Handcraft as a Rhetorical Prop: An Investigation into What Handcraft Techniques Offer the Discipline of Graphic Design

This thesis paper examines how handcraft (making an item by analog means using specific materials) can be a compelling rhetorical tool for graphic designers to harness. Contrasting handcraft techniques with computer graphics software “unsettles” rote graphic design practices. The meaning that lies in the physical act of making, the materials that are used and the contexts with which particular handcrafts are associated can support, as well as carry, visual rhetoric in design works. An analysis of the unconventional handcraft work produced by Stefan Sagmeister (USA), Mathias Augustyniak and Michaël Amzalag of M/M (Paris) (France), Marian Bantjes (Canada), and by this author (specifically, a design book produced in tandem with this paper) is used to demonstrate how complex meanings contained within handcrafts can be revealed and used in graphic design. The combination of handcraft and digital techniques enables designers to interweave the disparate social, physical and material qualities of the two processes into their work. In this way the work engages in disciplinary and societal discourse

Talking Plants and a Bug Hotel: Participatory Design of ludic encounters with an urban farming community

Due to environmental concerns, sustainability is a growing field of research in HCI. But utilitarian approaches for individual behaviour change that are typical within HCI have been criticised as being too simplistic and failing to take into account the complexity of people’s lives. This thesis contributes a design approach grounded in community-based Participatory Design, and drawing on ludic design, to expand the design space of sustainable HCI beyond individual behaviour change. The thesis demonstrates how the commitments, practices and values of community based Participatory Design and ludic design can be used effectively with a diverse and non-settled urban agricultural community. The research outlines how this approach can support the values, needs and practices of the community, and allow for holistic understandings of sustainability to emerge. This is achieved through three case studies conducted at Spitalfields City Farm, in inner East London. The first study was a way to get to know the farming community and to ground the subsequent work in the values, practices and needs of the farm. This was followed by two research through design studies to investigate designing ludic encounters with and for the community: i) the Talking Plants, a playful encounter with edible plants to support community engagement and learning, and ii) the Bug Hotel, a large musical sculpture for interspecies living, reflection and relaxation. After describing each case study individually in rich detail I turn to a comparison of their respective processes and the artefacts that each produced in the final chapter. These reflections include a manifesto for community-based sustainable HCI, through a Ludic Participatory Design methdology, as well as strategies and challenges to serve as guidance and inspiration for other researchers wishing to do similar kinds of work with similar kinds of communities

Memory, Identity, and the Rhetoric of Quilts

Quilts have been documented as artifacts of past experiences and social circumstances, but the rhetorical aspects have been largely unexplored. In this study, I establish quilting as a form of knowledge about memory, one of the canons of rhetoric. This task requires a rhetorical framework of memory to accomplish its end. In order to create a rhetorical framework for the study of memory, I examine preservative and generative memory as represented in women\u27s quilts. Previous quilt studies have not addressed these two facets of memory, and previous memory studies have paid little or no attention to quilts. Additionally, this study will link memory to identity. The dominant term discovered through Kenneth Burke\u27s pentadic analysis for identity will also be linked to memory study. Thus, this study links the concepts of memory and identity together and establishes quilts as an artifact for rhetorical study. In particular, this study demonstrates how the distinctive nature of memory generates new memories, preserves captured memories, and provides a powerful conceptual tool for the study of identity through quilts

Quilting the lesbian archive: quilt making as an affective methodology for re-visioning the lesbian archive

There is no lesbian archive in the UK; lesbian materials are clustered and dispersed in vastly divergent kinds of archives. In this context of fragmentation and loss this thesis uses practice-based research to establish quilt making as an affective methodology for revisioning the lesbian archive materials in Britain. Through the embodied methodology of auto-ethnography this thesis pays close attention to the material, and the affective resonances of the lesbian archive; making my own queer desires and longings explicit. Rather than a chronological or topographical ordering of archive materials, I present three kinds of archival encounter: the institutional (Vera Holme Collection: The Women’s Library at London School of Economics), the domestic (the private collection of photographer Phyllis Christopher, and the community (The Lesbian Archive and Information Centre Collection at Glasgow Women’s Library). Lastly, the thesis coins the concept of ‘the archival loop’ used to examine the archive of the Rebel Dykes that shifts between categories, defiantly in motion. The project presents a new body of quilted artworks that identify the under-researched imagery, symbolism, and visual cultures of lesbian communities in the 20th century. Through this specifically lesbian vernacular and a technical focus on digital embroidery, the works expand on traditional and feminist quilting practices. I offer a critique of the dominance of access and visibility as the primary tactics for liberating the lesbian archive (Castle, 1993; Jagose, 1994; Traub, 2016). Instead presenting quilt making as an affective strategy for piecing together fragments of the archive, whilst leaving space for the unknown and unseen. The quilt is established as both an act of ‘re-visioning’ and ‘femmage’ both of which are feminist strategies that turn towards the historical, in order to re-assemble the contemporary strategies for survival in a patriarchal world. Through a femme-ethical methodology that prioritises embellished aesthetics, emotional vulnerability, and an ethics of reciprocity the quilt not only re-visions the lesbian archive, but becomes an active contributor to the archive. Through this act of becoming the archive: I establish the archive as an active/activist site for intergenerational intimacy and collaboration that has the potential for new lesbian imaginaries and communities to form

Crafting Resilience: Cultural Heritage and Community Engagement in Post-Industrial Textile Communities.

This thesis discusses how engagements with cultural heritage through slow, localised craft practices construct and articulate collective identity and build resilience. Based in former areas of industrial textile production, it is a multi-site ethnographic study of two community-based long-term arts and heritage projects in Church, near Accrington, East Lancashire and Bradford, West Yorkshire. The projects explored specific aspects of textile heritage: printing and dyeing, and recycling and repair practices. The longitudinal nature of the research into processes including growing, making, unmaking, and remaking allows for consideration of how outcomes are embedded in projects like this. The locations of projects offer opportunities to consider the present lived experiences of post-industrial textile communities through their multi-layered heritage. The final fieldwork for the project was completed during the first UK Covid lockdown and offers valuable insight into the spatiality of projects like these and what happens when site-specific context is taken away. It is written through the lens of a practitioner-researcher whose many years of practice is based in the development and delivery of socially engaged arts projects. Multiple methods were employed over a period of years including participant observation during textile making and gardening workshops, semi-structured interviews with individuals and groups, photography and a reflective daily stitching ‘thinking through making’ (Ingold, 2011; Ravetz, 2013) practice of the researcher. This thesis argues that socially engaged arts practices used in heritage engagements can transform participants’ lives in a number of ways. These include allowing them to participate meaningfully in the co-production of knowledge through slow craft making and storytelling and the revoicing and ownership of personal and community heritage narratives. It offers insights into the challenges and multiplicities of researcher-practitioner experience, the value of projects that take place over considerable periods of time and that use dialogic approaches to heritage and site (Harrison, 2013)

“We come together as one…and hope for solidarity to live on”: On designing technologies for activism and the commemoration of lost lives

On the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers (IDEVASW), sex worker rights advocates and support services commemorate lives lost due to violence. In this paper we describe and reflect on a Feminist Participatory Action Research project that supported the activities of IDEVASW over two years in North East England. Working alongside a charity that provides services to women who are sex workers or have experienced sexual exploitation, we co-organised the first activist march on the day. As researchers and service providers, we present detailed reflections on the use of digital technologies during the public activist march, a private service for commemoration, and the development of a semi-public archive to collect experiences of the day. We develop three implications for the design of digital technologies for activism and the commemoration of lost lives: as catalysts for reflection and opportunities to layer experience

In the Technological Footprints of Urbanity: A Socio-political History of Water and Sanitation in Nairobi, 1899-2015

While History of Technology as a discipline has developed more strongly in the Global North, a huge lacuna exists in the Global South, particularly in Africa. In addition, the few texts that have given attention to the South have more often than not continued to bracket these localities and the experiences of its peoples as either a historical or lacking agency. The over-emphasis on the perspective of the colonizers rather than the colonized that is evident in most of the literature has led to inconclusive typologies common to many syntheses of Africa’s past especially its urban experiences. In many instances, the dichotomous and a symmetrical analysis results into the African practices of the city being reduced to a colonial perception of disorder. To envision Africa’s cities only in terms of their colonial and postcolonial relationships may preclude a fuller understanding of the multifaceted ways in which they have engaged with the larger world. Furthermore, most studies on technology and infrastructure to be particular have employed dominant paradigms like the theory of Large Technical Systems (LTSs) and propagated the imagination of most urban spaces within the lenses of the ‘networked city model’. These theoretical frameworks have produced incomplete narratives that see the South as chaotic, disorderly and operating on the brink of collapse. It is this fact that has driven contemporary social science and technology studies to call for a departure from the ‘old’ to a new scholarship that acknowledges the localities in the South as not only ‘sources for data’ but also as ‘sites for theorization in their own right’. What is needed in history of technology is a shift from focusing on ‘origin and invention’ to ‘use, meaning and effect’ so as to avoid the reproduction of knowledge that continues to ‘privilege’ the North. Towards the development of Global History of Technology, the gap needs to be bridged by giving attention to the historical particularities of the Global South rather than the South being approached as exceptional. It is on this backdrop that this study of Nairobi was undertaken. Moving between the formal level of engineering and planning and the informal level of daily practice, the dissertation investigated how urban water and sanitation technologies were adopted, appropriated, and contested by various actors. Archival investigations in Nairobi, London and Oxford (UK) and oral accounts of users were employed and analyzed qualitatively. By departing from the dominant LTS perspective, the study zeroes in on the role of users as participants in the making of the histories of the city and as non-passive recipients of migratory ideas and ideals, especially in the process of procuring their daily needs. Technical infrastructural artifacts are looked at as multilayered and possessing a powerful political and economic nature that determines their access and ‘allocative’ role. Nairobi’s water and sanitation socio-spatial outlay was unbundled to reveal a quilt of a heterogeneous techno-scape. Nairobi, like any city in the world has its urban materialities embodying aspirations of various actors but historically, its engineer sociologists continue to define both the characteristics of the technical artifact and the social universe in which they are to function. As a colonial city and an urban space, Nairobi was loaded with imprints of social differentiation, social control and domination and the post-colony has seen elitist ideals augmented in parallel with a rapidly expanding group of urban poor. However, much as infrastructure supply has for several years followed a variegated path, this study sought to push the boundaries beyond the conventional asymmetries of race, class and ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ as explained through the formal and informal binary that is common in Urban Studies. It is not enough to conclude that the deployment of key infrastructures adheres to racialized (later elitist or class) planning. Rather, the question of access is informed by many factors that include the political nature of artifacts themselves and people as non-passive recipients; the cost-recovery component of ‘modern’ infrastructure projects as juxtaposed to the socio-cultural constructs of water and sanitation provisioning. Nairobi in retrospect attains a techno-collage or patchwork of modalities of provisioning that affirms the heterogeneous nature of most urban spaces. Furthermore, juxtaposed against the ‘splintering urbanism’ thesis, this work reverses the narrative by pointing out that the Global South cities have traditionally been fragmented and ‘splintered’ in terms of their socio-technical topologies. Nairobi for instance has from its foundation been marked by a quilt of different socio-technical arrangement of water and sanitation provision that combine both top-down approaches that are characterized by highly centralized municipal governance and bottom-linked modalities. These include shallow wells, boreholes, rain-water-harvesting, cesspits, and pushcarts amongst others. There are also ‘mediative’ hybridized arrangements like the ‘spaghetti’ pipes and standpipes cum water kiosks. The centrality of some of these methods from below, as espoused in this study, has witnessed a process of streamlining. This is acknowledged by the utility companies through public-private partnerships that combine the large and the small to plug into the technological gaps existing especially in the informal settlements that are melting pots of both technological innovation and contestation. Heterogeneity and ‘decentered’ or devolved small scale modalities of provision have been and will always remain a permanent marker of most cities as their history goes hand in glove with that of the cities themselves. Nairobi’s checkered sociotechnical outlay is as old as the city itself. Perhaps, as the writing of a Global History of Technology takes center stage, future scholarship needs to focus more on the multilayered nature of human and knowledge flows that go beyond the North-South binary to encompass South-North, South-North-South, South-South amongst many other shifts and counter-shifts, as we grapple with the challenge of knowledge production on histories of technology that is highly representative