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

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

I wanted the queens to be on the cover of Vogue: Nan Goldin’s fashion dreams

Nan Goldin was sixteen years old, a stray who’d left home, when she became the ‘unofficial’ school photographer. She was studying at a countercultural free school in Massachusetts. It was here that she enveloped herself with David Armstrong, a beautiful, androgynous artist, who later introduced her to night and day worldings of drag and glamour in Downtown Boston. ‘Nan’ was a hippie who preferred pearls and red lipstick. She shared an apartment with drag queens Ivy and Bea who dressed in the soft silk pleats of vintage designer gowns like Fortuny, sometimes loose-fitting 1970s jersey, often cloche hats outside, and turbans inside, with lace-trimmed slips. It is these garments that feature in Goldin’s intimate black-and-white photographs of her gender-expansive friends, referred to as her “roommates”, beside their “sisters”; she photographed them in the intimate dwellings and textures of their lives as a creative, communing act of devotion. While Goldin also documented the queens performing at beauty parades and bars, it is the ‘fashion-intimate’ images taken in the corners of their collective home across 1972–73, which are my focus in this article: images that hum with quietude, respite, imagination, absorption, and practice. Inside and outside the image, it is a photographic archive that recuperates 1930s fashions and scenes as ‘backwards’, enchanted, cinematic reverie. Shaped by Goldin’s own monochromatic attachments across cinema, fashion, and fashion photography, as well as her ‘adolescent’ methods of research and practice (gossiping, shoplifting, past-decade-dreaming), I argue that this archive of ‘not-quite not-yet’ fashion photographs — encompassing images that are rooms that are studios that are dreams — holds speculative craftings of sensual life that offer reparative resources of political survival in the present. In the early 1970s — ten years before she published subversive fashion editorials in the arts, culture, and fashion magazines of Downtown New York — Goldin “dreamt of putting the queens on the cover of Vogue”. On the surface of such pages, the dream did not come true, but in dialogue with queer theorists of affect and time, including Munoz’s reclaiming of the “not yet queer”, this chapter wonders otherwise; slips into the fugitive spaces and shadows to dream some counter-possibilities

Appropriate technologies: For regenerative practices and ecological citizenship, yielding planet centred design

A planet without biodiversity cannot sustain life; biodiversity is no longer simply virtue but essential to planetary health and human survival. Prioritising the natural world is paramount and urgent, requiring navigation beyond traditional typologies. Governmental actions remain inadequate within planetary boundaries, hybrid and citizen-led initiatives become crucial in engaging planetary futures and distributing opportunities. In Appropriate Technologies (Patnaik et al., 2019), we unpack Ecological Citizenship-driven (Phillips et al., 2024) design propositions for diverse audiences—designers, strategists, technologists, and citizens—yielding tangible insights from live experiments. As environmental challenges are expedited, interdisciplinarity becomes vital in crafting innovative design proposals. Uniting traditional ecological knowledge with emerging technologies offers new pathways to resilience and regeneration (Whyte 2013). Authors critically analyse contemporary design-led technologies, illustrating a paradigm shift from extractive practices to regenerative methodologies. Examples span established case studies and innovative, UKRI pilot projects. Prevailing perceptions often depict technology as inherently oppositional to ecological sensibilities and behaviours. This perspective overlooks the potential of technology to act as a catalyst for ecological restoration and resilience (Rakova et al., 2023). Challenging this binary opposition, our examination seeks a perspectival reorientation towards technology as integrated within Ecological Citizenship, suggesting a new mode of technological engagement deeply embedded in its ecological and social contexts. This reorientation is further developed and articulated through specific design tools and principles, exemplified by case studies indicating preferable future trajectories for technology creation, deployment, and governance. By embedding regenerative principles into technological innovation, we advocate shifting from short-term efficiency to long-term planetary stewardship. Exemplifying case studies include: 1) The Citizens Air Complaint Program, empowering communities to actively report idling vehicles contributing negatively to local air quality. 2) Gain Forest, decentralized non-profit organization leveraging archival analytical methodologies for earth’s ecological data, facilitating transparent and inclusive environmental decision-making. 3) Experimental project AgLab, enabling farms to produce low-carbon, plant-based insulation blocks using existing agricultural waste materials and equipment. 4) Ecology of Things, innovative approaches to ecological-technological integration. Central to these case studies are design principles characterised as: Non-Extractive, 'Designed With, Not For,' Intent on Catalysing Autonomy Contextually Appropriate. Authors consider ‘technology’ not solely a logic of designed material artefacts, but as inextricably situated within a network of material, social, economic, and ecological relationships shaping their production and use; technology embedded in its planetary situation. Ubiquitous technologies like smartphones exemplify this inextricability: ore and its extraction (Jussi Parikka 2015), data centres with their physical infrastructure and extractions (Mytton 2021), online commerce portals (van Dijck, et al., 2018, p.10) and their capital flows, omnipresent signal networks (Bratton 2024), human labour and ecosystemic entanglements (Crawford 2021). Though often experientially transparent, these technologies are planetary in the extent of their presence and scale. Recognising this interconnectedness urges a shift from viewing technology as a neutral tool to understanding it as an active agent within socio-ecological systems. Appropriate Technologies provides an analysis of technology as a transformative influence on the emergence of Ecological Citizenship. It examines the characteristics of technological artefacts and processes as a means of reorienting their relationship to the complex entanglement of human and ecological systems, and reimagines the conditions structuring their behaviours and use. Our analysis finds support in theories which distinguish between instrumental and existential technologies (Antikythera 2023): those which transform as opposed to extract, tools that reconfigure our perceptions, values, and identities contrasted with those which solely engender specific, quantifiable ends. With an eye towards agential autonomy, we are motivated to initiate a move from extractive, inaccessible models of technology towards forms of technological behaviour and praxis that expand autonomy beyond ‘consumer choice’. By framing technology within ecological interdependencies, we challenge dominant narratives of progress that often ignore their unintended costs (Midgley et al., 2021). Avoiding techno-solutionist approaches that de-emphasise the role of technological praxis (Sætra 2023), we understand that Ecological Citizenship has co-emerged with technologies which simultaneously enable the possibility of understanding the same problems they produce (Gabrys 2016). To this end we are conscious of unintended consequences, perverse incentives and paradoxical solutions (Coad et al., 2020). We propose that Ecological Citizenship should not be an anthropocentric endeavor, and that this necessary feature represents a meaningful distinction from conventional categories of citizenship. Current discourses still often reflect the reproduction of ‘human values’, as with the discussion surrounding ‘AI alignment’. With this in mind, a focus on more-than-human ecologies and their entanglements across spheres of analysis (biosphere, technosphere) frames our discussion of Ecological Citizenship as it connects to increasing notions of deheirarchicalisation with regard to the centrality of our place in the world. The urgency of this reframing directly challenges entrenched paradigms that position technology as an instrument of extraction (Light et al., 2024), control (Zuboff 2019), and deterministic optimisation, operating in opposition to ecological systems rather than as an extension of them. By developing modes of technological engagement that are non-extractive, contextually adaptive, and structurally oriented toward autonomy, this framework questions the biases embedded in dominant technological paradigms. To shift the paradigms — From Extractive to Regenerative Design requires different roles. To designers, it provides a set of design tools that avoid universalist, top-down design methodologies, replacing them with an iterative, relational practice attuned to ecological and socio-technical interdependencies. This shift repositions design as a situated dialogue, enabling more responsive and adaptive technological interventions. To citizens, it offers a mode of interaction with technology that reinforces their agency within a dynamic, co-constitutive system. In doing so, this framework collapses boundaries between designer and citizen, repositioning design as a process of ongoing negotiation rather than unilateral prescription. Technological agency instead emerges through reciprocal adaptation within an evolving ecological field. More broadly, this shift from ‘for’ to ‘with’ reframes technological authorship (Almazán et al., 2024), distributing it across human actors and ecological systems in a way that resists pure instrumentalisation, proposing instead a model of technology that is entangled, situated, and generates new ecological affordances. This shift is significant not only in terms of physical assets but also aligns social and relational dimensions surrounding these technologies

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

Situating the landscape: An enquiry into how the landscapes of Suffolk are experienced and historicised through the practice of analogue large-format photography

This research project explores the significance of affective encounters with history, and the value of using a large-format analogue photographic practice to instantiate those encounters – a form of creative historiography that does not give primacy to situating remnants of the past in a linear teleological narrative. It seeks to demonstrate how an analogue photographic practice – contextualised within an auto-ethnographic narrative – can draw attention to the ‘affective’ nature of the past, through its entanglement with the present. Consequently, it explores history as a relational dynamic phenomenon, which continues to shape and characterise how we experience and navigate the environments we inhabit. The research addresses two interrelated questions: How does the large-format analogue photographic medium and its various processes and techniques shape an embodied engagement with place? How can engaging with an embodied and situated experience of place create the possibility of historicising it through large-format analogue photography? This research joins with the creative historiographic practices of artists like the writer W.G.Sebald and filmmaker Patrick Keiller. What the practice shares in common with these artists is an examination of landscapes shaped by social history that are discovered or revealed by walking them. The personal histories that emerge from these embodied engagements with place are subsequently narrated through recollection alongside the use of lens-based imagery. I argue for the particular contribution that can be made to creative forms of historiography through the use of large-format analogue photography. Within this thesis three walks are narrated. Each walk departs from the same place, situated in a region of the Suffolk countryside featured repeatedly in the works of Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. The first walk explores a region of the county previously unknown to me, via the Icknield Way path. The second is a circular walk, which retraces a region of the county that I knew well approximately thirty years ago. The third walk explores an area of the county I know only through depictions in historic works of landscape art. The research is presented through a body of large-format photographs and creative writing, which examine how the entanglements of my sensory experience, subjective framing of landscape and social history, and my memories – combined fleetingly while walking the Suffolk countryside – are shaped by the photographic practice and/or find expression through it

Look around you! Situating extended reality within the urban fabric

The future of Extended Reality (XR) technologies is revolutionising our interactions with digital content, transforming how we perceive reality, and enhancing our problem-solving capabilities. However, many XR applications remain technology-driven, often disregarding the broader context of their use and failing to address fundamental human needs. In this paper, we present a teaching-led design project that asks postgraduate design students to explore the future of XR through low-fidelity, screen-free prototypes with a focus on observed human needs derived from six specific locations in central London, UK. By looking at the city and built environment as lenses for exploring everyday scenarios, the project encourages design provocations rooted in real-world challenges. Through this exploration, we aim to inspire new perspectives on the future states of XR, advocating for human-centred, inclusive, and accessible solutions. By bridging the gap between technological innovation and lived experience, this project outlines a pathway toward XR technologies that prioritise societal benefit and address real human needs

Needs-based clothing design: Exploring breast support clothing focused on wearer expertise in the context of breast cancer

This thesis is concerned with design processes in the clothing industry and the breast support garments that are currently available in the context of breast cancer and breast asymmetry. Within this framework, the research study focuses on the underserved breast support needs of people who live with differently sized breasts or one breast, and those who live ‘flat’ (without breasts) after a mastectomy and neither choose breast reconstruction nor wear external breast prostheses (EBPs). These needs may be unmet by the range of post-mastectomy bras that are currently available. These garments are based on everyday bra construction principles that are conceptually flawed in several aspects. Conventional bra pattern-making relies on generalised and limited breast measurements that exclude many natural breast characteristics and conditions, as well as those acquired as a result of breast cancer, treatment and surgery. Bra sizing systems are vague and inconsistent between producers, meaning that most bra-wearers wear ill-fitting garments. The effects of breast cancer treatment and surgery adds to the challenge of finding breast support garments that cater to specific needs. Considering these circumstances, the research asks, first, how do people affected by breast cancer articulate their breast support needs? And, second, how can these needs be translated into clothing design processes? This research study explores novel clothing design strategies through conventional clothing industry design processes, with the aim of narrowing the divide between designers and consumers by adopting an approach of ‘designing with’ and ‘on behalf of’ consumers, who are experts in the wearing experience, rather than ‘for’ them. The thesis draws knowledge from individual breast cancer narratives through four research-specific Case Studies. A contextual review outlines the anatomy and physiology of the breast before and after breast cancer and explores how the available everyday bras support breasts generally and in the context of breast cancer. The research method focuses on providing people affected by breast cancer with modified clothing design tools to articulate and visualise their breast support needs in Participatory Clothing Design Sessions (PCDS). Based on the information collected, the research practice investigates alternative breast support construction principles by prototyping breast support clothing within a Needs-Based Clothing Design process (NBCD) that involves people affected by breast cancer as expert wearers. The design process explores engineered knitting methods to facilitate a modular and customisable pattern-making approach, in combination with a parametric approach to breast support, based on individual body topologies generated via 3D body scans. The outcome of the research practice is a range of modular, mass-customisable and individual breast support designs, developed through three iterative prototyping cycles (embrace1, 2 and 3), that have generated a unique textile surface structure. The thesis contributes to the emerging discourse on diversifying and individualising breast support clothing construction by incorporating information specific to breast cancer – acquired breast conditions and support needs – to the consideration of evolving and fluctuating breast shapes and conditions. The research practice contributes unique consumer-orientated participatory prototyping and clothing design methods (PCDS and NBCD) to existing clothing design practices, adding to the canon of inclusive clothing design. This research study aims to engage with clothing and textiles researchers and designers; with the bra manufacturing and producing industry and service providers seeking to produce and distribute breast support clothing in the context of breast cancer in general, and breast asymmetry in particular, and with people affected by breast cancer

Blind aesthetics: Art as the currency of radical vision

Blindness is both the instrument and the object of the blind author’s art practice that leads this research thesis. As such this art and this thesis is as much of blindness as it is about blindness. Whether it is the floating touch-points of the Transient Object (2019) rendered in 3D print; or whether it is the image of thought generated in the mind of the beholder in the mirrored jigsaw puzzle Blind I Stand… (2020); or whether it is the vacillating musical tones that eddy and flow around the body of the visitor to the sound piece Alarming Proximity (2019), all of these artworks delineate and describe a blind-life currency, an economy of the visible and the invisible that is constitutive of the blind aesthetic that is proposed by this research. The blind aesthetic or blind modality that emerges from this research has its own expressive language. This language celebrates the positive and generative aspects of blindness rather than striving to overcome the impediments that blindness presents in our contemporary ocularcentric society. As such, this work amplifies the work of contemporary disability-gain theorists Georgina Kleege and Hannah Thompson. These theorists are in turn, key members of the contemporary critical disability studies community. The thesis starts by introducing the important concept of anamnesis. Anamnesis is a form of pre-experiential, latent, embodied knowledge. Anamnesis is the idea that the knowledge of seeing or sight is prior to actually seeing. Furthermore, anamnesis as prior knowledge allows for blindness to be integral to seeing or sight. The works of Jacques Derrida (1967 - 1990) and Jean François Lyotard (1993 - 1997) have been particularly helpful in articulating anamnesis and the powerful contribution it makes to the argument to blind aesthetics. Chapter 2 of the thesis proposes that our epistemological lives consist of a fluxing, aesthetic currency and that, following Tobin Seibers (2008), this currency is essentially complex and embodied. Guided by the writings of Martin Heidegger (1953), Johnny Golding (2010) and Tim Ingold (2020) the thesis goes on to argue that this life-currency is regulated and articulated not only by anamnesis but also by the twin concepts of Attunement and the Comma. Chapter 3 examines the relationship between the spoken word and mental imagery. With the help of recently revived ideas on extreme imagination it is argued here that there is discontinuity between the mental image and the organs of sense. The final chapter of the thesis conducts a thorough survey of original blind artworks and blind-life experiences that consolidate the arguments used so far in the thesis. The questions that have guided this research are: To what extent and in what ways might art made by a blind person contribute to a new epistemological paradigm around vision? To what extent and in what ways might this new paradigm impact on both the visually impaired and wider communities? With the help of these questions this research proposes a radical rethink where blindness and blind experience is inherently complex and more contingently determined than previously thought. A far more integrated and distributed sensorium is proposed; here the coupling of modes of experience and their sense organs is more fluid and plastic than previously realised. Blindness, vision and visuality now expand into a realm way beyond the workings of just the eye and the brain