Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990

‘Postmodernism’ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of ‘postmodernism’. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism. Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&A’s permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world. The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, ‘bright ideas abound at the V&A’s lucid show’ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museum’s target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum Zürich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)

The reinvention of the ready-made

In this paper the history of a particular type of product design is analyzed, compared and\ud structured. The analyzed products are all of the type where existing objects are used or even incorporated\ud into the design. This principle is known in the art world as the ready-made. In this research\ud transformational- and composed ready-mades and several variations are described. The design principle\ud of using existing objects in designs is then compared with the relation between novelty and typicality as\ud predictors of aesthetic preference, as researched by Hekkert et al. From there it is argued that the readymade\ud principle could possibly contribute to designing pleasurable products because the resulting objects\ud incorporate both novelty and typicality in their presenc

“One Size Can Fit All” – On the Mass Production of Legal Transplants

Law reformers like the World Bank sometimes suggest that optimal legal rules and institutions can be recognized and then be recommended for law reform in every country in the world. Comparative lawyers have long been skeptical of such views. They point out that both laws and social problems are context-specific. What works in one context may fail in another. Instead of “one size fits all,” they suggest tailormade solutions. I challenge this view. Drawing on a comparison with IKEA’s global marketing strategy, I suggest that “one size fits all” can sometimes be not only a successful law reform strategy, but also not as objectionable as critics make it to be. First, whereas, “one size fits all” is deficient a functionalist position, it proves to be surprisingly successful as a formalist conception. Second, critics of legal transplants often insists on what can be called “best law” approach, whereas in law reform, what we sometimes need is law that is just” good enough” law. “Third, legal transplants no longer happen in isolation but rather on a global scale, so that context-specific rules are no longer necessarily local. This is not a plea for formal law, for commodification of laws, and for “one size fits all”. But it is a plea to overcome the romanticism and elitism that may lurk behind the seemingly benign suggestion that law reform must always be tailored to the specific societal context

Block party: contemporary craft inspired by the art of the tailor

Block Party: contemporary craft inspired by the art of the tailor, is a new touring exhibition from the Crafts Council curated by Lucy Orta - Professor of Art, Fashion and the Environment at London College of Fashion, and renowned visual artist whose own practice fuses fashion, art and architecture. Block Party explores the alchemy of the centuries-old skill of tailoring by presenting work by 15 UK and international artists who push pattern-cutting beyond the fashion garment. The artists Lucy Orta has selected take pattern-cutting as a starting point to produce sculpture, ceramics, textile, moving image and collage. Through experimentation the artists have found new ways to assemble pattern shapes, not to create garments but to manipulate shape to realise new outcomes. Block Party focuses on three themes; Storytelling, Embracing the Future, and Motif and Manipulation. In Storytelling artists use pattern-cutting as a means of expression. Turner Prize-nominated Yinka Shonibare MBE presents a child mannequin, dressed in a historically accurate Victorian outfit crafted from African fabric to reference culture, race and history. Claudia Losi’s 24m whale made of woollen suit fabric was transported around the world to stimulate discussion and storytelling before being deconstructed and transformed into jackets in collaboration with fashion designer Antonio Marras. In Embracing the Future existing pattern-cutting methods are manipulated and challenged through the use of innovative processes and technologies. Simon Thorogood’s patterns are created using digital programmes whilst Philip Delamore of the Fashion Digital Studio at London College of Fashion seeks to apply the latest developments in 3D digital design to the garment making process. In Motif and Manipulation the beauty of the paper pattern block is the visual inspiration. Ceramist Charlotte Hodes directly incorporates these familiar shapes into her ceramics whilst Raw Edges re-appropriate the use of a pattern block by creating a flat paper pattern of a chair which is then filled with expandable foam to create the 3D ‘Tailored Wood Bench’

AI-Copilot for Business Optimisation: A Framework and A Case Study in Production Scheduling

Business optimisation refers to the process of finding and implementing efficient and cost-effective means of operation to bring a competitive advantage for businesses. Synthesizing problem formulations is an integral part of business optimisation, which relies on human expertise to construct problem formulations using optimisation languages. Interestingly, with advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), the human expertise needed in problem formulation can be minimized. However, developing an LLM for problem formulation is challenging, due to training data, token limitations, and lack of appropriate performance metrics. For the requirement of training data, recent attention has been directed towards fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs for downstream tasks rather than training an LLM from scratch for a specific task. In this paper, we adopt an LLM fine-tuning approach and propose an AI-Copilot for business optimisation problem formulation. For token limitations, we introduce modularization and prompt engineering techniques to synthesize complex problem formulations as modules that fit into the token limits of LLMs. Additionally, we design performance evaluation metrics that are better suited for assessing the accuracy and quality of problem formulations. The experiment results demonstrate that with this approach we can synthesize complex and large problem formulations for a typical business optimisation problem in production scheduling