Art and Design Commons^™

Moth Wing Screen, Rab Mcclure

Nordes Conference Series

Inspired by contemporary Nordic design—characterized by fluidity of form, material innovation, tactile warmth, natural reference, and ties to a strong craft tradition—the Moth Wing Screen is a modular partition and design research project. The following essay describes the work’s goals and origins, beginning with first person reflections by the author on the sensory and tactile lessons of water skiing, a formative childhood preoccupation. Paired with excerpts from essays on seeing, drawing, and sensing by Juhani Pallasmaa, these reflections frame the discussion and provide a means of viewing the work through a lens of tactile warmth and softness. A description of …

Scaffolding Co-Design With An Amateur Quality Comic, Robb Mitchell

Nordes Conference Series

This article discusses an experiment in using a homemade comic to facilitate a visually based idea generating co-design activity with young children. The children were provided with an incomplete comic story that they were invited to complete by drawing a design idea in the final frame. The technique appears to have potential not only because of the quantity and range of ideas collected, but also because of the unexpected positive role that the children's drawings played as mediators between members of the design team. Reflections upon the case material draws on literature from a variety of fields such participatory design, …

Upon Opening The Black Box Of Participatory Design And Finding It Filled With Ethics, Marc Steen

Nordes Conference Series

In this essay, I bring together Participatory Design's (PD) tradition of critical reflection on one's own practices, and Science and Technology Studies' focus on specific activities ('opening the black box'), in order to explore the ethic of PD. I discuss three different forms of ethics-relational ethics, pragmatist ethics and virtue ethics-and provide several examples from practice, and argue that PD is 'filled with ethics': PD participants often find themselves in ethical situations and engage with ethics-even if they are unaware of these ethics and if these ethics remain implicit. I propose reflexivity as a way for PD practitioners to cope …

Dart: New Teaching Methods For Organizing Intuition, Maria Mackinney-Valentin

Nordes Conference Series

DART (Driver Analysis – Reading Trends) is a new approach developed by the author to organizing and developing intuition in the research and development phase of a creative process within the field of fashion and design. At its current stage, the model has been targeted teaching at design schools. The method is based on the author’s Ph.D. dissertation (“On the Nature of Trends: A Study of Trend Mechanisms in Contemporary Fashion”, 2010), teaching experience at design schools and methods from fashion forecasting. DART is intended to support design students on two levels: 1. To qualify the students’ sensibility or hunch …

Threads Without Ends: A Mobile Sewing Circle, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl

Nordes Conference Series

In this article the exhibition Threads – a Mobile Sewing Circle is used as an example of a design that travels. To tell the story of how Threads travels we use the concepts of immutable mobile (Latour 1990) and fluidity (de Laet and Mol 2000) – concepts that invite us to think of standardisation and stability on one hand and changes and adaptability on the other. Since Threads is continuously assembled, disassembled and reassembled in different contexts and by different actors, we argue that Threads needs to be able to deal with changes and local conditions and cannot strive for …

Reflection And Documentation In Practice-Led Design Research, Anna Maarit Mäkelä, Nithikul Nimkulrat

Nordes Conference Series

Practice-led research has been under debate for nearly three decades. One of the major issues of this form of research concerns how the researchers who are also the artists/designers can reflect on and document their creative processes in relation to their research topic. In this article, we review and discuss reflection and documentation in practice-led design research through four doctoral research projects completed at the Aalto University School of Art and Design. The cases come from craft related fields, i.e. from ceramics, glass, jewellery and textiles. This article poses twofold questions: firstly, it examines the role of creative processes and …

Design And Possibility, Mads Nygaard Folkmann

Nordes Conference Series

A central element in design is the search for the new and not-yet-existing. Thus, design is a matter of the possible, of which kind of products and meanings can be made possible through design. The article attempts to propose a way of theorizing the field of the possible in design. The ability to deal with, mediate and evoke new possibilities and thereby creatively explore new territories of use, meaning and impact is seen as a defining factor of design. Using a phenomenological framework and stating the imagination as a central concept, the article aims at pointing in new directions for …

Blind And Fake: Exploring The Geography Of The Expanded Book, Maria Hellström Reimer, Milica Lapčević, Luca Simeone

Nordes Conference Series

It seems like we are now rapidly leaving the galaxy of printed matter. As screen-based media is making its entry into our everyday lives, it is pushing aside an object – the book - that has structured our forms of being together for almost six hundred years. This shift is not absolute but successive, and it raises a lot of questions. What kind of mediating practices are developing beyond printed media? And how do these practices structure and organize common spaces and publicities? Even though we are today far into the electronic age, we are still in way suspended in …

Design Interventions As Multiple Becomings Of Healthcare, Tariq Andersen, Joachim Halse, Jonas Moll

Nordes Conference Series

Research on design of IT traditionally treats the scientific knowledge production and the design of new systems as related, but separate processes. We propose the fruitfulness of practicing a closer relation informed by interventionist design research (appreciating a problem through attempts at solving it) and actor network theory (reality is enacted and constructed through our engagement with it). Through three concrete design interventions with cardiatric healthcare, we illustrate how diverse agendas of sociological inquiry and practical design considerations can coexist and come to enact health care in specific ways. We suggest this as a strategy of multiple becomings, wherein assemblies …

Accounts Of A Critical Artefacts Approach To Design Anthropology, Tau Ulv Lenskjold

Nordes Conference Series

This article aims to contribute to a discussion of what design anthropology brings to the deployment of critical modes of engagement and artefacts in design. And, conversely, discuss how this specific framing of design anthropology may add to its disciplinary potential. I propose to do this by discussing how design provocations and critical artefacts, as transitional devices, and at different stages in a design process, can evoke a critical stance or render intrinsic controversies visible, while turning the artefacts into objects of mediation between heterogeneous assemblages of stakeholders, contexts and concerns. By framing design anthropology within a distinctly speculative and …

Design Of Design Tools: The Creation Of Tools As A Part Of A Personal Theory-Building Process, Tero Juhani Heikkinen

Nordes Conference Series

This article is a first-hand account of creating one’s own design tools in an art and design context. This practice-led research project investigates the intertwining of a design drawing process and the making of a software artifact for sketching spatial form out of tiles. This approach is compared with other practice-led research into design tools. The premises of the software, which emerge from design drawing, are explained as a part of the author's process of building a personal theory of space. These premises become materialized in the design tool artifact, which again in turn brings new elements to the design …

Giga-Mapping: Visualisation For Complexity And Systems Thinking In Design, Birger Sevaldson

Nordes Conference Series

Designers and design is facing ever growing challenges from an increasingly complex world. Making design matter means to cope with these challenges and to be able to enter new important design fields where design can play a crucial role. To achieve this we need to become better at coping with super-complexity. Systems Oriented Design is a new version of systems thinking and systems practice that is developed from within design thinking and design practice. It is systems thinking and systems practice tailored by and for designers. It draws from designerly ways of dealing with super-complexity derived from supreme existing design …

Magic-Mirror-Spiral: Looking Into The Role Of 'Design Ideal' In Interaction Design Research Projects, Naveen Bagalkot, Elena Nazzi, Tomas Sokoler

Nordes Conference Series

There is an ongoing discourse arguing for Interaction Design Research to contribute to theory-about-interaction on one hand, and advancement of particular situation on the other. While there is an acknowledgement of the dialectic relation between theory and situation, however, pointers to embrace the dialectic during a research practice are missing. In order to embrace this dialectic, in this article we suggest the formulation of a Design Ideal as the interface between theoretical concept and situation. We support our suggestion by a retrospection of our ongoing exploration of MagicMirrorSpiral, explicating the relation between theory, concept, design ideal, design artefact, and situation. …

Living The (Co-Design) Lab, Thomas Binder, Eva Brandt, Joachim Halse, Maria Foverskov, Sissel Olander, Signe Yndigegn

Nordes Conference Series

Design research environments are becoming visible in many places, in universities, in design schools, in companies and in public organizations. What most of them have in common is a commitment to the exploration of the possible rather than the factual.

Bethlehem Lutheran Church: Can A Building Teach?, Tyler Bland

Theses and Dissertations

The public school system in America has slowly phased music education out of most students curriculum. Cutting these programs help schools manage their fiscal budget and also keep students in the classroom longer in hopes that the extra time will produce better test scores. In recent years studies have shown that cutting music programs might not be in the best interest of students, or schools working for better test scores. One such study published in Social Science Quarterly, suggests that “students who participate in music are positively associated with academic achievement, especially during the high school years.” If this study …

2011 Program Booklet, Rhode Island School Of Design

Collection (annual runway show) 2007-2017

Official Collection 2011 Program distributed at the event.

Bleach, Kim E. Alexander Jr.

CGU MFA Theses

The work in this exhibition investigates the unique potential for drawing to articulate the ideas and attitudes of architecture and objects. Accepting drawing as operating in conceptual space, I explore experimental loops within the visual logic of that territory. The work asserts the material fact of drawing and its connection to forms of fabrication in other materials like wood, paint, metal, and plastic. Like painting and sculpting, the drawings occupy an intangible state between objects and ideas. I embrace this irresolution. Please see Download button in top right corner for the full statement.

A Framework For Digital Emotions, Meghan Rosatelli

Theses and Dissertations

As new media become more ubiquitous, our emotional experiences in digital space are increasing exponentially as well. While there is much talk of “affective” computing and “affective” new media art, a disconnect exists between networked emotions and the popular media that they inhabit. This research presents a theoretical framework for assessing “digital emotions”—a term that describes the feedback process between digital technologies and the body with respect to short, networked inscriptions of emotion and the (re)experience of those inscriptions within the body and through digital space. Digital emotions display five basic characteristics that can be applied to a variety of …

Stray: Paintings, Drawings, And Sculpture., Stephanie Streeter

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The artist discusses her Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition, Stray, held at Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from April 4th to April 8th. The show exhibit consists largely of self-portraits derived from the artist’s dreams, in an array of media including mixed media on paper, oil on canvas, and wire frame sculpture, all completed in the Spring of 2011, with the exception of one sculpture.

Ideas explored include the influence of dreams, representation of the self, masking, disguising, the loss of home, and the tendency of memory to fade. Influences discussed include the written work of Milan Kundera, as …

A Matter Of Taste., Charles E. Haskins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis paper supports the Master of Fine Arts exhibition at the Slocumb Galleries, East Tennessee State University, from March 14th through March 18th, 2011. The exhibit is composed of nine oil paintings depicting an invented story about two characters who create a soup for a cooking competition. The show A Matter of Taste chronicles an allegory concerning the evaluation of creative works. Through Gaudie and Baudie's "odd" recipe this work illustrates the ways in artists and art audiences interact and determine artistic value. The work is inspired by techniques in distortion and narrative painting. The following expands on the …