Art and Design Commons^™

Ecofeminist Understandings Of Care And Design For Sustainability Transitions: Towards A Theoretical Framework Of Work For The Degrowth Movement, Eeva Houtbeckers, İdil Gaziulusoy

Nordes Conference Series

The starting point of this paper is a recognition of the need for transitions to sustainability. This exploratory paper is a stepping stone for development of a theoretical framework for ways of imagining and acting upon ecofeminist degrowth futures based on design for sustainability transitions (DFST). The aim of the framework is to conceptualise the role paid and un(der)paid work in and for such transitions. In this paper, we bring together previous research of design for sustainability DFST, degrowth, and ecofeminist understandings of care as gendered work. With references to the multi-level perspective of system innovations, DFST investigates the niche …

Caring With Others – Cultivating And Revaluing As Forms Of Everyday Designing, Melisa Duque, Laura Popplow

Nordes Conference Series

In this paper we reflect on the notion of caring with in design research by discussing processes of cultivating and revaluing. Cultivating as a form of caring with other species. Revaluing as a form of caring with unwanted things. Both are addressed as everyday designing, ongoing liminal processes that have regenerative potential to revalue and care for/with dirty matters.

Affective Infrastructuring, Alicia Smedberg

Nordes Conference Series

This paper discusses the implications of care within infrastructuring processes, through the lens of a case study account and anecdote. The case study, located in Malmö (Sweden), is an on-going project exploring methods for citizen engagement within city planning. The paper seeks to exemplify how affect can travel - and accumulate - in interactions between public sector workers and citizens, and how this affective current means that each actor is simultaneously affecting and being affected by her surroundings.

Taking Positions: Institutions And Individuals In Public Sector Design, Maria Ferreira, Eeva Berglund

Nordes Conference Series

If recent decades have witnessed an expanded notion of design, here we explore such trends through the changing roles of public innovation labs and individuals within them. Recognizing the work of design scholarship in seeking to understand this influential and fast-changing field, we focus not so much on institutional form as on individuals doing design-led work in the public sector, whether or not they think of their work in terms of design. The paper draws on initial findings from ongoing work involving interviews and engagements with such labs in Latin America. We suggest approaching urban innovation labs with more attention …

Broadening Horizons Of Design Ethics? Importing Concepts From Applied Anthropology, Johanna Ylipulli, Aale Luusua

Nordes Conference Series

This paper is a thought experiment: we explore how certain ethical considerations of applied anthropology might contribute to the evolving body of work on design ethics. To begin to consider ethical analogies between these two fields, we first align them on a conceptual level by scrutinizing how they both change relationships. Further, we introduce three central concepts and related debates of applied anthropology that could supplement discussions on contemporary design ethics: beneficence, collaborative approach and advocacy. The authors are specialized in (design) anthropology, architecture and human-computer interaction (HCI); in this paper, we draw from our respective fields and backgrounds.

Designing Care And Commoning Into A Code Of Conduct, Cindy Kohtala, Jedediah Walls, We-Left Collective

Nordes Conference Series

Despite claims to being counterculture and a better alternative, grassroots activist design groups and free culture movements may replicate the marginalizing behaviours of dominant society, also in their governance and designs of their interaction platforms. We developed a code-of-conduct, or Community Guidelines, for our online commons-oriented group to nurture a sense of a caring and mutually responsible community. The guidelines aim to bring into online interaction the living person-to-person dialogic relationality we exhibit in collaborative work offline. Our social learning process could have implications for designing healthier online community protocols and platforms and be able to better tackle the challenges …

Research Experiences Beyond The Comfort Zone, Juan Sanin

Nordes Conference Series

The intersection between design and care is shaping new design fields that are both promising and challenging. Design for healthcare is one of these fields: it brings opportunities for improving people’s experience of care through design research, but it takes designers out of their comfort zone. Scholars have reported success doing design for healthcare, but not much has been said about challenges, failures or confrontations found in this field. This paper argues that we should care more about discomforting aspects of design research to get a better understanding of what designing together involves. It presents a case of care (in)action …

(Un)Curating The City: Participatory Design And Urban Heritage, Mela Zuljevic, Liesbeth Huybrechts

Nordes Conference Series

This article explores the relations between participatory design (PD) and critical heritage studies (CHS) in the context of urban planning and development. In searching for a PD approach which can critically address the role of heritage in urban development, it problematizes the focus on economic viability in urban renewal practices and the lack of care for socio-political values and challenges. The article searches for a PD framework that could support alternative regimes of care, via the notion of design space as the terrain for selection, articulation and curation of values. This framework will be outlined by reflecting on a case …

Testimonial Digital Textiles: Material Metaphors To Think With Care About Reconciliation With Four Memory Sewing Circles In Colombia, Jaime Patarroyo, Laura Cortés-Rico, Eliana Sánchez-Aldana, Tania Pérez-Bustos, Nasif Rincón

Nordes Conference Series

Research on textile crafting offers an opportunity to investigate reconciliation in a context that brings together every day practice, the realities of the conflict, the possibility of healing, and the rebuilding of social fabric. In this exploratory paper we deploy a methodological design which contributes to think about reconciliation with care through the practice of textile crafting in four memory sewing circles, integrated mostly by elderly women in different Colombian municipalities. This design implies the prototyping of a set of technologies that integrate digital components to various handcrafted textiles with the ability to digitally embody reconciliation in the selected sites, …

Design For The Age Of Species – Exploring Ways For Designers To Care For Multispecies Coexistence, Petra Lilja

Nordes Conference Series

This paper presents the project The Age of Species (TAS) and the ‘multispecies approach’ addressing the who in care with the aim to disrupt human-centeredness and open up for reconfigurations of design practices to better engage with troubled presents where a myriad of other species is overlooked and becoming extinct. TAS invites designers and scientists to speculate of and design for anthropo-de-centric futures by thinking through care and coexistence. By describing and reflecting on the experiences of an initial workshop and its outcomes as well as anchoring it with theories within feminist posthumanism, the aim is to explore and define …

Zoepolis: Non-Anthropocentric Design As An Experiment In Multi-Species Care, Monika Rosińska, Agata Szydłowska

Nordes Conference Series

The paper provides an introductory discussion and a curatorial case study on design practice that contributes to a constitution of a human and nonhuman community as well as challenges and expands the notion of care to other species. It starts with an examination of existing approaches to design that take into consideration relations between humans and non-humans. Departing from a critique of discussed perspectives we then introduce a concept of zoepolis based on theories of Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, Donna Haraway, Joanna Bednarek and Bruno Latour. In the second part of the article we discuss the exhibition “Zoepolis. Design …

Co-Ability Practices, Renáta Dezső-Dinnyés

Nordes Conference Series

This paper explores philosophical and strategic possibilities to understand the concept of co-Ability, and generate critical and new insights to our value system in human centred societal challenges. I apply an experimental approach of research through design, analysed from an interpretive point of view to prove a grounded theory. The paper starts from a prosthesis development presented as a tangible pragmatic procedure. The purpose of the case study is the notion of care through practical design that is marked with concern since the probability of harm can be incised by pure design decisions. Instead of describing the politics of roles …

Design For Care In The Peripheries: Arts-Based Research As An Empowering Process With Communities, Satu Miettinen, Melanie Sarantou, Essi Kuure

Nordes Conference Series

Arts-based research (ABR), its potential for participation and collaboration, can create insights and understanding of complex societal structures. It can also be used as an approach to find mindful solutions with peripheral communities. The paper argues that ABR, supported by practical collaborative processes, can offer suitable approaches to design for care by including local stakeholders in community-led development processes. This paper presents a Life Story Mandala tool that enables researchers and art and design practitioners to manage complex societal development processes in a globalised world (Bonsiepe 2006). The tool was developed during two global research cycles in South Australia and …

Three Ecologies Diffracted: Intersectionality For Ecological Caring, Martín Ávila

Nordes Conference Series

This essay commemorates the 30th anniversary of the publication of Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies. It does so by proposing a ‘diffractive’ reading of the book, suggesting latent potential in each of the overlapping “ecologies” that conformed the ecosophy sketched by Guattari. There are mainly two aspects of The Three Ecologies addressed in this essay. Firstly, the understanding of the general frame of the interrelation of the three ecologies as an “intersectional” approach. Secondly, the understanding of this form of intersectionality as a possible platform to acknowledge other-than human ‘intersections’. Through the essay I exemplify with one of my own …

Identities Shaped By Creative (Design) Journeys, Stephen Awoniyi

Nordes Conference Series

The current paper presents an exploration of creating or making. We interviewed several makers of creative work, using a creative piece each had made as a conversation core. Their descriptions of making journeys marked out coupling of processes and outcomes. Comanaging both structural components involved temporally-delimited stages of actional and conceptional unfolding. Doing and thinking, however, also sketched an outline of a personality at a moment in time. These were all fluid transactions. Based on accounts of making journeys which circumscribed person-work amalgamations, we described a dispersion of markers across a dispositional field negotiated by creators. The creative operation can …

Taking Care Of Plastic: Discursive Jewellery And Anthropogenic Debris, Synne Skjulstad

Nordes Conference Series

Tons of plastic waste pile up in our oceans by the minute. This paper discusses a jewellery design project where anthropogenic debris takes centre stage. The project investigates how marine plastic trash literally may be turned into treasures through approaches that transverse design, craft and communication design. The main design material are plastic pieces selected from the shores of Norwegian fiords. Each piece of plastic selected for jewellery is treated as precious. Care is thus a concept that frames this jewellery design project as it both connects to the micro and macro perspectives on plastic. The jewellery is relating aesthetic …

Why Care About Virtual Landscapes? Immersive Open World Gaming Related To Positive Health, Paul Roncken

Nordes Conference Series

For some reason many people enjoy, spend long hours and pay for being out on virtual fields, playing an avatar that needs to hunt, prey, hide, survive and interact with all kinds of programmed entities and online players. Surely the designers and programmers deserve praise for their efforts and achievements in yearly progress on more detailed and increasingly immersive virtual experiences. But does that suffice to care about virtual landscapes other than classifying them as artificial places for fun and diversion? In this paper I will make a first attempt to relate virtual landscape experiences to accumulated insights in environmental …

Who Cares About Those Who Care? Design And Technologies Of Power In Swedish Elder Care, Camilla Andersson, Ramia Mazé, Anna Isaksson

Nordes Conference Series

Design is increasingly recognized as an instrument of power. We explore power in the context of the Swedish welfare state and care institutions, which are undergoing political and structural reconfiguration as new technologies are introduced. Our aim is to better understand the effects of designed technologies within care institution and over care workers. Through our research, we have identified deviances, or gaps, between institutional policies and daily working practices, in which workers must cope within a grey zone of legality. Against this backdrop, we bring together and discuss concepts from philosopher Michel Foucault and sociologist Dorothy Smith in order to …

Health Cultures: Designing Healthcare Infrastructures As Urban Interfaces For Society Participation, Liesbeth Huybrechts, Katrien Dreessen, Irma Földényi, Daniela Dossi

Nordes Conference Series

This paper - based on the participatory design research project ‘Health Cultures, Healthcare and Multiculturalism’ - reflects on how we can redesign healthcare infrastructures as urban interfaces for citizens from different cultural backgrounds to participate more actively in society. The project investigates the health care systems and institutions of care in action, and how they develop within the context of a growing multicultural society and the declining welfare state. Via a design anthropological research in different health-related contexts within the city of Genk (Belgium), wherein 54% of the inhabitants come from foreign descent, we studied how these environments function as …

Caring Design Experiments In The Aftermath, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl

Nordes Conference Series

We live in the aftermath of industrial design, which primarily has been guided by a focus on making the new. Through the project Un/Making Soil Communities, carried out where glass production has left pollution in the soil, the authors propose caring design experiments which aim to foster maintenance and repair for livable worlds. In this articulation, the authors draw on democratic design experiments (Binder et al 2015), but propose a shift from gathering around matters-of-concern (Latour 2005) to matters-of-care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Furthermore, caring design experiments also entail engaging with big enough stories (Haraway 2016) through going visiting …

Reparative Practices: Invitations From Mundane Urban Ecologies, Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland, Kristine Samson

Nordes Conference Series

The paper proposes a reparative turn in co-design towards an attention and sensitivity to more-than-human world-making practices in our urban environments. The notion of ‘reparative’ hold strings with the reparative system that an organism starts when damage is experienced. Thinking-with this biological, cultural and performatively, we propose the reparative as the starting point for learning to notice life-giving potentialities in the Anthropocene. Reparative practices are ethical and political in the sense that we are searching for life-giving practices that can move us beyond design practices in the Anthropocene. Hence, by bringing attention to environmental enchantments related to sensory everyday practices …

Iron While Still Damp, Julia Valle-Noronha, Marina Valle-Noronha

Nordes Conference Series

This exploratory paper looks into the relationship between people and the things they wear through the lenses of care and domestic labour. More specifically it addresses the practice of ironing and what it can offer to such relationships. The work collects data from wearers via deployed kits—containing a shirt and a diary—and a group discussion on the wearer-worn engagements. The results show that while little academic focus is given to domestic labour, ironing emerges as a practice that can share understanding of what lies behind the visuality of garments. It suggests that designers and researchers invest in further exploring the …

Jesuit Winemaking And Art Production In Northern New Spain, Katherine M. Mcallen

School of Art & Design Faculty Publications

This article presents new research on Jesuit visual culture in northern New Spain, situating Santa María de las Parras (founded 1598) as an important site where the Jesuits and secular landowners became involved in the lucrative business of winemaking. Viticulture in Parras helped transform this mission settlement into a thriving center of consumption. The Jesuits fostered alliances with Spanish and Tlaxcalan Indians to serve their religious and temporal interests, as these patrons donated funds to decorate chapels in the Jesuit church of San Ignacio. This financial support allowed the Society to purchase paintings by prominent artists in Mexico City and …

Measuring Up: A Case For Redrawing The System Boundaries Of Sustainability At The University Of Kentucky, Brent Sturlaugson, Rebekah Radtke, Anita Lee-Post

Architecture Faculty Publications

The primary goal of this paper is to examine the role that sustainability assessment and reporting plays in creating a sustainable campus for academic excellence. A prototype sustainability assessment and reporting system is developed for triple bottom line impact analysis of the built environment of the newly expanded and renovated Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. The prototype system utilizes a toolkit to collect environmental, social, and economic data of the building's built environment for sustainable design performance analyses. The system also employs a comprehensive set of sustainability metrics to measure and report the building's …

Continuity, Aleksandar Eftimovski

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

The sculptures displayed in this exhibition demonstrate knowledge transfer and cultural exchange between Aleksandar and Lingnan students in the process of creating site-specific works. They are largely made by timber from Chi Kee Sawmill & Timber, which was founded in North Point on Hong Kong Island in 1947, but later relocated to Chai Wan and then its current site in Kwu Tong, Sheung Shui in 1982. Unfortunately, this rare survivor of timber business has recently been identified as one of the first areas to be cleared for the controversial North East New Territories Development Plan launched by the HKSAR government. …

Thalassic: Women, Gender, And The Sublime In Relation To Marine Art, Kelsy Patnaude

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

The sea may be regarded as a source of tranquility as well as one of unsettling trepidation, ambiguous even in its representation. Those who are called to it must be relentless in the face of uncertainty; what awaits them is the immeasurable sublime. Defined in art as a reference to greatness beyond all possibility of control, the sublime invokes an urge to pursue pleasurable terror in the unmanageable. On heavily trafficked and dangerous seas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the strict gender hierarchy of authority on board ships in seafaring industries was solidified. Thus, the dominance of the male …

Law Library Blog (June 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Fifth Aeon – A.I Competition And Balancer, William M. Ritson

Master's Theses

Collectible Card Games (CCG) are one of the most popular types of games in both digital and physical space. Despite their popularity, there is a great deal of room for exploration into the application of artificial intelligence in order to enhance CCG gameplay and development. This paper presents Fifth Aeon a novel and open source CCG built to run in browsers and two A.I applications built upon Fifth Aeon. The first application is an artificial intelligence competition run on the Fifth Aeon game. The second is an automatic balancing system capable of helping a designer create new cards that do …

Mes-Ti-Zo, Aeleen Jacinto

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Meztiso is an exploration of the artist’s identity as an individual born and raised in Guatemala; which is a country rich in natural resources where the majority of the population is native Maya yet the ruling class is majority white and poverty is widespread. The artist takes on this stunning contradiction using her own influences and views which were shaped by the political and economic upheaval and instability of her youth in Guatemala. The artist comments on her own identity as a person of mixed ancestry, a Meztiso, and because of her own family’s involvement in the capitalist government that …

Defining Moments / A Life Portrait, Timothy Haerens

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Defining Moments / A Life Portrait

In his MFA Thesis Exhibition, Defining Moments / A Life Portrait, Timothy Haerens explores and celebrates our connectedness to one another as members of the human race. “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” Haerens chose this quote from the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh, as the inspiration for his show because it affirms his belief that we are linked to one another by virtue of our humanness.

Through his abstract paintings on canvas and plexiglass, as well as through his prints and collagraphs, Haerens …