Martin Stacey | De Montfort University (original) (raw)

Papers by Martin Stacey

Method development is one of the raisons d'etre of engineering design research and method uptake ... more Method development is one of the raisons d'etre of engineering design research and method uptake by industry is perceived as an important success criterion. This paper argues that one of the problems with methods is the lack of clarity about what is actually proposed to industry and the academic community when a new method is put forward, in terms of how detailed, strict, precise and rigorous the method is and what it can deliver. This paper puts the concept of method in the context of related concepts and proposes a multi-level model of the elements of a method to argue that a contribution on each of these levels can be of value and that the introduction of methods can fail on each of these levels. Implications thereof for industry and academia are discussed, concluding that a clear description of methods and their intended use is important for enabling proper validation of each of the method's elements and for communicating methods to academia and industry.

Over the past decades, research in affective learning has begun to take emotions into account, wh... more Over the past decades, research in affective learning has begun to take emotions into account, which advocates an education system that is sentient of learner’s cognitive and affective states, as learners’ performance could be affected by emotional factors. This exploratory research examines the impacts of mental arithmetic demand and external stimuli on learner’s stress perception and job performance. External stimuli include time pressure and displays of countdown timer and clock on an online assessment system. Experiments are conducted on five different groups of undergraduate students, with a total of 160 of them from a higher learning institution. The results show that the impacts are significant. Correlations between task demand, external stimuli, learner’s stress and job performance are also significant.

International Journal of Product Development, 2010

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CRC Press eBooks, Aug 3, 2017

A modern Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) should be sentient of learner's cognitive and affe... more A modern Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) should be sentient of learner's cognitive and affective states, as learner's performance could be affected by motivational and emotional factors. It is important to design a low-cost and unobtrusive computational method for ITS to determine learner's states automatically. The automated learner's data sensing is useful in the development of personalized e-learning that can adapt learning content according to individual's emotion. Although many past findings relate stressor such as task demand to learner's emotion, however there is a lack of existing studies that examine the impact of stressor on learners' cognitive states and their mouse and keystroke dynamics. This exploratory research, conducted on 160 undergraduate students, found that the impacts of direct learning instruction and external stress stimuli, such as timer display, on learner's cognitive and affective states are significant. The correlations between direct instruction, external stimuli, learners' cognitive and affective states, as well as their mouse and keystroke behaviours are also significant.

Design science, 2022

Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express ... more Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express knowledge about how aspects of design could or should be done. However, assuring that methods are in fact used in industry has remained a challenge. Industry will only use methods that they can understand and that they feel will give them benefit reliably. To understand the challenges involved in adopting a method, the method needs to be seen in context: it does not exist in isolation but forms a part of an ecosystem of methods for tackling related design problems. A method depends on the knowledge and skills of the practitioners using it: while a description of a method is an artefact that is a formalisation of engineering knowledge, a method in use constitutes a socio-technical system depending on the interaction of human participants with each other as well as with the description of the method, representations of design information and, often, tools for carrying out the method's tasks. This paper argues that crucial factors in the adoption of methods include how well they are described and how convincingly they are evaluated. The description of a method should cover its core idea, the representations in which design information is described, the procedure to be followed, its intended use, and the tools it uses. The account of a method's intended use should cover its purpose, the situations or product types within its scope, its coverage of kinds of problems within its scope, its expected benefit and conditions for its use. The different elements need to be evaluated separately as well as the method as an integrated whole. While verification and validation are important for some elements of methods, it is rarely possible to prove the validity of a method. Rather the developers of methods need to gather sufficient evidence that a method will work within a clearly articulated scope. Most design methods do not have binary success criteria, and their usefulness in practice depends as much on simplicity and usability as on the outcomes they produce. Evaluation should focus on how well they work, and how they can be customised and improved.

Research in Engineering Design, Sep 24, 2019

Design process models have a complex and changing relationship to the processes they model, and m... more Design process models have a complex and changing relationship to the processes they model, and mean different things to different people in different situations. Participants in design processes need to understand each other's perspectives and agree on what the models mean. The paper draws on philosophy of science to argue that understanding a design process model can be seen as an imagination game governed by agreed rules, to envisage what would be true about the world if the model were correct. The rules depend on the syntax and content of the model, on the task the model is used for, and on what the users see the model as being. The paper outlines twelve alternative conceptualizations of design process modelsframes, pathways, positions, proclamations, projections, predictions, propositions, prophecies, requests, demands, proposals, promises-and discusses when they fit situations that stakeholders in design processes can be in. Articulating how process models are conceptualised can both help to understand how process management works and help to resolve communication problems in industrial practice.

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Ai Communications, 1988

Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative -- and hence unanalyzable -- wher... more Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative -- and hence unanalyzable -- whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs -- BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL -- are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along. Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science.

What people think creativity is and what constitutes designing influences how designing is organi... more What people think creativity is and what constitutes designing influences how designing is organized and carried out, and how design colleagues interact. In contrast to engineering, the fashion industry sees design as the process from idea to specification carried out by designers, and creativity only as open-ended and unconstrained. This reflects widespread beliefs about creativity and rhetoric about design. In knitwear, much detailed design is done by technicians converting these specifications into a program for knitting a garment. This often requires creative problem solving in finding a way to realise an idea or in optimising production without compromising the aesthetic appearance. Knitwear designers and technicians seldom co-design, but only a collaboration between designers and technicians can lead to an exploitation of the full potential of modern production machinery. This observation has implications for interactions between artistic and technical designers in a variety of other industries

European Journal of Risk Regulation, 2021

The extensive disruption to and digital transformation of travel administration across borders la... more The extensive disruption to and digital transformation of travel administration across borders largely due to COVID-19 mean that digital vaccine passports are being developed to resume international travel and kick-start the global economy. Currently, a wide range of actors are using a variety of different approaches and technologies to develop such a system. This paper considers the techno-ethical issues raised by the digital nature of vaccine passports and the application of leading-edge technologies such as blockchain in developing and deploying them. We briefly analyse four of the most advanced systems – IBM’s Digital Health Passport “Common Pass,” the International Air Transport Association’s Travel Pass, the Linux Foundation Public Health’s COVID-19 Credentials Initiative and the Vaccination Credential Initiative (Microsoft and Oracle) – and then consider the approach being taken for the EU Digital COVID Certificate. Each of these raises a range of issues, particularly relatin...

Product design cycle, custom made products, parametric solid modeling, top-down design methodology

Many universities have been employing Learning Management System (LMS) in their educational progr... more Many universities have been employing Learning Management System (LMS) in their educational programs for many years. However, sustaining the e-learning environment has become a great challenge for these institutes. Although there was much research conducted to study the success factors of a LMS, understanding the impact of user interface, navigation and usability designs, which may affect the user experience in virtual learning environment, is equally important. It is suggested that during the design stage the instructor should plan and structure the resources to assure interactions that assist in the transfer of skills and knowledge. In addition we can use tools such as email, chat rooms, and discussion boards to provide learners the opportunities to interact and add a new level of depth into their learning. It is also necessary to conduct a complete series of evaluations for testing the accuracy, effectiveness and clarity of the e-learning system. Therefore this research aims to evaluate the effectiveness and clarity of LMS design to encourage e-learning sustainability. We investigate the effectiveness of the LMS in assisting knowledge transfer and interactivity in the virtual learning environment, based on three areas: navigation design, user interface design and usability of the discussion board. An online questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from students and instructors regarding their experiences with the LMS, and their satisfaction levels in these three areas, as well as to suggest areas of improvements.

ArXiv, 2021

This paper investigates the effectiveness of an expert system based on K-nearest neighbours algor... more This paper investigates the effectiveness of an expert system based on K-nearest neighbours algorithm for laser speckle image sampling applied to the early detection of diabetes. With the latest developments in artificial intelligent guided laser speckle imaging technologies, it may be possible to optimise laser parameters, such as wavelength, energy level and image texture measures in association with a suitable AI technique to interact effectively with the subcellular properties of a skin tissue to detect early signs of diabetes. The new approach is potentially more effective than the classical skin glucose level observation because of its optimised combination of laser physics and AI techniques, and additionally, it allows non-expert individuals to perform more frequent skin tissue tests for an early detection of diabetes.

Design Science

Designing complex products involves working with uncertainties as the product, the requirements a... more Designing complex products involves working with uncertainties as the product, the requirements and the environment in which it is used co-evolve, and designers and external stakeholders make decisions that affect the evolving design. Rather than being held back by uncertainty, designers work, cooperate and communicate with each other notwithstanding these uncertainties by making assumptions to carry out their own tasks. To explain this, the paper proposes an adaptation of Kendall Walton’s make-believe theory to conceptualise designing as playing games of make-believe by inferring what is required and imagining what is possible given the current set of assumptions and decisions, while knowing these are subject to change. What one is allowed and encouraged to imagine, conclude or propose is governed by socially agreed rules and constraints. The paper uses jet engine component design as an example to illustrate how different design teams make assumptions at the beginning of design act...

We have technology now to design networks of small intelligent units capable of competing and/or ... more We have technology now to design networks of small intelligent units capable of competing and/or cooperating with each other on specified tasks and making decisions under conditions of uncertainty through a process of negotiation. In highly dynamic environments, such distributed systems are capable of achieving considerably better results in terms of performance/cost ratio and reliability than conventional centralised large systems and structures. The major elements of these systems are intelligent agents, which are software objects capable of communicating with each other, as well as reasoning about received messages. The paper discusses conceptual design of mechatronic systems based on multi-agent technology.

Method development is one of the raisons d'etre of engineering design research and method uptake ... more Method development is one of the raisons d'etre of engineering design research and method uptake by industry is perceived as an important success criterion. This paper argues that one of the problems with methods is the lack of clarity about what is actually proposed to industry and the academic community when a new method is put forward, in terms of how detailed, strict, precise and rigorous the method is and what it can deliver. This paper puts the concept of method in the context of related concepts and proposes a multi-level model of the elements of a method to argue that a contribution on each of these levels can be of value and that the introduction of methods can fail on each of these levels. Implications thereof for industry and academia are discussed, concluding that a clear description of methods and their intended use is important for enabling proper validation of each of the method's elements and for communicating methods to academia and industry.

Over the past decades, research in affective learning has begun to take emotions into account, wh... more Over the past decades, research in affective learning has begun to take emotions into account, which advocates an education system that is sentient of learner’s cognitive and affective states, as learners’ performance could be affected by emotional factors. This exploratory research examines the impacts of mental arithmetic demand and external stimuli on learner’s stress perception and job performance. External stimuli include time pressure and displays of countdown timer and clock on an online assessment system. Experiments are conducted on five different groups of undergraduate students, with a total of 160 of them from a higher learning institution. The results show that the impacts are significant. Correlations between task demand, external stimuli, learner’s stress and job performance are also significant.

International Journal of Product Development, 2010

For guidance on citations see FAQs.

CRC Press eBooks, Aug 3, 2017

A modern Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) should be sentient of learner's cognitive and affe... more A modern Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) should be sentient of learner's cognitive and affective states, as learner's performance could be affected by motivational and emotional factors. It is important to design a low-cost and unobtrusive computational method for ITS to determine learner's states automatically. The automated learner's data sensing is useful in the development of personalized e-learning that can adapt learning content according to individual's emotion. Although many past findings relate stressor such as task demand to learner's emotion, however there is a lack of existing studies that examine the impact of stressor on learners' cognitive states and their mouse and keystroke dynamics. This exploratory research, conducted on 160 undergraduate students, found that the impacts of direct learning instruction and external stress stimuli, such as timer display, on learner's cognitive and affective states are significant. The correlations between direct instruction, external stimuli, learners' cognitive and affective states, as well as their mouse and keystroke behaviours are also significant.

Design science, 2022

Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express ... more Method development is at the heart of design research as methods are a formalised way to express knowledge about how aspects of design could or should be done. However, assuring that methods are in fact used in industry has remained a challenge. Industry will only use methods that they can understand and that they feel will give them benefit reliably. To understand the challenges involved in adopting a method, the method needs to be seen in context: it does not exist in isolation but forms a part of an ecosystem of methods for tackling related design problems. A method depends on the knowledge and skills of the practitioners using it: while a description of a method is an artefact that is a formalisation of engineering knowledge, a method in use constitutes a socio-technical system depending on the interaction of human participants with each other as well as with the description of the method, representations of design information and, often, tools for carrying out the method's tasks. This paper argues that crucial factors in the adoption of methods include how well they are described and how convincingly they are evaluated. The description of a method should cover its core idea, the representations in which design information is described, the procedure to be followed, its intended use, and the tools it uses. The account of a method's intended use should cover its purpose, the situations or product types within its scope, its coverage of kinds of problems within its scope, its expected benefit and conditions for its use. The different elements need to be evaluated separately as well as the method as an integrated whole. While verification and validation are important for some elements of methods, it is rarely possible to prove the validity of a method. Rather the developers of methods need to gather sufficient evidence that a method will work within a clearly articulated scope. Most design methods do not have binary success criteria, and their usefulness in practice depends as much on simplicity and usability as on the outcomes they produce. Evaluation should focus on how well they work, and how they can be customised and improved.

Research in Engineering Design, Sep 24, 2019

Design process models have a complex and changing relationship to the processes they model, and m... more Design process models have a complex and changing relationship to the processes they model, and mean different things to different people in different situations. Participants in design processes need to understand each other's perspectives and agree on what the models mean. The paper draws on philosophy of science to argue that understanding a design process model can be seen as an imagination game governed by agreed rules, to envisage what would be true about the world if the model were correct. The rules depend on the syntax and content of the model, on the task the model is used for, and on what the users see the model as being. The paper outlines twelve alternative conceptualizations of design process modelsframes, pathways, positions, proclamations, projections, predictions, propositions, prophecies, requests, demands, proposals, promises-and discusses when they fit situations that stakeholders in design processes can be in. Articulating how process models are conceptualised can both help to understand how process management works and help to resolve communication problems in industrial practice.

For guidance on citations see FAQs.

Ai Communications, 1988

Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative -- and hence unanalyzable -- wher... more Scientific discovery is often regarded as romantic and creative -- and hence unanalyzable -- whereas the everyday process of verifying discoveries is sober and more suited to analysis. Yet this fascinating exploration of how scientific work proceeds argues that however sudden the moment of discovery may seem, the discovery process can be described and modeled. Using the methods and concepts of contemporary information-processing psychology (or cognitive science) the authors develop a series of artificial-intelligence programs that can simulate the human thought processes used to discover scientific laws. The programs -- BACON, DALTON, GLAUBER, and STAHL -- are all largely data-driven, that is, when presented with series of chemical or physical measurements they search for uniformities and linking elements, generating and checking hypotheses and creating new concepts as they go along. Scientific Discovery examines the nature of scientific research and reviews the arguments for and against a normative theory of discovery; describes the evolution of the BACON programs, which discover quantitative empirical laws and invent new concepts; presents programs that discover laws in qualitative and quantitative data; and ties the results together, suggesting how a combined and extended program might find research problems, invent new instruments, and invent appropriate problem representations. Numerous prominent historical examples of discoveries from physics and chemistry are used as tests for the programs and anchor the discussion concretely in the history of science.

What people think creativity is and what constitutes designing influences how designing is organi... more What people think creativity is and what constitutes designing influences how designing is organized and carried out, and how design colleagues interact. In contrast to engineering, the fashion industry sees design as the process from idea to specification carried out by designers, and creativity only as open-ended and unconstrained. This reflects widespread beliefs about creativity and rhetoric about design. In knitwear, much detailed design is done by technicians converting these specifications into a program for knitting a garment. This often requires creative problem solving in finding a way to realise an idea or in optimising production without compromising the aesthetic appearance. Knitwear designers and technicians seldom co-design, but only a collaboration between designers and technicians can lead to an exploitation of the full potential of modern production machinery. This observation has implications for interactions between artistic and technical designers in a variety of other industries

European Journal of Risk Regulation, 2021

The extensive disruption to and digital transformation of travel administration across borders la... more The extensive disruption to and digital transformation of travel administration across borders largely due to COVID-19 mean that digital vaccine passports are being developed to resume international travel and kick-start the global economy. Currently, a wide range of actors are using a variety of different approaches and technologies to develop such a system. This paper considers the techno-ethical issues raised by the digital nature of vaccine passports and the application of leading-edge technologies such as blockchain in developing and deploying them. We briefly analyse four of the most advanced systems – IBM’s Digital Health Passport “Common Pass,” the International Air Transport Association’s Travel Pass, the Linux Foundation Public Health’s COVID-19 Credentials Initiative and the Vaccination Credential Initiative (Microsoft and Oracle) – and then consider the approach being taken for the EU Digital COVID Certificate. Each of these raises a range of issues, particularly relatin...

Product design cycle, custom made products, parametric solid modeling, top-down design methodology

Many universities have been employing Learning Management System (LMS) in their educational progr... more Many universities have been employing Learning Management System (LMS) in their educational programs for many years. However, sustaining the e-learning environment has become a great challenge for these institutes. Although there was much research conducted to study the success factors of a LMS, understanding the impact of user interface, navigation and usability designs, which may affect the user experience in virtual learning environment, is equally important. It is suggested that during the design stage the instructor should plan and structure the resources to assure interactions that assist in the transfer of skills and knowledge. In addition we can use tools such as email, chat rooms, and discussion boards to provide learners the opportunities to interact and add a new level of depth into their learning. It is also necessary to conduct a complete series of evaluations for testing the accuracy, effectiveness and clarity of the e-learning system. Therefore this research aims to evaluate the effectiveness and clarity of LMS design to encourage e-learning sustainability. We investigate the effectiveness of the LMS in assisting knowledge transfer and interactivity in the virtual learning environment, based on three areas: navigation design, user interface design and usability of the discussion board. An online questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from students and instructors regarding their experiences with the LMS, and their satisfaction levels in these three areas, as well as to suggest areas of improvements.

ArXiv, 2021

This paper investigates the effectiveness of an expert system based on K-nearest neighbours algor... more This paper investigates the effectiveness of an expert system based on K-nearest neighbours algorithm for laser speckle image sampling applied to the early detection of diabetes. With the latest developments in artificial intelligent guided laser speckle imaging technologies, it may be possible to optimise laser parameters, such as wavelength, energy level and image texture measures in association with a suitable AI technique to interact effectively with the subcellular properties of a skin tissue to detect early signs of diabetes. The new approach is potentially more effective than the classical skin glucose level observation because of its optimised combination of laser physics and AI techniques, and additionally, it allows non-expert individuals to perform more frequent skin tissue tests for an early detection of diabetes.

Design Science

Designing complex products involves working with uncertainties as the product, the requirements a... more Designing complex products involves working with uncertainties as the product, the requirements and the environment in which it is used co-evolve, and designers and external stakeholders make decisions that affect the evolving design. Rather than being held back by uncertainty, designers work, cooperate and communicate with each other notwithstanding these uncertainties by making assumptions to carry out their own tasks. To explain this, the paper proposes an adaptation of Kendall Walton’s make-believe theory to conceptualise designing as playing games of make-believe by inferring what is required and imagining what is possible given the current set of assumptions and decisions, while knowing these are subject to change. What one is allowed and encouraged to imagine, conclude or propose is governed by socially agreed rules and constraints. The paper uses jet engine component design as an example to illustrate how different design teams make assumptions at the beginning of design act...

We have technology now to design networks of small intelligent units capable of competing and/or ... more We have technology now to design networks of small intelligent units capable of competing and/or cooperating with each other on specified tasks and making decisions under conditions of uncertainty through a process of negotiation. In highly dynamic environments, such distributed systems are capable of achieving considerably better results in terms of performance/cost ratio and reliability than conventional centralised large systems and structures. The major elements of these systems are intelligent agents, which are software objects capable of communicating with each other, as well as reasoning about received messages. The paper discusses conceptual design of mechatronic systems based on multi-agent technology.

Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1988

Second printing, 1992 © 1987 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No... more Second printing, 1992 © 1987 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without ...