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Remember the future: Prehistoric design and sustainability
Get PDFThe starting point of this study is the prehistoric “teganoschemo” archaeological find of the Syros-Keros civilization in the Aegean Sea. These artifacts have been causing debates among archaeologists as their raison d'être is still contested. The aim of this study is to bring a prehistoric ontological model of design and craft to contemporary design practices. In order to explore such alternative ontologies, we turn to the past and address themes of death and life embodied in these prehistoric artifacts. As we leave Modernity behind and transition towards Sustainment, a new ontology for Design is necessary. By understanding the ontological framework of prehistoric designers, we aim to create propositional artifacts that exemplify what design can be. The propositional artifacts created act as different phases in a research-through design process that aims to investigate how design operates within an alternative system of values
Whose preferred future is this? On possibility, potential, and plurality in visions of the future
Get PDFWhat do the images of our futures tell us about the world we live in? Whose preferred future do we often imagine? That of the people, the planet, or solely made for profits of a few masters? If it is for the benefit of the people, who are they, how much do they benefit, and how will their lives be better? What unforeseen implications might this have for the planet? Speculation is famously a provocative medium that allows us to start crucial conversations without explicitly referring to sensitive anecdotes. In an increasingly polarised and fragmented world, these images hope to spark empathy, and promote a holistic, considerate discourse
FabTouch: A tool to enable communication and design of tactile and affective fabric experiences
Get PDFThe tactile experience of fabric is not only a sensory experience but also an affective one. Our choice of fabric products, like clothing, is often based on how they feel. Effectively communicating such experiences is crucial for designing tactile fabric experiences. However, there remains a lack of comprehensive understanding of the fabric tactile and affective experiences, preventing the development of tools to facilitate the communication of these experiences. In this paper, we examine the fabric experiences of 27 participants towards nine cotton samples. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to create FabTouch, a novel tool to facilitate a dialogue in the design of fabric experiences. We found six phases of fabric touch experiences including fabric touch responses, sensory associations, and emotional responses. Initial feedback from designers suggested that FabTouch could enrich design processes both in practice and in education and can create inspiration for physical and digital design explorations
Introduction to the special issue on “designing the robot body: Critical perspectives on affective embodied interaction”
Get PDFDesigning and evaluating the affectivity of the robot body has become a frontier topic in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), with previous studies emphasizing the importance of robot embodiment for human-robot communication. In particular, there is growing interest in how the tactile, haptic materiality of the robot influences and mediates users’ affective and emotional states. Indeed, the sheer physicality of robotic systems is a crucial factor in the morphology of the robotic platform, and therefore in the robot's appearance to the user. How do the tactile properties of materials subtly influence user interaction? Why do certain morphologies prompt more empathetic interactions than others? How is nonverbal communication affected through the coordination of movements of the torso, head, and appendages to provide more naturalistic-seeming interaction? What is the role of nonverbal communication in the production of artificial empathy? And how do such factors encourage trust and foster confidence for nonexpert users to interact in the first place? This recognition of machinic corporeality has been of practical interest to designers and engineers working across a range of robot forms and functions. The objective of this special issue is to further this discussion, to consider theoretical, ethical, empirical, and methodological questions related to the design of robotic bodies in the context of affective HRI, and thus foster cross currents among engineering, design, social science, and artistic communities. It originally emerged as a set of conceptual and practical questions from a workshop at the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’20) in Cambridge, UK, co-organized by two of the editors [3]. The workshop, like so many other events, was canceled because of the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, we tried to pursue a longer-term exchange of engineering, design, and conceptual considerations through the publication of this special issue. Building out from the more practically minded exchanges of an in-person workshop, here was an opportunity to invite more wide-ranging contributions to consider questions related to the design of robotic bodies in the context of affective HRI. The issue could thus explore topics bridging embodiment and affect, including touch, materials, and physical form from the points of view of artists, designers, engineers, and social scientists alike
Our hieromantic objects of love
No full textTai Shani creates utopian worlds, combining abstract geometric forms with sensuous floral motives that reference spirituality, occultism, religion and mythology in colourful sets and arrangements. Feminism and resistance are a common thread in her work. In her first exhibition in the Netherlands, Shani will present an entirely new body of work, ranging from painting, sculpture and installation, to film, sound and work on paper. Her brand-new film My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, And All The Bodily Remains That Ever Were, And Ever Will Be will have its Dutch premiere in the exhibition. The exhibition promises to be a journey through Tai Shani’s universe, from absurd Madonna figures to magnified candles and crystal balls, from ceramics and glass to satin and velvet: the wide range of materials and details will make this a sensory experience. Architectural forms play a key role in the individual works themselves, and the same will be true of the exhibition space, with a big installation reminiscent of an Egyptian tomb at its centre. Shani connects the spiritual to the political, drawing viewers into a fascinating underworld. Shani’s feature film My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, And All The Bodily Remains That Ever Were, And Ever Will Be (2023) is an impressive piece of work about love, protest and the domain between life and death. All kinds of genres and eras pass by in colourful tableaux, from dreamlike technicolor to horror, from medieval scenes to a sci-fi future. As in Shani’s earlier films, poetic texts play a key role. She either writes them herself, or takes them from a range of sources. The film touches upon radical feminist protest movements, and also includes epic New Age-like passages from the fictional Book of Love. My Bodily Remains... has an original score by composer Maxwell Sterling and Richard Fearless (from the band Death in Vegas) as well as digital animations by Adam Sinclair, makers with whom Shani has been collaborating for years. KM21 is proud to have co-commissioned this film, along with Art Night, CCA Cincinnati and POR:TA Association. KM21 is the first institutional partner to show this work
Lichen clock
Get PDFLichen Clock is a sculpture commissioned for the commune of Martigny, Switzerland. The sculpture celebrates Lichen as a bio-chronological clock, to be stewarded over many generations, where it’s growth would be perceptible over different lifetimes. Here, time is understood not through solar time, but biological and environmental time. It acts as a bio marker for environmental conditions to give us tacit insight into air and water quality and hopefully encouraging us to reflect on how to be more socially and ecologically aware. This proposal encourages us to see ourselves as symbiotic with the Lichen, where our collective actions can serve to create a better environment not only for it but also the whole community. The study of Lichen has a deep history in this area of the alps, particularly Rhizocarpon geographicum or ‘map lichen’ which is abundant on these rocks. It has been used to understand geological dating by many researchers. This work was assisted by Dr Gothamie Weerakoon, curator of the Lichen Collections and Dr Christine Strullu-Derrien, department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, as well as Dr Nicolas Kramar from the Nature Museum in Sion. The piece alludes to traditional town clocks. The column structure that holds the rocks is based on what some researchers believe to be the ancient ancestor of modern Lichen, called Prototaxites, a type of fungi that existed 450 million years ago, creating a trans-temporal link between the two. This was ‘digitally grown’ through environmental simulation and then created in bronze, using weather data collected over the years from Martigny
Wiebke Leister - Echoes and callings
Get PDFPortfolio of photographic collages from Wiebke Leister photo-performance work 'Echoes and Callings' with contextualising text by Ashley Thorpe. (Talk by Ashley Thorpe at exhibition and book launch of 'Echoes and Callings' with performance response by David Toop, Ania Psenitsnikova & Emi Watanabe, and script reading at George Devine House, 9 Lower Mall, London, 13.07.23
AiLoupe at Dubai Design Week 2023
No full textAiLoupe is the first in the suite of AI-driven design tools developed to benefit both the designer and consumer as part of research into how humans experience materials. AiLoupe takes inspiration from the Loupe, a traditional tool used to conduct fabric analysis, translating this tacit knowledge into a digital tool. AiLoupe uses a camera to recognise different materials and provide information about them. This includes information about the material, its sensory properties, composition, supply chain and volume of water used during the manufacturing process. By making this information readily available, AiLoupe aims to reduce waste and educate on sustainable practices throughout the supply chain. The tool will be useful for manufacturers, suppliers, designers and the end consumer. Intelligent Design System for Innovation is part of AiDLab, a research collaboration between Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Royal College of Art. This research is funded by the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design under the InnoHK Research Clusters, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government
Streets for diversity: Exploring how neurodivergent people experience streets
Get PDFStreets play an important role in all our lives, however there is very little knowledge of neurodivergent peoples’ experiences of them. This project, a collaboration between the RCA’s Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and the Intelligent Mobility Design Centre that was supported by the Rees Jeffreys Road Fund, aimed to bridge that gap in research and hypothesise that our current streets and public realm may exclude by design some of us that are neurodivergent
Stephen Dwoskin, an intermedial artist
No full textThe work of Stephen Dwoskin (born 1939 in Brooklyn, died 2012 in London) is varied in form, subject matter, and genre. He is best known for his early underground films, his seminal book Film Is . . ., and his role in setting up the London Film-Makers’ Co-op. This chapter explores his artwork through the films Chinese Checkers (1965), Trixi (1969), Dyn Amo (1972), Central Bazaar (1976), Trying to Kiss the Moon (1994), and Grandpère’s Pear (2003), which span his life and demonstrate the breadth of his oeuvre. These provide an examination of Dwoskin as an intermedial artist who came to artistic maturity in the multimedia New York Underground of the early 1960s, and whose practice was informed by, and often incorporated, other art forms, such as dance, painting, performance, avant-garde theatre, literature, and music. Through close readings of film works as well as historical contextual analysis, this medial multiplicity will be shown to be an artistic embodiment of the layered complexities of any person’s life: the relationship between the individual, the family, and ethnic and national tradition; the interplay between the artist and histories of art; the conflation of varied temporal, spatial, and even metaphysical coordinates; and the paradox of the organic individual using impersonal reproductive technology to record and provide access to a life