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User Experience of a 3D Augmented Reality Human Anatomy Creative-based Learning Application
Get PDFSelf-awareness of human anatomy is variable in the general public. It has been shown that members of the public, including patients who have expressed medical-related problems, find it challenging to understand the function of their internal organs. Certain anatomical relationships can be complex for lay people to visualise and comprehend, including the spatial relationships and orientation between anatomical structures. Active learning is a method that allows students to actively learn and engage in their own learning through either discussion or activities. Active science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) learning approaches have often been implemented into the science curriculum to help young learners understand complex science concepts and gain practical skills essential for the world of work, such as problem-solving skills. More specifically, creative learning interventions based upon body painting and crafting are commonly used in anatomical education to improve active learning skills such as motor skills, observational skills, and visuospatial ability for younger audiences. In addition, visualisation paradigms such as Augmented Reality (AR), now easily accessible through widely available mobile devices, has the potential to improve the science curriculum offering innovative and engaging approaches to learning anatomy.
This chapter presents research aimed to create a user-friendly creative learning approach to facilitate active learning about human anatomy, taking the brain, lungs and heart as case studies. These organs were chosen as they are the ones that the majority of the public have a general appreciation of what they are for. This chapter describes the methodological and technological framework building upon anatomical baking as an expressive art form, photogrammetry, 3D modelling, AR and interactive application development. The outcome of this research is bringing learning outside the classroom setting through baking of anatomical structures supported by an AR application running on the learner’s mobile device. In addition, a YouTube channel has been set up for wider access via an online presence. Five individuals were asked to assess the usability and motivational aspect of the app. Results suggested that the application reached a good usability standard level and increased motivation for learning about human anatomy. The collated feedback was encouraging, although participants would have appreciated further instructions to use the AR application. However, due to the small sample size, these encouraging results need to be confirmed through more extensive user testing. Future research would need to look at the validity of the whole creative learning approach, assessing the anatomical baking activities supported by the AR application, which resulted challenging within the timeframe of this research. With the rise in popularity of baking programmes on widely accessible media channels, this presents a novel and engaging way to aid public understanding of some key organs of the body through the process of home baking
Special Issue: British Art Studies: Queer Art in Britain Since the 1980s
No full textThis special issue of British Art Studies foregrounds the specificity and political potential of queer art in Britain, taking the 1980s as a critical context through which to examine intersecting artistic, political and theoretical practices that continue to resonate today. Marked by Section 28, the HIV/AIDS crisis and the consolidation of neoliberalism, the 1980s is explored here not as a singular origin point but as a space of artistic innovation and theoretical capacity, a site of opposition and resistance to the straightened prospects for queer artistic organising and intervention now.
Contributions include new research articles that grapple with historic forms of art production and organising, cross-generational interviews, archival reflections, and commissioned artistic responses. Together, they offer points of departure for thinking about the kind of queer and feminist communities needed in the present.
Against the backdrop of unprecedented precarity in queer cultural production in the United Kingdom, this issue asks what it means to commit recent histories of queer art to the record, and how the frame of art history might limit or expand what is possible
Empire Retold: Bellahouston AR
No full textStep back in time to 1938 to discover the forgotten stories and legacies of Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition. Three augmented reality tales help you discover a lost archive and highlight untold stories created by local writers. Best experienced using headphones on a GPS enabled mobile device, on site in Bellahouston Park. However, it can also be experienced in any open space you choose
Critical thinking as resonant encounter in art school pedagogy
No full textThis paper considers the complex and multi-layered nature of critical thinking in art school education by examining its relationship to subjectivity and time. In his 2018 book How Art Can Be Thought Allan deSouza insists on the art school studio group critique as ‘a primary mode of art pedagogy.’ Concentrating an embodied, sensory and participatory ‘practice of thinking together,’ deSouza praises the breadth of engagement that it requires of students in their ‘movement between fields’ of art history and critical discourses as well as the ‘flexibility’ necessary in ‘being able to adapt language from different sources.’ Combining reasoning, insight and practicality, criticality in these terms is a highly-prized outcome of art programmes that may be seen as exemplary in creating ‘independent thinkers.’
This paper focuses on the student’s encounter with existing bodies of knowledge, theories, methods, and acquired perspectives, taking what is implicit in critique and considering it as an encounter with what comes to mediate student’s subjective histories. Accepting deSouza’s contention that critique analytically uncovers genealogies of the present in order to release potentialities for social change, this paper argues that this critical manoeuvre requires an affective temporal ‘disjuncture’ between the student and existing knowledge such that its value, significance and purpose is not fully bounded in its immediate reception. As Lisa Baraitser asserts ‘acts of ‘beginning’ are taken up … intergenerationally’ and for this reason it will be argued that an orientation and critical agency only emerges through its resonant repetitions in the subjective present.
The paper asks two basic questions: 1. what is the distribution of the work of critical thinking in art school pedagogy (as it relates to critical studies and studio components of a Fine Art programme)? 2. How do subjective histories affect the ways in which one enters into and takes up critical work (as a project of thinking)?
The paper addresses these questions through examining specific assertions and claims in pedagogic literature and by reflecting on particular student responses to Critical Studies syllabi and learning through an engagement with critical discourses. Specifically, it discusses Allan deSouza’s exemplary account of an art school’s group studio critique in How Art Can Be Thought (2018), which offers a vision of critique as a thinking together that entails many of the aspects and aspirations of Critical Theory as an academic, politically-orientated discipline and field of research. While deSouza offers a compelling account of what critique is, it relegates the study of the critical writing, critical discourses and art theory to the status of ‘tools’ for participatory thinking. This paper challenges this view by considering the implications of student responses to Critical Studies department teaching by highlighting two key points: firstly, that the work of critical thinking is already prefigured in critical writing in various ways, and, secondly, that the way in which one engages with critical histories of art and critical theory is determined in part by subjective histories and a generational questioning. Drawing on psycho-social studies theory (specifically, the writing of Lisa Baraitser), this paper points to ways that teaching and critical engagement is inter-generational and is conditioned in these terms by one’s relationship to the experience of time and the capacity to narrate, both of which are a decisive factors in how one is able and unable to enter into a critical theory as a mode of questioning, formulation, and insight.
The context of this paper is as a contribution to a conference on contemporary pedagogic practices, and in this respect it does not propose a new pedagogic practice as such but instead opens to question how Critical Theory (and critical discourses) works within art school education and bring attention to factors that are often overlooked
'Nostalgia isn't what it used to be'
Get PDF'Nostalgia isn't what it used to be', printed essay for Alexis Soul Gray's exhibition, 'Memory Play' at Bo Lee and Workman Gallery in January/February 2025.
The essay focuses on collage as a methodology to perform nostalgia within Soul Gray's work and suggests painting as a DeLorean, in perpetual return to its legacies.
The essay was published online and in print form - in a booklet designed by Lucy Harbut
Cognitive Mapping: Enhancing Discussions in the Transdisciplinary Design and Health Research Space?
Get PDFThis paper explores the potential for cognitive maps to enhance discussion of transdisciplinary research (TDR). Differentiating between tacit, internalised mental maps and sharable, visual cognitive maps as his point of departure the author revisits Sanders’ seminal 2006 cognitive map modelling the topography of design research and practice. He then articulates a rationale for creating a new framework for mapping the collaborative design and health research space, discussing how this may allow for the exploration of common research goals but approached from alternative but potentially mutually complementary perspectives, drawing from – and perhaps combining - the preferred methods and epistemes of different fields. A set of mappings of four different approaches to a particular health challenge is then discussed in relation to three identified characteristics of TDR, revealing options for design’s contribution working in collaboration with other disciplines
Designing a level playing field: The design politics of the baby box in Scotland
No full textThis article explores the design politics of Scotland’s baby box. Based on a similar government initiative from Finland, the baby box is essentially a large illustrated cardboard box containing around forty items for a baby and a new mother. Since 2017 every child born in Scotland has been entitled to receive a free baby box from the Scottish Government and the box allegedly uses ‘the power of design’ to give every child an equal start in life. By examining the design decisions that underpin the baby box, this article seeks to provide a more nuanced picture of the political uses of design, and to reflect on the changing role, responsibilities and meaning of government when expressed through both design policy and design artefact
Funerary Photographs as Enduring Kinship and Community Ties in Twentieth-Century Appalachia and Transappalachia: Material and Relational Methods
Get PDFThis research note proposes a relational methodology for examining the production and exchange of funerary photographs in which family and community members posed with the deceased in early twentieth-century Appalachia, and for exploring how this practice expanded through the mid-twentieth century between Appalachian diasporic communities in the industrial Midwest and their family members who remained “at home.” Initially associated with the Victorian period across European and Anglo-American contexts, these photographs evolved to serve crucial social functions in maintaining community ties across geographic distances. This research examines how the materiality and relational properties of these ritual objects were central to their exchange between families separated by economic migration. I draw on the suggestion of Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart to understand photographs as active objects rather than valuing them solely for image content, as well as Marilyn Strathern's work on relationality, which demonstrates that material objects actively constitute rather than merely reflect social relationships
'Creatures of the Deep' - an article in PSIAX Magazine 8 entitled 'Drawing & Ecology'.
No full textI have had an article entitled 'Creatures of the Deep' selected for publication in Portugal following a double blind peer review process. This article was published in PSIAX#8 in December 2025 – "Drawing and Ecology"
The article showcases research outputs developed during a two week residency undertaken at Cove Park in July 2024, where a series of klecksographic prints were made using ink made from oak galls from Peaton Wood and rust taken from the security fence of Coulport naval base. Coalport RNAD is the home of the UK's strategic nuclear defence capability otherwise known as Trident.
The residency culminated in an exhibition in the Jacobs building at Cove Park. The exhibition shared the same title as this article 'Creatures of the Deep'. Documentation of this work will feature in the magazine alongside an account of the research process
Retouching The Archive: Gender and Class in Early Photography in Scotland
No full text‘Retouching the Archive’ is a practice-based research project located between the archive, darkroom and studio that explores the role of women in early photography in Scotland between 1780 and 1847. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, women were at the centre of the scientific breakthroughs that would later become known as photography. This project focusses on the contributions of three women who lived and worked in Scotland: Elizabeth Fulhame, Mary Somerville and Elizabeth Johnston Hall. Through archival research and contemporary art practice, it examines their lives and works as they intersect with histories of photography. The project’s contribution lies in its retrieval of their work and its repair of the subsequent, canonical narrative which marginalised their vital contributions to an ‘invention’ of photography dated to 1839. More than this, its significance is in the creative methods of reenactment and retouching, demonstrating how a fine art practice can deepen our understanding of women’s contributions to early photography.
Following Lütticken’s theorisation of reenactment as activating ‘a potential waiting’ (Lütticken 2005), the project reenacts the published technical workings of women’s chemical and optical experiments undertaken before and after 1839. Its method of reenactment provides a haptic encounter with the materiality of historical photochemical processes, enabling me to experience, at a distance of over 200 years, these women’s still-thrilling pre-photographic moments of discovery. Reenactment also undertakes a reparative action that allows me to make the invisible labour of these women’s production visible once again. When the limits of the archival case files are breached (Hartman 2019b), I advance a feminist research method called retouching in which non-verbal, non-visible and non-dominant narratives are reactivated, and new knowledge produced. Ultimately, the art practice and archival research presented here attempts to create a space for women’s contributions to early photography to become known again so that a history of photography can be learned anew