross-disciplines' and 'accessibility' were highlighted for discussion when considering what visual literacy is not, and were consequently used to frame the problem. When considering each of these influences in terms of seeing; (a) Viewing visual language as a 'fixed' vocabulary does not allow for each working context to have its own visual value system. (b) Literacy of 'cross-disciplines' may not enable a way of seeing to be transferred between each design discipline. (c) 'Accessibility' in terms of a student's ability to read or write an image can not be determined from a designer's final product, as each individual and context is different. It is proposed that debating the three identified areas will heighten design educators' awareness and provide a valuable basis for future pedagogy practices.


Fostering Design Students' Visual Engagement using Personas

8 Reads

Visual awareness cannot be explicitly taught, as it is a subjective and an implicit skill 1 . However, it can be developed through design students reflecting upon their visual experience, to understand how they have made visual judgments and identifying areas to aid improved visual engagement. It is proposed that the development of students' visual engagement, their ability to question their visual usage, can be fostered. A method to foster design students' visual engagement emerged from three action research projects with first year undergraduate Multimedia Design students at Northumbria University. Over the course of three projects they were asked to maintain weekly reflective logs which were analysed in conjunction with semi-structured interviews and ethnographic research in a studio setting. This informed the development of three levels of visual engagement, communicated to students through the creation of personas. These were used in the design 'crit' where the students presented their work as a method of peer and tutor assessment, allowing criticism to be directed towards an external persona rather than towards the students themselves. If students are to self-reflect on visual experiences and transform their visual practices any method of fostering visual engagement must draw on design students' social experience, as well as assisting them to take ownership of their learning needs.

Citations (4)


... • Individual Differences: Individual differencessuch as personality, abilities, knowledge, and experiencesimpact how people solve problems and collaborate in design processes. This reflects the importance of a personalized approach to design education, as suggested by Yee, Jefferies, and Michlewski (2017). ...

Reference:

Integrative Reasoning Framework
Transformations: 7 Roles to Drive Change by Design

... Se ha optado por mantener la versión original de las citas -tanto las que aparecen en las tablas como en el artículo-para poder analizar los matices de la terminología escogida por sus autoras y autores. Barnhurst, 1987;Metallinos, 1993;Carlson, 1997;Left & Gazda, 1999;Velders, 2000;Chauvin, 2003;Curtiss, 2004;Tannenbaum & Goldstein, 2005;Mullen, 2006;Braden, 2007;Dake, 2007;Avgerinou, 2007;Brill, & Branch, 2007;Pettersson, 2007;Jefferies, 2007;Felten, 2008;Avgerinou, 2009;Yeh, 2010;Little et al., 2010;Lu, 2010 El primer elemento que conviene destacar de la Tabla 3 es que del total de 156 referencias consultadas únicamente son 25 las definiciones que pueden considerarse diferentes. El segundo tiene que ver con el impacto experimentado por dichas definiciones. ...

Devising a Method for Improving Design Education of Digital Visual Skills
  • Citing Article
  • January 2007

Journal of Visual Literacy

... Indeed designers are no strangers to saying yes to a job – and then figuring out the 'how' later (Murphy, 2010) In order to provide an unknown service, or develop a co-designed capability for a client, they may collaborate and test the water before committing to providing a new or augmented service, and especially before adapting their business model. In response to this, there have been evolutions of more agile and flexible partnerships which are temporary or short term (Yee, Jeffries and Tan, 2014). The features of these design business models can vary hugely; they can be temporary or experimental, they can be project-based, or even collaborating with a competitor to bring a joined-up comprehensive offer. ...

Brave New Worlds: Transitions in Design Practice

... Some researchers already claim that the role of designers is becoming more diverse (Polaine, Løvlie, & Reason, 2013;Stickdorn, Hormess, Lawrence, & Schneider, 2018;Tan, 2012;Yee, 2013). Next to becoming a specialist in service design methods, tools and practices, the role of a service designer in industry is often associated with both the management and facilitation of projects (Miettinen, 2016;Minder, 2019) and the collaborative orchestration of different human perspectives in the design process of services. ...

Design Transitions
  • Citing Book
  • September 2013