Textiles as Material Gestalt: Cloth as a Catalyst in the Co-designing Process

Textiles is the common language within Emotional Fit, a collaborative research project investigating a person-centred, sustainable approach to fashion for an ageing female demographic (55+). Through the co-designing of a collection of research tools, textiles have acted as a material gestalt for exploring our research participants' identities by tracing their embodied knowledge of fashionable dress. The methodology merges Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, co-design and a simultaneous approach to textile and garment design. Based on an enhanced understanding of our participants textile preferences, particular fabric qualities have catalysed silhouettes, through live draping and geometric pattern cutting to accommodate multiple body shapes and customisation. Printedtextiles have also been digitally crafted in response to the contours of the garment and body and personal narratives of wear. Sensorial and tactile interactions have informed the engineering and scaling of patterns within zero-waste volumes. The article considers the functional and aesthetic role of textiles

STATIC! The Aesthetics of Energy in Everyday Things

Abstract: Static! is a project investigating interaction and product design as a way of increasing our awareness of how energy is used in everyday life. Revisiting the design of everyday things with focus on issues related to energy use, we have developed a palette of design examples in the form of prototypes, conceptual design proposals and use scenarios, to be used as a basis for communication and discussion with users and designers. With respect to design research and practice, the aim has been to develop a more profound understanding of energy as material in design, including its expressive and aesthetic potential, thus locating issues related to energy use at the centre of the design process

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Knot, Just Craft It

The thesis aims to explore the intersection of traditional crafts and modern design by modernizing traditional Chinese crafts like knitting and knotting. The objective is to preserve the aesthetic, cultural, and utility values embedded in these crafts while creating a series of home-scaled furnishing designs that offer a self-making experience. By applying traditional crafts to modern daily life, the thesis seeks to give new life to the essence of traditional crafts and create new life experiences that are accessible to more consumers. The focus will be on creating modern designs that incorporate traditional knotting and knitting techniques, while also offering a DIY element that allows consumers to participate in the making process. The self-making experience will be an essential element of the project, allowing consumers to learn and participate in the making process while also creating a deeper appreciation for the artistry and skill required in traditional crafts. The resulting home-scaled furnishing designs will offer a unique blend of tradition and modernity, preserving traditional crafts\u27 essence while offering a fresh and contemporary perspective. Overall, the project aims to demonstrate the relevance and value of traditional crafts in today\u27s world while creating new opportunities for consumers to engage with and appreciate this ancient human-making wisdom

Games: Agency as Art

Games occupy a unique and valuable place in our lives. Game designers do not simply create worlds; they design temporary selves. Game designers set what our motivations are in the game and what our abilities will be. Thus: games are the art form of agency. By working in the artistic medium of agency, games can offer a distinctive aesthetic value. They support aesthetic experiences of deciding and doing. And the fact that we play games shows something remarkable about us. Our agency is more fluid than we might have thought. In playing a game, we take on temporary ends; we submerge ourselves temporarily in an alternate agency. Games turn out to be a vessel for communicating different modes of agency, for writing them down and storing them. Games create an archive of agencies. And playing games is how we familiarize ourselves with different modes of agency, which helps us develop our capacity to fluidly change our own style of agency

The evolution of a visual-to-auditory sensory substitution device using interactive genetic algorithms

Sensory Substitution is a promising technique for mitigating the loss of a sensory modality. Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs) work by converting information from the impaired sense (e.g. vision) into another, intact sense (e.g. audition). However, there are a potentially infinite number of ways of converting images into sounds and it is important that the conversion takes into account the limits of human perception and other user-related factors (e.g. whether the sounds are pleasant to listen to). The device explored here is termed “polyglot” because it generates a very large set of solutions. Specifically, we adapt a procedure that has been in widespread use in the design of technology but has rarely been used as a tool to explore perception – namely Interactive Genetic Algorithms. In this procedure, a very large range of potential sensory substitution devices can be explored by creating a set of ‘genes’ with different allelic variants (e.g. different ways of translating luminance into loudness). The most successful devices are then ‘bred’ together and we statistically explore the characteristics of the selected-for traits after multiple generations. The aim of the present study is to produce design guidelines for a better SSD. In three experiments we vary the way that the fitness of the device is computed: by asking the user to rate the auditory aesthetics of different devices (Experiment 1), by measuring the ability of participants to match sounds to images (Experiment 2) and the ability to perceptually discriminate between two sounds derived from similar images (Experiment 3). In each case the traits selected for by the genetic algorithm represent the ideal SSD for that task. Taken together, these traits can guide the design of a better SSD

Nine Quick Tips for Analyzing Network Data

These tips provide a quick and concentrated guide for beginners in the analysis of network data

Smart Textiles and Clothing: An Opportunity or a Threat for Sustainability?

Wearable technology products which include smart clothing and textiles have grown in popularity and are only expected to become more ubiquitous over the next several years with an annual growth of 23 percent reaching $100 billion in sales by 2023 and$150 billion by 2026. But this growing demand does not come without considerable cost. Combining electronics and textiles, which both are relatively short-lived mass consumer goods, would intensify product obsolescence and lead to even shorter life cycles and abandonment of products. Although there is extensive research on the sustainability of fashion, limited research exists on the sustainability of smart textiles and clothing, and it appears timely and significant for an exploratory study on this topic. This study explores sustainability of smart textiles and clothing by a critical and in-depth review of existing literature and recent design efforts in the industry and in alternative realms such as maker spaces. The study introduces design approaches for more sustainable products and user experiences by employing Norman’s levels of emotional design [1], and Lamb and Kallal’s functional, expressive, and aesthetic (FEA) apparel design models [2] as grounding frameworks to discuss the sustainability of smart textiles and clothing from all angles. References [1] Norman, Donald A. 2004. Emotional design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. Basic Civitas Books. [2] Lamb, Jane M., and M. Jo Kallal. 1992. A conceptual framework for apparel design. Clothing and Textiles Research Journal 10, 2, (1992), 42-47. </div