3983 research outputs found
Sort by
Plenary: Anti-ephemeral design for responsible production and consumption of mobility
Get PDFThis paper introduces the concept of Anti-Ephemeral Design through a dis-cussion about automotive design responsibility on collaborating to the generation of consumption habits which have great impact on the environ-ment. The paper examines the relationship between consumerism and the mythical images of the automobile. Findings from the Joyful Journeys [1] and Ecofitting [2] projects are used to point out the need to look at tangible and intangible aspects of design to address both environmental, economic, socio-ethic and subjective aspects of sustainability. The paper proposes an alignment with new values, to design, produce and consume mobility sus-tainably
Responsible design for (not with) hard-to-reach users
Get PDFAs is clear from the urgency of the themes in this conference, we are in a time of rapid change in design priorities, and these must be reflected in design education. A decade ago we would expect to see student collaborations with corporations, exploring new ways to meet customer needs, towards the implicit, and often unquestioned, goal of commercial profit. Now, outside academia urgent new priorities range from social inequalities to the climate emergency, combining with a widespread recognition of design’s tools and methods in broader spheres of application, to create important new roles for design professionals. These shifts are reflected in education, fostering responsible design through collaborations with new kinds of stakeholders, technologies and expert advisers. This paper contributes an example of such a multidisciplinary, design-led, innovation project, with student output and learning outcomes, reflections and subsequent developments. Framed within a course that emphasises personal purpose for change-making in the world, and alongside other units focusing on designing with ethical, environment and social responsibility, this unit tasked MA/MSc students of Innovation Design with applying artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to human rights and humanitarian issues. Small teams developed concepts in an intensive 3 week block. For practical and ethical reasons this was without direct end-user engagement – in contradiction to our usual mantra of ‘know your user’. The project brings expert insights, inspiration and guidance from fields of AI and ML, but also international criminal law & war crimes, collective intelligence, gamification, gender based violence and people trafficking. The process and outcomes are shared as examples of rapid learning outcomes from an intensive activity, light on technical instruction, and without direct user engagement. The outcomes were in the conceptual stage, but their viability is being explored to assess potential beyond the project limits. Some highlight concepts include assistance for law enforcement against sex trafficking, gathering secure evidence against intimate partner violence, protecting protesters’ anonymity, and assisting fair and legally robust asylum applications. In this, as for many of the services and products conceived by students of this programme, the designer is acting for users and stakeholders outside of the consumer-corporate dynamic (whereby a desired service is paid for in a transaction, with money or attention). The beneficiaries may be victims or potential victims of horrific abuses, and cannot ethically or practically be included directly in research or testing by students. Despite this, the project format demonstrates that for early stage concepts there is value in secondary research and empathic methods. Student feedback indicated a strong appreciation for the opportunity to explore such challenges, and for a sense of purpose, reward or validation in their efforts to create futures that are inclusive and just. Several expressed desire to work in related fields after graduation
Contested border urbanism: Learning from Cyprus dispute
Get PDFThe narratives of space, place and identity provide a basis to analyse the meanings of borders for Cypriots living in the north and south of the island. The historical background of the conflict in Cyprus introduces mixed villages and traces the importance of walls and borders in the urban fabric of Nicosia, Europe's last divided capital. We analysed narratives of crossing borders when they were opened every day, crossing on Ledra Palace /Lokmacı Street in Nicosia after three decades of closure. Opening this path would transform the dynamics of deep-rooted ethnic divisions and foreground shared cultures that draw on Nancy’s concept of inoperative community (Nancy 1991)Inoperative Community and Agamben’s Coming Community (Agamben 1993). Analysis of two examples against the background of de Certeaus’ concepts of everyday life Certaus concepts of everyday (de Certeau 1984) informs this urban epistemology: Home for Cooperation and a learning centre/café. These two spaces are neutral in the buffer zone /borderland for unified collectivity and “Occupy Buffer Zone Movement” (OBM) activities, occupying a non-place and transforming into a public square through grassroots activism. Cypriot history is complex and eclectic. It requires anti-essentialist acceptance of its multiple origins to imagine the future of urban territories in Cyprus. The communities of the temporal civic grassroots are particularly intriguing to challenge the top-down urbanism models and understanding of community and being in common. They produce and re-appropriate public space through collective participation, alter the spatial perception, approach the borders, and redefine urban space
The puna is not a triangle
Get PDFUnder the guise of the ‘green’ transition and implementing pathways to decarbonisation, a new frontier of capitalist expansion has emerged, in the form of a planetary race for minerals such as cobalt, copper, rare earths and in particular, lithium. Most of the world's exploitable reserves of lithium are located in an area commercially known as the ‘lithium triangle’, a geometric figure delineated by the salares (salt flats) of Uyuni in Bolivia, Atacama in Chile and Hombre Muerto in Argentina. Salares are dried lake beds with underground reservoirs containing high concentrations of dissolved salts, such as lithium, potassium and sodium. This is a result of activity in the surrounding volcanoes of the Andes cordillera. Over millions of years, minerals accumulate in these peaks that descend with melting ice during the spring melt, leaching into the lower-level soils, and eventually settling in the depressions at the bottom of the salares
The neon hieroglyph
No full textA series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD, from the author of Our Fatal Magic. From the cellular to the galactic, via Paleolithic cave markings to the trace impressions left by drone photography on our mind's eye, incorporating dancing plagues, communist psychedelic witches, hyper-sexual fungi, chthonic descents, and skyward ascents, The Neon Hieroglyph weaves together a series of painterly and poetic considerations on a feminized history of the rye fungus Ergot, the chemical basis of LSD. The Neon Hieroglyph constructs a house of lyrical reflections for our ghosts to inhabit, a place where the gothic and the hallucinatory collide, where gothic affect and fractal dread form a mausoleum for psychedelic specters. And also the Sun! The Sun is a ghost that haunts the night! Framed with new essays by artist and writer Caspar Heinemann and anthropologist Amy Hale, Tai Shani's The Neon Hieroglyph continues a journey into the post-patriarchal fictions that animated her first collection, Our Fatal Magic
Learning from informal gendered mobilities: Towards a holistic understanding for experimenting with city streets
Get PDFThis paper argues that the right to access public spaces and streets is impacted not only because of automobility but also by socio-spatial factors of the urban environment. This paper presents insights towards a holistic understanding for street experiments (with a focus on stationary and slow travel modes) by highlighting the factors that impact the conditions of mobility and access through the lens of gender. By adopting a combination of new technologies, such as GPS, along with mobile methods, like ethnography, this research centres around the everyday travel experiences of urban marginalized women (UMW) from peri‑urban areas of New Delhi who contest their right to access public spaces on a day-to-day basis. This study examines the socio-spatial environment comprising the daily mobilities of UMW to reveal the conditions of mobility and access to public spaces. The findings highlight that the issues faced by these women while travelling, mainly guided by aspects of gender, act as barriers to their mobility and access to public spaces (streets) in urban informal conditions. The study also reveals elements of urban informality (socio-spatial elements) enhance as well as negatively on the daily mobilities of UMW. These socio-spatial factors were found to be interconnected to one another and thus cannot be implemented as individual or isolated factors. The results of the study support the proposal of a more inclusive and accessible public space
Materials sustainability across the crafts and applied arts: A review and reflections
Get PDFIn late 2020, as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s ‘Where Next?’ Initiative, the Council funded a scoping project: ‘Sustainable Materials in the Creative Industries’ (SMICI) (AH/V005510/1). Over the course of the following year the SMICI project team of ten staff explored current and immanent sustainable practice around the sourcing, use, disposal, reuse, recycling, and upcycling of materials. This work was undertaken to understand the creative sector's ongoing responses to demands for more sustainable working practices, as well as its current and potential contribution to the development of a more circular economy. The SMICI Final Report, written for the Council, provided a snapshot of practice and perceptions around material sustainability across the creative industries, identifying existing trends and showcasing cutting-edge developments. It also flagged sector-wide and discipline specific barriers that would have to be negotiated or addressed to achieve widespread sustainably orientated practice. SMICI’s Principal Investigator will draw on material from the research that they and the rest of the research team undertook over the course of 2021, and follow-on research activities undertaken during 2022. This will be used to explain how the different branches of the creative industries identified in the SMICI proposal and Final Report as Crafts and Applied Arts have envisaged, engaged with, adopted, or promoted more sustainable practices around their engagements with materials. Specific aspects and issues will be illustrated through the presentation of a series of short case studies drawn from the project’s data. Referencing the project’s wider findings, the presentation will compare the current position of the Crafts and Applied Arts sector with developments in other creative industry disciplines and across the creative industries as a whole, considering the role of conventions of practice, education, transport, regulatory change, communities of practice, the procurement and disposal of electrical and electronic equipment, and the intersection of material sourcing, usage, and disposal and carbon calculating. This will lead to a discussion of the implications of the project’s findings for creative practitioners, academics teaching across these disciplines, and policymakers focusing on aspects of crafts and applied arts practice
Polymorph prototype
Get PDFPolymorph Prototype is a result of research into multisensory, distributed Ai working fluidly across different forms of matter, connecting the indeterminacy of complex physical systems with fixed, generative Ai models to produce emergent outcomes. In this iteration, small changes in air current, the movement of bodies, and fluctuating electromagnetic interference are entangled with fine-tuned generative Ai models. Data ‘leaps’ and ‘leaks’ across layers and formats at various time scales and between the tangible components of the work, producing sensorial magnitudes with no singular hierarchy. The sensing, auditory, and optic elements act as both inputs and outputs, forming a dynamic manifold/structure of feedback loops. Polymorph Prototype comprises a fine-tuned Stable Diffusion model, 2 steel plates which function both as sensors and sound resonators, and thin strands of conductive ‘hair’ that wave according to changing air currents in the room. As data transforms across formats and forms of matter, the dataset generating the visible and auditory components of the work expands, merging with the environment within which the work is immersed. Bending down to view the small onscreen image will fold the sensed presence of the body into the emerging long-term structure of the work. RP2-9 Artificial and Distributed Intelligence Research team: Dr Jeremy Keenan, Maggie Roberts, Sonia Bernaciak [Prof Johnny Golding (PI)
Agential digital materials : A fashion and textile perspective
Get PDFThis paper focuses on examining the experience of fashion and textile users in co-creative human-computer interactions. This is to understand how AI interactions could be better developed for the specific needs of fashion and textile users, informed by ideas in haute couture. Here we explore the idea of 'agential digital materials’ positioning the simulation tool as the material in the context of fashion and textiles
A design framework for cyber-physical-human-systems
Get PDFCyber-physical-human systems (CPHS) represent significant extensions of cyber-physical systems (CPS) to include aspects of human interactions and usage. A class of CPHS of interest here is smart products that offer services to their customers, supported by back-end systems (e.g., information, finance) and other infrastructure. We argue that although the domain of CPS relies on engineering and computer science as its foundations, the emerging field of CPHS does not have an underlying scientific foundation. Transdisciplinary teams of researchers are needed to integrate the engineering, computing, and human behavioral fields that are central to CPHS to develop new foundational theory and methodology. Furthermore, a new design methodology is needed for CPHS, given the transdisciplinary nature of the field, that anticipates human acceptability and usability considerations as well as emerging behaviors that result from human-system interactions. In this paper, we propose a framework for such a design methodology. The domain of assistive and rehabilitation technology is used in this paper to provide an example field of practice that could benefit from a systematic design methodology. A CPHS design example is provided to illustrate the application of the methodology framework