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Sundby portals
Get PDFSundby Portals is a project in collaboration with Natural Materials Studio, Copenhagen. These works were commissioned by OMF Sundby and funded by Copenhagen Commune. The project positioned 3 public sculptures across the neighbourhood. Taking the form of portals, each of these referencing a distinct material and environmental narrative related to Sundby, using the elements of Sea, Sky and Soil. These portals are intended to elevate, invert and twist perspectives on the local geography and create an East/West procession across the area, whilst using reclaimed, sustainably sourced and naturally safe materials in their construction. The sculptures sit on a route crossing the commune from Amager Fælled to Amager Strand, a material and elemental procession. We wanted to experiment as much as possible with reclaimed or natural materials for these works. Fabrication was done at the Statens Værksteder for Kunst over the course of 2022 with final elements completee at site. We would like to thanks SVFK for their generous support and technical expertise in assisting with these works. Materials for the work were provided by Dinesen/ Bank of Materials, SoulDK, and Havens Hænder. These works were made involving local residents from around Sundby in completing each work with support from OMF Sundby in coordinating the workshops. Each workshop was held over 1 day in October 2022. The 'Sea Portal' used dried eelgrass, a material that has an interesting history in Denmark. The Sky portal in Englandsparken uses reclaimed Douglas Fir sealed with linseed pigments, with etched apartures to view the park. The Soil portal was the final sculpture to be installed. It sits at the entrance to Phillipsparken in Amager in the rose garden. This work was produced at site, and is made from Hempcrete, supplied by Havens Hænder in Copenhagen
FabricTouch: A multimodal fabric assessment touch gesture dataset to slow down fast fashion
Get PDFTouch exploration of fabric is used to evaluate its properties, and it could further be leveraged to understand a consumer’s sensory experience and preference so as to support them in real time to make careful clothing purchase decisions. In this paper, we open up opportunities to explore the use of technology to provide such support with our FabricTouch dataset, i.e., a multimodal dataset of fabric assessment touch gestures. The dataset consists of bilateral forearm movement and muscle activity data captured while 15 people explored 114 different garments in total to evaluate them according to 5 properties (warmth, thickness, smoothness, softness, and flexibility). The dataset further includes subjective ratings of the garments with respect to each property and ratings of pleasure experienced in exploring the garment through touch. We further report baseline work on automatic detection. Our results suggest that it is possible to recognise the type of fabric property that a consumer is exploring based on their touch behaviour. We obtained mean F1 score of 0.61 for unseen garments, for 5 types of fabric property. The results also highlight the possibility of additionally recognizing the consumer’s subjective rating of the fabric when the property being rated is known, mean F1 score of 0.97 for unseen subjects, for 3 rating levels
Inner systems change: Why we should experiment with our humanity
No full text[KEYNOTE LECTURE] When it comes to the systems we inhabit, as humans we struggle to think and live in ways that generate resilience beyond the very local. This is not a moral indictment, but reveals a problem in how we think about change: linear, cause-and-effect, and binary models of understanding the world persist, even when we know they are far from accurate. In this keynote lecture, arts researcher and theorist Dr Danielle Barrios-O’Neill will discuss the power of experimental art and design to challenge the conventions of how we relate to our environments and to ourselves—especially when it involves experimenting with nonhuman points of view
Will Burtin at the RCA: 'Visual Aspects of Science’ meets 1960s popular culture
No full textGraphic Designer William Burtin’s ground-breaking 1960s exhibition ‘Visual Aspects of Science’ visualised microbiology and medical facts through models and diagrams. It was commissioned by Upjohn Pharmaceuticals, and found a second life in touring from the US to American Pavilion, Italia ’61 (Turin, 1961), Stedelijk Museum, (Amsterdam, 1962), before continuing to the Royal College of Art (London, 1963), and Palais de la Decouvérte (Paris, c.1964) This paper takes as its starting point the RCA version with fifty exhibits (RCA Gulbenkian Galleries, Kensington Gore, London, 8th October – 2nd November 1963). It was co-sponsored by the RCA, The Royal Society of Science, and the United States Embassy. The exhibition’s displays included a working model of audio-visual mechanisms in the brain, images of atomic structure and energy (Uranium Atom), and images and models of metabolic processes and cells. The paper will ask how the RCA’s version was recontextualised in a British art school setting and thereby put into conversation with what was happening in UK art schools at the time, including influences from pop art and ‘low’ popular culture such as comic books and science fiction pulp literature and films. The ‘Brain’ exhibit in particular, resonated with narratives around mind control and early psychedelia. Indeed, in some ways, ‘Visual Aspects of Science’ predicted the interest in ‘a widened area of consciousness’ (Miles, 2011) that came to characterise the late 1960s counterculture. The paper builds on the work of historians including Lysen (2015) and O’Reilly (2018), who focus primarily on Burtin’s contribution to the creation of a ‘visual language of science’ and the ways in which it communicated the technological perspectives of the Cold War period. As well as connecting the RCA exhibition to currents in culture, it will problematise the fact that it was commissioned by a pharmaceutical company, and ask how a show designed for education and advertising had the potential to be appropriated for other ends. It will utilise sources from the RCA’s Special Collections (e.g., ARK magazine) and the Carey Graphic Arts Collection, RIT (e.g., models, correspondence with the RCA) to offer a new perspective on the design history of exhibitions
Creative communities in action: Ecosystems of social innovation in remote places
Get PDFSmall and remote places rely immensely on their local communities, without which they slowly wither, becoming socially and culturally desolate. Exploring the ways a place can grow resilient when faced with adversity, we discover an amalgam of distributed design, whole systems thinking and the emergence of creative communities. When we begin to design within the embedded networks of a place, a heightened understanding of data collected across space and time is required. Within the framework of Human Cities’ SMOTIES, the University of the Aegean collected and analysed five case studies that represent the best practises in the field of social innovation in the context of creative works in the public space. This article picks out a couple of them in order to distil and analyse the lessons that can be learned from them
Gamification of self-care by Type 2 Diabetic patients
Get PDFThe project addressed by this paper was undertaken by graduate students in a healthcare-related design studio course within the MID program in the School of Industrial Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. After being briefed on the problem, students began with background research intended to help identify and understand the needs of various users, existing solu-tions, the use environment, as well as specific developmental requirements. In re-searching this problem further, the team that is the focus of this paper narrowed their attention from general medication adherence to the specific issue of medica-tion adherence in Type 2 Diabetic patients. The team wished to address this pop-ulation segment after discovering that the required adjustments to lifestyle & med-ication adherence are particularly problematic and challenging to the newly diag-nosed. This paper details the process of how this team leveraged “gamification” of the self-care process to ease the process of updating diet, medication and lifestyle habits. The design encouraged the patient to care for a virtual pet which moved the focus away from oneself and towards the virtual companion. By caring for this virtual pet, the patient could improve his/her self-care, presumably resulting in improved exercise, diet & medication adherence. This “gamification” contrasted with more traditional conceptual solutions pro-posed by other teams that included improved medication organizers, medication dispensers, and reminder Apps. The lifestyle adjustments required by a Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis are largely a psychological and emotional challenge; address-ing these problems through providing care for a virtual companion was a novel approach
Follow the boots: A case study of design and global value chains
Get PDFAs manufacturing has become globally fragmented, so too has the work of design. Complex supply chains conceal sources of creativity and innovation, posing new challenges for researching design history. There is little understanding of how the globalisation of manufacturing in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has affected design practice or how design authorship might be identified in mass-produced objects. This case study follows a pair of steel-toed boots named Vanessa from concept through design, development and production, moving from Canada to Italy, Mexico and beyond. It maps components, equipment and expertise, making it possible to trace sources and relationships of design. Analysis reveals how the boots reflect shifts in global trade and the concentration of knowledge and resources in new locations. It also shows how the globalisation of production has influenced the role of the product designer who acts as intermediary within transnational networks, combining pre-designed components and practices from around the world. The manufacturer, Mellow Walk, has experienced the transition from a regional manufacturing economy to one that is globally integrated. The company was founded in the 1990s when most Canadian footwear factories had closed due to global competition. It is unique as the last fully integrated footwear factory in Ontario, meaning that management, design, production, sales and shipping happen under one roof. Mellow Walk nevertheless depends on international suppliers and in this sense, represents many other footwear brands around the world
The ecological semiotics of air pollution and heat in Athens
No full textIn this paper I set a framework for thinking about ecological semiotics via elaborating a theory of 'The Two Ecologies' out of the work of Gregory Bateson. This is used to unpack the uneven effects of heat and pollution in Athens, Greece, and concludes by setting out a design project based upon evaporative cooling which has the potential to help ameliorate some of the conditions
In the wake of emergence
Get PDFOne may well wonder what emergence may have to do with trauma, war, political enquiry, identity, poetics whilst simultaneously underwriting the field of artificial and distributed intelligence. In tonight’s lecture, we will take a walk on the wild side - of method, of making and of knowing in the context of this oddly cathected moment that impacts on everyone and everything that we now call: reality
Up against the wall: A journey in culture, from resistant to dynamic, encountering the limit in the process
Get PDFNow is an inauspicious time of changes in Ireland. Boundaries and borders are once again called into question by external policies, rekindling debates about cultural identity. Questions of culture become questions of human survival. Current geopolitics provide the backdrop for an artistic enquiry into the position of women in Irish culture, then and now, with reference to the institutional structures of patriarchal control that shape lived experiences. The stark vernacular architecture of the Outdoor Handball Alley - designed to accommodate while controlling men’s play - will implicitly function as representative, in the Irish landscape, of the rules and boundaries that define women’s place under state and religious law. An important feature of the Irish cultural heritage, the Big alleys are primarily free standing, unroofed, structures built between the late nineteenth and late twentieth century in rural and urban areas. These fragile structures, at the edge of decay, are preserved in their community as carriers of a conflicted cultural memory and identity. I shall be attentive to the voices of women I discern in the cultural histories I traverse in the process. The literature of James Joyce will allow for the dissenting voices of an active feminine sexuality to resonate throughout the project while other women’s voices from a more recent troubled past speak of the violence of which women were both objects and subjects. Our bodies are not our own. The art works, in the form of live performances and photographic works, reflect on the effects of power structures on women’s bodies and minds. Evocations of women’s experiences of the troubles north and south of the border as well as the neglect and abuse suffered by women under the domination of the church over the procreative female body are an ever-present component of the works. My private body becomes a public body. The performance work takes the form of encounters with sites and locations. Works unfold in response to the often-toxic alchemy of past events that lingers there. Lucretius’s concept of the ‘swerve’ – the unpredictable movement of atoms – in his poem De Rerum Natura, provides a conceptual framework to think about the artist’s encounter with a multiplicity of histories. The encounter is not random but contingent upon the nature of the elements at play, always already inclined to swerve in unpredictable ways, therefore always open to a future. In the process I trace the Lucretian notion of the ‘swerve’ through several iterations from Albert Camus’ absurdist logic, Louis Althusser’s re-definition of an indeterminate materialism to a post human conception of an ‘agential cut’ in Karen Barad’s radical articulation of a diffractive ‘cutting together apart’ (folding) as an ‘Agential Realism’. Within the encounter of all these diverse elements - cultural, physical, philosophical - I sensuously inhabit a place, listening closely to the murmur of cultural memory. I trace a path from resistant modalities to dynamic energies, as an entanglement of entanglements