Art and Design Commons^™

Chamindika Wanduragala Interview, Vincent To

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Chamindika Wanduragala is a Sri Lankan American visual artist, cook, DJ ( DJ Chamun), puppeteer and stop motion animation filmmaker based in Minneapolis. Her work deals with personal experience through mythic stories. She is also the founder and Director of Monkeybear's Harmolodic Workshop, which supports Native/POC in developing creative and technical skills in contemporary puppetry.

Bio from: http://chamindika.com/index.html

Tori Hong Interview, Eliza Lemus

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: Tori Hong is a self-taught visual artist exploring homelands and homecomings. In order to create meaning out of the often ambiguous, disruptive, and generative spaces they occupy, Hong creates narrative-driven illustrations, portraits, and zines. The people Hong centers in their work are LGBTQ Asian Americans and people with marginalized identities. Hong is based in Minneapolis, MN.

Jennifer Tshab Her, Allison Bautista

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Artist Bio: My work demonstrates and complicates the politics of displacement through my experience as a second-generation Hmong-American woman. As a nation-less ethnic minority from Southeast Asia, I fear cultural extinction. I create work that reveals the diaspora of the Hmong, questioning the roles of site and place, and instead looking in-between. My work engages political and cultural space through multidisciplinary practices such as embroidery, installation, and social practice. I use color as a dialogue–a tool for bringing attention to space, claiming space and recognizing how spaces are claimed. I interpret the question of ownership, whether land or body, through …

Kelvin Burzon Interview, Maya Boustany

Asian American Art Oral History Project

Kelvin Burzon is a Filipino-American artist whose work explores intersections of sexuality, race, gender and religion. He was born on March 26, 1989, in Bataan, Philippines. As a child growing up in a Filipino culture, Burzon’s initial ambition was to become a Catholic Priest. “I have always been interested in the religion’s role in culture and familial relationships and have been drawn to the religion’s traditions, imagery, theatricality, and its psychological vestige.” His work is inspired by cerebral influences growing up in and around the church. “My cultural and familial identity, my memories as a child, cannot be separated from …

Save The Trees. Save Humanity., Lindsey Davis

The Goose

Visual art by Lindsey Davis

Environmental Art And Activism: Editors’ Notebook, Alec Follett, Melanie Dennis Unrau

The Goose

Editorial introduction to the special issue on environmental art and activism, The Goose, volume 17, issue 2 (2019).

James Joyce Run: Why Are We On The Move Again If It's A Fair Question?, Barry Sheehan

Academic Articles

I write a blog www.jj21k.com which looks at the works of James Joyce, the environment which he wrote about and changes that have taken place since he wrote about them. The blog posts are predominantly about Dublin.

During a time of injury, instead of running I was able to cycle. This blogpost describes the journey James Joyce made through houses in Dublin that he lived in whilst growing up. This is paralleled with a cycle I made and narrative I wrote.

You can see more background information and other posts on www.jj21k.com.

Book Review: Palaces For The People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, And The Decline Of Civic Life, Eric Klinenberg, Georgia Westbrook

School of Information Student Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Contemporary Art And Historical Archives: Collaborations And Convergences In A Digital Multicultural Age, Suzanne S. Lapierre

School of Information Student Research Journal

Literature illuminating the relationship between contemporary art and historical archives around the turn of the twenty-first century and how these interactions inform the evolution of archives in a digital multicultural age is the topic of this review. The literature reveals the extent to which art has been a means for members of marginalized groups to address their representation in historical archives, and also a means for archives to connect with a broader audience. Collaborations between artists and historical archives add new dimension to the debate about the nature of the archive as a creation in and of itself, and in …

Lawgleaning, Natalie Joelle

The Goose

Poetry by Natalie Joelle

Wrack Lines Volume 19, Number 1, Spring/Summer 2019, Nancy Balcom, Syma Ebbin, David Gregorio, Richard Telford, Judy Benson

Wrack Lines

Issue theme is: "Making Connections: As the Climate Changes, People and Nature Intertwine in New Ways." Articles include: "As More Roads Become Rivers, Communities Search for Solutions;" "Solving an Engineering Conundrum: As Coastal Homes Get Elevated, New Research Looks at Whether Vulnerability to Wind Damage Is Increasing;" "Along the Coast, Residents Consider How to Heed Sandy's Warning of What's to Come;" "All Rivers, All Lives Run to the Sea," about the intersection of waterways and the world of nature writer Edwin Way Teale; and "Crosscurrents: Connecticut Sea Grant's Retrospective Exhibition Makes Waves," about reaching new audiences and building bridges with …

Middle Waters: A Visual Historical Fiction Of The Osage Nation, Tori H. Forster

Honors Projects

The following project is in two parts: A series of concept art and illustration pieces surrounding the history of the Osage Nation, and a research paper detailing that history and exploring the process of creating the aforementioned visual pieces. The artworks are designed around an original story set during the 1920s on the Osage reservation, and explore past history of the Osage people as a part of that. The paper also discusses the author’s personal response to the research, and explores themes of ignorance and social justice as the project draws to a close.

Painterly Reality, Chao Ding

LSU Master's Theses

During my three years in the LSU M.F.A. painting program, I experimented with many different directions, but I have always returned to painterly figuration as the means best suited to the expression of my thoughts and feelings. Symbolism of alienation and isolation have always been extremely important to me, but as my painting has evolved formal issues of composition and color have become increasingly important, allowing me to address more complex metaphorical structures.

Interpreting Reality In The Anthropocene, Jake Philip Hamill

LSU Master's Theses

In this paper, I would like to propose that abundant beautification techniques in contemporary nature documentaries are counterproductive when attempting to address humans’ impact on our planet. By utilizing technology there could be a new way to educate ourselves about the Anthropocene on platforms such as Google Earth where one can view nature, statistics, and art by location. With limited data, learning about our effects on nature in its entirety is close to impossible but art can allow us to try and reveal new hidden connections.

Phantasmatic: Interrogating The (Im)Materiality Of Bodies Through Wool And Clay, Alexandria J. Arceneaux

LSU Master's Theses

Phantasmaticis an exploration of materials and materiality which relies on the concept of the phantasmatic body elucidated in Gayle Salamon’s work Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. This thesis is an exploration of these ideas. In my work, I use wool and clay to represent the material (known) and phantasmatic (sensed) bodies in an effort to explore an expanded understanding of the body at large. My work is also an effort to expand my own understanding of my phantasmatic body and its relationship to (my) materiality.

Public Libraries As Engines Of Democracy: A Research And Pedagogical Case Study On Design For Re-Entry, Lara Penin, Eduardo Staszowski, John Bruce, Barbara Adams, Mariana Amatulllo

Nordes Conference Series

Founded with principles of equity, freedom and access, public libraries have always served as a cornerstone of democratic values and civic participation. In the context of 21st century transformational forces of globalization and digitization, libraries are also evolving their role from repositories of information and learning, to critical contributors of a culture of care in their communities. In this paper, we present insights from an ongoing collaboration with the Brooklyn Public Library that focused on the library’s current re-entry services directed to formerly incarcerated patrons and their families. Drawing from participatory design and visual ethnographic approaches to inquiry, this study …

Empathy In A Technology-Driven Design Process: Designing For Users Without A Voice Of Their Own, Elina Ilen, Camilla Groth, Markus Ahola, Kirsi Niinimäki

Nordes Conference Series

Smart textiles are often developed in sports- oriented contexts through technology-driven processes. In the medical context, practitioners themselves also invent and develop technological aids in response to needs that emerge in practice. In these cases, novel technology may be the first driver for design to secure functionality and reliability, but our study shows that these processes benefit from human-centric and empathic design approaches. The project develops smart textiles for infants with medical adversities, such as preterm birth, neonatal infections, or birth asphyxia, collaboratively with medical researchers. Our pilot research illuminates the need to use the interest group’s empathic understanding as …

How Can We Come To Care In And Through Design?, Li Jönsson, Ann Light, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl, Mathilda Tham

Nordes Conference Series

On a generic level, caring can be described as "everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible" (Fisher and Tronto, 1990). This paper asks how we as design researchers in Scandinavia come to care, for our world and more specifically for the local NORDES community. We do this by describing how we have maintained, continued and added (as a practice of repair) in relation to the most recent NORDES summer school (2018). The summer school invited students to work with tensions between despair, in a site …

What Matters When Turning Utopias Into Material, Philip Hector, Mikko Jalas

Nordes Conference Series

With an increasing number of open laboratories for cultural and technical experimentation in place, questions arise regarding how and with what effects they come about, what they mean to those who partake and how they organize themselves in order to satisfy those involved. Recognizing the way that these spaces reach of alternative technologies and alternative ways of being we conceptualize them as materialized utopias, which are fragile socio-material arrangements. Rather than articulating grand utopian or ecotopian alternative societies, we look at materialized utopias as the gradual tweaking, probing and fixing of things. We elaborate on this with the study of …

Navigating Care In Social Design: A Provisional Model, Eva Knutz, Thomas Markussen, Tau Lenskjold

Nordes Conference Series

The aim of this paper is to show how the value of social design lies in the approach’s ability as a caring practice to foster change for vulnerable groups in society. Yet, to achieve such change, social designers must have a navigational tool that allows them to identify and steer through some of the value conflicts that are typically involved in public service care provision. To substantiate this claim, we rapport from two recent social design projects in the public sector dealing with care within criminal justice and healthcare. Building on these two projects we propose a provisional model for …

Caring For Diversity In Co-Design With Young Immigrants, Dagny Stuedahl, Henry Mainsah

Nordes Conference Series

This exploratory paper will ask questions about how we as co-designers and humanitarian designers engage with the outside and will especially be concerned with dialogues, interaction and knowledge production with young immigrants in co-design processes. We also will ask how we connect the questions arising from the histories of societies that participants bring into the co-design situation, how our practice and co-design understanding can handle cases where we cannot really grasp the complexity when religious, ethnical, personal and political experiences build the ground for collaborations. This becomes especially important in situations where complexity may ruin the co-design process and the …

Design For Sustainable Entangled Human-Nature Systems, Emīlija Veselova

Nordes Conference Series

Humanity must rapidly transition towards sustainable futures. Reaching planetary sustainability requires care for nature and radical transformation of human-made systems. Human and natural systems co-exist in extensive, complex, multi-layered entanglement. Design for sustainability and, ultimately, all design, will need to be transformed towards design for sustainable entangled human-nature systems. This paper outlines six developments to support this transformation. It suggests that all design projects must (1) be viewed as interlinked to human-nature systems and their sustainability, (2) include natural systems and entities as key stakeholders, and (3) include transdisciplinary perspectives on the entangled systems and sustainability. Moreover, design could adopt …

A Tangible Understanding Of Chronic Pain, Christina Fyhn, Jacob Buur

Nordes Conference Series

Pain is essential as a warning system for the human body. For some people, however, pain develops into a chronic condition. What makes it particularly difficult to care for patients with chronic pain conditions is that pain is an individual, subjective feeling. Traditionally, medical experts recommend that patients express their pain experience on a numeric scale or with standardised terms, but patients find this too simplistic to convey their condition. Also, the challenge that pain is a social issue, affecting patients’ work and social life severely, urged us to look for alternative ways in which people might communicate their pain …

Does It Spark Joy?, Connie Svabo

Nordes Conference Series

The question is asked by Japanese clutter-clearing expert Marie Kondo in a Netflix program, where she helps North Americans deal with their many things and where she also teaches participants to fold their clothes in organized ways. The question ‘Does it spark joy?’ in my text is used in an intellectual act of folding together thoughts from situational aesthetics, vital materialism and a philosophy of mingled bodies - into a relational and processual ontology, which overcomes the subject-object divide, highlights the transcendence of self and promotes receptivity to the dynamic and open-ended character of the world. The mundanity of clothing …

Towards Sustainable Textile Materials: Potential Pathways And Dialogues Between Disciplines, Pirjo Kääriäinen, Kirsi Niinimäki

Nordes Conference Series

The need to take care of our material environment has become urgent. New types of scientific collaboration have emerged, and designers are being invited to collaborate with top-level scientists. Several examples have shown that the creativity of designers can be brought into different kinds of scientific collaboration to enhance existing approaches and ways of working. This study investigates various design-science collaborations in the context of material research, all aiming to create sustainable textile materials. The empirical basis of this study consists of five material research and development projects. Our data identified five different approaches to materials; Transforming, Reinventing, Recycling, Biofabrication …

Who Cares? …But First, What Is The Who, And What Is Care?, Ian Coxon, Craig Bremner

Nordes Conference Series

What is Care? A word, a concept or a myth? In this paper we explore some of the key formulations of Care that should be considered if Care is to become instrumentalised in design. Primarily, we revisit that meaning of Care which could be of most value to design. After all, Care, at least to some, is the essence of what it means to be human. The goal of this paper is to prompt reconsideration of the many differing notions of Care and to stop for a moment to investigate one formulation of Care that contributes a way of clearly …

Waste, So What? A Reflection On Waste And The Role Of Designers In A Circular Economy, Holly Mcquillan

Nordes Conference Series

This paper discusses research currently being undertaken which addresses the interrelated volume, value and cost of waste and the responsibility designers have in its creation. The paper begins by outlining the contemporary waste problem (in the fashion industry). Then utilising observations made during recent field tests – where waste reduction and elimination strategies were applied to existing designs – the impact that explicit and implicit design hierarchies and complexity have on waste minimisation attempts are discussed. Questions such as: is waste a problem in the context of proposed Circular Economy models? After all, if we have a Circular Economy, then …

Advanced Resilient Practices: Demythologizing Design Heritage, Fahrettin Ersin Alaca, David Muñoz Alcántara

Nordes Conference Series

This paper presents an international research, exhibition and forum project that has been developing since 2016. The project aims to demythologize design’s consumerist Utopias and sectoral hierarchies as a series of temporary artistic and design interventions. By socio-historical analysis of politics of design, the project involves blurring the borders between exhibition, archival display, and action research. This involves pushing forward Pratt’s “contact zone” as a technological site of embodied advanced practice of design critique together with the exercise of dissent foregrounding ecology of practices. The present paper focuses on the project’s methods and research outcome concerning the case of Finnish …

Rituals Of Care: Reimagining Welfare, Meike Schalk, Sara Brolundde Carvalho

Nordes Conference Series

The legendary Swedish welfare state model comprised, on its smallest scale, an infrastructure of ‘common rooms’ (gemensamhetslokaler). Here, we explore common rooms as a spatio-social concept inspired by ‘the commons’. We argue that common rooms were fundamental to the Swedish welfare state model until the 1990s, and that the divorce of the spatial dimension from the social apparatus contributed to their decline. Using recent common rooms (Gemeinschaftsräume) in subsidized housing in Vienna as our empirical example, we illustrate how collectivity is influenced by changing legal frameworks, with common rooms receiving new attention in recent sustainable housing policies. On the micro …

Finding Calm In A Perfect Storm, Stella Boess, Elaha Zarabi, Christiaan Uythoven, Gerald Kraan

Nordes Conference Series

This paper presents insights from an exploratory study into the experience of orthopaedic rehabilitation that sought to support patients in self-care. In a research-through-design study, rough prototypes were generated and patient needs elicited. The project was a collaboration between an academic designer, a design agency, and an orthopaedic surgeon, and included perspectives from hand therapists and patients themselves. The study showed that patients greatly appreciate data support of hand rehabilitation exercises, because it helps them adjust and pace their perspective and experience of getting better. From a reflection on the prototypes in relation to the patient experience we also concluded …