Items where Year is 2025

Artificial intelligence is a transforming design practice. This research explores human-AI interaction in relation to human centred design principles in early stage design projects. Using a qualitative workshop methodology, this empirical study took a multidisciplinary team of participants from a yacht manufacturer through a series of divergent, discover phase activities that were augmented by AI tools. The results demonstrated how the advanced capabilities of AI to rapidly analyse vast quantities of data could be purposefully implemented to enhance engagement. the role off facilitator as an intermediary between the AI and participants allowed the interface between human and AI to be moderated and provided insights into effective effective use of AI during the fuzzy front end.

Franca Donda (Italy, 1933-2017) was an activist, filmmaker, and photographer who lived in Caracas for most part of the second half of the twentieth century. During these decades, she made several short films with the Venezuelan collectives Cine Urgente/Urgent Cinema (1968-1973) and Grupo Feminista Miércoles/Wednesday’s Feminist Group (1979-1988). Throughout her life, she also took thousands of photographs of women across Latin America. However, her work has received little scholarly attention, and her archive has not been properly preserved. This article demonstrates the importance of protecting the legacy of Donda, Cine Urgente, and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. To do so, it explores Donda’s multifaceted identity and outlines the production of the two collectives. It maps, locates, and assesses the conditions of some of the materials that could comprise their archive. And it reflects on issues of positionality and briefly describes the transmedia project that is emerging from this research.

Elsa Schiaparelli was well known for her collaborations with avant-garde artists, particularly those associated with the surrealist movement, however previous research has rarely discussed her relationship with the artist Leonor Fini. Between 1937-1940, Fini produced several designs for Schiaparelli, comprising three fashion illustrations and the bottle for the couturier’s perfume. Focusing on these illustrations, this article examines how Fini’s artistic aesthetic, particularly her use of animal-human hybrids, complemented and amplified the surrealist elements in Schiaparelli’s designs at this time. Capitalizing on the increasing popularity of surrealist imagery in contemporary fashion magazine publication, Fini and Schiaparelli both used the image of the woman-animal hybrid to evoke a sense of unease in contemporary audiences in a way that reflected deeper cultural tensions. These illustrations were a site of exchange between the two women, with a lasting influence on the Schiaparelli brand and on Fini’s ongoing artistic practice.

Captivating fusion of dance, art and costume design at The Moving Canvas Project Exhibition. This exhibition showcases the innovation work of Pavillion Dance South West’s adult contemporary company Co-Evo in collaboration with researchers Jenna Hubbard and Adele Keeley from Arts University Bournemouth.

In 2023, Co-Evo dancers worked alongside the research team to create a unique performance where movement and drawing intertwined. Though collaborative exploration, the dancers designed their own costumes by drawing and dancing simultaneously, allowing their movement to inspire their artistic expression.

Museum virtual tours are interfaces of interaction with archival spaces situated at the heart of the debate around the (in)accessibility of archives. Focussing on the case of The Red Lodge Museum in Bristol, we argue that drawing attention to the ‘insignificant’ - the transitional and interstitial spaces of both the virtual and physical tours - bring opportunities for decolonising the representations of history. Drawing from the works of bell hooks, Jack Halberstam, and Sara Ahmed, this paper examines the successes, failures, and strange joys of moving from a virtual tour to a physical space and back again.

Genealogically and technologically, a virtual tour inherits the imperialistic and global capitalist undertones of panoramic painting and photography, but discursively presents a well-intended call for accessibility. In the Red Lodge Museum, where the history of the place presents almost entirely a sequence of its possessors, this opens room for questions: how can we make a museum experience continuous, not focussed on these possession-oriented moments in time? How can we capture continuity in the museum context, or alternatively - how can we bring the gaps to the forefront in representing history?

The abrupt cuts in the transitions between the hotspots of virtual tours illustrate the gaps in the representation of the place’s history, which are also reflected in the patchwork-like organisation of the physical museum. In our experience of visiting the Red Lodge Museum, both virtually and physically, we wonder, “What happens when 'nothing noteworthy' happens?”

Referring to Jussi Parikka and Trevor Paglen’s conceptualisations of surface in 3d spaces, Tim Barringer’s work on panoramic gaze, as well as Annet Dekker’s nuanced approach to the intertwinings of the digital and physical archives, the paper will suggest an artistic approach towards interpreting the gaps in the museum virtual tours.

This paper conducts a comparative philosophical analysis of the works of the speculative, design-fictional architect and film maker Liam Young, and the academic design theorist Tony Fry, focusing primarily upon their responses to questions of sustainability in the context of design and architectural practice, and their respective approaches to de- and re-futuring the Earth.

Whilst Fry's Design as Politics (2010) aims to highlight the urgency of environmental crisis and the implication of designers in this, its predominantly rational, absolutist and logico-propositional mode of communication distances it from an audience more attuned to affective, emotional, forms of exchange, and to imaginative modes of visualization. It is claimed here, firstly that Young’s project Planet City (2021), a multi-platform, design-fictional response to a very similar set of concerns, is better able to engage Fry’s intended audience, through its rallying of affective and fictional modes of graphical communication, and secondly that Fry’s overly strong commitment to a reality principle, and his call for methodological standardization in the context of design futuring, runs the risk of defuturing the more hubristic, imaginative and speculative responses that are nevertheless important to the process of ontological transformation.

This paper presents the development of a macramé-inspired framework for evaluating the effectiveness of creative participatory research (CPR), addressing gaps in conventional framework models that overlook the complex, multidimensional and experiential nature of these research approaches. The framework was designed to visualize and materialize the evolving nature of CPR, where participant engagement,
contextual factors, and the sometimes organic and unpredictable creative activities shape both the research process and its outcomes. To achieve this, we worked with a group of experienced researchers with expertise in participatory textile-making methods in a series of three online workshops. Through these
sessions, the research team explored the challenges of evaluating creative participatory approaches to research, critiqued existing evaluation framework models and developed potential alternatives before finalizing the proposed macramé-inspired framework prototype presented here. The resulting framework employs macramé components such cords, interconnecting knots, and anchor points metaphorically to highlight different aspects of creative participatory research processes including the research context, participant engagement levels, project scope and duration, key research activities and participant
interactions. In order to support robust evaluation of research effectiveness, we have devised question prompts to encourage shared reflection and discussion between researcher(s) and participants, rather than the one-sided assessment more usually offered by a set of fixed evaluation ‘criteria’, thereby shifting the focus from static metrics to embodied, experiential data. The prototype macramé framework presented here has the potential to be adapted to a diverse range of creative participatory projects beyond its origins in participatory textile-making. We anticipate it to be particularly useful for researchers and practitioners seeking evaluation models that highlight experiential knowledge, contextual nuance, and participant agency experienced ‘live’ in the unpredictable contexts of creative participatory research. Future research plans for this experimental prototype framework will include testing through case studies of real-life contextualized
research settings.

Fashion is primarily a visual ontology consisting of definitions, theory, and methods that are based on visual language. The workshop Sensoaesthetics: Introducing alternative embodied material expressions in textile and fashion is a part of a three-year research project, Sonic Fashion (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2022-2024).
The project aims to expand the discourse of fashion by approaching it from a new and very different—sonic—perspective wherein sound
is considered not as a negative aspect, but as a potential source of a new theory and facilitator of the evolution of new methods.
The proposed workshop aims to (i) introduce participants to experimental inclusive aesthetics and (ii) expand the vocabularies of material definition - analyzing and defining them by using five experiential levels: functional, sensorial, interpretive, affective and performative. The workshop invites participants from a whole host
of design fields and people with a visual impairment to co-create together within sensitizing exercises and sonic design prototyping to develop more inclusive ways of designing, defining, and representing textile and fashion artifacts.

Despite often being labelled and/or perceived as immaterial, digital photography is no less material than its analogue cousin. Whilst the variety and diversity of material forms once ubiquitous in analogue photography have decreased exponentially, a physical vehicle is still necessary for viewing digital photographic images. Most recently, this is the screen. The screen has become the predominate material form of digital images – in fact, we would not be able to see them without it. Many important issues that have arisen out of digital image culture such as the overabundance of images, the ease of accessibility and appropriation, questions of authorship, ownership, distribution and circulation have all been addressed in scholarship; however, the singular physical environment upon which all these things occur, has not. This article examines the consolidated materiality of the screen; the consolidated imagery and contexts that exists on it; and the physical gestures we use to access that imagery, exploring the effects upon our relationship with images and in turn, our relationship to and perception of the world.