Play is an essential component of a healthy childhood, often manifesting even in difficult ecological settings. The instrumental nature of play and its role in development has been the focus of research for a long time, especially in the case of children with special needs. Existing literature presents contradictory opinion on how play of preschool children with Intellectual Disability (ID) differs from their typical peers, based on comparison of their play skills and complexity. There is also a gap in existing knowledge on designing for play of these children, with lack of theoretical frameworks and guidelines for design practitioners. The main objective of the present thesis is to study the relationship between design characteristics of play artefacts/activities and observed playfulness of preschool children with mild to moderate ID. Playfulness has been used as a handle to account for the experiential and affective components of play activity and an assessment framework has been developed over the course of the thesis, based on Sanderson’s (2010) construct. The thesis follows a sequential, exploratory mixed-methods design, where play interactions of children with a variety of age-appropriate toys are analyzed in a free play context using a qualitative analytical framework derived from Classical grounded theory (Glaser, 1998). With the perspective of a design activist, a number of useful actionable insights have also been reported for design practitioners and facilitators. A playfulness assessment framework has been developed which could be used to compare individual play episodes and observe the effect of interventions. Lastly, an initial proposal is made for a model useful for design practitioners to control the features in toy design using the dimensions and aid in the idea generation process for developing playful solutions, which would need further validation.

The intent of this PhD research is to critically examine the language of Bombay’s Art Deco architecture from 1930 to 1949 in order to develop a semiotic to read meaning into its form. By retrospectively describing this architecture as ‘Art Deco’ (the term came into common currency from the ‘60s), this period has been studied as a stylistic label, with the baggage of colonialism (the copying of a foreign architecture) and revivalism weighing it down. Such an approach regards all the buildings of a particular period as more or less homogeneous, and built out of the same common motivating factors. . In examining the facades of cinema houses, office buildings and apartment buildings of the period 1930-1949 our aim was to read these buildings as the billboards of their age, as metonymic representations of the whole. In previous work done on the subject this vital component has not been tackled and our intention has been to research into these buildings as rich semiotic/semantic texts. Our research looks at these buildings as objects in themselves and seeks out semiotic congruency in the buildings of Bombay during the 1930s and 1940s. The processes, methods and tools adopted are semiotic, and the objects/buildings examined and analyzed synchronously and (largely) from an ahistoric standpoint. The set of research tools chosen for this semiotic analysis were used to observe and analyse the signification of objects. These properties are used to generate an ‘exemplar’. Based on the determination of exemplars, a bundle of features or Basic Objects were derived, and then validated for proximity. These properties were then be searched for, metonymically, in other such objects for ‘self-similarity’ or ‘family resemblances’. The aim of this research is to find, if any, patterns of collective significance in the buildings of Bombay from 1930-1949.The methodical framework we used for carrying out this research was as follows: The building facades under study were looked at as cultural products of their time and contextualised in order to appreciate the ‘conventional meanings’ attributed to them. This research has produced a better understanding of Art Deco architecture in Bombay as significant producers of meaning. We believe that our research contributes to the architectural xvi history of pre-independence Bombay and India, Art Deco architecture and building facades, and offers methods for any future semiotic analyses in architecture. There is a further scope of using the tools adapted for this research in the analysis of buildings other than Art Deco as having inherencies and salience. We believe that this research has made significant contributions to the field of architectural design and historical research.

Since ancient times, across civilizations, various scripts have been developed and have continued to be in use even today. This proves that the practice to learn and write is ancient. However, evidences of scientific research on handwriting can be traced only since 19th century AD and most of it is Roman/Latin centric. Surprisingly, in a multi-script country like India, no trace of scientific research has been found on the process of teaching and learning handwriting. Each script is unique and has different graphical and morphological aspects. Hence, it is necessary to study every script individually. The skill of handwriting is acquired through regular and step-by-step practice. And it starts with learning some basic strokes. Traditionally, various learning aids also known as primers were used to teach handwriting. These basic strokes didn’t seem to be of much relevance for a complex script like Devanagari. How important are the basic strokes for handwriting acquisition, hasn’t been researched yet. Therefore, to confirm the conventions, instructional theories of academicians were studied. Further, we shed light upon what can be Devanagari’s basic strokes and, how to extract them. The session on extraction, was conducted with two groups of people. The first, with six random participants who were given general instructions to cull out the various basic strokes of Devanagari. The second group comprised five expert participants who were given pointed instructions to perform the same task. Clustering these strokes as per form and movement similarity, led us to find primitives for Devanagari handwriting. The primitives were classified into ‘unidirectional’ and ‘multi-directional’. Now, to test the efficiency of these primitives, final experiment was designed. The results of statistical analysis of the jury evaluation proved that the basic stroke practice is effective for correct handwriting acquisition. Moreover, it was also proved that script specific practice is necessary for correct acquisition. The newly extracted Devanagari primitives for handwriting have shown significant impact on handwriting acquisition by new learners. The manual method for extracting handwriting primitives are proposed, which will surely help many other Indian scripts in the future.

The guiding question of this research is how the image of home is constructed. As an image, how is the home imagined, drawn, projected, and, most importantly, conceived? As a composition, how is the home arranged, pieced together, and fabricated? As both an image and a composition, how is the home evoked? Sociological and psychological approaches to built form have treated "design" as a more socio-cognitive structural activity. Approaches of this sort tend to see design as the evolved arrangement of a sociality—more in terms of an apparatus that has been arrived at via evolutionary processes. At the sites on which these home spaces are built, within housing schemes and tiny flats, the intentions of the primary makers of these spaces and how they negotiate are not visible or are lost in sweeping readings of space. Also downplayed are the intentions at work in the making of situated meaning—the on-site practise of making spaces. If practise is an act that constitutes knowledge-in-action, it would inform us about things not encapsulated in theory. This study is therefore an attempt to understand the making of the home through design practice.

This inquiry is posed within the urban metropolitan milieu of Mumbai - within the framework of the design of the apartment flat artefact, with the developers, dwellers, and designers as the primary stakeholders. From the perspective of design, the flat has two points or levels of intervention. At one level, it is conceived within the mass-housing apartment complex format—just one flat amongst many others. On the other level, the flat is conceived purely within its interior. These two conceptions are studied via two live cases, which represent the differing contexts in which the artefact is shaped. The researcher witnessed and documented the complete unfolding of the design in these two cases. The documented whole, consisting primarily of discourse between designers and between designers and dwellers, was then subjected to thematic analysis.