The development of design strategies that promote the engagement of users in the authorship process

Underlying all the ideas articulated in this thesis is a political challenge to the designer's innate right to occupy a hierarchical position in the designer/user relationship. Equally, where these relationships have been superseded (in for example Desktop Publishing and web page design) the designer still has an important, but quite different, role to play. In contrast to some community design-led initiatives, the aim here is not necessarily to welcome users into an aspect of the conventional design process on terms determined by the designer by helping users conform to practices established by the designer. The aim is the development of strategies in which the designer and user can influence each other without dominating, going beyond conventional strategies of consultancy or feedback. My determination is not to turn everyday users into mouthpieces of surrogate design sensibility, in the way that 'makeover' TV programs, and their DIY predecessors, promote a particular aesthetic as good design, leading to a rejection of direct communication between designer and user. This places the designer in a position of power; users will skew their responses towards what they think the designer is looking for. Also designers could never work so inexpensively as to engage in bespoke design activity for more than a fraction of the population. This view has been achieved through the interplay of my own design practice and a spectrum of theoretical (broadly post-structural) influences, although most individuals referenced here would reject this (or any category), including Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and the Situationists. My responses to these ideas influence and are influenced by the production of a range of design proposals, and the promotion of the colonisation, modification and even hijacking by others, including designers, users and educators. These have developed in a number of phases: 1 Modular/Adaptive proposals for office furniture, and product design; 2 CAD/CAM proposals in which users select and modify 'design methods' to help them exploit the more technical expert systems available to help them create their own artefacts; 3 Flexible communication systems, which are designs populated and modified by users in ways beyond the control or knowledge of the designer. These stages show an evolution in my creative responses from producing designed artefacts that promote interaction with users, to systems in which the designer and user have to contribute jointly for the systems to function. It is organic, uncontrolled development by the user that determines the development and configuration of these systems guided by the initial conditions and processes determined by the designer. This allows the interreIationship of designers and truly user-led creative activities

Immediation II

All “media-tion” stages and distributes real, embodied – that is, immediate, events. The concept of immediation entails that cultural, technical, aesthetic objects, subjects, and events can no longer be abstracted from the ways in which they contribute to and are changed by broader ecologies. Immediation I and II seek to engage the entwined questions of relation, event and ecology from outside already claimed territories, nomenclature and calls to action

Museum of Infinite Relations: Artists’ spaces, worlds and models of the universe

Atelier Brancusi, Paris, can be used as a model to configure a Museum of Infinite Relations. This hypothesis forms the foundation for a study of the systems, processes, rationale and methods used to produce a physical museum collection – a theoretical and material formation of the Museum of Infinite Relations. This research employs the paradigm of the monad, which is read through various proponents of the form, predominantly Pythagoras, Leibniz, the Holographic Paradigm and Beckett, which this project then reconfigured as the Universal Object. It also considers the artists’ spaces of John Latham’s Flat Time HO, Helen Martins’ Owl House and Ferdinand Cheval’s Le Palais Idéal, alongside the concept of worlds, and models of the universe. By integrating the references, critiques and perspectives generated from the study, it binds them together into a way of thinking. Research into the Universal Object as a multi-functional apparatus, logic and lens, is done through practice, working across photography, image-making, sculptural installation and theatre. The resulting artworks all take up a range of references to test and reflect on the methods, and in so doing, interpret and filter possibilities encountered by employing the Universal Object as an analytical and generative device. Artworks produced during the research are brought together in the Museum of Infinite Relations, articulating a self-referential museum that generates itself through the creation of its collection. My research questions: what is a Museum of Infinite Relations?; what is an infinite relation?; and how does one develop that into a museum collection?, are approached through the logic(s) of the Universal Object. Its representations and iterations trace the emergence of the Museum of Infinite Relations. Connections are formed across multiple categories, such as ‘living sculptures’, Cosmism, experimental museology, Remix theory, embodied research and the idea of ‘art event’, to mark out a terrain of concerns. This thesis mobilises the Universal Object as a building block to sustain the development of the initial hypothesis into a working system, a ‘machine’ for producing artworks and a paradigmatic construct. By predominantly locating the questions of this part-meditation, part-critique in Atelier Brancusi, this thesis reconfigures that site into a model for expanding the paradigm of the Universal Object as a methodological and conceptual structure in my studio practice. This research proposes further knowledge generated from working with the museum as an artistic medium; how artists’ spaces have transformed from operational into museological spaces; and how this can be transferred. This is finally tested through an original theatre piece that draws on multiple strands of the research to form a compound image. References, analyses, terms and discoveries encountered in the research are brought together as examples of the ‘machine-like’ nature of the way of thinking, enabled by working with the Universal Object as a building block and method