3132 research outputs found
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Quilts, Snapdragons, and Spoons
Get PDFThis thesis examines and shares my experiences during my time at OCAD, as I search for comfort and grounding through self-reflective awareness of objects and my physical surroundings. In the past few years, I have found in increasingly difficult to balance my mental health between coming to terms with adulthood, the looming threat of environmental collapse, the pressures of hyper-connectivity via the internet, and most recently, the isolation of COVID-19. The purpose of this research paper is to add my contribution to the archive of experience surrounding art and wellness and relay the methods and processes of self-soothing and grounding that I have discovered in my journey. I return to childhood memories and anecdotes that have defined my relationship to tangible materials like food, craft, furniture, collectables, and toys. Through research and studio investigations, this thesis conveys the importance of interaction with the physical world, promoting the adoption of daily tactile processes and self-reflection. Using artmaking as an analytic tool, I consider the relationships behind each object and the stories that have continued to influence the way I exist in the world today. I consider the past, my present, and how I might take steps towards the future
Drawing Light in the Cave: Embodied Spatial Drawing in Virtual Reality with Agency and Presence
Get PDFThis thesis project began as an exploration of the ways in which Virtual Reality (VR) could revolutionize drawing. What I learned through this research journey was that drawing could also revolutionize how we see, and therefore, what we can do, in VR.
I will begin by establishing a contextual background about the vision that some artists and theorists have had about the potential of VR over the past three decades. These individuals hoped to see VR become a tool that could help us learn to see and do things differently than the conventions of our everyday reality. Throughout this background context, I will form links to how three themes in VR: agency, presence, and embodiment, are all linked to drawing. With a focus on creative works made in VR, I will summarize the challenges to embodiment that I observed through my design research. I will present the pivotal insight in my research: that the root of these challenges lies in the use of linear perspective, a drawing method that evolved into a coordinate system that now underpins computer graphics systems. I will propose that an alternative method of drawing in perspective is made possible through VR; one that is based on the perceptual qualities of how we naturally see. In addition, I will show how VR also offers the possibility of drawing in an embodied way through techniques of spatial gesture drawing. Lastly, I will present two methods for applying these concepts for creatives working with 3D geometry in VR. While these methods will help creators today, I hope that this research can contribute to the innovation of VR software and tools
Exploring racism in Ontario’s public high schools: A case study research of Chinese students in Ontario and two public School Boards for a regional systems of innovation
Get PDFThis paper aims to fill a knowledge gap regarding students of Chinese heritages’ experiences with racism and create a sample regional systems of innovation to show policymakers the possibility of change in public education. The paper examines the context within Ontario, Canada, and on a few occasions, borrows information from Vancouver, Canada; Saskatchewan, Canada; Scotland, United Kingdom; and the United States. Using Secondary Research methods, design empathy, and systemic inquiry to clarify what is quality and equitable schooling, as well as the assumptions that fundamentally and the current operating public high school education system in Ontario is still heavily under the colonial influences to expose possible errors, such as systemic racism and structural violence toward the Chinese, poor, and Minority. Last, this paper provides an intercultural, inclusive, and humanized solution, which is the sample regional systems of innovation based on System Boundary, Panarchy, and evaluated with Strategic Foresight, that can be change-making and liberating to all, including young white students, to increase quality and equity. This paper is an important study because education involves everyone and most likely is a stage of everyone’s life
Performing Agency - Contemporary Burlesque and the Feminist Gaze
Get PDFBuilding off Laura Mulvey’s theories on the male gaze as well as bell hooks’ theories on the oppositional gaze and Indigenous scholars Carla Rice et al.’s research on the anti-colonial gaze, this paper will define the feminist gaze as an active and informed rejection of the objectifying and power-hungry white, heteropatriarchal, male gaze. Performances done through or for the feminist gaze can be interpreted as empowered and done primarily for the self, in order to activate and engage with one’s agency and subjecthood. Through analysis of the work of two burlesque performers, Miss Paige and Lou Lou la Duchesse de Rière, the feminist gaze can be understood as an active refusal and disentanglement of the male gaze, which constricts women, femmes, and queer people to the role of passive object, providing the performer with opportunities to construct new, intersectional ways of seeing and being that center the self and one’s own agency. Contemporary burlesque uses this feminist gaze to create performances that allow the performer to reject this way of being seen by others and find their own empowerment and agency through a performance of their sexuality that is done for themselves, to resist oppression and celebrate their own pleasure
Unmasking Power: Alternative Futures for Empowering Our Digital Identities
Get PDFAs generations of new users are born into a radically interconnected world, digital identities are increasingly becoming a key determinant for how we interact with products, services, information, and each other. Yet, our digital futures seem to be in the hands of a few highly powerful platforms, instead of ourselves. In this paper I make the case that we’re building a future where inhabitants of digital communities may well be losing trust, choice, and human rights without awareness.
This research project calls for and aims to demonstrate a kind of transformation of the design of digital services. The paper examines various models of power relationships in online digital identity ecosystems, revealing multiple leverage points for change. To help investigate alternative futures with an intersectional and systemic lens, I start an ongoing creative collaboration which explores the futures of digital identities through serious game design and development.
The project is directed primarily toward design and innovation teams, and associated knowledge workers, whose efforts have significant influence on future technologies, platforms, and their impacts. This work explores how we might deconstruct power dynamics prevalent in digital service design today. Through multiple analyses, maps and models of these systems, the paper reveals multiple opportunities for change. The serious game prototype, developed and tested through iterative, participatory design, demonstrates promise in facilitating critical conversations about digital identities, enabling discovery of new insights
Aging Women in Lebanon: Struggles of Pet Owners in a Collapsing Economy
Get PDFCompanion animals can enrich people’s lives in various ways. Numerous research studies have proven that pets have the ability to improve a person’s emotional wellbeing, physical health, and social lifestyle as well as reduce feelings of isolation and loneliness. Among the constantly rising number of people living with companion animals, older adults often tend to form deep connections with their pets and perceive them as irreplaceable family members. However pet ownership comes along with a set of responsibilities and expenses that are crucial to maintaining a healthy human-animal relationship. Following the overlap of Lebanon’s financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, aging Lebanese women have become significantly more likely to suffer from financial insecurity. In this study, seven Lebanese women were asked to participate in semi-structured interviews and co-design iterations to identify, and find a solution for, barriers they are facing as pet owners. In addition, four animal care professionals were invited to contribute as secondary participants. The results indicated that the current most common pet-care barrier for aging women in Lebanon is the lack of funds to support their animals. Findings also support previous research claims revolving around human-animal relationships, family-centered Lebanese community values, and how the crises in the country have affected people’s daily lives
Co-Design as Applied to Accessibility in Health Care
Get PDFThis research study is a participatory exploration of the experience of people in accessing health care. The study highlights barriers and personal accounts from people who were excluded in accessing health care during the Covid-19 pandemic in Ontario, Canada.
The study employed two qualitative research methods to gather information: storytelling and co-design. People with lived experience of health care exclusion shared stories of barriers they experienced in accessing and receiving health care during the pandemic.
As part of the co-design sessions, participants (who are referred to as ‘co-designers’) designed and participated in collaborative design exercises aimed at developing improvements to existing health care barriers. Co-designers worked together to design approaches to address common barriers, and developed recommendations to support meaningful consultations with the disability community
Triaxial Bias Plaited Basketry Theory, Structure and Technique
Get PDFMy thesis presents an ancient form of weaving knowledge known as triaxial bias plaited basketry. Informed by forty- plus years of studio practice my research investigates this advanced technique that uses three elements, woven at sixty degrees from each other, in a closed hexagonal structure. The technique presently is not widely known or practised; triaxial bias plaited basketry is in danger of extinction. My research asks: How can triaxial bias plaited basketry be preserved, and what approaches can be taken to help understand the complexity of its construction and pattern for future weavers? Drawing together written and visual resources, I first compile a body of historical knowledge, then apply an inductive mathematical theory of Making with Rigour: MathWeave to conduct an evidence-based approach toward research-creation methods. Key design elements of colour and weave techniques are fundamental to weaving, yet a critical gap in the knowledge of triaxial bias plaited basketry was made evident in the initial research. Responding to this knowledge gap, a practice-based research method was undertaken to document the creation of 52 experimental baskets, proposing new knowledge of colour placement pattern control and weave techniques. This research provides applied math and colour theory with advanced weaving knowledge, encouraging current and future basket makers to participate in triaxial bias plaited basketry, working toward the preservation of this technology
Seeing RSD11’s Seven Foci Relationally
No full textContext: seeing the event’s seven foci relationally. Planetary life is sick, this sickness is a product, one produced by rogue systems that are undercutting life’s dwelling, with design complicit and failing to confront designing-in-time. Thus the story to tell is eternal, and is of holding foreshortened, but destined, oblivion at bay.
Three chapters of this storybook that needs to be made never-ending.
One: Being autoimmune and design in error
Immunity was first understood in the ancient world as a judicial doctrinal practice that prevented a political institution from being exposed to legal jeopardy. It remains as such. Understood biophysically, immunity is a system by which a body defends infection. It was a nineteenth-century discovery. Autoimmunity is a dysfunction of the immune system whereby all resistance to infection is lost, and the body starts to destroy itself. The story to be told is about the transposition, with the assistance of design, of autoimmunity to the system of life in general – it is a way to understand unsustainability as a process of suicidally-induced systems failure.
Two: (Op)pressive things – defuturing and futuring and design in time
Homo sapiens are wonderful creators of things, a practice enabled and amplified by technology. But likewise, we/they/them/us have consistently failed to grasp that destruction is the price of creation. However, a moment has now been reached where this actually has turned critical. The story to tell here is of defuturing, overtaking futuring, an inability to ‘design in time’ and the un-concealment of the oppression of things.
Three: Where does the future of architecture come from now?
No reset – so what is architecture’s future? In 1901 Lenin wrote ‘What Is To Be Done? The question lives on, his answer didn’t. For architecture are two almost invisible massive projects globally to be done. Both would totally transform architecture and make it profoundly futural.
Life is in the balance and ever moves toward a deep crisis. That this condition does not arrive in its fullness means there is a crisis of crisis. Sure, we can tick off a list of critical conditions: global warming and associated problems of climate change, a loss of biodiversity, geopolitical disorder and conflict, resource stress and more. But ‘the crisis’ is a relational compound of all that is critical: that this is unrecognised is the crisis of crisis. Such unseeing undoes affirmative action