Items where Subject is "Design"

In the year which marked the centenary of the start of the First World War, a series of creative projects in Bristol considered past, contemporary and continuing conflicts. A unique record of these exhibitions and events has now been captured for this book.

Under the generic title Back From the Front: Art, Memory and the Aftermath of War the projects consisted of five overlapping exhibitions staged at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, UK - a curated show of work by John and Paul Nash; a unique gathering of work by contemporary artists examining war and peace under the title Shock and Awe: Contemporary Artists at War and Peace, and a sequence of exhibitions united under the word Re-membering, which were a series of commissions funded by the Arts Council England and co-ordinated by the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership and Bristol 2014. A fifth exhibition The Death of Nature gave a showcase to the recent paintings of Michael Porter RWA.

Plastics have now been our most used materials for over fifty years. This book adopts a new approach, exploring plastics’ contribution from two perspectives: as a medium for making and their value in societal use. The first approach examines the multivalent nature of plastics materiality and their impact on creativity through the work of artists, designers and manufacturers. The second perspective explores attitudes to plastics and the different value systems applied to them through current research undertaken by design, materials and socio-cultural historians. The book addresses the environmental impact of plastics and elucidates the ways in which they can and must be part of the solution. The individual viewpoints are provocative and controversial but together they present a balanced and scholarly un-picking of the debate that surrounds this ubiquitous group of materials.

The 1940s were an iconic period of women's dress history, with the familiar square shoulders, crepe tea dresses and seamed stockings paired with red lips, victory curls and head scarves. This book explains the period's sewing techniques and makes a range of 1940s outfits to recreate the look of those vintage years. With detailed step-by-step instruction and over 300 photographs, it captures the style of the time and explains the impact of wartime austerity on the cut and construction of women's dress.

In the context of a rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. The book analyses the ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. This study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian period.

In what ways do changing notions of social class correspond with key developments in the history of fashion? Focusing on examples ranging from 18th-century Britain to aspects of the global fashion industry in the early 21st century, 'Fashion and Class' examines the meaning and evolution of the term 'class', from its Marxist origins to modern day interpretations. Did industrialisation, technological change and developments in fashion retailing bring about a degree of 'class levelling' or in fact intensify class antagonism? And to what extent does modern mass consumption and cheap labour revive some of the ethical issues faced in 19th-century British textile factories? Exploring a variety of case studies that examine the changing relationships between fashion and class in different historical contexts, from the French revolutionaries of the 1780-90s through to the changing relationships between couture, designer and high-street fashion in the mid-20th century and onwards, this book is essential reading for those wishing to understand the ways in which the fashion system is closely connected with ideas of class.

Where once geographers could argue that the ideological and aesthetic issues surrounding the military cemeteries created by the British Empire had drawn little comment, there is now a considerable literature exploring the spaces and places of remembrance. Increasing attention has been paid during the past decade to the value of ‘situation’ in the discourse of death, grieving and commemoration. In this respect, ‘situation’ should be understood to be a focus on ‘place’, ‘space’ and the geopolitical. The emerging discipline of cultural geography in the late 1990s created the tools necessary to elaborate ‘space’ in the abstract, to regard ‘place’ as a site where an individual might negotiate definitively social relations, and give voice, as Sara Blair argued, to ‘the effects of dislocation, disembodiment, and localisation that constitute contemporary social disorder’. Almost a century after Sigmund Freud’s treatise Mourning and Melancholia, our understanding of how memory and mourning function continues to be challenged, revised and refined. Issues of place have become important to this debate. Once a marginal topic for academic investigation, there is now a body of scholarly work – including deep research in landscape and garden design – that explores the complex interrelationship between memory, mourning and ‘death-scapes’ (or ‘memory-scapes’), a portmanteau term that fuses an appreciation of once-violated landscapes with personal and discursive memories.

In spite of the long-lived and ongoing trade in plastic flowers, they are scarcely mentioned in books on plastics and in accounts of the history and craft of artificial flowers. This chapter considers the cultural, historical and commercial value of plastic flowers. In its consideration of the presence, popularity and provocative nature of plastic flowers, notions of taste and different attitudes towards plastics and plastic flowers, it draws on the views of designers, key manufacturers, academics and professionals associated with design, horticulture and floristry. It argues that plastic flowers have and continue to make, an important contribution to design and culture, even though they can disgust as well as delight.

This chapter considers objects as powerful pedagogic tools and examines how they can facilitate student-centred, experiential and active learning. This study reports key research findings, based on students’ critical and reflective evaluation of their object-based learning, and provides evidence that objects provide active learning experiences that can engage learners, enrich learning and energise teaching.

The study considers how students develop their engagement with objects and how they can explore individual preferences through the appraisal of objects’ form and function. The discussion considers how mundane objects can generate valuable and memorable pedagogic experiences, notably when studied away from the museum and placed in the context of the students’ classroom. Objects can present complex, challenging conundrums which students, through their interrogation of examples, can interpret, take meaning and make sense of. Students’ hands-on engagement with objects can inform and inspire their thinking and design making.

In particular the toilet brush - a necessary prosaic design – is considered as a valuable pedagogic implement: it can encourage students to critically analyse its social, historical, cultural, economic and technological relevance and worth. The discussion evidences that objects can generate deep learning opportunities as items stimulate curiosity and critical and analytical investigation, debate and evaluation. This chapter explores the challenges and nuances of using such learning objects and considers the reasons why certain designs prove to be successful learning aids and are popular with both learners and tutors. This study presents a specific pedagogic approach that offers potential for cross-discipline adoption and adaptation.

The strongly entrepreneurial orientation of the University of Huddersfield is the subject of this article. A brief history is followed by sections on belief systems and values between employer engagement and the curriculum. The article concludes that collaborations outside academia are essential in guaranteeing vocational relevance in university teaching

Proceeding from the assumption that there is, and has been, inadequate emphasis on appropriate leadership development and support, at all levels of art and design leadership, this chapter examines contemporary evidence and experiences to test those assumptions. The 12 case studies underpinning this chapter were conducted during the GLAD conference in Cambridge in 2007.

Through our first repeated interaction with books, we come to recognize elements recurring in these experiences, such as: verso and recto pages, covers, spine, etc., as well as relations between these elements (front/back, part/whole, etc.). Such interaction enables us to construct abstracted mental representations of the book, which are simpler than any single physical instantiation, but indicative of many other books. This schematization provides the basis for a range of structures and pathways that can be linked, or mapped, onto text and imagery in both conventional and unconventional ways. Through metaphor and metonymy basic concepts evoked by schematic book-form can link with words and images to make new meaning. Therefore, rather than thinking of the book page as simply a substrate onto which the printed word is inscribed, it can be understood, for example, as a slice of time and/or space, and such an understanding provides opportunities for making associations with text and imagery. Consequently, the book is not a neutral carrier of meaning but can prompt the reader to think in particular ways about how information is presented. This essay will explore the book-form as a source of schematic structure that can be linked and blended with other elements to instantiate texts in diverse and creative ways. Using ideas from conceptual metaphor theory and conceptual blending theory, it will focus on one metaphorical understanding of the book: book is tunnel, to highlight possibilities for integrating book-form with book texts.

The tunnel-book is a format that has been explored by book artists in which apertures are cut into pages suggesting movement through, rather than around pages. This essay discuses a book produced as part of an ongoing PhD project that uses the same understanding of cutting through the book but instead seeks to evoke this understanding through imagery and the conventional codex rather than through piercing the book page and utilizing the tunnel-book format. An account is provided of how conceptions of moving through a tunnel are projected onto experiences of moving through a book and the ways in which these domains of experience can additionally be blended with other metaphorical journeys, in this case involving a progression through a course of postgraduate study.

This paper presents an overview of an exploratory case study collaboration between Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) in support of an RNLI delivery programme for international community management of drowning prevention in low-resource environments. The study focuses on the development of low-volume public rescue throw-lines that can be community made and maintained, the assembly and use of which are supported by a set of RNLI-developed instruction manuals intended for universal dissemination. The study examines the clarity of the instructions in the context of the makers’ interpretation of the manuals within the local constraints of Zanzibar. Preliminary findings indicate that these universally intended instruction manuals, in their current format, are open to interpretation, producing unsafe drowning prevention rescue lines that do not meet safety-critical standards. A re-design of the manuals through creative collaboration in a local context are the outcomes of this research. Discussion is also given as to whether a universal instruction manual should be the desirable outcome.

The Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial is a 16.5 hectare (40 acre) tract of preserved battleground dedicated primarily to the memory of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, who suffered an extremely high percentage of casualties during the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Beaumont Hamel Memorial is a complex landscape of commemoration where Newfoundland, Canadian, Scottish and British imperial associations compete for prominence. A previous paper argued that those who chose the site of the Park, and subsequently reordered its topography, helped to contrive a particular historical narrative that prioritized certain memories over others (Gough, 2004). This argument focused on the premeditated redesign of the ‘park’ after the Great War, and then again in the early 1960s. Since the publication of the paper the soaring popularity of battlefield tours and visits has placed an intolerable strain on the very land that many regard as sacred and hallowed. A land that took decades to recover and reclaim from violation is now being threatened again both by developers and by crowds of tourists. As a result, measures have been taken to restrict access and control roaming rights. This paper will revisit the original arguments and examine the many tensions that have arisen in one of the most popular destinations on the old battle front. Reflecting on the recent dispute, the paper will explore issues of historical accuracy, topographical legibility, freedom of access, and assumed ownership. It will also try to understand the recent disputes as examples of borrowed ‘entitlement’ and a resistance (by some British visitors) to recognizing the historic value of Canadian (or more specifically, Newfoundland) heritage.

This paper explores monuments to peace and peacekeeping, as distinct from monuments and memorials that commemorate the war dead. Two principal lines of enquiry are explored: the first examines whether it is possible to create secular monumental sculpture that promotes peace or espouses reconciliation. Secondly, the author asks whether monumental art is able to advocate peace without relying on the frameworks or discourses of commemoration and remembrance. Through an initial examination of the differences between ‘monuments’ and ‘memorials’ the paper explores the iconography and discourses of peace and pacifism. The paper then focuses on the Peacekeeping Monument in central Ottawa, Canada: a monument that was intended to mark forty years of international peacekeeping, but was unveiled in the same year that Canadian troops fought as part of a military coalition in the Middle East and were embroiled in a civil war in Africa. By comparing the Peacekeeping Monument with the nearby Canadian War Memorial the author explores the manipulation and creation of heroic landscapes, concluding that far from advocating peace and reconciliation, the Peacekeeping Monument captures a defined period in Canadian polity.

The Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial is a 16.5-hectare (40 acres) tract of preserved battleground dedicated to the memory of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment, who suffered an extremely high percentage of casualties during the first day of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916. Beaumont Hamel Memorial is an extremely complex landscape of commemoration where Newfoundland, Canadian, Scottish and British imperial associations compete for prominence. It is argued here that those who chose the site of the Park, and subsequently reordered its topography, helped to contrive a particular historical narrative that prioritized certain memories over others. In its design, the park has been arranged to indicate the causal relationship between distant military command and immediate front-line response, and its topographical layout focuses exclusively on a 30-minute military action during a 50-month war. In its preserved state the part played by the Royal Newfoundland Regiment can be measured, walked and vicariously experienced. Such an achievement has required close semiotic control and territorial demarcation in order to render the ‘invisible past’ visible, and to convert an emptied landscape into significant reconstructed space. This paper examines the initial preparation of the site in the 1920s and more recent periods of conservation and reconstruction. The author examines precedents for the preservation of battlefields, the spatiality of commemoration and the expectations aroused by such sites of memory. By focusing on the Beaumont Hamel memorial site the author explores several areas of contention: historical accuracy, topographical legibility and freedom of access.

Bellantoni and Woolman (2000) note that "Italic and oblique typefaces possess a kinetic quality because of their slant to the right." But what is the nature of this kinetic quality and why is it imparted in this way? This paper explores kinetics, not as a property of italics, but as a manifestation of cognitive work involving metaphoric projection, for which the typeface is but a cue. It will use concepts from cognitive semantics (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) to posit the idea that the dynamic quality of italics arises from preconceptual structures (such as image schemas) related to embodied experiences of writing and running. These structures forming the basis for higher level metaphors to be constructed in cognition. Consequently, a layout incorporating italics is metaphorical to the extent that the concept of
running is used (consciously or unconsciously) to understand an arrangement of type characters. Furthermore it is argued that the meaning we construct from italic type is not a simple correspondence between slanted letters and the body in motion, but is situated; resulting from a blend of concepts triggered by such things as the meanings of the words italicized and the site/s where they appear.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 14 and 15 outline a broad concern for us to take better care for our lands and oceans and act on the negative anthropogenic impact that we, as humans, are having on this planet. However, I propose that many of us see ourselves as separate from nature and lack a connection with it. This, in turn, affects the way we treat it. In this research I explore how we can frame our futures by telling visual stories about the land and sea and the geological foundation of the world we live in. This is achieved by exploring the relationship between natural landscapes, earth sciences and the ‘bodily’ canvas. By presenting examples of costume and textile design in response to a specific brief this visual essay introduces the notion that by anthropomorphizing nature through costume design a sense of connectivity between humans and nature can be bridged. Although there are many examples of how nature has been used as a springboard for garment design this article draws attention to theories explored in social science that claim if we attribute human characteristics to natural forms we feel greater connectivity towards it. I present ideas that using the visual detail of the landscape and by exploring the opportunities of how these can be embedded into costume design we can create a playful public engagement performance tool. This approach has the potential to, not only investigate new ways of interpreting landscape and geology through a costume-design-led performance model, but also challenge the way people think about the natural world with the potential to foster pro-environmental behaviour.

The Moving Canvas Project is a participatory research project with an adult community dance company where the dancers explore the act of drawing and moving simultaneously. The project offers new insights relating to the relationship between movement, drawing, textiles and choreography. This emergent knowledge is underpinned by theoretical frameworks, in drawing performance (Foà et, 2020), costume design (Barbieri, 2020), and movement improvisation (Buckwalter, 2010; Burrows, 2010; Doughty, 2019). The paper discusses a series of workshops where the process of creating textile design for costume and choreography for performance occurred concurrently. The authors present a balanced evaluation of the outcomes, sharing several observations regarding behaviour, performance, and overall aesthetic that emerged when dancers are asked to wear plain cream-coloured jumpsuits and draw on them whilst moving. It explores what influence the two disciplines had on each other and how dancers play with autonomy and collectivism as they draw on themselves and one another. The transient nature of movement creates a dissonance with the permanence of the drawing, which is left as a mark on the dancer’s disobedient bodies. It is within this dynamic interplay between movement and mark-making that a performance emerged.

The Second World War necessitated the transferral of labour and supplies from civilian manufacture to war production. Orders initiated by the government, in an attempt to make economical use of limited resources, severely affected the clothing industry from production to consumption. As a result, many contemporaneous sources and contemporary scholars claim that civilian dress was standardised. Scrutiny of trade journals, government documents, Mass Observation records, extant garments, and sewing patterns demonstrates that though manufacturing methods were standardised and simplified, there continued to be a range of styles in women’s dress.

This article develops a comparative analysis of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten, and Eva Szasz and Robert Verrall’s Cosmic Zoom, seen through the lenses of Bergsonian and Deleuzo- Guttarian philosophy. The author claims that, despite similarities with respect to their subject matter and modes of production, there are significant stylistic differences between these films that are suggestive of divergent ontological, epistemological and political commitments. Of particular importance is the foregrounding of objectivity in the case of Powers of Ten and subjectivity in the case of Cosmic Zoom – a distinction that is reflected in their respectively quasi-indexical and expressive modes of representation. This fundamental tension similarly conditions their differently inflected approaches to time, space and measure, drawing attention to the strange intertwining of representation, abstraction and affect that is characteristic of much animated film. Ultimately, it is proposed that, in the context of Powers of Ten and Cosmic Zoom, animation’s capacities for abstraction and expression are differently distributed, resulting in a cosmopolitical opposition which can be aligned with the Deleuzo–Guattarian distinctions between major and minor language, and royal and nomadic science.

Many of the questions that are central to the consideration of graphic design and communication have a strong resonance with issues appertaining to the philosophy of affect. It seems strange then that whilst there has been much interest in the affective turn in the context of the arts, it has been relatively absent
from discussion of graphic design. This seems particularly odd when we consider the ways in which matters of feeling, emotion and behavioural disposition are often combined in the context of advertising and visual communication – that is, in the at once semiotic and political regulation of the social, or, conversely, in the modes of resistance that emerge out of practices of design activism. This article attempts a (re)reading of contemporary and historical graphic design, through the concept of affect.

Following Massimo Banzi's comment that the Arduino development board might be seen as a means of ‘scratching your own itch’, this paper explores the concept of affect in relation to physical computing, and investigates the ways in which cybernetic and networked objects could be said to enact a series of process-philosophical and object-oriented tensions. In so doing it addresses the cultural saturation of Arduino and its employment in an array of institutional, artistic and activist contexts, and brings this to bear on the conflict between the process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the more directly object-oriented perspectives of Graham Harman, Ian Bogost and Bruno Latour. Framing the enquiry around the at once ethico-aesthetic and speculative realist questions of what it is to ‘scratch' and what it is to ‘itch', the paper examines micro- and macro-political agency in the context of physical computing—contrasting process philosophy's pronounced notion of affective, connective, creative differentiation with the black-boxed, withdrawn objects of object-oriented philosophy, and its quasi-causal mode of aesthetic interaction.

This article, written by the coordinators of the Stitching Together network, introduces a diverse range of case studies that critically discuss participatory textile making activities, complementing a first collection of case studies that was provided in the previous volume of this journal. Drawing on a recent network event and the case studies included in this issue, the article outlines a number of ethical dimensions that arise in participatory textile making activities: first, the challenge of inclusivity; second, the vulnerabilities that arise when space is made for shared learning; third, the issue of communication between facilitators, participants and partners in collaborative projects; and fourth, the ways in which projects and participants are (re)presented in research findings. The theme of innovation is also discussed, with a focus on the participant experience. Looking to the future, the need for further collaborative interrogation of the complex questions raised through participatory textile work is highlighted. A good practice document, created with the input of network members, is highlighted as a potentially useful foundation for critical discussion.

Arising from a recently formed research network, Stitching Together, this article introduces a collection of case studies that critically examine participatory textile making as an emerging methodological approach to research. The twenty-first century resurgence of interest in textile processes such as knitting, sewing and weaving, whether as individual practice or community- based initiative, builds on a long and culturally diverse history of collaborative textile-making activity. This resurgence, combined with the familiarity, accessibility and flexibility of textile practices, has influenced a recent growth in the use of such activities as a means of inquiry within diverse research contexts.

The article considers the ways in which collective textile making projects privilege social encounter as a format for learning skills, creating friendships and consolidating shared interests. It goes on to discuss how researchers are drawing on these characteristics when devising new projects, highlighting the quality of experience afforded by textile making, the diverse forms of data generated and the variety of ways in which these participatory activities can be set up. Recognising that this research approach is far from straightforward, three key methodological themes are then considered: the multifaceted nature of the researcher’s role and the complexities of relationships with participants and other stakeholders; the difficulties that can arise when using such familiar textile processes; and the opportunities, and complexities, of co-producing knowledge with participants through collaborative textile activity.

Within the field of digital musical instruments, there have been a growing number of technological developments aimed at addressing the issue of accessibility to music-making for disabled people. This study summarizes the development of one such technological system—The Modular Accessible Musical Instrument Technology Toolkit (MAMI Tech Toolkit). The four tools in the toolkit and accompanying software were developed over 5 years using an action research methodology. A range of stakeholders across four research sites were involved in the development. This study outlines the methodological process, the stakeholder involvement, and how the data were used to inform the design of the toolkit. The accessibility of the toolkit is also discussed alongside findings that have emerged from the process. This study adds to the established canon of research around accessible digital musical instruments by documenting the creation of an accessible toolkit grounded in both theory and practical application of third-wave human–computer interaction methods. This study contributes to the discourse around the use of participatory and iterative methods to explore issues with, and barriers to, active music-making with music technology. Outlined is the development of each of the novel tools in the toolkit, the functionality they offer, as well as the accessibility issues they address. The study advances knowledge around active music-making using music technology, as well as in working with diverse users to create these new types of systems.

Music technology can provide unique opportunities
to allow access to music-making for clients with complex needs. While there is a growing trend of research in this area, technology has been shown to face a variety of issues leading to underuse in this context. This literature review is a collation of information from peer-reviewed publications, gray literature, and practice. Focusing on active music-making using new types of alternate controllers, this review aims to bring together information regarding the types of technology available, categorizes music technology and its use within the music therapy setting for clients with complex needs, catalogues work occurring within the field, and explores the issues and potentials surrounding music technology and its use in practice.

Design and manufacturing innovations are important competitive attributes in the premium marine sector. The adoption of an open innovation process has the potential to deliver behavioural and technological transformation. This pilot study illustrates an open innovation approach to explore the benefits of digital innovation when designing new products within the premium marine industry. The research demonstrates how an open innovation approach will flourish when focused on co-creation in collaboration with a network of cross-functional partners.

I want to explore the potency of gardens, trees and flowers to evoke and stimulate memory. I would like to
start with two opposing provocations about nature as a place of commemoration: the first provocation which forms the opening section of my talk today is framed in the diction of protest. It contests the notion that the garden is a place of rest and repose; a view expressed so provocatively by Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay who asks why should certain gardens be described as retreats when in fact they are really attacks. To do so, I’ll briefly draw on some notions of horticountercultural politics, which can best be presented here through a number of visual images framed within the rhetoric of radical gardening.

The second section of my talk embraces the idea of the garden as a place of recovery, remembrance, even redemption. I will reflect on the huge enamel wreath, Flowers of War, made by my RMIT University colleagues and installed in the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. This will offer an opportunity to offer some thoughts about the value of gardens as enclaves of a temporal peace, and I’ll also explore the idea of surrogate gardens through guerrilla tactics and the roadside floral tribute, which will also introduce the uncomfortable concept of ‘recreational grief’. So, I’ll be taking a rather binary approach; on the one hand the garden as attack, as place for dissent and intervention; on the other hand the land as memorialised space, with its manicured turf and strict taxonomy of plants. But my overarching question comes straight from writer-gardener Jamaica Kincaid who asks, ‘Why must people insist that the garden is a place of rest and repose, a place to forget the cares of the world, a place in which to distance yourself from the painful responsibility with being a human being?’

There are many dynamic communities of practice within the arts but not all of them can claim to have their own research culture. Consequently, many researchers become adept at co-opting theoretical frameworks, research methods, and language from other disciplines. But what happens when we use concepts and language developed elsewhere to address our own particular disciplinary concerns? Language matters, and as the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure noted, language is not a nomenclature—it is not simply a question of linking a set of words to a pre-existing set of things; different languages
divide up the continuum of the world differently.
It follows that the ways that we engage with other disciplines potentially has a bearing on how we see, think and talk about our home discipline. This conference explores the
challenges and benefits of research that features significant interaction between two or more disciplines. It will explore [even contest] ‘trans-’, ‘cross-’ and ‘multi-’ disciplinary approaches to research.

This study focuses on mind-maps as an aspect of design culture – the conventions and practices adopted by a community of designers. The research aims to work towards establishing the effectiveness of mind-maps as a tool for ideation. It questions the extent to which mind-maps enable students to break away from the cultural frames evoked by design briefs in order for creative cross-space associations to occur. By comparing mind-map-like diagrams produced by nine undergraduate students with codes emerging from the analysis of the corresponding briefs, the study seeks to answer the question: What levels of cross-space mapping are evident in the knowledge representation diagrams produced as part of an undergraduate graphic design, practice-based project? The study found 301 cases of internal linking, as opposed to 23 instances of cross-space mapping, however it concludes that there is value in knowledge representation diagrams for ideation and makes recommendations for their use.

This paper will expand on insights unearthed during a practice-led PhD recently undertaken by the author at University of the Arts, London. The research project is investigating illustrated skateboard deck artwork in order to identify the distinct visual aura the skateboarder conjures within popular culture. Skateboard deck artwork is a kind of illustrated vernacular, principally developed in California during the 1970s and 1980s, to market skateboard products. The imagery is distinguished by thematic concerns aimed at young adult skateboarders. A practice-led investigation will reveal the origins and function of this persistent illustrated language. This approach will rely upon the author’s prior experience as a professional illustrator and arts educator to illuminate the significance of visual aesthetics, thereby offering a new lens to survey skateboard’s resilient visual culture.

This paper reports on an investigation into the role of experiential knowledge in growing capacity for producing low-cost buoyancy aids with soft goods manufacturers – tailors – in Zanzibar, set within complex knowledge exchange collaborations under academic-industry partnerships. In this study, the makers' practice of tailoring and their local environment knowledge had a formative role in designing a prototype ‘workflow system’ for local, small-batch production of low-cost rescue throwlines as part of a wider community-led water safety programme.

The study builds on a previous phase of the research that identified limitations with a human-centred design (HCD) approach to the creation of opensource instruction manuals for low volume production of rescue throwlines. We propose that the previously incumbent HCD approach through its problem-solving procedures obscured the importance of the local makers’ participation in the problematisation of the manufacturing process. By foregrounding the local makers’ knowledge of the whole manufacturing process, from sourcing materials in the market to making and testing the products, this study aimed to investigate how the local makers would devise and develop their own methodological approach to making the rescue throwline, examine what the findings would suggest for the design of the throwline, and explore how this knowledge might be exchanged with other collaborators in the project. A further and longer-term aim is to support the development and impact of local capacity building in end-to-end drowning prevention management by demonstrating the importance of experiential knowledge in existing local communities of makers.

A participatory making approach informed by design thinking underpinned the design of the study. An experimental participant-led approach to the generation of data draws attention to the different positions and types of knowledge negotiated. The study elucidates some of the barriers for exchanging this critical experiential knowledge with collaborators and exposes challenges for creating new social infrastructure within the community concerning drowning prevention. It concludes that managing complex knowledge exchange in prototyping in the Zanzibar context requires an iterative methodological approach to the co-construction of knowledge centred around the experiential knowledge and skills of the users of the ‘workflow system’.

This thesis, A Matter of Material: Exploring the Value of the Museum of Design in Plastics (MoDiP), sets out to understand how a museum focusing on a single material family can contribute to the societal and museological comprehension of design in plastics. It looks at how museums communicate a group of materials that audiences believe they know and understand, yet that knowledge and understanding may not be the whole story. It explores why it might seem strange that a museum dedicated to plastics even exists, by looking at what museums are, what they have been traditionally, and what they can become.
The contribution to knowledge that this research demonstrates is in the previously unwritten history and close study of MoDiP which is an, as yet, under researched resource. My role as Curator of MoDiP has provided an empirical knowledge and expertise that grounds this contribution in my professional practice. This has enabled an opening of a knowledge embedded in the role of a museum of a contested and devalued material, illuminating the problem of plastics in museums. The study inserts plastics, and the specific collection of them by MoDiP, into the relational museological theory to discover the value of the museum’s practice where complexity is added to the debate about plastics in the current climate. The particular interest of the triangular relationships between audiences, museums, and plastics is demonstrated using new diagrams, a tradition of museum studies especially used by Susan Pearce. The six original diagrams within the thesis are used to illustrate new ideas and concepts.
This research uses the tools of case study as a methodology to make a close study of the functions and collections of MoDiP, and in contrast the Pinto Collection of wooden objects at Birmingham Museums Trust. These tools include interviewing employees, studying documents, and observing practices, and sit alongside the curatorial practices of collections and object research, audience sampling through surveys and social media, as well as visiting other museums and exhibitions and reflecting on such experiences. By using these methods, this work investigates the material qualities of plastics, alongside other materials, and looks at why the placement of some materials within the museum setting might be difficult to comprehend and how, by being the sole focus of the museum, materials can be more deeply explored.

This research explores how blind and visually impaired (VI) people can engage with e-textiles in creative and tactile ways, by making interactive e-textile art pieces to tell their own stories. Touch, gestures used to interact with textiles and e-textiles, and association of meaning with objects are central concerns of the work, in the context of how different materials can evoke and be used in self-expression. The research focuses on how VI participants can design and make their own e-textile objects, bringing in ideas of empowerment and agency, and drawing attention to what characterises an effective ‘participatory making’ environment.
Three studies are reported. The first study observed practices at two schools for blind and VI children/young people to establish how ‘objects of reference’ are used within the classroom environment, and what other sensory stimulation is important. The second study involved two series of hands-on e- textile making workshops, at a charity for VI people, and at a contemporary art gallery, to explore how visually impaired participants can design and make personal e-textile objects. The third, a laboratory study, investigated what associations and gestures visually impaired participants used with e-textile sensors that had different textures and functioned in different ways. The research explored the potential of participatory making of e-textiles in terms of touch, personal association, accessibility, and creativity.
The research identifies some effective practices for participatory making of e-textiles with visually impaired people, including a modular approach to circuit-making. It highlights the importance of ownership of the process for the participants. It demonstrates that, although there is ‘no common language of gesture’ for touch-based interaction with e-textiles, conventions can be established through example or consistent use. It outlines the ‘lessons learned’ in working with blind and visually impaired people, which can inform other researchers, designers, or artists interested in participatory making.

Music is essential to most of us, it can light up all areas of the brain, help develop skills with communication, help to establish identity, and allow a unique path for expression. However, barriers to access or gaps in provision can restrict access to music-making and sound exploration for some people. Research has shown that technology can provide unique tools to access music-making but that technology is underused by practitioners. This action research project details the development and design of a technological toolkit called MAMI – the Modular Accessible Musical Instrument technology toolkit - in conjunction with stakeholders from four research sites. Stakeholders included music therapists, teachers, community musicians, and children and young people. The overarching aims of the research
were: to explore how technology was incorporated into practices of music creation and sound exploration; to explore the issues that stakeholders had with current music technology; to create novel musical tools and tools that match criteria as specified by stakeholders, and address issues as found in a literature review; to assess the effectiveness of these novel tools with a view to improving practices; and to navigate propagation of the practices, technologies, and methods used to allow for transferability into the wider ecology. Outcomes of the research include: a set of design considerations that contribute to knowledge around
the design and practical use of technological tools for music-making in special educational needs settings; a series of methodological considerations to help future researchers and developers navigate the process of using action research to create new technological tools with stakeholders; and the MAMI Tech Toolkit – a suite of four bespoke hardware tools and accompanying software - as an embodiment of the themes that emerged from: the cycles of action research; the design considerations; and a philosophical understanding of music creation that foregrounds it as an situated activity within a social context.

This research project explores the notion that by anthropomorphizing nature through an emergent practice of landscaped inspired costume design a sense of connectivity between humans and nature can be bridged. It builds on somatic costume research by Dean (2014 and 2016) and asks the question: How can the body be used as a somatic landscape to create a playful public engagement performance tool to promote a connection with the natural landscapes of Dorset.

A costume -design -led approach was executed by combining theoretical and empirical research that explored the connectivity between the landscape and the body. This included field trips and visual hands-on research included rock rubbing, sketching, fossil hunting, archival research and investigative walking. Most significant was the dialogue with the earth scientists from the Jurassic Coast Trust who supported the research and its development. Combining this practice-based approach with theories in social scientists (Tams et al. (2013), Berry & Wolf-Waltz (2014) and Lumber, Richard and Sheffield (2017)) the outcome of this research highlights how the intervention of performance, or more specifically costume design in performance, can be used as a method to get its audience to think about natural landscapes. Cited in Resonance in Rocks: Building a Sustainable Learning and Engagement Programme for the Jurassic Coast, Proceedings of Geologists’ Association, the work was referred to as a ‘remarkable piece of interpretation’ Khatwa Ford, (2018).

The Flock! exhibition explored the diverse and dynamic uses of flock. It provided an understanding of the applications, benefits and important qualities and uses of flock through the exploration of an array of historical and contemporary flocked objects. The exhibition explored how flock is used across a variety of contexts, including interior design, publishing, and fashion design. It addressed the importance of flock as an important process and surface treatment that is widely used. Importantly it explained that flock is a distinct process and outcome that is not to be mistaken as velvet or referred to just as a ‘fuzzy’ surface.
The exhibition provided visitors with an understanding of flock and how and why it continues to endure and appeal.

This unique exhibition, the first exhibition of its type, explored flock and the extent of its use across a range of contexts. The exhibition brought together for the first time numerous historical and contemporary examples of flock in its exploration of flock's sumptuous, tactile surface finish. The exhibition explored flock's rich history and importantly its contemporary relevance and importance.

The exhibition showcased artwork and design objects produced by artists, designers and many of the leading international flock manufacturers. The exhibition gained a The Textile Society Award and was successfully supported by the Arts Council England-Grants for the Arts, and the European Flock Association. The exhibition was accompanied by Flockage: the symposium that featured presentations by leading flock specialists and design academics. The exhibition was extended by four months owing to popular demand and resulted in Hardie being invited guest speaker at the Flock Association of Europe conference in Berlin, 2009.

The Creative Interventions research project examined creative arts student experiences of work-related learning (WRL) activity in the public and third sectors. It set out to explore how such experiences contribute to students’ employability skills, how these are identified by the students and how the activities are valued by students, the higher education institution (HEI) and the external partners involved. This report was primarily written for academics (both within the creative arts and other
disciplines); the Higher Education Academy (HEA); employability support workers (e.g.careers staff); and employability policy-makers.
The project took place between 2008-2010, and was a collaboration led by the University
of the Arts London (UAL), in partnership with the Arts University College at Bournemouth (AUCB) and the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education (SCEPTrE) at the University of Surrey. It was part of the National Teaching Fellowship Scheme (NTFS) project strand initiative funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and managed by the HEA.