Neighbourhoodies: courageous community, colours, blazing bling and defiant delight

As we see a global culture appear across the planet identity politics simultaneously gravitate towards issues of the local. In society’s top strata people strive to live in posh areas with the right postal code. Subversive counterculture activists try to keep their own multi-ethnic spaces free from yuppies who in turn try to gentrify the same areas into authentic bohemian-chic quarters. In the urban fringes gangs protect their territory and even tattoo their hood names as a sign of authentic pride. Caught in the line of fire of identity politics is the hoodie, an average street-style garment, the canvas on which social conflicts and criminal stigmata are drawn, but also where local pride and reconciliation can be brought about, inspired by its connection to the resonance of musical milieus. In a time of liquid consumerism and fear, the habitus of the hoodie seems to frame a problematic identity which has been exposed in the ban on such garments in some British malls. The Neighburhoodies expands on a practice-based endeavour where fashion students from London College of Fashion reflected on their glocal London identities through the design of a special hoodie - a Neighbourhoodie

Fashion-able. Hacktivism and engaged fashion design

This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able. As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the DIY upcycling of clothes through “open source” fashion “cookbooks”. By means of hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion experiments in galleries, collaborative “hacking” at a shoe factory, engaged design at a rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands. Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-amateurs, the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alternative reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words, bending the current while still keeping the power on

Made by hand

Although the mainstream animation industry has adopted digital production methods, the attraction of laborious hand-made methods for making animation persists in the independent sector. The chapter considers how ‘craftivist’ opposition to mechanical, technological and digital techniques is validated in this community of practice through ideas that haptic knowledge by skilled physical labour and an exploration of materiality, autographic mark-making and imperfection (Wabi-sabi) are guarantors of authenticity and individuality that can only be carried out by hand. Why is this? What ideas and assumptions can be seen to underpin the notions of craft and crafting? Tracing connections between craft and activism since the Industrial Revolution, this chapter critically reflects on discourses of craft and the handmade through reference to Ruskin (1851), Morris (1892), Hobsbawm (2000), Thompson (1980), Benjamin (1935), Krauss (2000) and Takahashi (2005). Whereas the experimental animation community privileges analogue, handmade processes that appear to oppose and critique commercial animation production, building upon Warburton (2016) and Frayling (2017) it is argued here that this approach is underpinned by nostalgia and often faked. What looks like a hand-painted animation could actually be a simulation that was ‘painted’ in a software package: a pastiche of manual labour. Aesthetics alone do not guarantee that a work of art opposes the mainstream. Instead of recycling the past to create ‘artistic’ animation, it is argued in the conclusion that contemporary practitioners can equally investigate issues of labour and materiality through digital tools and virtual materials such as in the ‘ugly’ CGI animation of Nikita Daikur (2017)

Human transformations of the Wadden Sea ecosystem through time: a synthesis

Todayrsquos Wadden Sea is a heavily human-altered ecosystem. Shaped by natural forces since its origin 7,500 years ago, humans gradually gained dominance in influencing ecosystem structure and functioning. Here, we reconstruct the timeline of human impacts and the history of ecological changes in the Wadden Sea. We then discuss the ecosystem and societal consequences of observed changes, and conclude with management implications. Human influences have intensified and multiplied over time. Large-scale habitat transformation over the last 1,000 years has eliminated diverse terrestrial, freshwater, brackish and marine habitats. Intensive exploitation of everything from oysters to whales has depleted most large predators and habitat-building species since medieval times. In the twentieth century, pollution, eutrophication, species invasions and, presumably, climate change have had marked impacts on the Wadden Sea flora and fauna. Yet habitat loss and overexploitation were the two main causes for the extinction or severe depletion of 144 species (~20% of total macrobiota). The loss of biodiversity, large predators, special habitats, filter and storage capacity, and degradation in water quality have led to a simplification and homogenisation of the food web structure and ecosystem functioning that has affected the Wadden Sea ecosystem and coastal societies alike. Recent conservation efforts have reversed some negative trends by enabling some birds and mammals to recover and by creating new economic options for society. The Wadden Sea history provides a unique long-term perspective on ecological change, new objectives for conservation, restoration and management, and an ecological baseline that allows us to envision a rich, productive and diverse Wadden Sea ecosystem and coastal society

Cities are flows of urban magma

Without abstrac

Social Means Do Not Justify Corruptible Ends: A Realist Perspective of Social Innovation and Design

This article introduces designers to the dilemma that arises when twin aspects of social innovation—social means and social ends—do not align. Some academics have noted the anti-social, anti-political, and anti-inventive effects emerging from the spread of microfinance practices. We discuss the tendency for social design and innovation literature to focus on design processes rather than outcomes, and introduce ideas from realist political theory to account for the corruptibility of social innovations. We suggest that designers can prevent the corruption of social outcomes by shifting from idealist “what if” scenarios to realist “who whom?” questions instead