Learning virtually or virtually learning? : a survey to gauge students’ use and perception of Blackboard and VLEs

This report presents the findings of a survey of students’ use and perception of Blackboard and VLEs as part of their learning in art and design higher education. In November 2007 a consultative process began through which the scope and design of the survey were decided. An on-line questionnaire was designed and piloted, and eventually responded to by 256 students across UAL during spring of 2008. This data was supplemented by data from a focus group interview held in June 2008

Developing teaching identities : An evaluation of the UAL postgraduate certificate - teaching in HE

This report has two aims. Firstly, it is an evaluation report of the first run of a new course run by the Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design (cltad). The second aim is to begin to report on a longitudinal study of a small sample of individuals entering into a career in teaching in Higher Arts Education. This strand of the study is not concluded in this report, but preliminary findings from the cohort regarding their professional identities at this point in time are included

Mid-Century Molecular: The Material Culture of X-ray Crystallographic Visualisation across Postwar British Science and Industrial Design

This thesis investigates the use and significance of X-ray crystallographic visualisations of molecular structures in postwar British material culture across scientific practice and industrial design. It is based on research into artefacts from three areas: X-ray crystallographers’ postwar practices of visualising molecular structures using models and diagrams; the Festival Pattern Group scheme for the 1951 Festival of Britain, in which crystallographic visualisations formed the aesthetic basis of patterns for domestic objects; and postwar furnishings with a ‘ball-and-rod’ form and construction reminiscent of those of molecular models. A key component of the project is methodological. The research brings together subjects, themes and questions traditionally covered separately by two disciplines, the history of design and history of science. This focus necessitated developing an interdisciplinary set of methods, which results in the reassessment of disciplinary borders and productive cross-disciplinary methodological applications. This thesis also identifies new territory for shared methods: it employs network models to examine cross-disciplinary interaction between practitioners in crystallography and design, and a biographical approach to designed objects that over time became mediators of historical narratives about science. Artefact-based, archival and oral interviewing methods illuminate the production, use and circulation of the objects examined in this research. This interdisciplinary approach underpins the generation of new historical narratives in this thesis. It revises existing histories of the cultural transmissions between X-ray crystallography and the production and reception of designed objects in postwar Britain. I argue that these transmissions were more complex than has been acknowledged by historians: they were contingent upon postwar scientific and design practices, material conditions in postwar Britain and the dynamics of historical memory, both scholarly and popular. This thesis comprises four chapters. Chapter one explores X-ray crystallographers’ visualisation practices, conceived here as a form of craft. Chapter two builds on this, demonstrating that the Festival Pattern Group witnesses the encounter between crystallographic practice, design practice and aesthetic ideologies operating within social networks associated with postwar modernisms. Chapters three and four focus on ball-and-rod furnishings in postwar and present-day Britain, respectively. I contend that strong relationships between these designed objects and crystallographic visualisations, for example the appellation ‘atomic design’, have been largely realised through historical narratives active today in the consumption of ‘retro’ and ‘mid-century modern’ artefacts. The attention to contemporary historical narratives necessitates this dual historical focus: the research is rooted in the period from the end of the Second World War until the early 1960s, but extends to the history of now. This thesis responds to the need for practical research on methods for studying cross-disciplinary interactions and their histories. It reveals the effects of submitting historical subjects that are situated on disciplinary boundaries to interdisciplinary interpretation. Old models, such as that of unidirectional ‘influence’, subside and the resulting picture is a refracted one: this study demonstrates that the material form and meaning of crystallographic visualisations, within scientific practice and across their use and echoes in designed objects, are multiple and contingent

Sonically-attuned design histories: Directions in research and communication

Sound is ephemeral and intangible, yet it is also resolutely physical, taking the form of vibrations felt in the body when it is perceived. Despite its fleetingness, sound is therefore tied to the materiality of things and spaces, and to the human interactions with and within them. Think of the hushed interior of a library, for instance, or the aural feedback offered by an electronic device. Whether deliberately ‘designed’ or not, the sounds of so many subjects of design scholarship serve communicative functions and shape social relationships and experiences around them. Yet sound is rarely an explicit presence in design history narratives. In this paper, I ask how we can write design histories that are enriched by tuning into the sonic qualities of artefacts and spaces, and to historical modes of listening and sound production. In reflecting on the possibilities of sonically-attuned design histories, I explore how thinking through sound might not only broaden the scope of design history’s subject areas, but also affect approaches to research and modes of dissemination. The paper draws upon an analysis of sound archives, including my own experience making a pilot sound archive at the Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as examples from sound art and design practices. These cases prompt reflections on how sound-focused research can advance design historical concerns and questions, including investigations of materiality, and prompt methodological approaches associated with ways of listening

Making ‘Atomic’ History: Consuming Historical Narratives in the ‘Unofficial’ Digital Archive

This chapter explores how narratives about postwar British design are mediated by ‘retro’ designed objects on eBay today. eBay has altered the way retro objects are consumed, contracting geographies and time, changing how sellers describe and categorise objects, and, I argue, redesigning the way both retro consumers and academic historians understand histories of design. As a vast database of artefacts from the past accessible by almost anyone with an Internet connection, eBay is an example of a new breed of dynamic, publicly accessible archive generated online. Through its display design and indexing functions, eBay acts not only as an e-commerce platform, but also as a digital archive that exerts a powerful narrativising influence on popular and scholarly understandings of history. I focus on the contemporary life on eBay of a class of postwar British furnishings distinguished by their ball-and-rod form, which often go by the appellation ‘atomic’. The passage of time, and changes in the technologies mediating these furnishings, correspond with great shifts in their status and significance for consumers between the 1950s and today. On eBay, these designed objects help to construct a history of a future-facing, optimistic vision of mid-century science. In the process, they raise key questions about who—and what—produces histories when we think beyond the text, and focus on narratives embedded in the object, image, or browser window. Drawing upon scholarship on retro culture, collective memory, public history, digital media studies, and empirical research into the social lives of ball-and-rod furnishings in postwar and contemporary contexts, this analysis offers new insights for historians. These include findings on the role of memory in the long history of ball-and-rod furnishings; how new technologies of archivisation shape design historical timelines; and how understandings of the past within academic design history are influenced by new cultures of collecting

Reflections on and in virtual space: Book test unit 2020 at the Royal College of Art

The shift to online learning has brought a dramatic alteration, for many, in how students and tutors communicate and collaborate. Communication media and technologies help shape the new interactions involved in online learning and teaching. Communication design research students are therefore well-positioned to work reflexively with current challenges of communication, social interaction, and the tools and media through which they happen, while learning during the pandemic. This presentation reports on ‘Book Test Unit 2020: The Future of Telecommunication’, a project on the Communication Design Pathway of the Royal College of Art’s MRes programme, in partnership with the BT Archives. It discusses insights about creating and studying objects in the virtual space – when one of the objects of study is the virtual space itself. It focuses on using archival research during the pandemic to produce a designed object: a virtual publication. The project began in February 2020 with a visit to the BT Archives and a brief to produce a collaborative publication exploring the future of telecommunication. As lockdown ensued in London, our engagement with archival artefacts turned virtual, and the focus pivoted from ‘the future’ to telecommunication during the pandemic. Artefacts took on new virtual lives in the students’ work, providing both grounding and inspiration for speculative design in the online space, and a prompt for reflexivity. As Teal Triggs and I wrote in the introduction for the students’ publication Dis-connect: Communication in the Age of Isolation, archival artefacts ‘became prompts for critically engaging not only with a history and a future, but with the content of an evolving ‘live’ pandemic’. Reflections on this experience shape learning and teaching on the pathway, as I continue involving design students in re-thinking how we communicate as collaborators, researchers, teachers, and students during the pandemic, as we navigate it together

Designing the virus

‘Designing the Virus’ brings together my ongoing research across the histories of science and design in two specific areas: practices of visualizing viruses for both scientific and public communication; and design in response to risk. In 2020, these areas intersected in a way that was impossible, as a researcher, to ignore, when a medical illustration of coronavirus released by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took on life in a way that no previous scientific image has done, as a frequently cut-and-pasted, remixed, and broadcast signal not only of the danger posed by the virus, but of the pandemic itself. By summer 2020, the ‘spiky blob’ coronavirus illustration had grown prevalent in the visual culture of numerous countries across the globe. This essay, written in August 2020 in part as a ‘timestamp’ of the period, questions what it means for a biomedical image to become an icon for a global crisis. I analyse the image from interdisciplinary angles of the history of graphic design for public health communication and scientific image-making practices, draw upon published interviews with the CDC’s medical illustrators, and build on recent research in disaster studies that critiques the notion of ‘natural disaster’. The medical illustration of the coronavirus presents an unusual case in the history of public risk communication, as a stand-alone scientific image that has come to act as a piece of wordless risk communication. I argue that this image, and its widespread dissemination in the US (and beyond), ‘implicitly reinforces a specific position within the politics of risk that have been unfolding in the US during the pandemic: that the overriding threat is the virus itself, divorced from the social, political, and environmental factors that shape how lives across the globe are affected by this pathogen’

Creative science: A collaborative journey through design and chemistry

How does creativity connect Design and Science? What are the similarities between science and design language, methods and processes, and how can these disciplines learn from each other? How might sharing design approaches across artists, designers and scientists lead to new possibilities for scientific research? Join Dr Amanda Jarvis from the University of Edinburgh and the ASCUS team for a discussion round that meets with selected art-science duos to dive into cross-disciplinary Design and Chemistry collaborations. We will explore their creative outputs and gain insights on their collaborative journey to guide what has already been achieved and what conversations still need to be had to help us be the best designers we can be in all disciplines. The panel will be chaired by Emily Candela, a researcher focusing on relationships between design, science, a sound practitioner, curator and senior tutor in Communication Design at the Royal College of Art, UK. We are excited to have the creative duo John Hardy and Adam Blaney from Lancaster University on board who will share of their collaborative endeavours into the potential of Chemistry in Multidisciplinary, Interdisciplinary, and Transdisciplinary Teaching. They will be joined by Rasa Weber, PhD candidate and design researcher from Matters of Activity, sharing of her collaboration with UK based Chemist Richard Blackburn and the Leeds spin off Keracol within the design studio Blond and Bieber

Designing Science: The display of X-ray crystallography in post-war Britain

This paper explores how design mediated scientific knowledge and official messages regarding science in post-war Britain, with a focus on public exhibitions. It centres specifically on the science of X-ray crystallography: British X-ray crystallographers produced cutting-edge research in the mid-twentieth century, not least of which was the discovery of the DNA double helix. The historical memory of X-ray crystallography in mid-twentieth-century British design provides a way in to this topic. Today, the period’s history of science, and X-ray crystallography specifically, is remembered in part through design: the Brussels Atomium, for instance, and the Festival of Britain’s exuberant crystal structure patterns for textiles, wallpapers, metal and more. The historical memory prompts questions about communication, transmissions and historiographical relationships between the worlds of design and science. These include questions about how the representations of a rather complex science, X-ray crystallography, travelled beyond the laboratory and even became emblematic of a kind of ‘period design’ in historical memory and collecting cultures decades later. This paper places X-ray crystallography’s representations within a broader context of molecular imagery in design emanating from adjacent fields, and zooms in on Britain, where the public display of X-ray crystallography served political goals. It represented a less-threatening ‘atomic’ than that of the bomb, and, as a home-grown science with prominent researchers in the UK, was ripe for national promotion. Designed molecular and atomic structure forms circulated through public exhibitions, including crystallographic imagery at the Festival of Britain and 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The paper presents new findings on their reception, and identifies design communities as an important ‘public’ for the science of X-ray crystallography. It concludes with reflections on how a more porous border between histories of design and science can yield new angles on the circulation of scientific knowledge through designed artefacts ‘in public’

Emily Candela in conversation with Huren Marsh

This session of the The Furniture History Society’s 45th Annual Symposium: Design 1900-Now was an interview I conducted with furniture designer Huren Marsh. The conversation covered Marsh’s experiences as a Jamaican designer who studied and works in England, British design education in the 1980s, and Marsh’s work as a designer, curator and educator, past and present. The conference was staged on the occasion of the opening of the new ‘Design 1900-Now’ galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), which include Huren Marsh’s Akuaba chair (1985). Emily Candela conducted early foundational research for the new galleries in 2016