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Financial Management in Fashion
No full textAfter studying this chapter you should be able to understand:
- the link between the strategic aims and the financial capability of a fashion organisation
- sources of long term and short term funding used by fashion businesses of all sizes
- published financial information as a rich research source that can aid understanding of the financial structure and health of a fashion business
- the application of basic financial analysis skills to financial statements to assess the position and performance of a fashion business
- the complexity of issues around valuing fashion businesse
The Performance of Labour In, As and Beyond the Image
Get PDFAbstract: Within post-Fordist economies, work has been theorised as increasingly performative, relying on communicative faculties even at the menial level of call centres and carework. In popular discourse, automation has been presented as a threat to this model. However, since the extraction of value can only happen in relation to labour rather than machines, this fantasy continues to function in the way it has historically, as a disciplinary means of lowering wages. Within performance art, liveness has been fetishized in opposition to mediation. However, performance, like all art today, results in the documentary image, which becomes the commodity produced by artistic labour. The circulation of such images in turn relies on yet more performative labour, including the sharing of the image and other discursive practices. As a consequence, the more it tries to present a critique of mediation, the more artistic performance draws nearer to non-artistic, extractive labour practices. Instead of seeing liveness as external to mediation, then, we argue that it is more productive to explore the critical potential of the mediated image of living labour
Intimacy vs. Property
Get PDFThis prompt has been contributed by Andrea Francke who proposes to revisit the “infectious concepts” of property and sovereignty. She writes, “I’m annoyed by radical structures that reify the idea of property as the way to think about our relations to each other and the world.” Instead, she calls for the courage to pay attention to the actual ways in which we exist with each other, what she calls “the intimacy of interdependency”.
With the help of a selection of texts, from C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl to Lauren Berlant and Mia Mingus, Andrea provides different entry points to thinking about the shift from property to intimacy. For those who have difficulties in engaging with long texts, she prepared short introductions summarising the texts’ main ideas, as well as her rationale for selecting them. She also sent audio recordings of her prompt with spoken word for ease of access
Design and Other Ways of Knowing the Future
Get PDFMany disciplines are turning toward design today, in what some scholars are calling a ‘design turn’ within society and academia. A field is emerging, for example, in between the Futures Studies and design disciplines. An emergent field such as ‘design futures’ may seem contradictory, however, given that design has historically been preoccupied with objects, materials and space, rather than with time and the future. While many will be familiar with spatial design fields such as interior, furniture and industrial design, however, temporality is central to a number of more recently emerging fields such as communication, experience and interaction design. Through outlining some of the concerns and practices in such fields and by pointing at several practical design examples, I explore in this paper some of the ways in which temporality and futurity have entered more substantially and explicitly into design. Futurity, I argue, is one of many ways through which to expose and explore the heterogeneous nature of design, to inquire about which knowledges as well as whose are at stake both within design and within the wider ‘design turn’. With reference to Futures Studies and, more explicitly, a typology that makes explicit the different knowledge paradigms underpinning different futures approaches, I argue that design scholarship should become similarly explicit and reflexive. Ultimately, by recognizing the multiple and different knowledge foundations in design, new possibilities are revealed for broadening and deepening the emergent field in between Futures Studies and design
Control, Detention and Torture in the So-called Global War on Terror
Get PDFThis thesis is a PhD by Published Work comprising three books and three solo survey museum exhibitions that form a collective body of research contributing new knowledge about unseen or underrepresented aspects of conflict and counterterrorism in the so-called Global War on Terror, including the detention camps at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, the extraordinary rendition process, the CIA secret prison programme, the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, and the use of control orders as a counterterrorism measure in the UK.
This knowledge contributes to a range of fields including photography, art and visual culture, international relations, security studies, and international law by adding significant new complexity to narratives obscured by state denial and simplified by stereotypical media analysis and representation, and filling absences of justice or accountability with original insights. The thesis illustrates how this is achieved through: long-term immersion in research leading to uncovering previously unseen material; new insights into experiences of control, detention and torture generated by relationships of trust with former detainees; unique access to secure and hard to reach detention sites and representation of significant global locations; the collaboration of world-leading experts in human rights law and counterterrorism research.
In turn, this thesis demonstrates how investigative research combined with visual art practices, are uniquely able to interrogate new forms of conflict and terrorism through an emergent methodology and original strategy of visualisation. It illustrates how, through these approaches, the quotidian experience of the Global War on Terror is represented in my work by the themes of everyday terror, legal terror, bureaucratic terror, and sublime disorientation
Towards a sensory-emotional framework for design and management practices to cultivate a greater sense of connectedness in public environments
Get PDFThis presentation articulates insights from an investigation into the personalisation of experience in the public interior to uncover principles that can contribute to the visitor emotional attachment to place. The research posits that catering for a multiplicity of sensory and emotional needs can foster a greater sense of connectedness and belonging. To support this perspective, insights are synthesised into a sensory-emotional framework for design and management practices to cultivate a diversity of people and activities, individual and collective wellbeing.
The methodology is rooted in the paradigm of embodiment to explore the visitor situated experience of personalisation analysed in two dimensions: personalisation for visitors, the way the interior is designed and managed, and personalisation by visitors, the way they engage with the environment to enact their preferred activities. Personalisation for and personalisation by are treated as complementary and interdependent.
The sensory-emotional framework developed through this research can deepen our understanding of qualitative practices at the intersection of physical space and lived experiences, to contribute to the creation of public environments that are inclusive, welcoming and sustaining but also stimulating, enjoyable and fun, making daily life more rewarding and connected
Speculative Co-design With AI: An Artist-Friendly Prototype for Non-Human Avatar Creation
Get PDFThis technical demonstration responds to the growing importance of virtual identity. It introduces an artist-friendly, no-code prototype designed specifically to transparently integrate speculative AI processes into artistic co-design methods focused on virtual identity exploration. Artists and designers often struggle to effectively integrate AI into their creative practice because packaged commercial AI tools rarely accommodate their unique visual language and generally obscure creative control through black-box interfaces. These tools typically lack transparency for advanced users and are inconvenient when managing diverse creative inputs, especially in participatory co-design contexts involving multiple contributors. Addressing these challenges, this demonstration showcases a prototype developed using ComfyUI, a visual, node-based interface for building generative AI workflows without coding, combined with custom-trained LoRA models to ensure visual consistency and personal artistic expression in participant-driven avatar generation. Grounded in literature emphasising AI’s potential to foster imaginative engagement through transparency and creative flexibility, this transparent AI tool supports co-design activities, encouraging a wider community of creative practitioners to confidently experiment with speculative AI-driven co-desig
Brewing the Past: A Journey Into History Through Beer and Film
No full textIn September 2021, a unique team of historians, archaeologists, scientists, traditional craftspeople, and filmmaking team came together to recreate and document a beer last brewed in sixteenth-century Dublin.
The film documents the interdisciplinary efforts of historians, archaeologists, scientists, and traditional craftspeople to recreate a 16th-century Dublin beer recipe. This reconstruction involved selecting period-appropriate grains, building a replica brewery, and analyzing the resulting beer to gain insights into early modern brewing practices and dietary habits.
This project isn’t just about brewing beer - it’s about the fascinating ways that hands-on experiments with history can give us new insights into how people lived, worked, and enjoyed life centuries ago.
This event features a screening of the short film "Drunk? Adventures in Sixteenth-Century Brewing", which captured the team’s journey to recreate the past, followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Prof Shreepali Patel, historian and FoodCult project leader Dr Susan Flavin, and Mark Burton, biochemist and Brewer at Jesus College. Chaired by Dr Julian Huppert
A Collaborative Imperative: Embodied Design Pedagogies for Democracy
No full textAs four design educators from different countries in the global north, and with varied lived experiences, we are alarmed by the global rise of the far right and the weakening of democratic initiatives for social, climate and educational justice. Inequality is rising and human rights are at risk; from the Supreme Court Ruling Act in the UK that means trans women are no longer legally recognised as women, to ongoing rulings against academic freedom on higher education campuses.
What does this erosion of fundamental democratic values, including DEI initiatives, gender equality, indigenous sovereignty, and trans people’s rights, and the rise of the far right across the globe mean for us as design educators – personally and professionally, for our students, our communities, and our institutions? How might design education be used to promote democracy?
We believe there is an urgent need to come together as a community across disciplines to create a critical mass of activist-scholar-educators that embody and enable values of democracy.
We are proposing a workshop to explore the question: how can design educators and students across different disciplines collaborate to face threats to democracy? What would that community of leading learners and learners teach and learn? How would that community (have to) act? What are their responsibilities and possibilities? How can we leverage agency into actions?
This workshop takes inspiration from the kitchen table which has been used as a site of resistance for feminist praxis to develop initiatives, practices, teaching strategies, action plans, ideologies, methods & formats to create transformative ways of engaging our students with the urgent need to recontextualize our current systems of design learning. In multidisciplinary groups, we will work through a series of provocations to facilitate rich exchanges of experiences and development of design pedagogies for democracy
Ghost Singers, Crowd Pleasers, and Non-Participation
Get PDFA conversation with Bruce Hainley, Karsten Lund, Ramaya Tegegne, and Helena Vilalta October 18, 202