The values of being in design: Towards a feminist design ontology

This article critiques the way in which contemporary western design ontology is constructed, why this affects conceptions of female creative practice and how this impacts on women’s lives. Starting with a personal account of educating female designers, the article aims to unpack the different ways in which ontologically invisible patriarchal and capitalist value systems act on us as designers, aided by processes of embodiment which are essential to design practice. It calls for the “de-designing” of our ontology as designers through feminist epistemologies and practices which keep questions about transformations, futured by design, in a state of critical plasticity by attending to socio-political, socio-economical and ecological ethics whilst keeping issues of gender exclusion at its core

“It Tells You What it Wants to Be” How Women Make, with Immanence, Love, Decay and other Transgressions

This paper discusses how a close encounter with a woman’s making practice, when viewed through a critical feminist lens, can give space to a broader discus-sion on how female creative labour is viewed and valued. Drawing on a 2018 doc-toral thesis titled ’How women make – exploring female making practice through design anthropology’, the focus here is firstly, on how conceptions of immanence in a making practice have implications for ontological concepts of agency and, secondly, on the re-working of normative identity positions within women’s differ-ent crafting and up-cycling practices. These in turn point to certain conceptions of the feminine in the public realm and how visual and material voice is perceived based on gender. Different opportunities for subversion materialise in the wom-en’s work through the interplay of concepts of beauty, femininity, nature, decay and death. The discussion highlights excerpts of a series of close up vignettes, which combined ethnographic, auto-ethnographic accounts and reflections informed by feminist theory and critique

Service design for Rural Heritage Tourism

‘i am not a tourist’. – Why collaborative service design may be the key to developing sustainable cultural & rural visitor economies, with the help of ICT, social media and crowdsourcing Abstract: This paper will outline how the practice of Service Design can facilitate the creation of sustainable cultural and rural visitor economies, with the help of ICT, social media and crowd sourcing. This paper is not written to be ‘value-neutral’, but is motivated by the author’s belief that academic activism in tourism ‘must be with the communities and not for them: solidarity is the basis where our common concern is mutual empowerment, self-determination and emancipation.’ (Hales et al.,2013, p17) The aim of the paper is to identify how Service Design and its processes, such as co-creation, have the potential to develop cultural and rural tourism economies, which are community centric and allow the often-narrow role of the tourist to be humanised and democratised. Service Design will be discussed on the on the basis that ‘Design has shown itself to be an efficient way of improving a business’s profitability at a practical level, but when we recognize its capacity to transform environments and people’s lives, it also becomes a catalyst for social change.’ (Viladas 2011, p26) The paper will touch on the need for a democratically supported strategic framework, which ‘incorporates a broader set of values beyond economic growth’ (Hales et al., 2013, p12), and that design thinking has the ability to effect economic and cultural sustainability through co-creation and technology. Service Design thinking can be help define values and identities, that further the concept of tourism in a societal and economic context, by taking advantage of opportunities created in the digital realm by crowdsourcing and social media. The knowledge base of the author’s professional background is design and advertising, and the paper will aim to make sense of this knowledge in relation to sustainable tourism. In the latter part it will focus on the island of Crete to discuss how some of the Service Design and Advertising principles may be applied in practice and why a holistic service design strategy may be particularly suitable for community centered cultural and rural tourism on Crete

Create & Connect : wearable stories

As we navigate through our lives we often collect and keep mementoes, souvenirs and found objects that remind us of significant moments, times, places and experiences. However for the vast majority of people, making and material knowledge is limited and a sense of agency with our ‘stuff’ is missing. In his book ‘The case for working with your hands’ Matthew Crawford (2009) suggests that in order to be responsible for the world and our sense of being within it we need to feel that it is intelligible and the provenance of our things need to be brought closer to home. In this workshop we explored how different material objects can be used as cultural probes in order to articulate cultural identities and values. It used contemporary studio jewellery as a device to engage participants in a dialogue about the everyday and explored how sensory experiences with the material world define who we are. Design thinking and craft knowledge were combined in a practical co-creative workshop to interrogate the emotional connections between people, materials and body adornment. It used life experiences, storytelling and narrative structures to inform the making of a wearable jewel. It focused on the following two questions: How can the intrinsic preciousness of ‘things’ often discarded (but kept) be re-appropriated through creative making? How can objects, fragments and materials be beautified and re-contextualised through design thinking and processes of craft (reclaiming, reworking, transforming and relocating)

HOW WOMEN MAKE - exploring female making practice through Design Anthropology.

This thesis explores the process of female making as a creative and socio-political act and how/where/why this creative labour gets ‘spent’, in terms of energy, outcomes and beneficiaries as well as how it might be situated in the context of contemporary Western Design ontology. Fieldwork took place over a period of 10 Months, with 11 female participants in two countries, during a number of repeat encounters, which included co-making, participant and ethnographic observations as well as informal interviews. The findings are presented as focused narratives based on three of the participants, through a series of ethnographic/auto-ethnographic accounts, which each conclude in a discussion based on my thematic analysis of that particular woman’s making. Drawing on the fieldwork with all 11 women, the three chapters which follow weave together data and theory into thematic discussions and analysis. The research documents and makes visible both the women’s making practices and things acting upon it, through observations of the participants making, and conversations and co-making with participants. A design anthropological approach of ‘anthropology as correspondence’ (Gatt & Ingold, 2013; Ingold 2013a) informed all data collection, with informal interviews providing the core data and focus of analysis, supported by analysis of visual data such as photography and moving image, as well as field notes and reflective auto-ethnographic writing, based on my experiences with the women and their making. As a design anthropological study, it situates and analyses female creative practices in a broader human ‘making’ context, whilst utilising a range of ethnographic, practice-led and co-creative methods, situated within a framework of a feminist inquiry and design discourse. Key theorists informing the analysis are Karen Barad (2007, 2008), Elizabeth Grozs (1999, 2010), Erin Manning (2016), Doreen Massey (2005) and Tim Ingold (2007, 2013a), whilst building on the work of Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (1981), Cheryl Buckley (1986) and Sheila Rowbotham (1973/a, 1973/b), amongst many others. Key theories triangulated within the discussion and analysis stem from Material Feminism, Design Anthropology and Design Theory. This triangulation, woven around and into the observations and accounts of lived experiences, forms an emergent proposition which considers how female enactments of creative labour can provide us with ways to critique and un-ravel contemporary Design ontology, its modes of production and consumption. Drawing on post-capitalist scholars such as Kathy Weeks (2011), amongst others, and the writing of Raoul Vaneigem (1967/2006), the penultimate chapter ‘Implication for Design Pedagogy’ discusses why the implication my findings should be considered in relation to design pedagogy and education yet to come, and to ‘futures yet unthought’ (Grosz, 1999)

Hidden in plain sight - engaging in the visual construction of European identities and narratives through ancient European script

The aim of this project was to enable visual communication designers and young European citizens to reflect on how societal narrative and meaning can be communicated via a shared visual literacy, by exploring signs, symbols and semiotics inherent in our ancient shared European heritage of the Linear A and Linear B scripts. The reason for using the ancient scripts was the premise that they would act as a ‘neutral’ but relevant visual and semantic content basis from which to explore visual and written meaning making in contemporary society. Archaeology can grant us access to our history by allowing us encounters with remnants of the past. How these remnants are translated for us, read by us and what we believe that they tell us, is intimately tied up with the context of our own contemporary culture. This makes any interaction with history also a potential interaction with the present and future. Any ‘reading’ of the past, is also a reflection of our presence (Gamble 2001)(Gere 2009) (Hayden1993). Archaeological research into the scripts from a semiotic perspective and into Linear B’s administrative function is particularly relevant to this research, because it highlights potential points of similarity with contemporary conceptions of citizenship. Linear B in particular offers clues to social, political and economic structures of the pre-historic society, and includes ideograms for slaves, religious offerings, domestic animals and commodities amongst many others (Chadwick 1987). The aim was to use these elements to provide a starting point for reflection on contemporary European societal narratives. How visual discourses of European identities are constructed is rarely discussed even in Design Schools. How can we ever develop a (multi)-cultural sense of belonging and a notion of European citizenship, when the majority of political and media generated messages we receive accentuate our differences and bemoan our co-dependency? International branding has made us very competent in receiving messages communicated through visuals, but if the messages and their intended meaning have not been reflected upon and critically analysed, we may not be conscious of how, and to what ends, our emotions and behaviors are being influenced (Ollins 2003). Whilst we may be seemingly united in the consumption of international brands, identifying and understanding their brand values without much effort or inhibition by our individual and diverse, cultural backgrounds (Klein 2003), it is often the sub-conscious nature of how visual language is ‘read’ that can also make it less likely to be critically analysed and reflected upon (Crow 2003). If visual literacy can be successful exploited for uniting disparate cultural groups for commercial purposes, then visual communication design should, in principle, also be able to facilitate the co-creation of visual language that can help us to explore, understand and propose values of European citizenship that transcend local political and media manipulation (Kress 2010). The aim is to involve young people in discussions about how aspects of historical visual literacy can be critically examined and re-designed in the context of contemporary forms of communication and reflections on citizenship and European identities

Creativity - innovations muse: how art & design pedagogy can further entrepreneurship

This paper will discuss how Art & Design Pedagogy can further entrepreneurship in a societal, economic and educational context, so that students may thrive in a world full of complexity and flux, empowered to create sustainable futures of their own making for themselves and their communities. It will touch on some of the methodologies inherent in art and design pedagogy to teach creativity and innovation, but will give a broader overview over how the values and attitudes inherent in this pedagogy may further the current concept of innovation and entrepreneurship and its societal and economic context. This paper will aim to highlight how the values, attributes and attitudes associated with art and design pedagogy bear translating into the economic focus of most current entrepreneurship thinking

The Art of Unknowing – The joy of amateur practice as a space for emancipation from the constraints of academic discipline.

Being immersed in the Art School for the most part of your professional life is a privileged position to find oneself in. But what if this immersion also presents a certain entrapment in the connoisseurship and knowledge that you have acquired, embodied, and are passing on. This paper is about the creative liberation of two female visual communication academics, through the pursuit of amateur practices in un-professional curatorship of personal obsessions. The first of these practices is a long-standing obsession with Marcel Duchamp, which has been enacted in the unofficial spaces and places of true fandom, where obsessions are lived out and ideas of being a neutral historian no longer need to be adhered to. The practice that has emerged is one based on leisure, travel and appropriation through collecting, recording and archiving. The importance of the process far outweighs any potential outcome or the production of any individual artefacts, as it is these alternative ways of experiencing, thinking about and documenting Marcel Duchamp that are the ultimate centre and purpose of this practice, - a kind of Duchamp Tourism. The second amateur practice could be considered to have made a similar journey of engagement only in reverse. The experience of childhood holidays on the island of Crete started a lifelong obsession with the collection of touristic artefacts and an immersion in its visual and historic heritage. An added dimension of ‘living out’ being the amateur, in as far as whilst loving a foreign place you still always remain ‘un-official’ – an outsider. This paper is an opportunity to discuss not only the freedom that is inherent in the enactment of amateur practices, but also the struggle to remain within the joy of the process rather than arriving at a destination. How can we preserve the freedom of ‘unknowing’ at the same time as the agency of the objects and experiences collected keeps on ‘acting back’ (Ingold 2009); beckoning to be solidified out of the aesthetic experience of the ‘making’ to new, but potentially dead-end, forms

Visual translations of ancient heritage – re-contextualising ancient European script through contemporary visual communication methods and media

The purpose of this practice led research project was to apply a design anthropology approach to the visual re-contexualisation of ancient European script, using contemporary visual communication practices and media strategies in order to explore opportunities for creative engagement with archaeological knowledge. Archaeology can grant us access to our history by allowing us encounters with remnants of the past, but how these remnants are translated for us, read by us and what we believe that they tell us is intimately tied up with the context of our own contemporary culture. What role can contemporary visual communication practices play in communicating archaeological knowledge to young audiences by overcoming potential aesthetic or media based barriers. Like visual design, ancient script deals with visual presentation of meaning and is directly relevant in relation to Frutiger’s interest in archetypes and Neurath’s Isotype collection. Under the guidance of a specialist Archaeologist advisor and two Design researchers, a team of visual communication designers used their individual creative practices to visually re-contextualise the oldest deciphered and un-deciphered European scripts of Linear A and Linear B, with the goal of engaging a teenage audience. The aim was to explore how visual communication can facilitate archaeological heritage experiences that explore a multi-layered narrative through co-creative and democratised strategies of engagement. This investigation raises not only the question of the overall relevance of creative re-contextualisation of archaeological heritage in engaging new audiences, but also to what extent this re-contextualisation can be allowed to undermine the ‘authenticity’ of the source material