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Dr Martin Stacey

Job: Senior Lecturer

Faculty: Computing, Engineering and Media

School/department: School of Computer Science and Informatics

Address: Â鶹ƵµŔ, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH

T: +44 (0)116 250 6256

E: mstacey@dmu.ac.uk

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Personal profile

Dr Martin Stacey is a cognitive scientist with a training in psychology and artificial intelligence. This background informs his teaching activities, which focus on human computer interaction and information design, and his research into how designers design. Martin’s research is fundamentally interdisciplinary, combining approaches from psychology, sociology, AI and philosophy and looking at comparisons between design processes in a variety of different industries. Martin’s research collaborators have included Claudia Eckert and Chris Earl (Design, Open University), John Clarkson (Engineering, Cambridge), Alan Blackwell (CS, Cambridge), Louis Bucciarelli (Engineering, MIT), and Anja Maier (Design Management, Danish Technical University).

Publications and outputs


  • dc.title: Supervised laser-speckle image sampling of skin tissue to detect very early stage of diabetes by its effects on skin subcellular properties dc.contributor.author: Orun, A.; Critien, L.; Carter, J.; Stacey, Martin dc.description.abstract: This paper investigates the effectiveness of a multi-disciplinary system based on laser speckle image sampling, image texture analysis and Artificial intelligence applied to the early detection of diabetes disease. With the latest developments in laser-optics and laser speckle imaging technologies, it may be possible to optimise laser parameters such as its wavelength, energy level and image texture measures to achieve this goal. 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. dc.description: open access article

  • dc.title: Elements of a design method – a basis for describing and evaluating design methods dc.contributor.author: Gericke, Kilian; Eckert, Claudia; Stacey, Martin dc.description.abstract: 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. dc.description: open access article

  • dc.title: Objects as Carriers of Engineering Knowledge dc.contributor.author: Stacey, Martin; Eckert, Claudia dc.description.abstract: The role of previous products in evolutionary engineering design is often neglected. In design discourse, references to objects provide terse expressions of complex information that cannot easily be expressed otherwise. Previous artifacts serve in conjunction with more general engineering knowledge to enable designers and design teams in engineering companies to work in ways that would be very difficult or impossible without them. They trigger the retrieval and active construction of personal knowledge, but also provide a scaffold for sharing knowledge and using it collectively. For companies, their products encapsulate and carry a significant part of the collective knowledge of the organization. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

  • dc.title: Past Designs as Repositories of Tacit Collective Knowledge dc.contributor.author: Addis, Mark; Eckert, Claudia; Stacey, Martin dc.description.abstract: As most engineering design proceeds by modifying past designs and reusing and adapting existing components and solution principles, a significant part of the knowledge engineers employ in design is encapsulated in the past designs they are familiar with. References to past designs, as well as encounters with them, serve to invoke the knowledge associated with them and constructed from them. This paper argues that much of this knowledge is tacit consisting in and/or made available by the perceptual recognition of features and situations, using a discussion of design margins to illustrate how engineers use tacit knowledge in reasoning about the properties of new designs.

  • dc.title: What counts as design? No one right answer dc.contributor.author: Eckert, Claudia; McMahon, Christopher; Stacey, Martin dc.description.abstract: What design is remains controversial. Views are shaped by people’s different perspectives, which depend both on the particular design disciplines they practise or study, and on the concerns and the theoretical and methodological concepts and tools of the intellectual disciplines they bring to looking at design. This paper looks at just how different some alternative views are, and argues that the different types of design are too diverse to make agreeing on a crisp definition of design a feasible enterprise. Instead we should accept that design is a family resemblance concept, and that different and seemingly contradictory views on what design is can be valid. What follows from this is that we should focus cross-disciplinary studies on understanding the patterns of similarity and difference that connect different design fields, but do not apply to all types of design. Moreover, we should treat knowledge generation and problem-framing activities as legitimate and important parts of design.

  • dc.title: The Digital Network of Networks: Regulatory Risk and Policy Challenges of Vaccine Passports dc.contributor.author: Wilford, S.; McBride, Neil; Brooks, Laurence; Eke, Damian; Akintoye, Sinmisola; Owoseni, Adebowale; Leach, Tonii; Flick, Catherine; Fisk, Malcolm; Stacey, Martin dc.description.abstract: 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 relating to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the need for standards and due diligence in the application of innovative technologies (eg blockchain) that will directly challenge policymakers when attempting to regulate within the network of networks. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

  • dc.title: Overconstrained and underconstrained creativity: Changing the rhetoric to negotiate the boundaries of design dc.contributor.author: Eckert, Claudia; Stacey, Martin dc.description.abstract: 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.

  • dc.title: Design as playing games of make-believe dc.contributor.author: Poznic, Michael; Stacey, Martin; Hillerbrand, Rafaela; Eckert, Claudia dc.description.abstract: 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 conceptualize 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 activities and negotiate what can and cannot be done with the design. This often involves iteration – repeating activities under revised sets of assumptions. As assumptions are collectively revised they become part of a new game of make-believe in the sense that there is social agreement that the decisions constitute part of the constraints that govern what can legitimately be inferred about the design or added to it. dc.description: Collaboration between ITAS, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology CEM, Â鶹ƵµŔ, Design, The Open University

  • dc.title: Continuous Stress Monitoring under Varied Demands Using Unobtrusive Devices dc.contributor.author: Lim, Yee Mei; Ayesh, Aladdin, 1972-; Stacey, Martin dc.description.abstract: This research aims to identify a feasible model to predict a learner’s stress in an online learning platform. It is desirable to produce a cost-effective, unobtrusive and objective method to measure a learner’s emotions. The few signals produced by mouse and keyboard could enable such solution to measure real world individual’s affective states. It is also important to ensure that the measurement can be applied regardless the type of task carried out by the user. This preliminary research proposes a stress classification method using mouse and keystroke dynamics to classify the stress levels of 190 university students when performing three different e-learning activities. The results show that the stress measurement based on mouse and keystroke dynamics is consistent with the stress measurement according to the changes of duration spent between two consecutive questions. The feedforward back-propagation neural network achieves the best performance in the classification. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

  • dc.title: Process Models: Plans, Predictions, Proclamations or Prophecies? dc.contributor.author: Stacey, Martin; Eckert, Claudia; Hillerbrand, Rafaela dc.description.abstract: 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 models – frames, 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 conceptualized can both help understand how process management works and help resolve communication problems in industrial practice. dc.description: The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.

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Key research outputs

M.K. Stacey & C.M. Eckert
Reshaping the box: Creative designing as constraint management.
International Journal of Product Development, volume 11 number 3/4, 241-255, 2010.

M.K. Stacey, C.M. Eckert & C.F. Earl
From Ronchamp by sledge: On the pragmatics of object references.
In J. McDonnell & P. Lloyd (eds.),
About: Designing: Analysing Design Meetings, Leiden, Netherlands: CRC Press, 2009, pp 360-379.

M.K. Stacey
Psychological Challenges for the Analysis of Style
Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, volume 20 number 2, 167-184, 2006.

M.K. Stacey & C.M. Eckert
Against Ambiguity
Computer Supported Cooperative Work, volume 12 number 2, 153-183, 2003.

C.M. Eckert & M.K. Stacey
Sources of Inspiration: A Language of Design
Design Studies, volume 21 number 5, 523-538, 2000.

Research interests/expertise

Research interests

  • Design thinking
  • Design processes
  • Human Design Tool Interaction

Specific research topics

  • How people use representations of design information
  • Factors influencing problem structuring and creative thinking
  • Causal modelling of design processes
  • Role of object references in design
  • Sources of inspiration
  • Psychology of style
  • Epistemology of models in design
  • Research methodology for studying designing.

Areas of teaching

  • Human computer interaction
  • Systems analysis and design
  • Web design
  • Programming
  • Artificial intelligence.

Qualifications

BA Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

MS Psychology, Carnegie-Mellon University

PhD Artificial Intelligence, University of Aberdeen

Membership of professional associations and societies

Design Society.

Current research students

Yee Mei Lim (2nd supervisor)

Professional esteem indicators

Member of Advisory Board for Design Computing and Cognition’06, ’08, ’10, ’12, ’14.

Reviewer for Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design Analysis and Manufacturing, Design Studies, International Journal of Design Engineering, International Journal of Human Computer Studies, Journal of Automated Software Engineering, Journal of Engineering Design, Psychological Methods, Research in Engineering Design, Software Practice and Experience.

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