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

Healthy families: the present and future role of the supermarket

In this report, we contend that the grocery industry must be accountable for their role in an obesogenic environment. The social context most likely to support making healthy behaviour changes is the family. For families, supermarkets represent more than merely places in which to spend their money. They establish the values that underpin the ways in which people conduct their lives

Common Origin of Soft mu-tau and CP Breaking in Neutrino Seesaw and the Origin of Matter

Neutrino oscillation data strongly support mu-tau symmetry as a good approximate flavor symmetry of the neutrino sector, which has to appear in any viable theory for neutrino mass-generation. The mu-tau breaking is not only small, but also the source of Dirac CP-violation. We conjecture that both discrete mu-tau and CP symmetries are fundamental symmetries of the seesaw Lagrangian (respected by interaction terms), and they are only softly broken, arising from a common origin via a unique dimension-3 Majorana mass-term of the heavy right-handed neutrinos. From this conceptually attractive and simple construction, we can predict the soft mu-tau breaking at low energies, leading to quantitative correlations between the apparently two small deviations \theta_{23} - 45^o and \theta_{13} - 0^o. This nontrivially connects the on-going measurements of mixing angle \theta_{23} with the upcoming experimental probes of \theta_{13}. We find that any deviation of \theta_{23} - 45^o must put a lower limit on \theta_{13}. Furthermore, we deduce the low energy Dirac and Majorana CP violations from a common soft-breaking phase associated with mu-tau breaking in the neutrino seesaw. Finally, from the soft CP breaking in neutrino seesaw we derive the cosmological CP violation for the baryon asymmetry via leptogenesis. We fully reconstruct the leptogenesis CP-asymmetry from the low energy Dirac CP phase and establish a direct link between the cosmological CP-violation and the low energy Jarlskog invariant. We predict new lower and upper bounds on the \theta_{13} mixing angle, 1^o < \theta_{13} < 6^o. In addition, we reveal a new hidden symmetry that dictates the solar mixing angle \theta_12 by its group-parameter, and includes the conventional tri-bimaximal mixing as a special case, allowing deviations from it.Comment: 60pp, JCAP in Press, v2: only minor stylistic refinements (added Daya Bay's future sensitivity in Figs.2+8, shortened some eqs, added new Appendix-A and some references), comments are welcome

Digital Art, Culture and Heritage: New constructs and consciousness

Invited presentation for special symposium at EVA London 2019. This half-day Symposium explores themes of digital art, culture, and heritage, bringing together speakers from a range of disciplines to consider technology with respect to artistic and academic practice. As we increasingly see ourselves and life through a digital lens and the world communicated on digital screens, we experience altered states of being and consciousness in ways that blur the lines between digital and physical reality, while our ways of thinking and seeing become a digital stream of consciousness that flows between place and cyberspace. We have entered the postdigital world and are living, working, and thinking with machines as our computational culture driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning embeds itself in everyday life and threads across art, culture, and heritage, juxtaposing them in the digital profusion of human creativity on the Internet