3983 research outputs found
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Look around you! Situating extended reality within the urban fabric
Get PDFThe future of Extended Reality (XR) technologies is revolutionising our interactions with digital content, transforming how we perceive reality, and enhancing our problem-solving capabilities. However, many XR applications remain technology-driven, often disregarding the broader context of their use and failing to address fundamental human needs. In this paper, we present a teaching-led design project that asks postgraduate design students to explore the future of XR through low-fidelity, screen-free prototypes with a focus on observed human needs derived from six specific locations in central London, UK. By looking at the city and built environment as lenses for exploring everyday scenarios, the project encourages design provocations rooted in real-world challenges. Through this exploration, we aim to inspire new perspectives on the future states of XR, advocating for human-centred, inclusive, and accessible solutions. By bridging the gap between technological innovation and lived experience, this project outlines a pathway toward XR technologies that prioritise societal benefit and address real human needs
Objects, bodies, territories: The financial calculations of border regimes and humanitarian governance
Get PDFMarked by unprecedented numbers of forcibly displaced individuals from the Middle East, the African continent, and Asia, the intricacies of European humanitarian governance and border regimes have become critical components of contemporary geopolitics. This thesis contends that a financial logic underpins these mechanisms, investigating the legal and architectural processes involved in producing and assigning statuses—refugee, asylum applicant, detainee, or deportee—to displaced individuals. While these processes may appear purely administrative, they instead act as catalysts for intricate assemblages that extract financial and biopolitical value from displaced bodies. A value that transcends conventional financial transactions, and encompasses the allocation of resources, the exertion of control, and the shaping of public opinion. Through its chapters, the thesis seeks to uncover these financial machinations, where naming operates as a strategic tool for categorisation, segregation, and exploitation. It also examines how economic calculations infiltrate every phase of displacement: from the initial act of flight, through perilous journeys, arrival in foreign lands, incarceration, and internment in various facilities, to eventual settlement in urban or rural settings for some—or, more often, repatriation for others deemed ineligible. Central to this research is the development of a material and visual practice that exposes the violence inherent in the regime of calculations perpetuated by humanitarian governance and border apparatuses. Through iterative interviews with aid workers, live-action recordings of sites, and the use of physical (architectural) models, this practice seeks to document and testify to systemic violence. Physical models, in particular, are more than mere tools of representation; they serve as evidentiary media, capable of measuring, studying, and analysing these calculations while amplifying the voices of those ensnared in extractive systems. By employing physical models, this thesis underscores their ability to embody and articulate the spatial, material, and corporeal relationships that define the migrant experience. Thus, I argue that these models can function as operative objects that are able to reframe advocacy discussions, generating a field through which claims and counterclaims can be articulated, exposing the financial and biopolitical dimensions of displacement, and offering the potential to inspire new policies and practices aimed at dismantling the regime of calculations. Ultimately contributing to a more equitable response to the challenges faced by displaced populations worldwide
Microbriefs: Using design sprints in practice based education
Get PDFThis paper introduces an educational approach implemented within the Design Products MA programme of the Royal College of Art in London UK, focusing on enabling students to develop their personal practice around their values, concerns, and materialities. The approach integrates Kolb's experiential learning theory, design sprints, and the community of practice framework to foster hands-on problem-solving within set time frames, encourage collaboration, and facilitate reflective discussions. The 'Experimental Design' unit, building on the 'Locating Practice' unit, aims to broaden students' horizons through consecutive 'Microbriefs,' emphasizing trial and error to expand creative bandwidth and explore various design practices, materials, and technologies. The six Microbriefs undertaken during the curriculum explore themes such as self-portraiture, spatial design, communication, error, traditional meaning-making, and ethics in design
A wrong kind of landscape: Essaying the Broads
No full textThis visual essay is developed from an archive of site videos, photographs, photogrammetry and studio models, accumulated over walks along the 37.5-mile Wherryman’s Way on the Norfolk Broads. The archive was initiated, and has continued beyond, a Heritage Lottery Fund public project 'Mapping the Broads', in partnership with the Norfolk Broads Authority. The essay has been accepted by the Journal of Illustration for their second issue of 'Heritage', to be published later in 2026. The essay will critically reflect on what is and is not seen through a heritage lens on landscape – and (drawing on David Matless, paraphrasing W.J.T. Mitchell) “approach landscape as a verb rather than a noun.
A circular experience toolkit: A dynamic scenario-building resource for designing circular consumer experiences in fashion
Get PDFConsumers play a key role in sustainable fashion and textiles, specifically in the use and (re)distribution of resources and product care and repair. They have, however, largely been neglected in conceptualizations of the Circular Economy (CE) and there are limited research and strategies on consumer participation in materials circularity. The Circular Experience Toolkit (CET) is a dynamic scenario-building resource developed to address this gap. We designed the card-based toolkit to prompt and foster interdisciplinary conversations between researchers, textile and fashion industry professionals and consumers to support meaningful circular consumer experiences. It achieves this objective through a novel recoupling of resource flow and human well-being, and by mobilizing creative technologies to enhance opportunities for consumer participation in the circular textile economy. This article outlines the iterative development of the toolkit and illustrates its use for generating scenarios to support fashion professionals with the creation of circular consumer retail experiences
ReWilding AI : Weather spores
No full textReWilding AI leads you into stunningly immersive, curious and paradoxical ecologies of AI through an immersive game-based experience called Weather Spores. Through a multi-dimensional maze of five immersive portals, you will encounter the symbiotic interspecies intelligence of mycelium, birds and trees, cross expanded geographies of urban AI data systems, and witness present-tense archaeologies of the supply chains that deliver AI. You will play with carbon and blow straws and ‘sticky encounters’ via the strange and wild worlds of ‘emergence’ and ‘indeterminacy’, and explore how the very fundamentals of linear and non-linear thinking and creating triangulate with the political, the cultural and ethical to encourage different forms of individual and collective agency. In ReWilding Ai, we move away from probability and randomness towards indeterminacy, emergence and entanglement. Here we find critical, urgent new ways to query the temporalities and geo-politics of AI, rethinking immersive generative AI through art-led practice from the ground up and for the common good. Principal Research Leads: Johnny Golding and Tom Simmons Senior, Post-Doctoral and Technical Research Associates: Samuele Albani, Sonia Bernac, Jonathan Boyd, Jeremy Keenan, Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel, Maggie Roberts, Rian Stephens, Shira Wachsmann, John Wild, Tao Xi
3D printing bacterial cellulose and polyethylene terephthalate glycol to reinforce textiles for material longevity in textile circularity
Get PDFIn a circular textile economy, there is a requirement to reduce the consumption of new materials and encourage ways to keep materials and apparel in use for longer while utilising waste as a raw material. Repair and reinforcement of materials are circular practices that have been applied to extend the life cycle of apparel. The digitalisation of repair tools could facilitate how the repair is adopted at scale. 3D printing has been highlighted as an important technology for future manufacturing due to its ease, speed, and ability to be locally or globally produced. Although 3D printing is an accessible tool for at-home object printing of repair parts, this tool has not been investigated to extend the life cycle of a textile material through repair or reinforcement. In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary approach explored in the Textiles Circularity Centre to investigate how 3D printing a medium consisting of bacterial cellulose and polyethylene terephthalate glycol onto textiles can reinforce a material. We characterise the printed medium and discuss the use of 3D printing as a tool for advanced repair practices in a circular textile economy. The novelty of this approach is in the deposition of a cellulose-based filament onto a textile to facilitate material longevity, namely, reinforcement for repair and reuse
CircularDesign.it: A digital toolkit to support circular design practices
No full textCircularDesign.it is an open-access digital platform developed to support designers, educators, and businesses in applying circular design strategies. The tool translates research insights into accessible methods, frameworks, and exercises, aiming to bridge theory and practice in circular economy implementation. The platform promotes systemic innovation, design for longevity, and closed-loop approaches
