Promoting Healthy Body Image Through the Costume Design Process

This paper focuses on incorporating healthy body image and body awareness into two aspects of teaching costume design; the research and rendering phase, and the fitting and design realization process. Using Lisa Loomer’s The Waiting Room, a play exploring the body modification of three women from different cultures and time periods as a basis for research and character analysis, students begin to understand the cultural, social, and political frameworks behind significant historical fashion trends, and to translate that information into a design that communicates the same messages on a contemporary body to a contemporary audience. As students begin to research each culture and time period, they are tasked with finding ways to relate to the characters through common feelings of body confinement and dysmorphia, for example, finding commonalities between the Chinese practice of foot binding, Victorian corsetry, and modern day plastic surgery. Advanced student designers, when given the opportunity to realize their designs, are challenged with promoting healthy body image through their sketches and in fittings with performers. By addressing the way costume sketching is taught and steering away from 9-head fashion sketches, student designers are better able to demonstrate a full understanding of character, and the performer who is represented in the sketch is more likely to relate to the design and see it as an attainable image. In preparation for fittings, student designers are coached on how to address and clothe varying body types and are then guided through the fitting. Designers learn to see and dress each performer’s body without judgment or cultural bias, while maintaining the significant style lines and aesthetics a particular production, time period, and culture requires

A creative journey developing an integrated high-fashion knitwear development process using computerized seamless v-bed knitting systems

This PhD applied a participatory action research approach to address the organizational problems that compromise the use of computerized seamless V-bed knitwear systems in the high-fashion knitwear sector. The research is a response to a widely acknowledged conflict between high-fashion design processes and processes by which designs are developed on computerized seamless V-bed knitting systems. The social, organizational, and technical aspects of design and manufacturing using computerized seamless V-bed knitting technology in high-fashion knitwear design were analyzed as a socio-technical system (STS). This approach led to a review of the workflows, tasks and roles; identifying and testing new design and manufacturing processes, design methods, and garment solutions; creating a theory model of a new integrated design process; and developing and testing new design processes, design methods, and fashion design education courses that teach these new fashion knitwear approaches.The research was undertaken using a Shima Seiki WholeGarment® system, a current computerized seamless V-bed knitting design and manufacturing technology. The studio workspace, yarn, use of the Shima Seiki system; involvement in fashion projects, and associate supervision were provided by the Department of Agriculture and Food Western Australia (DAFWA).The research demonstrated a high-fashion knitwear designer can undertake all aspects of managing computerized seamless V-bed knitwear design and production to the completion of 1st sample, the first successful sample of a new fabric or garment, was produced using the computer knit data. This finding was developed into a new integrated design process and design methods that remove most of the problems of computerized seamless V-bed knitting systems in high-fashion and offers additional benefits including reduction in time to market and design costs, and increases in the creative solution space for high-fashion knitwear design.The researcher has called this new role, a ‘designer-interpreter’ to denote a professional knitwear designer with additional training in managing computerized seamless knitting machines. Within the context of ‘designer-interpreter’, this research also established the feasibility of a new form of a ‘post-industrial craft-based one-person knitwear production system’

Placemaking and the Loss of Place: Perceptions of Tourism-Induced Neighborhood Change in South Korea’s Disadvantaged Neighborhoods

This dissertation research uncovers how seemingly beneficial urban projects associated with tourism reinforce inequitable urban environments and loss of place by examining different perceptions and experiences of tourism-induced neighborhood change in disadvantaged neighborhoods in South Korea. I investigate how public art projects implemented by the government to regenerate daldongnes—informal hillside settlements—have brought economic and social disruption to residents and generated a series of contest outcomes. In this research, I examine how tourists’ perceptions and representation of the neighborhood in social media contribute to the (re)construction of the neighborhood, how the growth of tourism has influenced place attachment, and how residents and small-business owners experience indirect displacement induced by tourist gentrification. I use ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative methods to explore how, by whom, and with what effects the neighborhoods are reimagined and reconstructed as contradictory sites to visit and explore. I have demonstrated in my research that the coexistence of tourism and everyday life in the space of residential neighborhoods has led us to rethink a series of controversial outcomes accompanied by the process of neighborhood transformation. This includes the full understanding of perceptions and experiences of different stakeholders, a fluid and relational understanding of place attachment in touristifying neighborhoods, and an expanded understanding of displacement that includes both direct and indirect displacement. By doing so, my research contributes to a wide range of scholarship within urban and tourism geography, critical tourism studies, and Asian studies by engaging with interdisciplinary theories and concepts. My key findings are as follows. First, I contend that so-called ‘neighborhood improvement projects’ are, in fact, micro-scale projects of entrepreneurial place-making. The reproduction of daldongnes as tourism destinations primarily serves a “nostalgic fantasy” for a romanticized, fading past for outsiders, instead of properly addressing the real needs of marginalized residents. This disparity has served as the seed of a complex neighborhood conflict. Second, I claim that a fluid and relational understanding of place attachment is critical in understanding the complexity in daldongnes changing through touristification. I claim that place still matters in being an object of strong attachment, and people continuously construct, adapt, and reshape their place attachment during the process of tourism-induced neighborhood change. Thus, I contend that urban policy must recognize these dynamics of place attachment in order to address community conflicts likely to emerge with tourism development. Place attachment could not only positively bring the community together but also rupture relationships. Finally, focusing only on numbers of displaced people by excessive rent increases in a touristified daldongne presents a partial understanding of neighborhood change. This is because people can experience displacement without actual physical displacement. Thus, it is critical to engage with indirect displacement—emotional, psychosocial, and material impacts of displacement—to understand the phenomenon in a daldongne fully. While daldongnes are essential and exciting in their own right, the study of these neighborhoods enriches several bodies of literature and areas of geographic investigation. As I have demonstrated in this research, uncovering tourism-induced neighborhood change is an essential and inherently geographic phenomenon that reflects a complex people-place relationship that calls for more geographers\u27 engagement. A critical analysis of such a tourism phenomenon serves not only as a way to unpack the broader issue of urban inequality and marginalization but also as a way to discover what sustainable, just, and inclusive urban-dwelling means and to envision ideal neighborhood change

Rethinking jewellery for Korea: a practice-led approach to creating high-visibility wearables

This thesis introduces the idea of high-visibility wearables as a new way of thinking about craft (jewellery in particular) in Korea. This new idea is challenging for many people in Korea, because jewellery is still narrowly understood there either as that which has financial value or as an instrument of personal expression (social status, individual character, etc.). Jewellery in this sense clashes directly against the idea of high-visibility wearables, which are still strongly associated in Korea as a vocational uniform, something road-related workers wear, for instance, thus vitiating the personal meaning of wearing jewellery. The challenge for the designer-researcher, therefore, is to find a way to neutralize that tension between the two, so that high-visibility wearables can be accepted as socially desirable. The thesis argues that this tension is not a design problem per se, but a conceptual problem which requires a socially-conscious approach. Firstly, by taking jewellery into the field of road safety, it seeks to expand the idea of jewellery; by wearing a piece of high-visibility jewellery, the wearer declares not only what they want to be seen as, but also what their public right is as a pedestrian, so that jewellery becomes a visible sign of collective action rather than just an individual form of self-expression. In this sense, the jeweller who designs such an item, as well as the wearer, exercises her social responsibility. This is identified as an area where the jeweller and the wearer can come together to break the current deadlock, pitting the former against the latter over the future of contemporary jewellery. Secondly, the thesis proposes that by focusing on new ways of developing high-visibility materials, jewellers can – indeed will inevitably –break into interdisciplinary areas where collaboration is the norm rather than the exception. This is an area for further development, where investigation of materials can lead to cultural transformations, including environmentally-conscious changes

Piñatex, the design development of a new sustainable material

This is a research project by practice, which firstly develops a new material invention derived from natural fibres extracted from waste pineapple leaves; secondly it articulates the contemporary designer’s role in facilitating sustainable solutions through: Insights from my own material invention, PiñatexTM, which integrates the materiality of design with the immateriality of concepts and values Developing a visual model of mapping I began with these questions: ‘What are the challenges in seeking to make a new and sustainable material from the waste products of pineapple agriculture in the Philippines?’ and ‘How can a design practice link elements of materiality (artifacts) with immaterial elements (value systems) in order to improve sustainable social and economic development?’ Significant influences have been the work of Papanek1 (2003), Hawken2 (1999) and Abouleish3 (2008) and in particular the ethical business model initiated by McDonough and Braungart in Cradle to Cradle®4 (2002). My own research project is inspired by the Cradle to Cradle® model. It proposes the development of a new material, PiñatexTM which is derived from natural fibres extracted from waste pineapple leaves and could be used in a wide variety of products that are currently fabricated in leather or petroleum-based materials. The methods have comprised: Contextual reviews; case studies (SEKEM, Cradle to Cradle® and Gawad Kalinga); practical experiments in the field of natural fibres, chemistry, product development, manufacturing and prototyping, leading to an invention and a theoretical model of mapping. In addition, collaboration has taken place across scientific, technological, social, ecological, academic and business fields. The outcome is a new material based on the synchronicity between the pineapple fibres, polymers, resins and coatings specially formulated. The invention of the new material that I developed as a central part of this research by practice has a patent in the national phase (PCT/GB 2011/000802) and is in the first stages of manufacturing, commercial testing and further design input (Summer 2014). The contribution to knowledge is firstly the material, PiñatexTM, which exhibits certain key qualities, namely environmentally non-toxic, biodegradable, income-generating potential and marketability. This is alongside its intrinsic qualities as a textile product: aesthetic potential, durability and stability, which will make it suitable for the accessories, interiors and furnishing markets. The theoretical mapping system Upstream and Downstream forms a secondary contribution