Cubic Journal
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How Do We Get Paid for This? The Relationship Between Strategic Design Management and Pricing Power
Get PDFThe belief that strategic design leads to improved firm competitiveness is broadly recognised in contemporary research. However, much less is understood about the precise, concrete mechanisms by which organizations translate their design-based resources and capabilities into higher performance. This paper provides context to this relationship by introducing the variable of pricing power as a potential element of unobserved “dark matter” that clarifies how design-based differentiation results in product performance. Pricing power is described by Stephan Liozu (2019) as “the ability to increase prices without losing demand”. Remarkably, nowhere in the vast literature on pricing is design mentioned, while in parallel pricing has not appeared to be of particular interest to strategic design researchers. In an effort to spur further interest in this variable a case study is provided, illustrating the process footwear and apparel brand Nike employed to leverage design-based differentiation to support the pricing power of a new offering
Image Protocol – A Tool for the Philosophy of Art
Get PDFAn investigation into illustrations of philosophical texts conducted by artist Barbara Ellmerer and graphic designer Vera Kaspar, two artists who documented their enquiries with ‘image protocols’. These protocols, in turn, led to a re-evaluation of the materials and means used in the process of artistic perception and production. This process remains structurally resistant to verbalisation but relies on individual calibrations between the perception of a given image and the means and materialities at the artist’s disposal (colours, brushes, paper, but also photography, scanning, printing)
Connecting Memories, or the Making of an Inverted Archival Tree
Get PDFCollect. Connect. I was intrigued by the correspondence between these two words, when I, primarily as a creative writer, started my residency at the Asia Art Archive (AAA) in Hong Kong, where I was invited to focus on AAA’s Ha Bik Chuen Archive (H.B.C Archive). Ha (1925–2009) was a well-known artist, a fervent collector of exhibition catalogues, documentations, and the photographs he took at these exhibitions, among other things. Visiting the HBC Archive and his old home, I started to think of Mrs. Ha, of the impossibility of a collection without connection. We collectively remember; we connect for memories. If we can’t know of what, we can at least know with whom. This essay documents my – or our – project titled Connective Memories , or the making of an inverted archival tree, a project that brought me into contact with six young people and over to the field of music. I end with a song on faith and letter-writing
Poetics of Light – Truth and Reality of Knowledge
Get PDFLight makes our surroundings visible to us. Vision plays a substantial role in how we access our environment and make sense of it. Yet, the understanding of light vision suffers from the discrepancy between physical and perceptual facts. This contribution questions the rationale of how knowledge and truth are generated. Language may often not be adequate to activate and guide all of our senses whereas artworks, especially light art, may evoke thoughts and demonstrate experiences (of perceptual processes) that open up reflective attitudes on reality’s subjectiveness. In this essay, the original physical artwork can only be displayed as a representation. Printing light as images is in itself an experiment in knowledge production, a subjective experience. The imagery maps the light and colour effect of the artwork and invites the viewer to trace the installation’s experience as well as to try out the after-image effect and optical illusion, examining knowledge along the way
SloMoVo [Slow (Almost Silent) Voice Experiments]
Get PDFSloMoVo is mostly inaudible voice/grunts/hums triggering synths generated in real-time. It is throat synthing: making silence into sound. Each word makes a mountain. Each breath begins a tide. SloMoVo asks: how do tiny seemingly inconsequential gestures of our lives reverberate through networks? How potent is the seemingly impotent unheard voice when augmented with tech? What effect does the unheard or repressed or invisible have on the resonance of the universe? Is network technology and media software capable of expanding identity? What is the resonant frequency of society
Fifth Region
Get PDFLucas Kwok’s Fifth Region is a speculative spatial narrative. Positing a new region in the air above Hong Kong in 2060, as the city below has become too crowded to live in. At a time when previously scripted futures of this city are currently being hastily re-written, Fifth Region presents an allegorical parable, a critique of overpopulation, density and government control of land, as well as an imaginary vision of a utopia escaping the city below. Kwok’s project works on two scales: the first reveals the megastructures of the Fifth Region that tower over the city below, the second focuses on the everyday to imagine future lives, and events within the clouds. In eight chapters, scenarios are imagined and linked, with aleatory events and moments occurring in the Fifth Region's evolution. The narratives construction reveals how the accumulation of micro events lead to transformative scenarios traceable in visual motifs to earlier chapters. The Fifth Region explicitly implies new political and socio-economic orders – evident, for example, in how upper floor residents may end up polluting those who live below and in the hypothetical creation of new social and economic hierarchies depending on one’s height above ground
Rhizomatic Telling –Recognising the Mechanism of Small Stories in a Community Organisation Process
Get PDFAs an unforeseen pandemic disturbs our livelihoods and forces us to change our boundaries, small talks arise and disperse in fleeting moments within and beyond physical perimeters. The notion of singular truth (metanarrative : Lyotard 1984) has evidently been overridden in this time. Small stories (Bamberg 2004, 2006; Georgakopoulou 2006; 2007) are heavily embedded as part of the trajectory of social interactions. As fragments of talk-in-interactions, they are recontextualised and reaffirmed as narratives along multiple threads of conversations across time. Presented in this article is a microstudy implementing the lens of small stories on communication activities taking place among members of a specific location-based community. This is a part of the ongoing PhD research on bottom-up community organisation through the alignment of community-specific narratives and positioning of socially engaged art practitioners. The microstudy on communal conversations on an instant messaging app looks into how multiple realities are reconfigured by virtue of multiple tellers and modes of telling
On the Question of Objects –“Imagined Field from the Deconstruction of an Apparatus”
Get PDFThis text is an artistic companion to the accompanying collages where complexity, ambiguity, emergence, and abstraction are emphasised. Through artistic practice I investigate the primacy of objects and their relations. Consistent with Barad’s Agential Realism, objects are constructed through their relations. This conflicts with a capitalist and colonialist view where objects pre-exist relations and are that which can be extracted, used and/or consumed. The images herein are composed from fragments of photographs taken at a particle accelerator facility where fragment boundaries are constructed by a machine learning algorithm. Images are composed by placing fragments according to their relationships using a second machine learning algorithm that emphasises some boundaries and dissolves others. These layers of boundary-making are analogous to cognitive processes where the objects of thought are proxies for complex relations. This is the crux of our contemporary era; social and material complexity cause us to attend to objects at the detriment of the systems that allows those objects to be
There is the Beach, There is the Ocean
Get PDFMy work investigates our complex cultural relationship with Nature with a capital "N", in particular the fantasy of tropical space: a collage of impressions and desires which ossify into a psychological 'elsewhere' that is in fact no place at all. By making images that simultaneously trigger and violate romantic tropes, I attempt to reverse the gaze of the tourist back onto itself. This essay describes the process by which I became a tropical tourist at the age of six, the year that I found my father’s heart-attacked body on our kitchen floor. This early experience of mortality, coupled with yearly family trips to the beach, created the representational code by which I now work out poetic relationships with desire and loss
Public Art, Representation, and Questions of Revising the Past
Get PDFOperating from the position of an artist with a mature practice in creating public art, this essay chronicles and contextualises the development of a series of works that consider the history, symbolism, interpretation, and evolving understanding of specific historic public artworks. There is a paradox in my development as a muralist: my significant experience while being affiliated with and working on behalf of a prominent community-based non-profit arts organization, where I repeatedly faced constraints upon the content and attitude of the work being created, earned me the notoriety and reputation that facilitates for-profit work that critiques design-by-committee at best, and malignant censorship at worst. Works in the series deal with the intersections of gender and race in the content of public artworks in tones that range from reverent to harshly critical and – in some cases – suggestive of reparative action