Digital Commons Network^™

Terminally Ill Documents: The Lasting Impact Of Ephemera, Deama Khader

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Murals and portraits of cultural icons such as George Floyd and Ahed Tamimi are more than aesthetically engaging objects. They can inspire viewers to act, attend protests, and share their own feelings on an issue, whether that be in the form of more street art or something as simple as a social media post. This is often how social and political movements are made.

Street art poses a unique challenge to information professionals since the documents that are created with the intention or expectation of disappearance. They are documents suffering from terminal illness. Their ephemerality is their disease. Per the …

The Death Of Malls: The Rise Of E-Commerce And Digitally Native Brands, Alexis Montgomery

Theses

Since the mid-2000s, malls and retail brick and mortar stores have been on the decline. Stores not making enough revenue in-person; the rise of online shopping and e-commerce, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the rise of digitally native brands have contributed to this. This research aims to figure out how the current consumer atmosphere, as well as how the rise of e-commerce and digital marketing, will impact the mall of the future. This research aims to discover how local malls are faring, if stores are truly closing and if national retail brands are pulling out of malls. This research also aims …

Beyond Elements And Principles: Bringing A Visual Culture Curriculum To High School Art, Julie Winston

Theses

The elements and principles of design are the building blocks that art students use to create a composition. These foundational tools have been used by art students throughout their elementary and secondary school years, as required by state and national art standards. This project is an example of how to enrich high school introductory art classes by implementing lessons that include visual culture education. A combination of successful art museum teen programs and existing visual culture curriculum were used to aid in the development of a semester’s worth of lessons that emphasize visual culture. Visual culture curricula produces more student …

The Foreboding Campaign System, Michael Fetters

Theses

This project creates a new campaign setting compatible with the Dungeons and Dragons system utilizing the SRD Open Game License content as a starting point. The campaign setting created establishes mechanics allowing for narrative interaction between the past and present timeline of events in the world of Lunaria. This new system, entitled The Foreboding, utilizes a shift mechanic to alter the player characters in several possible ways, ranging from changes in race or character history to interactions with past time periods and events that alter the present timeline of the narrative. New character options for race and class were also …

Project - Sustainability In Education

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

At HKDI's Centre of Innovative Material and Technology, students and designers are constantly exploring how to achieve more possibilities for sustainability and upcycling through conscious material choices and innovative techniques.

Issue Twenty Seven Full Text

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

No abstract provided.

An Exploration Of The Black Female Cosplay Experience, Geneisa B. Ragin, Geneisa Ragin

Honors College Theses

Cosplay is the practice of dressing up as a fictional character whether it's from a television show, video games, or even a book series. Many people participate in cosplay to show their dedication or admiration for their favorite character and sometimes cosplay a character that helps reflect their own character or personality. This thesis will mainly focus on the experience of being a Black female cosplayer in pop culture, social media, conventions, and other places where people can share and communicate. In this thesis’s research, participants' answers about their experiences were centered around their inspiration to start cosplaying, their ways …

Harmony Of Difference: Theorizing Rashid Johnson's New Universalism In The Grids Of Antoine's Organ, Mark Fredricks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My reading of Antoine’s Organ, a sculptural installation created by the artist Rashid Johnson in 2016, explores the artwork as a richly textured response to the limited universalism of modernism. I argue that Antoine’s Organ is a multimodal expression which crafts a harmony of difference using the aesthetic language and forms of both visual art and music. The term “harmony of difference” is taken from and inspired by a composition of the same name by jazz musician Kamasi Washington, and is used within to describe Rashid Johnson’s counterpoint strategy to work differences with and against each other, mobilizing the grid’s …

Analog Matters: Labels, Cassettes, And Alternative Economies In Argentina’S Independent Music Scenes, Maria Agustina Checa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of current cassette production and circulation in Argentina. It analyzes the work of independent labels that record music available online onto cassette tapes, incorporating a variety of music styles. I examine practices of production, circulation, and exchange, and the alternative economies performed around cassettes, with particular attention to the materialities constituting these processes. Through cassettes, I conceptualize and trace "relational value," a notion to understand objects with different kinds of social agencies valued for their abilities to generate connections. Relational value is a theoretical construct that emerges from the ground-up approach to studying …

Chef Minoritas Di Tempat Kerja: Perempuan Di Dapur Profesional, Intan Yusan Septiani, Mia Siscawati

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Cooking activities in the traditional kitchen or in the domestic area—which are supposed to be the domain of women—are interpreted as an obligation as well as a form of a woman’s service to her family, spouse, children, and even other people who are close to her life. In other words, cooking in the domestic area is an undefined job. Regardless of the fact, when cooking shifted to the public space, it turned into a professional job, a work area which was later known as the professional kitchen. People who work in a professional kitchen are given the title professional chef. …

Negosiasi Wacana Femininitas Melalui Film-Film Animasi Putri Disney, Sella Putri Arby, Lina Meilinawati Rahayu, R M. Mulyadi

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Negotiation Discourse of Femininity Through Disney Princesses’ Movies. Femininity tends to be explained as a condition ‘to be a woman’, making it an ideology that gives limitations to women. Mills uses discourse theory to explain femininity, stating femininity is a process that is constructed and negotiated in every interaction. Disney Princesses show changes through times and each animation film, showing a negotiation of what defines femininity. The data collection was carried out by qualitative method narrative study, with Performativity of Gender by Judith Butler and Negotiation Discourse of Femininity theory by Sara Mills. Thirteen Disney Princesses were used as researched …

Benetton’S (In)Equality: A Semiotic Reading, Hianly Muljadi, Sonny Angjaya, Joanna Deborah

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

United Colors of Benetton, or UCB, has been using its advertisements to deliver positive messages and values that the clothing company represents. This article analyzes one of the photographs in Benetton’s campaign for their Spring Summer Collection of 2018. The campaign, which consists of some photographs by Oliviero Toscani, raises the theme of equality of gender and ethnicity. It shows various photographs of both female and male models from different ethnicities. However, it is found that there is one photograph that shows inconsistency with the very value that Benetton wants to convey through their campaign. Based on the semiotic analysis, …

“It's So Normal, And … Meaningful.” Playing With Narrative, Artifacts, And Cultural Difference In Florence, Dheepa Sundaram, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article considers how player interactions with religious and ethnic markers, create

a globalized game space in the mobile game Florence (2018). Florence is a multiaward-

winning interactive novella game with story-integrated minigames that weave

play experiences into the narrative. The game, in part, explores love, loss, and

rejuvenation as relatable experiences. Simultaneously, the game produces a unique

experience for each player, as they can refract the game narrative through their own

cultural, identitarian lens. The game assumes the shared cultural space of the player,

the player-character (PC), and the non-player-character (NPC) while blurring the

boundaries between each of these …

Multitudes: Widening The Research Agenda For Personal Informatics Design, Emily Winter, Bran Knowles, Daniel Richards, Kim Snooks, Chris Speed

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The personal informatics field claims many potential benefits for users, from self-reflection to self-improvement. However, despite this focus on the self, the personal informatics literature has given little attention to how the self is conceptualised in tool design. From a starting point that all notions of the self are socially constructed, we draw on critiques of the PI literature to track three key conceptualisations of the self that are prevalent in the personal informatics literature – the unitary self, the lacking self, and the knowable self. For each of these, we suggest a possible design space opened by embracing an …

Negotiating The Page: Digital Annotation And Graphic Literature, Tania Allen, Margaret Simon

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The past ten years have seen an increased acceptance and study of the graphic novel as a literary instrument. More and more authors and designers are using the comic book platform and its shorter, serialized structure, to tell stories about race, class, and gender. In tackling these more complex issues, creators are intentionally or unintentionally making environments where readers are engaging in methods of negotiated reading—discovering an affinity with aspects of the characters and stories, and actively creating a discourse with identity and positionality. Digital annotation and reading platforms offer a unique opportunity to teachers, designers, scholars, and readers to …

Designing New Financial Transactions: Theories, Case Studies, Methods, Practice And Futures, Chris Elsden, Inte Gloerich, Bettina Nissen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Talking about money can be difficult; designing with it, harder still. Though design is increasingly ‘value-centred’, this theme-track proposes the need for critical attention to how we actually represent, transact and exchange what we value. In this editorial, we offer some background to the topic, describe potential areas of development for design researchers and practitioners, and introduce the papers presented through this theme at DRS 2022.

Anatomy Of A “Technology”: Proposing A Meta-Design Framework For Sustainability Literacy That Addresses The Issue Of Efficacy In Modern Socio-Technical Cultures, Nicole Sacchetti

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In the era of the Anthropocene, where the climate crisis forces humankind to rethink its values and systems of production, sustainability literacy becomes crucial for any design practitioner. This paper aims to contribute to the extensive literature that regards meta-design as a reflexive practice for the study of design purposes, processes, methods, and outputs by outlining a meta-design framework to tackle the modern artificial environments in which humankind has become naturalized. Specifically, by inscribing modern “technologies” within Simondon’s concept of “technical object”, it delineates the preliminary guidelines of a research approach for design education that, drawing from Lemonnier’s chaîne opératoire …

North-South Design Education: Integrating Māori Knowledge In Design Using The Blend Approach, Luke Feast, Kei Hoshi

DRS Biennial Conference Series

We investigated how to align design education that integrates mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) with the knowledge development aim of modern university education. Our main idea was to use culture-based knowledge as a source of creativity rather than socialization. We share insights from two critical cases where we tested whether the blend approach is a useful design method for integrating Māori knowledge in design education. The insights show that conceptual blending is an effective method for students to understand culture-based knowledge through creative design activity.

Reframing Advanced Manufacturing Ontologies Through An Exploration Of Ductus, Lewis Urquhart, Andrew Wodehouse

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Ontologies of manufacturing and making have received closer attention in recent years thanks to a renewed interest in materiality and questions of form-emergence and form perception. This work argues that the hylomorphic ontologies dominant within advanced manufacturing can be challenged through the introduction of a “ductus” concept, which relates to the traces left by unique material interactions and energy transferences as artefacts are fabricated. Drawing on multiple strands of scholarship, this paper develops a new ontological model integrating material-process relationships and end user experiences with the ductus of the making process at its core. This model is illustrated and elucidated, …

Augmented: Design And Ethnography In/Of An Architecture, Computer Science, And Textile Research-Creative Collective, Claire Nicholas, James Forren, Derek Reilly

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper introduces a multi-disciplinary research-creation project that examines the embodied and social nature of textile design and making at different structural scales – from beaded accessories to architectural components. Bringing together anthropology, architecture, computer science, and textile craft, “Gesture and Form” seeks to develop effective and ethical pedagogies for teaching design and handcraft with new materials and technologies. Specifically, the project explores the potentialities and limitations of a head-worn augmented reality (AR) system that documents, encodes, and later guides making practices. The discussion first introduces different disciplinary frameworks for understanding and researching embodied knowledge, before sketching the multi-disciplinary research …

Beyond The Body: Moving Past The Metricised Bodily Goal In Self-Tracking, Kim Snooks, Roger Whitham, Daniel Richards, Joseph Lindley

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Currently self-tracking systems, that sense and infer data about an individual or ‘the self’, focus on gathering quantitative data about the body. The social features present in these systems measure data about the body against other bodies or ‘the other’. However, focus on these metrics is causing harm. In this paper we discuss relations between the self and the other and more-than-human perspectives to pose questions for moving beyond the body and acknowledging potential harm in self-tracking systems. Throughout we draw on work from across Design Research, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Philosophy and Sociology, to high-light challenges and opportunities for Designers …

The Power In Maps: Reviewing A ‘Youth Violence’ Systems Map As Discursive Intervention, Jocelyn Bailey, Lorraine Gamman

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper offers a reflection on a systems mapping experiment undertaken as part of the Redesign Youth Futures project, which aimed to visualise the complex system producing youth violence in London. The paper brings together key ideas in the practice of systems thinking and mapping, with contributions from the literature on design and power, to theorise the map as an intervention in a discourse – in this case, the popular and policy discourse around youth violence. In doing so, it offers an account of how power is operant in and through such an artefact: in the embodiment of (and resistance …

Studio Through Studio: A Diffractive Reading Of The Educational Design Studio, James Corazzo

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This article aims to unsettle familiar notions of the educational design studio by examining how it is different from the professional studio. Both settings share similar routines, practices, and physical features; however, I argue their operations differ in critical ways. By bringing attention to these differences, I hope to open up new perspectives on how learning happens in educational studios and make a case for further material and spatial accounts of learning. I will draw on empirical accounts of professional studios from the book Studio Studies. Wilkie and Farias identify the studio as a sociologically significant yet overlooked setting for …

Weaving With Design Research To Study Children’S Everyday Practices In Cancer Care Environments, Piet Tutenel, Stefan Ramaekers, Ann Heylighen

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Children affected by cancer often require repeated hospitalisations. The impact of the material hospital environment on children's well-being receives growing attention across various disciplines. Yet, because of their ‘double vulnerability’ – being children and being ill – young people affected by cancer are less considered as direct research participants. We set out to put the experiences of these children at the centre of attention. To do justice to the complexity of their interactions with the material hospital environment, we brought together concepts and insights from childhood studies; scholarship in anthropology and philosophy; theories on materiality; and design research; and combined …

Articulating Theories Of Change Towards More Just And Transformative Design Practices, Hillary Carey, Madeline Sides, Erica Dorn

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In any collaborative change-making process, team members hold individual, and often differing, ideas about how change happens. These ideas may address whether to work top-down or bottom-up, what leverage points are to be targeted, or who should be involved in the work, in what capacity, and when. If these differences in perspectives are not examined and discussed, they can lead to conflicting actions, lessen positive impact, and may even do harm. Mapping “Theories of Change” is an approach that has been used to clarify strategies for initiating change across many sectors. Yet, when it comes to complex design engagements, we …

Design Beyond The Human World Of Management And Organizations: Towards A Cosmology For The Anthropocene, Emmanuel Bonnet, Diego Landivar, Alexandre Monnin, Ulises Navarro Aguiar

DRS Biennial Conference Series

In this paper, we intend to make explicit the shared ontological foundation of design and management and question them in light of the advent of the Anthropocene. To do so, we first draw these disciplines closer before qualifying their common ground as an underlying “cosmology they share”. This cosmology is characterized by the centrality of the notion of organization. We argue that design as well as design knowledge must be assessed with regards to this peculiar cosmology. We call for the need to go beyond what we call the “monism of organizations” or the “organized world”. We propose a new …

Sounds That Satisfy: Describing The Relationship Between Sound And Need Fulfilment, Gijs Louwers, Elif Özcan, Jasper Van Bommel, Sylvia Pont

DRS Biennial Conference Series

Psychological needs of users as a basis for design are at the core of design practice, yet the importance of fundamental human needs when designing soundscapes has not been studied specifically. This paper investigates the relationship between nine fundamental human needs and the affective qualities and categories of soundscapes. In a free-labeling survey study, we collected descriptions of imagined sound environments for the fulfilment of the needs, as well as ratings of the perceived affective quality of these environments. We found that needs were associated with pleasant soundscapes, while their eventfulness varied. ‘Human’ sounds were a common category for each …

Musings On Vocabulary Choices When Proposing Design Towards Profound Systems Change, Gwendolyn Kulick

DRS Biennial Conference Series

The search for an imaginative vocabulary that encourages mind and behaviour shifts is not an easy task in processes of formulating design trajectories towards profound systems change. At the same time many design concerns are embedded in larger ecological, social, economical or political systemic crises and call for generating systems change across multiple dimensions. A prolonged terminology search when describing the theoretical and practical results of a PhD research into Pakistan’s craft sector through the systems lens triggered the interest in penning this paper about the entanglements of language and expanded design horizons and methods. While it can only offer …

Mutant In The Mirror: Queer Becomings With Ai, Grace Leonora Turtle

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This paper contributes to scholarly discourse on design and AI by using queerness as a theoretical grounding to explore potentialities for design to interface with and imagine artificial intelligence (AI) differently. The paper does so by reporting on an autotheoretical experiment in which I pose the questions: What if we understood AI as queer, a kind of mutant, in a state of becoming; a dynamic, relational, non-binary gender variant? How then might AI show up in and act on the world (with us humans) differently? The experiment uses a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to unsettle how AI is understood today, …

“Same World,” “Different Eyes”: Photography And Visual Narrative In Three Guineas, M. Giulia Laddago

Virginia Woolf: Selected Papers

No abstract provided.