The Book Spotter's Guide to Avian Titled Literature

In order to remain relevant in the digital age, physical libraries have to strengthen their position as social and cultural spaces. They need to find ways to challenge existing users perceptions of the collections and how they are accessed and presented. In an attempt to engage with these challenges, the University of Technology Sydney Library redesigned its visual identity and interior spaces, and commissioned us to create an installation in the central stairwell. From our initial research we formed the following question: how can we design a creative work (installation) that suggests the library is a space for play and discovery? This paper reports a practice-based research project with two intrinsically linked outcomes:1. An installation: `Avian Titled Literature'; 2. A hybrid exegesis: `Field Guide to Avian Titled Literature'. The project is the first iteration of a larger, ongoing research project investigating ways visual communication design could encourage serendipitous discovery, browsing and more playful engagement within libraries

Graphic criticism and the material possibilities of digital texts

© 2018 The Author(s). Narratives of material loss are often attributed to the process of digitising cultural heritage collections. Not being able to physically hold a literary artefact denies the reader an embodied understanding of the text made possible through tangible and contextual cues. What the artefact feels like-the dimensions, weight, volume, and paper quality-and where it is located-the institution, collection, shelf, or archival box-all play a role in the production of textual meaning. Thus, the argument stands that by removing these cues certain ways of knowing a text are diminished. The process of digitisation, however, is not solely one of loss. Scholars working with digital texts are finding new ways to search, model, analyse, and rearrange written language, and in doing so are benefiting from the interpretive possibilities of textual mutability. While some scholars are taking advantage of digital materiality through computational text analysis, far less attention has been paid to the non-verbal materialities of a text, which also play a role in the production of meaning. To explore the potential of these non-verbal materialities, we take a digitised version of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and alter graphic features of the page such as line length, type size, leading, white space, and tracking. Through a critical design practice we show how altering these non-verbal elements can reveal textual qualities that are difficult to access by close reading, and, in doing so, create new, hybrid works that are part literary page, part information visualisation

Visualising text-based data: Identifying the potential of visual knowledge production through design practice

An increase in the availability of digitised data coupled with the development of digital tools has enabled humanities scholars to visualise data in ways that were previously difficult, if not impossible. While digitisation has led to an increase in the use of methods that chart, graph and map text-based data, opportunities for visual methods that are non-aggregative remain underdeveloped. In this paper we use ‘Writing Rights’, a collaborative project between design and humanities scholars that examines the process of writing the ‘Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen’ (1789), to explore this issue. Through a series of visual experiments we discuss how the production of knowledge is enacted textually, within the written language, and graphically with the visual arrangement of the text. We argue that by drawing on the domain expertise of design, with its commitment to the semantic potential of the visual, practices that more wholly account for the qualitative nature of humanities data can be developed

Safe & SuRe Decision Support Tool

This is the author accepted manuscript.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Work/Play: 30 Years of Visual Communication

This exhibition surveyed the work of some Australia's leading visual communication designers spanning the past 30 years. Participating exhibitors were asked to exhibit a single piece of work and design a piece of visual communication that explained the creative process they went through in conceiveing and executing that work

A Tool for Global Resilience Analysis of Water Distribution Systems

This is a joint publication in collaboration with Centre for Water Systems at University of Exeter. This research is based on my previous work for Prof. Butler's project of "Safe and SuRe: A New Paradigm for Urban Water Management".A comprehensive assessment of resilience requires consideration of system performance under exceptional conditions, including those that are unforeseen, and can be achieved using a previously developed methodology called ‘global resilience analysis’ (GRA). GRA captures the effects of both probable and highly improbable (unknown probability) system failures and requires no knowledge of threats. Here, a simple, user-friendly tool that automates the simulations required for GRA of a water distribution system and assists comprehension of the results is presented. Provided the user can supply an Epanet .inp file for the system and that this contains demand data (an understanding of Epanet and system failure modelling is not necessary), the tool can be used to quantify the resilience of the system to pipe failure, pump failure, demand increase and contaminant intrusion. An interactive results explorer allows the user to easily identify critical system components based on the selected level of service type and failure measure (e.g. pressure, supply or contamination and failure magnitude or duration). A map of the network can be used to either color-code components based on their criticality in a single component failure analysis or to identify specific combinations of components which result in the greatest level of service failure magnitude or duration when failed simultaneously. ‘Stress-strain’ type response curves can also be automatically generated and key findings automatically extracted. Additionally, the tool enables systems to be compared on a like-for-like basis, enabling the effects of proposed interventions on resilience to be quantified and visualized

Resilience learning for water sector culture change

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the European Water Association via the link in this recor

Co-producing research with academics and industry to create a more resilient UK water sector

This is the final version. Available on open access from UCL Press via the DOI in this recordSocietal, economic and environmental impact generated by academic research is a key focus of publicly funded research in the UK. Drawing on experiences from the Safe & SuRe project, a five-year research project that was co-produced with industry, this paper explores the challenges, learnings and benefits of co-producing research with academics and practitioners to create a more resilient UK water sector. Three aspects of the project are explored in detail: the use of a steering group, co-developing research intensively with a water company, and co-dissemination industry-facing events. Emerging themes include: (1) benefits of the industry steering group to develop working relationships and trust among the group; (2) increased dialogue and sharing of information between industry and academics going beyond the one-way communication more commonly reported by STEM academics; and (3) the value of co-disseminating research to maintain and engage new connections and spark new research questions.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC