Storytelling and material interferences: Practice-led research between puppetry and textiles

The thesis discusses how researching ‘weird materials’ to design puppetry performances may support textile designers in their creative journey and research process. On the one hand, textile designers are interested in emulating liveliness between the functional and the aesthetic qualities of their artefacts. Material-driven researchers investigate methods to translate the enactment of their materials’ fluid and ambiguous nature for a human audience. On the other, puppetry explores materials through their potential for ‘liveliness’ and their ability to translate the human and non-human nature of the puppet. During a performance, the puppet oscillates between being an object, a symbol, and a character. The audience resolves the uncertainty of the puppet’s ontological status by producing a narrative. The research examined the relationship between puppetry and textile design and their shared interest in the liveliness of materials. Through a series of action-research activities, the practice produced fertile ground for the development of puppet characters and engaged in a dialogue with textile designers and researchers about character design and storytelling in puppetry. The design of puppetry systems with thermochromic and bio-based materials through textile processes generated a series of stop-motion animations, short video recordings, still images, and textile artifacts that reflect the evolution of the practice. Ultimately, the research will provide textile designers with new tools for translating the ‘weird’ life of their materials into their creative practice and research

“Another Taste, Another Year, Another Place, Another Tear”: Fashioning the anti-social icon from Orlok to Lestat

“Another Taste, Another Year, Another Place, Another Tear”: Fashioning the Anti-Social Icon from Orlok to Lestat Fashion is an ever-evolving academic field. Once ‘relegated to art, anthropology and dress studies’ (Hancock, Johnson Woods and Karaminas, 2013), fashion is now located within a wider cultural framework that includes film and television. It has been identified by scholars as a place for discourse historically, but since the new Millennium, this space has become more engaged in critical analysis (Petrov & Whitehead, 2019). From the interdisciplinary perspective of fashion studies and the literary queer Gothic, this chapter will explore how costume design specifically narrates and emphasises the queerness and exceptionality of the vampire. Analysing the economic metaphors extant in two examples of vampiric nobility which have seen several adaptations over the years and have resurged in popularity once more, we will analyse Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024) as contextualising frame to our analysis of Lestat de Lioncourt (Sam Reid) in the recent AMC television adaptation of Annie Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (2022-present). Costume offers a way to explore complexities of narrative structure especially within an increasingly complex and non-linear approach to storytelling (Mulholland, 2020). This chapter will argue that these characters are brought to life in new ways which emphasise their existence as out-of-step with chronological aesthetic trends, fashioned visually, symbolically and materially to express their exceptionality. To do this we will engage with queer theory’s antisocial thesis (Sedgewick, 2002; Edelman, 2004) to unpack how realism and authenticity are articulated to circumnavigate human, heteropatriarchal and essentialist limitations of gender expression and sexual mores.This will develop into a discussion of how the stylised vampire can provide us with both an anticapitalist metaphor for overconsumption and an aspirational image of aesthetics detached from their contemporary zeitgeist

AI-powered consumer electronics repair towards a digital circular economy

Electronic waste is a growing global challenge, with projections indicating a significant increase from 58 million metric tons in 2021 to an alarming 112 million metric tons by 2050 (Forti et al., 2020; Parajuly et al., 2019). This surge underscores the urgent need for circularsolutions in managing the lifecycle of electronic products. Furthermore, the current economic and marketing dynamics often make replacement seem more appealing than repair (Sonego et al., 2022; Terzioğlu et al., 2015; VandenBerge et al., 2023). Addressing this challenge requires understanding the multifaceted barriers users face, which the Repair Motivation and Barriers Model categorizes into technical, emotional, and value-related aspects of repair (Terzioğlu, 2021). This research aims to tackle these barriers by introducing an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tool called AI-Fixer that provides step-by-step repair instructions, building user confidence, and enabling self-repair practices.Within the field of Circular Economy, researchers are increasingly investigating the role of emerging digital technologies in enabling circular practices (Bressanelli et al., 2018; Sherpa & Sinha, 2021). Among these, AI holds significant promise offering capabilities such as diagnostics, predictive maintenance, and real-time repair support. This study explores the feasibility of AI-Fixer in assisting users with repairing consumer electronics. It specifically investigates whether AI can assist and empower users to repair devices

An uncommon thread

‘An Uncommon Thread’ features 10 contemporary artists living and working in the UK. The group exhibition highlights the transformative power of unconventional mediums in evoking personal and collective memories. Each artist demonstrates an unwavering commitment to the integral role materials and techniques play in their creative process; employing unexpected painting surfaces, adapting formal craft traditions and repurposing discarded products into compelling works. Through individual investigations of identity, tradition, nature, fantasy and the environment, the artists invite viewers to engage with the rich stories woven into each work. Tai Shani weaves a cosmic realm in a new installation that continues to reimagine female otherness as a perfect totality. Shani’s cacophony of color, pattern and organic form immerse the viewer in an act of world-building in which feminism, the sublime and mythology merge

Gestures: a body of work

Combining creative and critical methods, this cross-disciplinary collection contributes an original feminist investigation of embodied, affective, and political gesture in/as feminist art and writing. It considers and performs how gesture/s and feminism/s have animated one another in feminist and interdisciplinary artistic practices, contributing new theorizations of gesture, gender, sexuality, and embodiment, alongside revised histories of feminist art and literature. The book’s introductory essay “Writing Gesture” argues for a logic of in-betweenness that connects gesture, feminism, and interdisciplinarity. This new articulation of feminist practice is realized in the book’s innovative structure focused on ‘gestural’ stances, which contain transnational readings of artists and writers’ work from the 1960s onwards, as well dialogues between contemporary artists and writers

Counter-practice: Design and prefigurative politics in housing struggles beyond the imaginary of development

In this thesis, I propose a practice of spatial design and documentation which runs counter to the standard working methodologies of international development institutions. I propose this practice in response to the restrictions faced by design practitioners and social movements when it comes to evidencing claims, funding projects and sharing knowledge. I call this ‘counter- practice’. Counter-practice is proposed as a method with which to challenge the universal imaginary of development, which I argue marginalises non-scientific epistemologies, expelling the poor from direct negotiations over the production of their own futures. The thesis explores how political agency is restricted by the knowledge biases which structure development, and how spatialised approaches to the study of urban politics and struggles for a dignified life might inform alternatives to techno-centric, financialised paradigms of urban planning, which fail to recognise their own role in reproducing and reinforcing marginalities. Counter-practice is intended as a guide for design practitioners who wish to embed their work in social struggle, to expand the possibilities for equitable urban futures. It is a practice focused on forging non-extractive relationships between design and research professionals on the one hand, and social movements or people’s organisations on the other. As such, in this work I ask the following questions: What principles of architectural design should be mobilised in collaboration with the urban poor, to expand inclusive and reciprocal processes of urban production? How can the methods and aesthetics of design be mobilised in support of knowledge exchange between social movements, as a way of proliferating the knowledge practices being built around housing struggles in the Global South

Conference: Archäologische Grundbegriffe - Maske Paper: Traurige Raserei, ängstliche Wut: Maskenfunktion, emotionale Gegensätze und Fotografierbarkeit im japanischen Nohtheater

Paper: Sad frenzy, fearful anger: Mask function, emotional contrasts and un/photographability of Japanese Noh theatre using the example of the visual layers of the Hannya mask; Potentially transferable concepts and questions for an expanded mask philosophy. Conference: The fourth workshop in the series ›Archäologische Grundbegriffe‹ is dedicated to the concept of mask. In analogy to the successful workshop on mosaic, the focus is on an idea that will serve as a key to the question of the aesthetic and ethical dimension of ancient images and objects. The archaeological concept ›mask‹ refers to specific object genres: theatre masks, ancestral masks, mask images, mask models. The mask opens up our view of concepts, rituals and processes associated with these objects. Secondly, the concept of the mask refers to a fundamental anthropological and technological phenomenon. It refers to that curious group of odd entities that interpose themselves between subject and object, between human and human, and between human and machine: images and screens, masks and surfaces, faces and interfaces, curtains and windows. We are particularly interested in the dual nature of such instances. Masks conceal, disguise, obscure — and at the same time they mediate, translate, explain. The workshop is part of the project ›Pre-Modern Elements of a Digital Image Theory‹, funded by the DFG Priority Programme 2172 ›The Digital Image‹. Organisation: Andreas Grüner, Julian Schreyer

RECOMPOSE: An invitation to explore the pedagogical environment as a regenerative front-line

Fashion education urgently requires a radical overhaul to challenge the socially, economically and environmentally extractive paradigm of which Fashion is a constituent part. A regenerative Fashion ecosystem cannot be envisioned without challenging the existing cultural and economic narratives necessary to transform the discipline. A regenerative approach to developmental learning is therefore relevant in terms of the personal journey, professionalism of students and the evolution of their personal agency, their capacity to externally consider others (people and situations), from an ethics of empathy and care (Mountz et al. 2015). Challenging the dominant perspective of educator as knowledge provider and motivated to unearth how students might reimagine Fashion as a field of knowledge by creating spaces for student-led agency in the context of regeneration we developed Recompose: ‘from the city to the farm back to the city’, an experimental workshop series at the MA Fashion at the Royal College of Art. This shifted the focus from viewing the design education context merely as a site for 'designing things' to recognising the design learning environment as a critical factor when exploring ecologically centred educational practices. The workshops engaged students in a series of activities that aimed to ground the regeneration in sites of situated knowledge, through their own understanding of locality and through a visit to a regenerative hemp farm. A focus of the facilitation was in encouraging a learning environment that supported open discussion, reflection, and student-driven inquiry through experiential approaches. During Recompose we aimed to start a reformation of the cultural understanding of fashion with the students, as an entry point to reconstructing the system around it. This paper problematises prevailing fibre narratives in circular fashion design, asking, what happens when regenerative materials encounter unsustainable, non-regenerative systems? How does a direct engagement with an environment inform an understanding of the systemic conditions of fashion creation? As part of the learning experience, we travelled to Margent Farm in Cambridgeshire with seven Architecture students. Here we learned about the affordances of limitations and the approach taken by Paloma Gormley (Material Cultures) in designing the site using hemp grown at the farm. We posed questions to the students about the value of regeneration in their practice, the importance of local production, and the generosity of the land. How can these practices give more than what they take? The Recompose workshop was a valuable experiment in recontextualising regeneration for fashion education. What emerged was a reframing of the social environment of learning in a regenerative pedagogical context: what can that situated learning environment afford? What could it mean to be regenerative with each other and with the land

Designing wearables: a Practice-led framework for enhancement technologies

My research asks the question How can design re-think the approach to enhancement technologies? I approach this question through reflective practice-led inquiry, designing wearable systems aimed at questioning, extending and reframing the very notion of enhancement. Through three projects and the thesis, I offer a new approach to enhancement focused on expanding an agent’s senses within its environment to access hidden affordances. My research aims at establishing a pragmatic and practice-led approach to enhancement systems that translates philosophical debates into actionable artefacts. The research’s intended audience includes researchers and practitioners seeking a pragmatic approach to design enhancement technologies that extend the sensory information available to an agent. It also contributes to theories of enhancement by developing a design-led methodology for sensory enhancement that uses ideas from theories of embodiment, affordance, and design cybernetics. The thesis builds on the debate concerning human augmentation, which has often followed subjective and ambiguous assumptions. Modern approaches to the subject – bio-conservatism and bio-liberalism – contend that enhancement technologies affect humanity’s essence despite different defining perspectives. I argue for separating the notion of “enhancement” from “human”, focusing instead on any agent’s body and senses, or lack thereof. I redefine enhancement as the practice of enabling agents to perceive environmental information they traditionally would not have access to. This information is presented to the agent through feedback loops that use the agent’s pre-existing senses. I define this practice as sensory layering. I first establish a body-centric framework that addresses enhancement technology agnostically as the enhancement of both humans and human-made agents such as robots. This acknowledges but deliberately sets aside much of the debate about what is essentially human. Within this framework, I redefine enhancements as devices expanding an agent’s senses in its environment to access hidden affordances. Next, I elaborate on five guidelines that facilitate cutting through the cross-domain knowledge needed to develop pragmatic enhancements. Finally, I explore these five guidelines through three case studies to enhance the navigation abilities of human and human-made agents. The five design guidelines for practitioners approaching wearable enhancement form parts of an overall design strategy and are concerned with: (1) selecting the hidden affordance to target, (2) selecting a pre-existing sense to design on, (3) deciding on how the feedback loop integrates with the agent’s pre-existing senses, (4) locating the wearable on the agent’s body, and (5) making the final design accessible to and reproducible by a larger community. The three case studies of wearable enhancements are used to gauge the guidelines’ value, utility and transferability. Further, they present several advancements in the state-of-the-art in robotics, Human-Computer Interaction and wearables. The first case is a robot’s resilience to motor faults. The project aims to develop a motor assembly that predicts a fault and switches to a backup system. The system allows a robot to keep moving by anticipating and preventing hardware failures. I employed on-device deep learning algorithms and a custom 3D-printed motor assembly. This project illustrates how the design guidelines apply to human-made agents. It highlights the importance of Guideline 3 when designing robotic enhancements. The second case study investigates how a human’s sense of direction can be enhanced by layering the perception of magnetic North. This project aimed to exemplify a design pipeline for body-moulded wearable enhancements, resulting in a wearable device moulded on the wearer’s body. To this end, I employed photogrammetry and 3D printing. This prototype highlights Guidelines 2 and 4. The final case study looks into layering digital audio information on humans moving through a physical space. This project introduces a hybrid bone and soft tissue conduction headset and a mixed reality experience that provides contextual audio feedback. The hybrid headset was designed to address the limited ability of off-the-shelf bone conducting headphones to reproduce a wide range of sound frequencies without occluding the ear canal. Further, the system employs centimetre-level accurate ultra-wideband sensors to track wearers indoors, streaming their position data to a simulation in real-time. Based on their position, the wearers receive layered sound cues about the environment they are navigating. This final prototype highlights the role of Guidelines 3 and 4. My contribution to knowledge is threefold. First, each of the three case studies presents a distinct design innovation: a novel redundant actuator in robotics, a body-centric design pipeline for wearable systems, and a hybrid bone and soft-tissue conduction headset for immersive audio experiences. Second, the research introduces and rigorously explores five design guidelines, forming a new, pragmatic framework for developing enhancement technologies. These guidelines provide practitioners with a method for navigating complex domains like design and robotics through sensory layering. Finally, this framework also advances enhancement theory by challenging traditional, human-centric views of enhancement, proposing an agent-centric – whether human or human-made – epistemology. My research materialises theoretical concepts, via experiential prototypes, to explore and reflect on the theory of enhancement itself