3128 research outputs found
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Fashioning Futures: Leveraging Digital Innovation and Sustainability in Mentorship for Marginalised Entrepreneurs
No full textThe fashion industry's rapid evolution through digital transformation and heightened sustainability consciousness demands new strategies for aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly those from marginalised groups. This paper reevaluates mentoring programmes in the United Kingdom's fashion sector, focusing on their adaptation to digital and sustainable practices to support young entrepreneurs from minority and low-income backgrounds. Employing qualitative methods, including interviews and case studies, we investigate how mentoring intersects with digital technologies to navigate and mitigate traditional industry barriers and power dynamics. Our research, based on sixteen semi-structured interviews with fashion experts in the United Kingdom's South-East and Midland regions, reveals that effective mentorship in the digital age requires overcoming challenges related to network access, mentor-mentee dynamics, and systemic industry biases. These findings underscore the importance of embracing digital technologies and sustainable practices within mentoring to promote inclusivity and long-term success in the fashion industry, aligning with emerging global trends towards ethical and sustainable luxury branding
Ethical materialities in art and moving images
Full text linkIn the age of the Anthropocene, when artworks cannot rest upon their separation from the planet, this book questions the ethical and material relations that artists, art and images are entangled in. It examines how the relations between the ethical and the material figure in a context in which a dearth of ethical practice and thought has caused the materialities of the Anthropocene and the climate catastrophe.
Ethics are generally regarded as constituted through immaterial relations guided by moral imperatives. By contrast, this volume argues that the singular ethicalities that are manifested in a work cannot be captured by abstract ethics. The explorations of the ethical here are not prescriptive, but creative. Through artistic and philosophical thought and practice, the contributions move beyond the division between an active practice of ethics and a contemplative theory of aesthetics.
Across three sections, practitioners and theorists consider the singular relations between materials and ethics in biodiverse environments. They suggest that to bring out the ethical dimensions of the material and the material dimension of the ethical—without identifying one with the other—is a responsibility of art and images
I like your new eyes: representations of extended reality technologies in tabletop roleplaying games
No full textThis chapter investigates how extended reality technologies are represented in the worldbuilding of tabletop role-playing games and how the experiences of seeing or perceiving the world through machine vision are integrated into gameplay. Due to their flexibility and openness in creating imaginary speculative futures, tabletop role-playing games will be used as a reference point. Due to its uninterrupted release history and publication policy of reflecting on and responding to contemporary technological developments, the Shadowrun (1989-2024) series is selected as the focus of the chapter. The chapter first discusses how science fiction has shaped the public perception of extended reality technologies and how tabletop roleplaying games can be used to approach technology critically. The chapter then presents how the Shadowrun series integrates emerging technologies into its world-building and continues with an investigation of how extended realities are represented. Two distinct periods are identified in this survey. In the first period, emerging cyberpunk tropes are used to speculate on extended reality technologies as a novelty with little social commentary. Inspired by the growing availability of online services, the second period envisions a future society where extended realities have become ubiquitous. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how tabletop role-playing games can be utilized to explore perceptions, expectations, and design possibilities regarding developing extended realities by providing a space for exploration and speculation
Foreword
No full textThis brief piece is a discussion of the haunting qualities of the videogame medium, incorporating the ghostly entities of early arcade titles, the abandoned labyrinthine spaces of contemporary walking simulators, the often-spectral presence of players within game environments, the uncanny nature of videogame technologies and digital animation, glitching, game nostalgia, and the way games experiences haunt everyday life
Liquid Architecture: Experimental Practices of Design in a State of Flux
No full textLiquid Architecture challenges the idea of architecture as a fixed, inert container and reconceptualises it as a body whose boundaries are rather blurred and ever-changing. This book moves away from form as the primary driver of spatial protocols and explores what the built environment might look like when viewed through the lenses of a ‘wet ontology’ that is attentive to fluidity, flows and territorial dynamism. A reconfiguration of architectural materials and authorship is thus considered, leading, in turn, to an exploration of the ethical dimensions of co-designing with natural systems (of various viscosities) through liquid paradigms.
The book examines a set of principles for practice-led discoveries that incorporate hybrid, mixed media with the author’s intersubjective relationship with liquid matter. Drawing from qualitative-based analytical investigation models, the text allows comprehension of the liquid phenomena via material contextualisation of an ever-becoming research setting. Through a practical and theoretical engagement with the ontology of liquids, the reader is exposed to a range of design-led experiments and creative propositions, visualisation systems, construction, and testing of physical models that collectively translate into a series of novel insights for architectural agendas.
This book will be of interest to architecture and design research students and academics because it advocates the need for a more symbiotic and resilient approach to natural systems, which could benefit from the integration of regenerating material flows into our buildings and urban settlements
Exploring online brand mediated communities and customer experience: insights and evidence from the Luxury fashion industry
Full text linkAbstract
Purpose
Online brand community research has been directed at examining the consequences of consumer–brand relationships on various behavioural issues, with little to say about reciprocity and variants of millennials’ loyalty in the luxury fashion industry. The purpose of this paper is to advance knowledge of millennials’ participation in OBCs and reciprocity.
Design/methodology/approach
This qualitative study utilised an interpretive research approach and focused on the voices of millennials who had experience with OBCs. This study builds on social influence theory and extends existing understanding of millennials’ participation in OBCs by highlighting the constructs of customers’ reciprocity structures that lead to loyalty towards luxury fashion brands. Fifty semi-structured interviews were conducted, and the emergent data were qualitatively analysed using thematic analysis.
Findings
This paper developed an emergent theoretical framework that identifies and conceptualises four archetypical categories of millennial consumers in the luxury fashion industry: traditionalists, inspirers, self-containers and expellers. The framework illuminates varying strategies and explains how certain strategies might be more effective with different categories of consumers.
Originality/Value
This study builds on social influence theory and extends existing understanding of millennials’ participation in OBCs by highlighting the constructs of customers’ reciprocity structures that lead to loyalty towards luxury fashion brands.
Keywords: Online brand communities, customer loyalty, luxury fashion, social influence, social constructionist, interviews, millennial
Knowledge management towards sustainable competitive advantage in higher education: an analysis of productive and counterproductive behaviors
No full textPurpose: Based on the knowledge-based view (KBV) and theory of planned behavior (TPB), the study aims to investigate the impact of sustainable leadership (SL) on knowledge management processes (KMPs) and the direct influence of KMPs on sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). Additionally, it aims to explore the mediating role of knowledge worker social responsibility (KWSR) in the relationship between KMPs and SCA. Furthermore, this study aims to evaluate the moderating effect of knowledge sabotage behavior (KSB) on the relationship between KMPs and KWSR.
Design/Methodology: The sample frame consisted of 354 academic and administrative workers from Pakistan’s higher education institutions. The hypothesized relationships were tested using the PLS-SEM approach.
Findings: The study found a significant positive effect of SL on KPMs as well as KMPs on SCA. Partial mediation of knowledge worker social responsibility between knowledge management processes and sustainable competitive advantage was confirmed. Furthermore, our findings indicate the negative moderating effect of knowledge sabotage behavior on the relationship between KMPs and KWSR.
Originality/Value: The originality of the study lies in elucidating the direct relationship of SL & KMPs with the moderating role of KSB in the link between KMPs and KWSR and the mediating effect of KWSR on the relationship between KMPs and SCA in the setting of higher education institutions (HEIs) in Pakistan. Furthermore, this study provides in-depth insights into the existing body of knowledge on the KBV and TPB about SL, KMPs, and SCA
It's A Small World
No full textFrom April 9 to 20 2024, Blossom Art Agency is moving to 13 rue Mazarine to present the exhibition "It's a Small World". In a small setting in Saint Germain, Paris the works of eight international contemporary artists will be brought together. Revealed in an atypical space, this eclectic and vibrant exhibition is a great opportunity to discover in Paris, a great diversity of works from elsewhere, including Norway, Iran or England. A small artistic world to be enjoyed.
List of artists exhibited:
Marit Geraldine Bostad (Norway)
Laya Kazerouni (Iran)
Matthew Livrieri (Belgium)
Hannah Rollings (England)
Karen Ösp Palsdottir (Iceland)
Jude Zawaideh (Jordan)
Garance Blachier (France)
The Emma Series (Taiwan
A space in-between whitework and indigo resist: Unravelling cultural dislocation through symbolic cloth
No full textThis research concentrates on the material histories of a whitework embroidered cloth and an indigo-resist blueprint cloth. The two cloths are rooted in transcultural stitch craft and textile dye traditions and both share a complex heritage originating from the 1850s. The colonisation and decolonisation of India and South Africa influence the reading of these culturally symbolic things.
Three central theoretical positions illuminate the research. Homi Bhabha (1990, 1994) theorises liminal space 'in-between' cultures, in which difference is negotiated to shape new cultural meanings. Cloth culture incorporates a transcultural textile language (Harris, 2015). Textile methods and media form a tangible bridge operating between past and present and across cultures. Doreen Massey's (2005) critique of space emphasises a relationality in places crossing space and time, where collectively multiple events form 'stories-so-far' of place. The two cloths' material histories cross space and time, and these connect places and cultural dislocations. This praxis created a between-meeting point for unravelling both cloths’ stories-so-far in material ways.
The methodology, exhibition as research as theorised by Pierre Bjerregaard (2020), demonstrates research practice and theory set in relation to developing new knowledge. Adapting the model, this practice-based research spatially reframed the two cloths’ material histories by producing room-scaled installations consisting of cloth, stitch, light, and drawing. Presented as encounters with cloth at exhibition events, both cloths were set in dialogue with places and spaces.
Unravelling two cloths’ stories in a south-thinking praxis metaphorically and materially connected threads between cloth, cultural tissue and dislocation. Intersecting praxis methods progressed interpretations of a connective ambiguity, thereby revealing a discomfort between cloth and cultural tissue. This research set conditions for encountering revised stories-so-far of cloth as installations in in-between spaces; as a result a newly south-made blue-and-white thread is pinned into the local southern England landscape
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