3132 research outputs found
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The Freedom to Choose: Factors Shaping Women’s Parenthood Decisions
Full text linkThis report investigates the multifaceted factors that influence North American women’s decisions in whether to pursue motherhood, and how society might empower women with the true freedom to decide based on personal desires and life goals rather than external factors that are often perceived or experienced as uncontrollable. Drawing upon one-on-one interviews, polls, and existing literature, the study explores how themes such as interpersonal relationships, financial stability, policy support, and the loss of personal and leisure time associated with having children impact decision-making. We will then delve into strategies aimed at mitigating external barriers that influence women's decision-making regarding having children. By addressing these barriers, my hope is to ensure that women’s decisions on whether to pursue parenthood is driven by personal yearning and reflection rather than external restrictions or influences
Embodiment of the Intertwined
Full text linkConsequential to the traumatic societal and political situation in my motherland, Iran, the number of Iranian diasporas has increased all over the world, and the Persian cultural, social, and political borders have been expanded much wider than their geographical ones. While this immigrant populace living in the receiver societies is still affected psychologically, and physically by the traumas coming from their land of origin.
For this thesis, I as an Iranian female artist, living in exile, and as a cancer survivor, interrogating my body and my soul, about what I have experienced in my social-political time and place. The research applied a combination of studio-based exploration through video performance and sculptural installation, supported by library-based investigation which lies in the intersection of psychoanalysis, trauma’s physical and psychological impacts, displacement, politics, and art. I use the idea of Jungian archetypes alongside Gabor Maté's work in When the Body Says No to argue that the social-political traumas from the homeland will never be erased from immigrants' bodies, minds, and souls. I examine how the chronic pain that runs through my body is interwoven with the trauma of people living in Iran through the sense of empathy, and how this situation could be explored through the lens of such Jungian archetypes as the Caregiver.
My work visually explores reconstructing Iranian cultural elements, like the Persian rug, through/with my body. The Routes of Blood is a creation of Persian rug sand installation, which embodies my labor, physical presence, soul, and mind in the space, simultaneously. In The Woven Bodies Series, the image of my body through repetition forms the textile patterns of the Persian Rug. The act of performing with the rug and its documentation symbolically represents my memories of my motherland and the trauma that resonates through the afflictions of the chronic pain I have experienced.
The thesis is a visualization of the trauma experienced in my Iranian body in the disassociated space of a diasporic context within Canada
EMPOWERING WITH Co-DESIGN:From Music-making to Achieving a Sense of Agency
Full text linkMusic is a source of self-expression. Concerning adults with Cerebral Palsy (CP), active music-making brings multiple benefits. This paper explores strategies to empower Christine Jimenez musically. She is a 51-year-old individual with cerebral palsy and a member of the Bliss i-Band, a music community that gathers weekly as an ensemble. This design-based project investigates lived experiences and challenges associated with technology and communication within the Bliss i-Band and proposes design concepts to overcome systemic gaps. With an Inclusive Design approach, the project utilizes a community-led co-design practice by involving i-Band members, their music companions, and facilitators as collaborators. The three-dimensional inclusive design framework lays the foundation of this collaboration of designing within a complex adaptive system. By integrating every co-designer’s narrative, we emphasize the importance of understanding user needs, goals, and contexts. This co-design intervention provides insights into the current system and proposes a foundation for future innovations within the Bliss i-Band and similar community frameworks
Beyond Screens: Tangible Approaches to sleep-tracking excellence
Full text linkSleep quality profoundly influences physical and mental well-being, yet it is frequently neglected in health discussions despite its pivotal role in these domains. This thesis utilizes Autoethnography, incorporating Mixed Method - Quantified Self-Tracking and Journaling methods to collect data and critically understand my sleep, lifestyle, and sleep environment. Sleep-tracking apps provide valuable data on our sleep, but interpreting this data can often be challenging. A sleep application utilizes mobile phone sensors and advises us to keep our phone close to the body, which may increase screen interaction and impact our quality of sleep. Sleep is complex, and many factors of our physical and mental health are interlinked. This thesis suggests tangible approaches to visualize personal data from sleep apps and journaling. Through the exploration of my own data, I experimented with different tangible representations, turning abstract information into touchable objects, aiming to foster a serene user experience by reducing reliance on screens. This research contributes to the fields of data visualization, tangible interface, and health design showcasing the potential of tangible visualization in promoting the understanding of sleep patterns.
Keywords: Tangible Representation, Sleep Environment, User Experience, Data Humanism, Data Visualization, Digital Fabrication, Quantified Self, Self-trackin
Pixilated figments
Full text linkExploring animation as research creation, this project combines pixilation animation and analogue lenticular printing to explore how film can have a unique in-person viewing experience without screens. For artists working with the moving image as a medium, single-channel installation and projection have become the preferred modes of display. This project seeks to provide an untethered, re-materialized and immersive analogue viewing and making experience in an era of increasing digital interfaces. It reflectively analyzes the links between handmade art practices and the moving image. Personal experiences of time and memory will also be analyzed against the moving image and its mode of display. Although display formats of moving image work have long histories of change, the mode in which they are displayed and produced has largely remained tethered to screens or projections. Lenticulars are one technique I have used to explore this problem. Instead of screens and projections, they serve more as windows, windows into the wonder of discovery that pixilation has previously established in film. This paper questions expectations for experiences, especially pertaining to viewing moving image work in person. It questions people's engagement with moving image work and how this engagement might be made more inviting. It compares the modes in which we can transmit video and offers a contemplative proposal of a new life for the moving image. By using lenticular animation to bring the moving image into plastic practices, the thesis gives the moving image a unique container
Exploring Positionality Workbook
Full text linkExploring Positionality: A Self-Reflection Workbook Using the Power Flower Tool
Presented at the Anticipation Conference, September 2024
Authors: Morgan Bath & Danny Ghantous
This workbook supports researchers, designers and foresight practitioners alike in building reflexive, positionality-informed practices through structured self-exploration. Grounded in intersectional feminist theory and critical pedagogy, it adapts the Power Flower tool, originally developed for educators in Educating for Change (Arnold, 1991) to research contexts, enabling individuals to map and reflect on the dynamics of their social identities in relation to systems of power, advantage, and marginalization.
Developed iteratively through workshops with diverse participants from design and foresight communities, this resource integrates identity-based reflection with design-justice and research reflexivity methods. The workbook facilitates deep introspection across personal, collective, and social contexts, encouraging users to articulate how lived experience, bias and positionality shape their design and research approaches. By engaging with guided reflection prompts and an adaptable identity-mapping tool (the Power Flower), participants are invited to continuously re-examine their assumptions, uncover blind spots, and situate themselves within their research and design groups and contexts.
This contribution supports the reflexive and critical capacity of individuals and teams by cultivating a practice of grounded, accountable research, offering a replicable model for integrating reflexivity into research, design and futures-oriented work
Eco-Wearables: Merging Art and Technology for Environmental Crisis Awareness
Full text linkEco-Wearables focuses on global warming, the ways that the fashion industry contributes to climate change, and the ways that fashion can also help consumers to have environmental awareness. The contemporary environmental crisis poses significant threats to global ecosystems, necessitating proactive measures to mitigate its undesirable effects. The fast fashion trend plays a significant role in Earth's warming. According to some estimates, the fashion industry is responsible for 10% of humanity’s carbon emissions, water consumption, and waste production, leading to unprecedented temperature rises (UNECE, 2018). The aim of this research is to explore the potential use of wearable technology as a medium for visualizing the intensity of environmental crises and depicting temperature fluctuations. This project designs and creates an interactive garment centered on Canada, one of the significant contributors to Earth's warming, and victim to its effects, through forest fires. By designing a garment with precise laser-cut patterns inspired by Canadian provinces, it endeavors to dynamically visualize data that represents the challenges of a warming planet. The garment statistically shows the wildfire data in different Canadian provinces, transforming them into visual and wearable cues, that is a number of LED displays and colour changes based on equal intervals. Heating pads warm the garment, and these are driven by temperature increases in each province, making the climate crises tangible. By exploring global warming and its effects like Canadian wildfires and the impact of the fashion industry I intend to provide a comprehensive and holistic perspective on the complex web of issues surrounding climate change
a place to fall apart
Full text linka place to fall art is part of an exhibition that crafts a speculative world, urging viewers to momentarily unwind beneath a canopy of eight smaller suspended artworks. This exhibition emerged from practice-based research, utilizing diverse materials like algae, kombucha, takeaway containers, gelatine, metal, and plants. These materials were used to explore Donna Haraway's idea of sympoesis, through an embodied Indian understanding of ancestral ways of thinking about interconnectedness and ontology. These eight assemblages/artworks are interconnected within the installation, resembling a spider's web, woven with crochet patterns and painting using spirulina pigment, including an algae-arachnid hybrid, one kinetic mobile, and other ephemeral sculptures that reflect an appreciation of child-like play that I developed as a methodology. a place to fall apart came about as a personal need to create a speculative space to come undone as an Indian woman and mother, existing in several ecological and humanitarian crises while also thinking about how to trouble post-colonial and settler-colonial imaginaries of futurity by building relationships. This research invites viewers to consider worlds beyond survival in the “end times” that weave stories of new, inclusive, collaborative futures. I argue that joyful resilience in ecological crises includes celebrating human-nonhuman kinship and reclaiming the collective possibility to heal together.
Keywords: Climate crises, Anthropocene, sustainability, Ecofeminism, Motherhood, Care, Resilience, Play
Reflections Unveiled: Publicness vs Privateness Through the Lens of Surveillance
Full text linkThe pervasive nature of surveillance in urban spaces raises important questions about the boundaries between public spaces and an individual’s privacy. At the same time, defining private, public, or semi-public spaces has also become difficult. Many of these surveillance systems are embedded into the urban spaces extremely well and have become a part of an individual’s everyday life, as in the case of CCTV cameras and RFID machines. This thesis project explores the ways in which an immersive experience along with data physicalization techniques can be employed to convey the scale and impact of surveillance in urban spaces. The research was conducted through a literature review that explored surveillance from a historical and contemporary perspective, the relationship between bodies and screens and the role of data physicalization. Research-Creation was employed as a key research methodology for conducting data walks and iterative development of prototypes. This research resulted in exploring analogue materials and digital techniques within a physical immersive experience. Reflections Unveiled invites visitors to engage with aspects of visible and invisible forms of surveillance, through elements such as distortion and layering depicted by using mirrors in the immersive space while uncovering how they are viewed through those surveillance systems
Exploring Strategic Ways to Encourage Peruvian Women to get Involved in Tech Careers/ Programs
Full text linkThis research project investigates the gender gap in the tech field, specifically in Private Universities in Lima- Peru, and the challenges that female students encounter in these programs. All results paved the way to explore short-, medium- and long-term strategies to potentially reduce this disparity.
Both secondary and primary research were used to gain an initial understanding of the selected issue. The secondary research involved reviewing articles, research papers, books, case studies, and news outlets. Primary research focused on conducting one-on-one interviews with experts in gender and inclusivity experts, “Women in Tech” Experts, and Tech Professionals to gain insights into the tech and gender landscape in Peru and understand the latter’s group experiences as undergraduate students.
The collected data and information shed light on a potential solution: a comprehensive 30-year strategy divided into decade-long plans with various activities aimed at reducing gender disparity. These initiatives primarily address key issues identified during our discovery phase, including creating safe spaces, promoting inclusivity, fostering diversity, enhancing representation, building communities, instilling a sense of belonging, and driving behavioural change within the private university ecosystem. The final solution places the private universities in the middle of an ecosystem to provoke change not only within their institution but in High Schools and Private Sectors (potential work spaces) to increase attraction and retention of female students.
Key Words: Peru, Lima, Technology, Private Universities, Gender Gap, Gender Disparities, Equity, Inclusivity, Female Students, Strategy