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LLM-mediated domain-specific voice agents: the case of TextileBot
Get PDFDeveloping domain-specific conversational agents (CAs) has been challenged by the need for extensive domain-focused data. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) make them a viable option as a knowledge backbone. LLMs behaviour can be enhanced through prompting, instructing them to perform downstream tasks in a zero-shot fashion (i.e. without training). To this end, we incorporated structural knowledge into prompts and used prompted LLMs to prototyping domain-specific CAs. We demonstrate a case study in a specific domain-textile circularity – TextileBot, we present the design, development, and evaluation of the TextileBot. Specially, we conducted an in-person user study (N = 30) with Free Chat and Information-Gathering tasks with TextileBots to gather insights from the interaction. We analyse the human–agent interactions, combining quantitative and qualitative methods. Our results suggest that participants engaged in multi-turn conversations, and their perceptions of the three variation agents and respective interactions varied demonstrating the effectiveness of our prompt-based LLM approach. We discuss the dynamics of these interactions and their implications for designing future voice-based CAs
AI-powered consumer electronics repair towards a digital circular economy
Get PDFElectronic waste is a growing global challenge, with projections indicating a significant increase from 58 million metric tons in 2021 to an alarming 112 million metric tons by 2050 (Forti et al., 2020; Parajuly et al., 2019). This surge underscores the urgent need for circularsolutions in managing the lifecycle of electronic products. Furthermore, the current economic and marketing dynamics often make replacement seem more appealing than repair (Sonego et al., 2022; Terzioğlu et al., 2015; VandenBerge et al., 2023). Addressing this challenge requires understanding the multifaceted barriers users face, which the Repair Motivation and Barriers Model categorizes into technical, emotional, and value-related aspects of repair (Terzioğlu, 2021). This research aims to tackle these barriers by introducing an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tool called AI-Fixer that provides step-by-step repair instructions, building user confidence, and enabling self-repair practices.Within the field of Circular Economy, researchers are increasingly investigating the role of emerging digital technologies in enabling circular practices (Bressanelli et al., 2018; Sherpa & Sinha, 2021). Among these, AI holds significant promise offering capabilities such as diagnostics, predictive maintenance, and real-time repair support. This study explores the feasibility of AI-Fixer in assisting users with repairing consumer electronics. It specifically investigates whether AI can assist and empower users to repair devices
Painting practice as network: The interoperability of contemporary painting
Get PDFThis practice-based research re-articulates the correlation between a physical painting and its on-screen image in the context of today’s post-internet painting practice. Since its inception, the term ‘post-Internet art’ (Olson, 2008) has been defined in various ways (Connor, 2015; Kholeif, 2020) in response to the developing relationship between contemporary art practice and the digital network. Despite the ‘opacity’ of the current online environment, in which the context of user-created content is manipulated by social media (Lanier, 2018), paintings are presented and circulated through the online platforms in the form of images, which ‘act and catalyze actions’ (Steyerl, 2021) regardless of the painter’s intention for the works. I use my painting practice as the central method of this research. I make paintings in the studio and examine both the outcomes and the processes involved. I also re-examine the processes through the lens of ‘computational thinking’ (Wing, 2010) by translating them into a procedural programming language. I use my solo exhibition to lead and evidence the development of an online proxy for a painting in a real-life setting. The proxy offers the painter a way of building the context of their own work online. To utilise the internet as the ‘ground’ of painting through which to exploit the ‘image power […] derived from networks’ (Joselit, 2013), I refer to Berners-Lee’s (1994) idea of the ‘Semantic Web’, which is a combination of ‘machine-readable Web content’ and ‘automated services’. I adopt metadata schemas, which are, importantly, readable and writable by both humans and machines, as a ‘common language’ and ‘proper standard’ (Haraway, 1991) to construct a ‘joint’ that can ‘accommodate and manage heterogeneous elements’ in a network (Galloway, 2021). The joint, consisting of a painting’s metadata, not only contextualises the painting’s online content available in various formats but also interconnects these into a network, which serves as the work’s online proxy. Working closely with search engines, the proxy enables the interoperability of painting for both the painter and the viewer. I redefine the painting-canvas as a sensuous interface by which the painter can realise the ‘rhythmic unity of the senses’ (Deleuze, 2003). Informed by Galloway’s (2008) idea of interface as ‘translation’, I utilise the interface to reinterpret the ground of painting through the lens of the painting’s subject matter. Together, the paintings made as part of the research offer multiple viewpoints on the correlation between the material ground (the canvas) and the immaterial ground, such as the digital screen and the internet. Combining both Ash’s (2015) notion of the interface and Latour’s (2011) notion of the network I construct a conceptual framework – an ‘interface for the network of painting practice’, through which the painter can remap their painting practice as a ‘distributed network’ (Joselit, 2013). Using Galloway’s (2021) idea of ‘holes’ in the network, they can ‘embrace the chaos’ (Deleuze, 2003) of newly discovered and unpredictable outcomes of the painting process
Studio south: A model for co-production of architecture education and practice through residencies
Get PDFThe research initiative Crossing Cultures introduces an innovative pedagogical model, immersing London-based architecture students in a Calabrian village through residencies, in collaboration with a local non-profit organisation (NPO). Since 2016, the program has addressed societal issues of migration and depopulation, fostering a community of practice with locals, asylum seekers, and other newcomers. Since 2020, the residencies, Studio South, have worked with the London-based design studio. They have disrupted traditional pedagogy, emphasising students as research partners, fostering hybrid roles, and transcending research-practice boundaries. The findings reveal a convergence of students' and the NPOs concerns, endorsing residencies as a model bridging academia and practice for societal impact
Global aesthetics in The Distance between the Staircase and the Sky (2022) and WAVES (2024)
No full textMy paper examines Global Aesthetics through Practice-as-Research (Nelson, 2013), by taking a close look at certain collaborative practices and production pipelines in my two most recent films: The distance between the staircase and the sky (2022) and WAVES (2024). Both filmsdepict celestial bodies and are created through a series of translations - including from Greek to English, from poetry to film, from data to image, from Virtual and Augmented Reality to singlescreen, from mocap to character animation. The first film, created as part of my doctoral study,uses immersive technologies and photogrammetry to document real spaces and translate theminto moving images. The work was deeply informed by the humble school globe, which culturalhistorian of South Asia and the British Empire Sumathi Ramaswamy discusses as a colonialist instrument, but also as an inspiration for journeying (2017). Social anthropologist Tim Ingold asserts the colonialist roots of the globe but highlights the vastly different presence of the sphere within pre-modern and non-western cultures (2002). The distance between the staircase and the sky uses tools stemming from colonialist ideals, but - rather than perpetuating the latter - turns immersive technologies into earth-shaped beach-balls: as playful instruments to exchange and play together. The second film, WAVES, listens to the recently resurrected dreams of colonising outer space. Inspired by the 1972 Pioneer 10 mission and its ‘pioneer plaque’, it imagines an alien woman waving back to an old human message of interplanetary friendship - an interstellar kind of global, bringing Earth and Moon into contact through silent gestures
Art education in the metaverse
Get PDFInteraction between the physical and digital worlds has become a contemporary challenge and revelation for art education. With metaverse technologies and spaces developing, it is timely to consider how living art education in the metaverse is affecting art education at present and how this may evolve in future. This article will therefore discuss the values, attitudes, challenges, and directions associated with art education in the metaverse. It will connect metaverse experiences with art, new media, and educational cultures to recommend how art education may embrace the metaverse sensitively and flexibly to advance and align the pedagogy, practice, and policy of art education with contemporary and future life. Issues of reluctance, opposition, accessibility, and change will be explored along with metaverse influences on local and global heritage and sustainability to present a current and developing picture of the complexities and opportunities associated with art education in the metaverse
Opening doors: To cognitively curate creativity concepts in art education
No full textIn this personal artographic inquiry paper, artistic engagements with doors and reflexive insights (of the artist, teacher, and researcher) help establish cognitive curation as a pedagogy and practice. In art education, practicing cognitive curation and cognitive curatorial pedagogy affords educators and learners critic, empathy, and autonomy in creative knowledge pursuits. When artography is used to cognitively curate doors open, as knowledge, which can transform understandings and systems. By demonstrating cognitive curations reflectively in curatorial pedagogy (applied during an M-Level Creativity and Visual Arts Education module), this paper opens five doors: navigating difference, accepting movement, engendering possibilities, building partnerships, and mobilizing knowledge complexities that could facilitate cognitive curation and cognitive curatorial pedagogy. By using artography to unravel the practice and pedagogy of cognitive curation, in this inquiry when teaching about creativity concepts, this paper responds to neoliberal art education barriers. It begins to show that using cognitive curatorial pedagogy could help curate and create autonomous, empathetic selves with permission to feel during creative educational experiences. Thus, using cognitive curation to bring forth and reinstate the intrinsic value of art education needed in global education systems
Hongshan culture: Controversy, numbers and a proto-industrial design society?
Get PDFThe Neolithic Chinese Hongshan culture attracts fascination and controversy in equal measure. It represents one of the highest volumes of diverse jade making with spectacular technical achievements and almost unparalleled variety. While researchers have explored Hongshan culture from different disciplinary perspectives, this research seeks to combine insights across archaeology, anthropology, geology, geochemistry, and history to make a new case for a design led analysis of Hongshan culture jade ‘products’ from a creative and production technology perspective. Examining Hongshan culture through a design lens creates new insights into the motivations for making jade artifacts, hints at the spiritual significance and socio-technological innovations and provokes the idea that Hongshan may be considered as a neolithic proto-industrial design society. Learning from Hongshan culture can provide new insights and inspirations to meet contemporary challenges and regenerative practices derived from this rich historical context
The illustrator in the archive of Katie Gliddon
No full textWhile established within the creative industries as a visual tool for representation, illustration practice is here positioned as a dynamic communication discipline, able to engage audiences within immersive narratives bringing feeling, empathy, and emotion to the representation of lived experience. The discussion is framed around a practice-based enquiry of the prison writings of the Croydon suffragette Katie Gliddon whereby narrative illustration practice, both written and visual, are used to examine and describe a web of interwoven stories across time. Here ‘illustration’ provides the tool with which the enquiry is made; a holistic process in which a series of strategic research methods are used to conduct and represent an investigation. The chapter asserts the kinships between feminist methods, specifically the writings by Maria Tamboukou, scholar in Gender and Feminist Studies, and what are broadly recognised by the author as illustrative non-representational principles and strategies
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, …”: Josephine Baker and modern architecture across the colonised Arab world
No full textA story that unfolded in the shadow of the Second World War is that of African American and Black French performer Joséphine Baker, who at times travelled alongside, in advance of, or behind Allied soldiers, alternately conducting acts of espionage and entertainment. Her perilous trajectory across the shifting borders of the war zones of North Africa and the Middle East is known only in broad terms. Evidence that could detail the series of places where she performed between 1941 and 1943 is almost completely lost. This installation follows a few of the faint traces, speculations, rumours, and documents that indicate Baker’s presence in military camps, clubs, cabarets, casinos, theatres, and ‘gin joints’ across the region. Reconstructing the story of a few of the locations where Baker performed the exhibition aims to untangle a web of cross-border relations that have since become hardened by national boundaries, and of trajectories now severed