Publications
266 results found
Baxter W, Yang, Aurisicchio, et al., 2016, Exploring a human-centred design of possessions, NordDesign 2016
Understanding the idea of possession is essential for creating successful products and services, particularly in digital and access contexts. This paper examines current shortcomings in conceptualising ownership and possessions before presenting a framework for the process of developing user possession. The framework is grounded in psychological ownership theory and informed by interviews with thirteen participants. The theory considers ownership as a mental state in which users feel the object is theirs. The interviews explored this mental state underthree contexts: traditional material possession, digital possession, and access-based possession. This work helps inform the meaning of possessions, and can aid designers and policy makers in how to approach the notion of designing possessions from a human-centered viewpoint.
Baxter W, Aurisicchio M, Childs PRN, 2016, Tear Here: the Impact of Object Transformations on Proper Disposal, IAPRI 20th World Conference on Packaging
Efforts promoting proper disposal of packaging generally focus on infrastructure and messaging. Significantly less attention has been given to how the attributes of packaging can be used to change disposal behaviour. This research shows how changes in packaging attributes (e.g. alterations in shape, colour, or size) influence two disposal behaviours: recycling and littering. Specifically, we use an implicit association test to measure the subconscious tendency to categorize altered objects as trash rather than recycling. The results indicate that 82% or respondents showed at least a slight effect and 53% showed a strong effect towards associating altered objects with waste. Next, we evaluate object transformations on littering behaviour through an observational field study. Observations (N = 2823) indicated that littering is influenced by deformed, torn, disassembled, and partially full packaging. No significant effect was found with regard to packaging that is wet, sticky, has undergone colour changes or that is has remains (e.g. sauce) on it. These findings suggest that the (re)design of packaging can significantly influence proper disposal. Based on this, packaging can be (re)designed in two ways. First, many types of packaging have scripted alterations such as the iconic ‘tear here’ indicator. These can be changed to preserve properties associated with recyclables and non-littering. Second, packaging can be designed so that there are fewer alterations during use. This work can also help identify inherent attributes that encourage proper disposal.
Childs PRN, 2016, Nanoscale thermometry and temperature measurement, RSC Nanoscience and Nanotechnology No. 38, Thermometry at the Nanoscale: Techniques and Selected Applications., Editors: Carlos, Palacio, Publisher: Royal Society of Chemistry, Pages: 3-22, ISBN: 9781849739047
Temperature measurement on the nanoscale is important for applications such as detecting the local temperature changes associated with microelectronics, optics, microfluidics, chemical reaction and biochemical processes, such as living cells and nanomedicine. The drive for information at this scale comes from the electronics industry, materials development and the biosector, combined with rapid development in enabling technologies such as sensor integration and manufacture. The scale of the application and the nature of physical probes distorting the local temperature field due to thermal conduction effects, or optical probes due to thermal radiation heat transfer or energy associated with excitation of a medium, means that great care needs to be taken in order to provide meaningful measurements. This chapter provides an overview of temperature measurement principles along with a review of some of the principal and emerging technologies for nanoscale temperature measurement.
Chen X, Mi P, Childs PRN, et al., 2016, EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF EVAPORATION HEAT TRANSFER INSIDE HORIZONTAL MICRO-FIN TUBES, ASME Summer Heat Transfer Conference, Publisher: AMER SOC MECHANICAL ENGINEERS
Childs PRN, 2016, Nanoscale Thermometry and Temperature Measurement, THERMOMETRY AT THE NANOSCALE: TECHNIQUES AND SELECTED APPLICATIONS, Editors: Carlos, Palacio, Publisher: ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY, Pages: 3-22, ISBN: 978-1-84973-904-7
- Author Web Link
- Cite
- Citations: 11
Southgate DFL, Childs PRN, Bull AMJ, 2016, Sports Innovation, Technology and Research, Publisher: World Scientific, ISBN: 9781786340412
Sports Innovation, Technology and Research gives an insight into recent research and design projects at Imperial College London. It presents the on-going development of a diverse range of areas from elite rowing performance to impact protection to sporting amenities in communities.Also included are descriptions of some of the latest innovations that have been developed as part of the Rio Tinto Sports Innovation Challenge, an initiative that tasked engineering students to design, build and implement Paralympic and other sporting equipment. It offers a glimpse at the breadth of creativity that can be achieved when human centred design is applied to an area such as disabled sport. It also shows the potential that design and engineering have to contribute to healthy lifestyles and the generation of whole new sporting domains.
Yan Y, Childs P, 2015, Creativity tool selection for design engineers in idea generation, International Conference on Engineering Design 2015 (ICED 2015), Pages: 359-370, ISSN: 2226-8790
The aim of this study is to investigate the utility of a framework of selecting suitable creativity tools for designers according to personality attributes and design application. Five intuitive feeling (NF) design engineers who share similar if not identical personality type, were observed while using lateral thinking, which is suggested as one of the suitable creativity tools based on this framework, to produce ideas for a design task. The aim of this study is to understand the creative process that designers go through when using lateral thinking, and the perceived utility of this creativity tool in ideation by this personality group. The analysis of the ideation process revealed creative thinking is an intuitive and associative process where intuition and imagination are frequently employed by the intuitive feeling designers to construct the problem, trigger ideas or illustrate ideas. The subjects’ positive evaluations towards the use of lateral thinking in ideation supported its utility, but factors such as ease of use and previous experience in using creativity tools should be taken into account when applying the framework.
Childs PRN, pennington M, 2015, Industrial, and innovation design engineering, Impact of Design Research on Industrial Practice Tools, Technology, and Training, Editors: Chakrabarti, Lindemann, Publisher: Springer, Pages: 133-149, ISBN: 9783319194493
The Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) double masters programme, run jointly by the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London is now in its 34th year. Originally called Industrial Design Engineering the aim of the pro-gramme was to provide an educational pathway for taking graduate engineers and produce a new type of industrial designer. The two-year full-time programme in-volves a series of themed but student-directed projects in the first year, prior to major group and solo projects in the second year. This chapter introduces the orig-inal purpose of the programme, documents some of the transitions as well as providing a description of the current format of the programme, with a particular focus on addressing the needs of industry and those of individual students and graduates, and the sometime tensions between these. The Innovation Design Engi-neering is characterised by a ‘borrowed discourse’ with no distinct disciplinary language owned by the community at the moment. This is manifest in the exten-sive engagement by the students in their collaborations across the Departments and Research Centres at Imperial and their willingness to explore diverse innova-tion spaces. Traditionally graduates have gained subsequent employment in corpo-rations and design consultancies. The last five years has seen a significant shift with the greater proportion of graduates setting up their own businesses and con-sultancies on completion of the programme.
Baxter W, Childs PRN, Aurisicchio M, 2015, Using psychological ownership to guide strategies for slower consumption, Product Lifetimes And The Environment (PLATE), Publisher: Nottingham Trent University
Baxter WL, Aurisicchio M, Childs PRN, 2015, A psychological ownership approach to designing object attachment, Journal of Engineering Design, Vol: 26, Pages: 140-156, ISSN: 0954-4828
The mental state in which an individual claims an object as theirs is called psychological ownership. Psychological ownership is associated with motives, routes, affordances, and outcomes directly linked to attachment. This research introduces psychological ownership in the context of designing object attachment and identifies affordance principles that help facilitate it. A framework presenting the motives for and routes to psychological ownership is proposed to provide a holistic understanding of object attachment. In the framework each route to psychological ownership, that is, control, intimate knowledge, and self-investment, has a corresponding class of affordances. Overall a total of 16 affordance principles are identified through contextual inquiry with 4 objects (a car, a mobile phone, a pair of shoes, and a park bench). Previous studies have identified various elements of this framework but have fallen short of clearly defining and relating the motives, routes, and affordances to psychological ownership identified here. These affordance principles are readily mapped to experience design models and provide a practical resource for designers. Together, the framework and the affordances inform design decisions and move towards a prescriptive design method for facilitating object attachment.
Baxter WL, Aurisicchio M, Childs PRN, 2015, Materials, use and contaminated interaction, Materials & Design, Vol: 90, Pages: 1218-1227, ISSN: 0261-3069
Materials help communicate meaning to users. This meaning changes with time as the object transforms due to use. Through a two-phase study, this research develops new understanding of how people appraise used objects and the mechanisms driving contamination—the aversion that one has towards engaging with used objects. In the first phase, observations of indicators of use were collected from participants in order to develop a general typology for indicators of use and deduce the sensorial properties of used objects. In the second phase, these observations were analysed to isolate the data, which caused feelings of aversion. The subset of observations marked with aversion was labelled as contaminated. Further analysis revealed three mechanisms driving contamination—hygiene, utility, and territory—presented together as the HUT contamination model. Sensorial properties from the first study were mapped to contamination mechanisms and properties most frequently contributing to contamination were identified. The properties contributing to the various contamination mechanisms differ significantly. Hygienic contamination typically results from transient object states, utility contamination from permanent changes to object characteristics, and territorial contamination from object settings and contextual factors. As expected, the majority of the indicators contributing to contamination are related to material properties. This work acts as a link between material selection and contaminated interaction with used objects.
Michalakoudis I, Childs P, Aurisiccio M, et al., 2015, Using Functional Analysis Diagrams as a Design Tool, ASME 2014 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition
This paper presents the process and outcomes of the pilot introduction of Functional Analysis Diagram (FAD) as a design assist tool within a Small Medium Enterprise (SME). During this study, two sets of Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (PFMEA) sessions were conducted using the traditional and the proposed, FAD assisted (FMEA-FAD) method developed, aiming to optimize the failure mode selection phase of the process. The results have shown that the FMEA-FAD method has significantly improved the efficiency and the effectiveness of the process. They were also consistent with previous research, suggesting that FAD is relatively easy to use, supports high levels of understanding through functional decomposition, and can be used as an interdisciplinary communication platform (Aurisicchio et al., 2011). Given the resource limitations in SMEs, such an efficiency improvement could be vital for a resource intensive process such as FMEA.FAD discourages disciplinary terminologies in function descriptions; instead, the functions can be represented simply by the combination of an active verb and a measurable noun. Breaking the system down into lower level subsystems and studying the functional interrelationships between system components, can help us understand the overall system functions (Pahl et al., 1996). As market needs are mostly determined based on past user experience (Norman, 2010), innovation commonly occurs incrementally. Although this practice reduces risks — being, as it is, based on already tested platforms, incremental innovation often leads to the retention of superfluous components and outdated technologies. The process of functional modeling prompts the users to question the existence of every component and feature within a product or process, potentially leading to a radical reassessment of a design against the need which created it.
Childs PRN, Garvey B, 2015, Using morphological analysis to tackle uncertainty at the design phase for a safety critical application, PROPULSION AND POWER RESEARCH, Vol: 4, Pages: 1-8, ISSN: 2212-540X
- Author Web Link
- Cite
- Citations: 6
Childs PRN, Linpinski TB, Holloway M, 2014, Robot for spraying insulation, GB2514405 (A)
A robot 1 for spraying insulation (such as polyurethane), comprising an elongate chassis 3 carrying a spray nozzle 4, a source 16 of spray thermal insulation foam coupled to the nozzle, and at least one wheel 2 mounted on the chassis arranged to drive the robot over a surface on which it is located. There may be a bearing surface 7 in the form of a hemisphere which is dragged over the surface over which the robot moves. The foam source may be a supply pipe and there may also be wires 15 to provide power to the robot. The robot is particularly suited for working in an underfloor cavity. Also claimed is a method of using such a robot.
MASEN M, BRAND A, Yan Y, et al., 2014, Demanding it all from the novice mechanical engineer through design and manufacture, INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION(E&PDE 2014), Pages: 669-674
A core design and manufacture group project has been run in the second year of the Mechanical Engineering undergraduate programme at Imperial College for over two decades where students are required to develop highly loaded rotating machinery, such as a pump or a winch, early in the second year of their undergraduate study. The aim has been to provide a practical opportunity to apply and develop skills learnt in the first year and to provide the experience of manufacturing, operating and testing what has been designed. While these projects have been a mainstay of the educational experience for many years, there has been a persistent concern that the projects are deterministic and highly constrained. The course team and student body have debated and now implemented a new project that is both less constrained and more appealing to the student cohort. In this project the students are tasked with developing a transmission for an electric scooter. The project has resulted in a significant diversity in designs and, importantly, the students embracing the curriculum content with fervour. The challenge still requires attention to the application of fundamental mechanical engineering principles such as transmissions, solid mechanics and materials, but also focuses on electronic control systems, battery and motor characteristics, high current and power, health and safety and a range of transferable skills. The multi-disciplinary nature of the project combined with an appealing application has resulted in a highly engaged year group. This paper reports on the project and includes an analysis of the diversity of designs and student effort.
Yan Y, Jiang P, Squires A, et al., 2014, Ill-defined Engineering Problem Solving Empirical Study, Singapore, International Conference on Advanced Design Research and Education 2014(ICADRE14), Pages: 144-149
Yan Y, Jiang P, Squires A, et al., 2014, Stimulation of Creative Output By Means of the Use of Creativity Tools – A Case Study, INTERNATIONAL DESIGN CONFERENCE - DESIGN 2014
In this paper, a theoretic framework was proposed on how to select the most appropriate creativity tools to stimulate designers' creativity in terms of the nature of the design task to be tackled, and the personality traits and preferences of the designers. This is illustrated in an engineering problem solving case study. The results were overall positive, many and diverse ideas were obtained although designers reported few challenges when using the creativity tools. The findings address the need to carefully choose creativity tools suited to designers' personality and the type of design task.
Lipinski T, Lee SH, Childs PRN, 2014, Domestic Passive Ventilation with Heat Recovery (PVHR): Performance criteria, tests and operational variations
Historically, housing in general has had low levels of insulation and poor airtightness. Although this characteristic was not energy efficient it provided a plentiful supply of fresh air. Over the last twenty years insulation and airtightness of homes has received attention due to a global drive towards energy efficiency and carbon emissions reduction. Since a large portion of energy used in homes is utilised for comfort heating or cooling, the focus has been on improvements to insulation and airtightness in order to decrease the dwellings' total energy use, as well as ensuing carbon emissions. However, a large body of research shows that airtight houses require adequate air management (controlled ventilation) to prevent the occurrence of poor indoor air quality which can contribute to illness such as asthma as well as the so-called sick building syndrome. Introduction of controlled ventilation presents another energy related challenge - fresh air introduced to homes needs to be re-heated (or cooled) adding to energy use and negating most gains resulting from improved insulation. Even if Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR) is used, the systems use electricity and require maintenance to operate, adding to cost and reducing energy savings. Thus an air management system that can improve building ventilation, prevent excessive heat loss and use no energy in operation is a desirable option. The Ventive PVHR technology, described in this paper, can be such an option that provides efficient ventilation with heat recovery and no electricity use. This system utilises both thermal buoyancy and pressure caused by the wind-driven Pitot effect of a cowl as its two driving forces. Advances in heat exchanger design resulting in interleaved coaxial heat exchanger units allow the thermal energy of the outlet air to be exchanged to the cooler inlet air with consistently high efficiency and negligible pressure drop. Thus heat loss due to air ventilation can be minimised a
Childs PRN, 2014, Engineering Tolerancing, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 761-796, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
Childs PRN, 2014, Specification, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 25-49, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
Childs PRN, 2014, Springs, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 625-675, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
- Author Web Link
- Cite
- Citations: 3
Childs PRN, 2014, Clutches and Brakes, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 513-564, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
- Author Web Link
- Cite
- Citations: 1
Childs PRN, 2014, Bevel Gears, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 403-438, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
Childs PRN, 2014, Spur and Helical Gear Stressing, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 367-402, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
Childs PRN, 2014, Shafts, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 255-315, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
- Author Web Link
- Cite
- Citations: 1
Childs PRN, 2014, Gears, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 317-366, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
Childs PRN, 2014, Rolling Element Bearings, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 201-253, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
Childs PRN, 2014, Journal Bearings, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 139-200, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
- Author Web Link
- Cite
- Citations: 1
Childs PRN, 2014, Ideation, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 51-119, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
Childs PRN, 2014, Machine Elements, MECHANICAL DESIGN ENGINEERING HANDBOOK, Publisher: ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV, Pages: 121-137, ISBN: 978-0-08-097759-1
This data is extracted from the Web of Science and reproduced under a licence from Thomson Reuters. You may not copy or re-distribute this data in whole or in part without the written consent of the Science business of Thomson Reuters.