Phd

I was reflecting after the Experio Seminar last Friday, something that I have been thinking and writing about for a few years is perhaps worth formalising. Two distinct research traditions have...

Three years have passed since the concentrated sequence of posts that built this series' formal apparatus - conceptual spaces, state spaces, graphs, promises, statecharts, service grammar - and...

This is the fifth post in The Contested Prototype series. The first post described the practical situation; the second developed a prototyping typology grounded in Floyd (1984) and the Scandinavian...

The previous post traced connections between three uses of "frame" - Fillmore's linguistic frames, Goffman's situational frames, and Dorst's design frames - and concluded by noting that framing as a...

The word "frame" appears across multiple intellectual traditions, each using it to describe how structure shapes meaning and possibility. In the domain engineering vocabulary, frames are domain...

In the previous post, I argued that the "good services are verbs" heuristic, while valuable, is incomplete. Verbs alone cannot capture the material infrastructure, institutional rules, practice...

The previous post argued that the "good services are verbs" heuristic, while valuable as a corrective to bureaucratic naming, obscures as much as it reveals. The noun/verb distinction in service...

This series explores how linguistic structure shapes the way both human designers and computational agents understand and describe the abstract entities that services are. The connection to the...

This post was originally written in November 2024. It has since been revised to include cross-references to the companion Language, Frames, and Domain Understanding series - on case grammar,...

The posts in this series have traced a set of connections between the systems design literature - explored on a recent Linköping University PhD course, and the Tavistock tradition of systems...

The Scandinavian participatory design tradition has, over half a century, developed a compelling account of what design can contribute to democratic deliberation and social change. From the workplace...

The aesthetic disruption literature in service design - developed most fully by Vink, Wetter-Edman and Blomkvist (2018) and Wetter-Edman, Vink and Blomkvist (2017) - makes a compelling case that...

Jones's seminar - as part of the ongoing Systems Engagements series at Linköping Univerity - on facilitating co-creation in context introduced a set of principles for convening participatory...

Vink's paper on bodily entanglements in social systems design makes a case that systems design has neglected the body - that it has operated primarily through cognitive and representational modes,...

A recent seminar - Berggren's - as part of the Systems Engagements series at Linköping University on systems simulation raised a question I have been circling around in my own practice without having...

Design practice is, at its core, representational work. Designers make sketches, journey maps, system maps, concept models, diagrams - visual and conceptual representations intended to change how...

Over the past year I have been reaching, in several posts and in the course of my industrial doctorate work, towards a set of ideas or perceptions about design and the design process that, it turns...

In 2011, I completed an MPhil thesis titled An Investigation into the Concept of Motivation within Design (Bisset, 2011). It argued that design practitioners and researchers needed to more clearly...

In a previous post I worked through von Busch and Palmås's (2023) Realdesign propositions against my experience at SCÖ, and the exercise left me with a question I could not answer within their...

Three things converged during my time at SCÖ, a Swedish coordination association for vocational rehabilitation, that set the direction for this series. Each pointed toward the same underlying...

I first read The Corruption of Co-Design (Von Busch and Palmås, 2023) when it came out late last year, around the same time I was writing about organisational metaphors and performance and substance....

I have submitted a paper to the NORDES 2023 Doctoral Consortium exploring something that has been building throughout this series: the psychodynamic processes that emerge when designers attempt to...

My employment at the coordination association ends this month. The ESF funding wasn't renewed. Up to eleven of us are being made redundant. The PhD continues, technically, but without the industrial...

Design theory rests on an assumption so foundational it's rarely examined: that making things visible enables change. Prototypes surface problems or prove viability, or provide something tangible...

In earlier posts, I described what federated learning is, what it would require, what happened when I tried to reverse-engineer the Pathway Generator, and what the discipline of typing its data...

In the previous post I described three kinds of artefact from the algorithm archaeology: concept maps that synthesised and performed a gap analysis of the Pathway Generator's structure against...

In previous posts, I've described what federated learning is and what it would actually require. This post is about what happened when I tried to understand the algorithm that the project was...

The LiU Design department has been running a seminar series on mission-oriented innovation. I've been attending, trying to connect what I'm learning about federated learning to broader discussions...

In my earlier post, I described what federated learning is. Now, a few months into the work, I want to think through what FL would actually require in practice - and why I'm increasingly concerned...

I've recently started a research position exploring machine learning and design for Swedish vocational rehabilitation services - specifically, the possibility of using federated learning to support...