Items where Year is 2024

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.

Bajo el título donda-doc: Documenter les Femmes et les Féministes par la photo- graphie documentaire. L’exemple de Franca Donda au Venezuela, este proyecto pretende arrojar luz al legado de Franca Donda a través de la producción de varios artefactos culturales desarrollados a partir de su archivo. En este texto ofrecemos, en primer lugar, una breve biografía de Franca Donda, prestando especial atención a su producción cinematográfica y fotográfica. Y, en segundo lugar, ahondamos en el compromiso feminista de su trabajo fotográfico.

The appreciation or reception of materials can create a positive or a negative reaction in the user and an individual’s understanding of materials comes from their own experiential knowledge, influence of others, and cultural perception. The condemnation of the overuse of plastics materials and their impact on the environment when they become waste has, understandably, meant that today the cultural perception of plastics is largely that they are cheap, rubbish, throw away - all bad news. This position of negativity has been reached because we currently see the mismanagement of plastics waste as it blows about in the wind; we see it as rubbish in our streets, and as detritus in the oceans. However, our relationships with the material family, over the time they have existed, have had a varied and turbulent history with different perspectives generated by different people at different times. This article will briefly explore ‘a’, rather than ‘the’, history of the use of plastics with the aim of putting the current societal relationship with them into context.

The use and misuse of plastics in design have been the bedrock of turbulent relationships between consumers, manufacturers, and the material family. It has been acknowledged that culturally we, in the West, have had a deep, long-lived, yet ambivalent relationship with plastics as the materials have been seen as both a bringer of utopian ideals as well as a cheap alternative to nobler natural materials. Today, those relational connections have become diametric with individuals loving plastics because of what they can be made into, and those who hate them for the very same reason. This chapter will explore the historical comprehension of designed objects made of plastics, based on the notions of identity and authenticity, the acceptance of new materials, the ideas of cultural perception and taste, and the general understanding, or lack thereof, of manufacturing processes.

This chapter explores the role of arboreal and natural ‘memorials’ in evoking memory and creating meaning. It examines how the planting of commemorative trees, plants and flowers to create garden memorials differentiates from more monumental forms because it requires wilful participation from those who wish to actively remember. Where the erection of a monument in stone and bronze might appear to bring about a moment of closure, a memorial garden usually offers only a start. Seeding, planting and nurturing is seen as a means not an end: gardening invokes collaboration rather than closure. In examining the specific heritage of the memorial garden and arboreta, both for military and civilian purpose, examples are drawn from sites of trauma in Europe and North America, as well as commemorative domains and roads of remembrance in Australasia and Asia. Distinctions are drawn between sites of vicarious remembering and those places where the theatre of war has been superseded by commemorative theatres of memory.

Gilbert Spencer (1892–1979) was a British painter, muralist, illustrator, teacher, and writer whose career spanned more than six decades. Recognised during his lifetime as one of the leading artists of his generation, his reputation has long been overshadowed by his more famous brother, Stanley. Yet Spencer’s fascination with landscape and his ability to capture everyday life in rural England led to the creation of some of the most poignant artworks of the interwar period.

Drawing on a newly discovered archive of personal letters, notebooks, and diaries, this illustrated biography tells Spencer’s story for the first time. Bringing together his major paintings, drawings and illustrations, many never before seen, the book greatly expands our understanding of Spencer. It reassesses his status within twentieth-century British modernism and the revival of the landscape tradition, as well as the important role he played in the reinvigoration of public mural painting. Spencer is also reappraised as one of the most successful art teachers of his time, and his extensive influence on the lives and careers of many twentieth-century artists is explored in detail.

Reflecting on a tour of the Western Front trenches in 1916 the writer Reginald Farrer suggested that it was in fact wrong to regard the ‘huge, haunted solitude’ of the modern battlefield as empty. ‘It is more’ he argued, ‘full of emptiness… an emptiness that is not really empty at all.’ Contemporary artists, poets, and composers seized upon the concept of a crowded emptiness, of gaps, pauses and silences that were in fact crammed with resonance, populated with overwhelming memory.

This paper and film screening considers the phenomenology of aural emptiness and its manifestation during remembrance and repatriation ceremonies. It focusses on a short film by Kate Davies ‘The Separation Line’ which is a montage of 14 repatriation events held at Royal Wootton Bassett between 2007 and 2011. The film lasts precisely 9 minutes and 50 seconds, which is the temporal length of the town’s High Street, lined on either side by mourners maintaining an unsteady silence.

What is a Studio, Anyway? brings together artists, curators, designers, educators and arts professionals across the UK and further afield to share, question and contemplate the idea of the artist’s studio and the role of Higher Education in shaping it.

This new publication collates conversations, interviews and musings on the artists' studio, featuring contributions from Amelia Hawk, Andy Harper, Ben Sanderson, Eugenia Popesco, Georgia Gendall, Jane Darke, Joanne Masding, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Jordan Verdes, Leila Galloway, Maria Lalić, Marisol Malatesta, Professor Teal Triggs, Sarah Taylor-Silverwood, Simón Granell, Shen Xin, Stella Kajombo, Tarek Lakhrissi.

The project began in early 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when access to studio spaces for fine art students was prohibited. As researchers Professor Susan Orr and Dr Alison Shreeve have argued, the studio is central to fine art pedagogy, enabling an expanded means of knowledge production - rather than being, ‘delivered,’ it is, ‘forged’ (Orr and Shreeve, 2018:3) between students and educators. Successive lockdowns significantly disrupted the norm of studio-based practice which has underpinned Fine Art higher education in the UK for many decades. However, as artist and lecturer Kate McLeod has acknowledged, the lack of access to the studio during this time ‘created opportunities to experiment with different approaches, and to gain an appreciation of some of the limitations of the studio’ (McLeod, 2022).

One such limitation is the affordability and accessibility of artist studios post-education. Recent research published by ACME studios has found that long-term, secure and affordable artists’ studios are increasingly rare (Acme Studios, 2022:6) and therefore many artists are working outside of, or without a traditional artist’s studio space. These combined factors led us to initiate What is a Studio, Anway? with the central aim of offering students alternative insights, ideas and models, which would expand, challenge and disrupt dominant perceptions and representations of the artists’ studio (both within and beyond higher education).

We invited practitioners with a broad range of professional experiences to contribute to our research – from recent BA Fine Art graduates to established artists at the peak of their career. The research follows a qualitative narrative-based enquiry, and participants were asked four key questions:

What do you consider to be a studio?

Has this changed in the past year?

Across your career, have there been points where you have not had a physical space to work, and how have you navigated this?

What piece of advice would you give about studio practice?

What distinguishes our project from existing studies and research is the breadth of contributors and its specific response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The book sits in contrast to recent large scale survey publications, such as The Artist's Studio: A Century of the Artist's Studio 1920–2020 (Blazwick, 2022), which featured critically acclaimed artists; those often far removed from the experience of an emerging graduate or student – our intended audience.

This project offers a unique insight and contribution to the field of alternative ways of conceptualising and re-imagining the artist’s studio. The publication was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Grant from UCL, 2022.

This book demonstrates the relevance and importance of cognitive linguistics when applied to the analysis and practice of graphic design/communication design.

Phil Jones brings together a diverse range of theory and organizes it in accordance with different stages in the design process. Using examples from contemporary communication design, as well as more familiar selections from the graphic design canon as case studies, this book provides an account of how meanings are made by users, and suggests new strategies for design practice. It seeks convergences between the ways that graphic/communication designers think and talk about their practice and the theories emerging from cognitive science.

This book will be of interest to scholars working in design, graphic design, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, communication studies, and media and film studies.

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.

This article presents and analyses the results of a research workshop conducted during and after the 2022 Transitus symposium at Falmouth University. The article aims to explore our visions of physical space, travel and migration through stock landscape illustration. The workshop invited illustrators to draw a five-step sequence of images customising a stock landscape by turning it into a view out of their window, thus exploring how a visual digital ‘airport’, a utopian hub of a stock landscape, disintegrates into particularities of individual experiences. The resulting sequences of images were put together in an online magazine about illustration, slonvboa.ru, and are available here: http://slonvboa.ru/nonlandscape (Accessed 10 June 2023) This webpage collects 30-minute drawings from fourteen illustrators based in ten countries: Armenia, Dubai, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, with ten of the participants being based outside of their home country. Building upon the idea of the ‘nomadic illustration’ suggested by Catrin Morgan and Marc Augé’s notion of ‘non-place’, this article will explore further similarities between nomadism and the circulation of stock imagery. It will thus use the term ‘nomadic’ not only as a metaphor, but also as a direct link to migration studies and studies of digital nomadism, which often describes the precarious occupation of a migrating illustrator. This project will aim to highlight the unlikely possibilities that stock illustration may offer as a point of connection, rather than presenting stock landscapes an alienating utopian abstraction. It will also analyse how individual authorial strategies deal with the notion of space, and how artistic means shape our visions of private and public spaces.

Throughout the twentieth century architectural models served as the miniature playgrounds in which the future of Britain’s built environment was imagined, and in drawing from the evidence provided by those models today, this book considers how architects, planners, and civil engineers thought about that future by presenting a history of yesterday’s dreams of tomorrow, told through architectural models.

Focused not on the making of architectural models but rather the optimistic and utopian visions they were made to communicate, this book examines the possible futures put forward by 120 models made by Thorp, the oldest and most prolific firm of architectural modelmakers in Britain, in order to reveal a century of evolving ideas about how we might live, work, relax, and move. From depictions of unbuilt city masterplans to those of seemingly ordinary shopping centres and motorways, the models featured trace a progression of the architectural, social, political, technological, and economic influences that shaped the design of Britain’s buildings, transport infrastructure, and its towns and cities during a century of relentless change.

Illustrated with over 130 photographs, this book will appeal to academics and historians, as well as anyone with an interest in architectural models and the history of Britain’s twentieth century built environment.

In this article I explore the embodied epistemic of the act of reading, arguing that it is an inherently ecological phenomenon. I draw upon Phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau Ponty, Abram) and Ecolinguistics (Naess, Stibbe).

This creative writing textbook introduces students to ecofiction: narrative writing that focuses on the environment. Also known as ‘climate fiction’ or ‘cli-fi’, an increasing number of short story writers, novelists and pioneers of emerging forms such as interactive fiction are taking up the call to develop their own creative responses to the climate crisis. This guide explores a cross-section of genres and ways of writing about our world, as well as the ethical and technical challenges involved. It offers a discussion of classic and contemporary texts, literary criticism and creative writing exercises. The book covers a broad range of themes and styles of writing, from works that engage with nature and landscape writing to those that take a more activist approach to climate change. With an awareness of the Global South and the subaltern, the framing of the Anthropocene, wilderness and nature writing is challenged. Each chapter offers a new perspective on ecofiction for the creative writer, with reading suggestions and connections to other writers and texts, and writing activities. Designed for upper-level undergraduate and postgraduate writing modules on the environment, the book is also suitable for independent writers looking to expand their skillset.

With the increasing reliance on digital technology globally, the adoption of industry 4.0 within the fashion industry has accelerated. The full 3D digital production process is at the forefront of fashion innovation, however legacy issues such as traditional size charts persist.
Inclusivity of diverse body shapes is a major issue for the fashion industry. By adopting a new approach, this research introduces a new process that has the potential to improve customer satisfaction and reduce waste.
This study evaluates the traditional size chart by comparing the industry standard to 3D body scan data from participants, focusing on the use of avatars and body scanning to improve the fit process and challenge the existing sizing system implemented throughout the fashion industry. This provides the foundation for a pilot study of a novel virtual fitting room which explores digital process as an alternative to the traditional size charts.
The result of this research is a prototype for the avatar library 'fitting room', that contains the 'real women' avatars from body scans. 3D avatars can be beneficial in both improving fit and reducing waste within the fashion industry. Further development of the avatar fit library will be available for industry to utilise in the fit process from design through to sampling and production stages. This prototype demonstrates a means to disseminate this research in an innovative and engaging way.

Recent decades have seen increasingly complex external regulation applied to higher education providers. This has accentuated the role of heads of quality, who require considerable specialist knowledge and insight to ensure that organisational practices align with regulatory expectations. However, while the existing literature recognises that heads of quality do not perform a uniform role, it does not typically discuss the key organisational features which explain the differences in the role or necessarily position of heads of quality as third space professionals. Drawing on a comparative case study of three universities, the article extends our understanding by confirming that heads of quality can legitimately be termed third space professionals and by showing that heads of quality must navigate their environment in different ways according to the degree of access to the third space offered by their organisation. A more structurally situated explanation of third space activity is thus required. The article also reflects on the tendency to discuss a particular group of third space professionals and to characterise their experience as though it were broadly common. It argues for a more nuanced explanation, taking account of organisational structure as a further variable which may help to explain the experience of the third space professional.

A work on silenced history, life writing and auto ethnography focused on divisions created by barriers and borders. The three sisters confront their childhood after spending decades apart in culturally and politically diverging countries. For all of them, one moment in life determined everything that followed.
Narrated with the use of archival material and photos saved from the work of time, the film enters into the private memories of three girls now in their lated 80s, and unveil the dramatic impact of societal rules and history in itself of these unusual women.

Over the last decade developments in virtual reality (VR) technologies have given rise to a new wave of immersive storytelling experiences that have captivated audiences at film festivals, in galleries, through online platforms and various other venues. In response, scholarly research into narrative-based VR has sought to understand the affordances, artistic qualities and immersive nature of this medium. Within this array of analysis and reflection, traditional screenwriting concerns such as narrative structure, plot devices and character development have been discussed alongside notions of immersion, embodiment and user experience design. Accordingly, notions of ‘script development’ have expanded to encompass processes gathered under terms like ‘conceptualization’, ‘prototyping’ and ‘narrative design’, which assume specific connotations in relation to various disciplinary approaches. This Special Issue explores the technologies, practices and paradigms that VR storytelling implements, with particular attention given to the differing terminology across disciplines that resonates, repurposes or redefines conceptual understandings belonging to earlier media, and specifically, to screenwriting for film.

Contact is a unique configuration of eight artists, which is structured equally across two exhibitions, at New Art Projects, London. These artists work in distinct and interrelated mediums and forms that explore material, temporal and spatial relations working with stil and moving images, analogue and digital practices, human and machine processes. Their distinct approaches and applications produce different, but related, medium engagement, viewing regimes and cross-disciplinary discourse. They are in contact with materials, forms, context, one another, and are part of an ongoing conversation that generates new connections and ideas.

Curated by: Andrew Vallance

Part 1: 20 July-17 August 2024
Jenny Baines, Sophie Clements, Carali McCali, Cathy Rogers

Part 2: 18 January-8 February 2025
Savinder Bual, Jim Hobbs, Simon Payne, Andrew Vallance

Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema is a collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema, involving a range of international film and video makers from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. The book represents a snapshot of the diverse ways that these practitioners have come to think about the field of experimental cinema, in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large, and wider social issues. Film Talks: A Touring Programme of Experimental Cinema, a series of eight international screenings, is in two parts and features twenty-one 16mm films and video works by artists who feature in the book, drawing out new ideas and connections that span different visions of cinema.

This research unearths insights into the entangled pedagogic processes that occurred between students and educator when co-creating during a contemporary art project called Sonic Camouflage. The off-campus project-based learning environment of Sonic Camouflage was shown to boost and intensify learning for all participants, with an integrated re-energising tri-role for the educator to partake in art, education, and research practice. The research discovered that Sonic Camouflage contained intertwined learning processes that I term ‘microcultures of collaboration’. These microcultures are unravelled to reveal new insights surrounding improvisational learning using a cultural instigator as provocation and around individual artistic development. Sonic Camouflage was also shown to react to pervasive segregating media and technology by generating an immersive sense of belonging to a co-supportive learning community that instilled an empowering resilience for participants’ future art practice. Dialogic and collaborative constructivist approaches were integral methods employed to undertake the research.

The Power of Collaboration as Practice-Based Learning investigates the rich entangled hierarchical processes that occur during a collaborative artistic project called Sonic Camouflage. The Sonic Camouflage project was conceived at a time of decreasing radical art school cultures in an attempt to re-radicalise and intensify periods of learning for both students and tutor through a flattening of power structures between students and tutor. The research unearths insights into the effects of hierarchical power sharing during Sonic Camouflage on its collaborative participants by asking How do participants negotiate an artistic learning collaboration individually and collectively? The enquiry reveals that themed collaborative projects can be used successfully to provoke and propose a levelling out of power dynamics as positive agency for participants learning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rA5t0gYd088