Developing Expertise and Connoisseurship Through Handling Objects of Good Design: Example of the I.L.E.A./Camberwell Collection (original) (raw)
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Pedagogies of ‘Good Design’ and Handling in Relation to the I.L.E.A./Camberwell Collection
2016
The present thesis investigates educational aspects of material culture, examining the I.L.E.A./Camberwell Collection as a case study for the teaching of ‘good design’ in post-war Britain from 1951 to 1977. The methodological approaches used are drawn from the disciplines of design history, material culture studies, educational theory,museology and sociology. The main objectives of the thesis aim to examine ‘good design’ as an educational project, to establish the socio-cultural contexts that produced the I.L.E.A./Camberwell Collection, to relate these contexts to the premise of ‘good design’, and to assess the Collection’s educational affordances, both historical and contemporary. In order to illuminate how the I.L.E.A./Camberwell Collection represented the didacticism of ‘good design’, the investigation locates the historical and educational roots of ‘good design’ in relation to specific time-frames and practices, especially with regards to initiatives driven by government. The th...
2014
An HEA funded seminar entitled: “Collecting as a form of material knowledge across design disciplines: a narrative research method from FE to HE to lifelong learning” took place on 4 April 2014 at the Faculty of Art Design & Architecture at Kingston University London. The event was co-ordinated by Associate Professor Lucy Renton and Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design, Cathy Gale, with the collaboration of students from the BA Hons Graphic Design and Fashion courses. This seminar stemmed from two perspectives, the PhD research of Cathy Gale, and her developing Museum of X project that has also received funding from the HEA through a National Teaching Fellowship Award (2010-11), and Lucy’s work on Open Educational Resources in her role as Faculty Blended Learning Co-ordinator at Kingston through the HEA funded ‘Practising Open Education’. The broader context of this seminar includes pedagogical work on the creative process by Dr. Natasha Mayo at Cardiff and the Share Academy at UCL.
READING MATERIAL CULTURE: AN ANALYSIS OF DESIGN AS CULTURAL FORM
The aim of this study is to explore the possibilities of how the product form conveys meaning, and then how this meaning can be the bearer of any kind of cultural information or inscription upon the object. The reading of the object is discussed within the framework that can be named as the ‘material culture of the everyday.’ Situating and defining design as a product of modernity, specific categories of objects and related theories about the possibility of the modern subject and his subjective relation with the world of objects is discussed. Last of all, following the route of identity, the Turkish tea-pot set and water-pipe is chosen for a deeper analysis for demonstrating the mechanisms or forces that shape these objects of cultural rituals within the dynamics of tradition and modernity. Keywords: Design, Material Culture, Objects, Tradition, Modernity, Identity, Turkish Teapot Set, Water Pipe.
Situating Creative Artefacts in Art and Design Research
2012
This paper aims at discussing the positions of art and design artefacts and their making in a practice-led research process. Three creative productions and exhibitions featuring my textile artefacts inclusively carried out for tackling specific research problems are examined as case studies. The first two cases include the production of two series of artworks and exhibitions namely Seeing Paper and Paper World created as part of completed doctoral research entitled Paperness: Expressive Material from an Artistʼs Viewpoint. The study examines the relationship between a physical material and artistic expression in textile art and design. The third case includes the production of a series of luminous objects called The White Light. These objects are expected to generate a discussion on boundaries between functional and aesthetic objects and those between art, craft and design disciplines. Both cases exemplify the roles of creative productions and artefacts situated in the process of inquiry. Throughout a practice-led research process, art and design artefacts can serve as inputs into knowledge production and as outputs for knowledge communication. As inputs, both art productions and artefacts can be the starting point of a research project from which the research questions are formulated. They can also provide data for analysis from which knowledge are constructed. As outputs, artefacts can indicate whether the research problem requires reformulation, demonstrate the experiential knowledge of the creative process, and strengthen findings articulated in the written output. Creative practice in a research context can contribute to generating or enhancing knowledge, which is embedded in the practice and embodied in and by the practitioner. This knowledge can be obtained in the artist creating the artefact, the artefact created, the process of making it, and the culture in which it is produced and viewed or used, all taking place at a different stage of a research process.
Taste and attunement: Design Culture as World Making
Design Culture: Objects and Approaches, 2018
This chapter is a speculative attempt to position ‘design culture’ at the centre of our descriptions and understandings of the world. In it I argue that ‘design culture’ allows us to see the world as particular sets of qualities, feelings and meanings as well as a purposefully fashioned material environment. But rather than claiming that design is at the centre of the world (a claim that, to my mind, would be no less spurious than any other claim for the centrality of one particular phenomenon) I want to more modestly explore what it would mean to position design at the centre. In other words, my interest is in the generative affordance of inquiries that treat design as somehow foundational to how the world seems to us (the qualia of our being in the world). In some ways this centrality is already assumed by the actual term ‘design culture’, which orients the ambition of investigation about design towards considering the world-forming activity of design. ‘Culture’, as a qualification for the word ‘design’, offers significantly different capacities than the word ‘history’ or ‘social’, for instance. At its most limited ‘design culture’ might suggest a form of attention aimed at investigating the practices and values enacted, say, by a particular design studio, in the same way that anthropologists might want to look at practices and values of a group of Trobriand Islanders. At its most extensive, though, ‘design culture’ might well try to attend to any and every aspect of society where tools, technology, clothing and the fashioning of an environment are central.
2015
Much recent writing on object-based learning (OBL) in museums assumes that the prevailing paradigm sanctions against touch. However, the Museum and Study Collection at Central Saint Martins has always been a handling collection within a wider tradition of teaching collections associated with art schools. This chapter argues that haptics and material culture play a key role in art and design pedagogy, and that interactions with museum collections should reflect that. The nature of learning in an art and design context is explored and the general benefits of OBL are considered. Themes include knowledge transaction, meaning making and the creation of more student-centred learning environments. The chapter also addresses new research into how OBL is experienced by art and design students. Touch has emerged as a key part of their experience, particularly for fashion and textiles students who find that wearing gloves to handle textiles limits learning opportunities. The potential importan...
The design culture: actions and narratives between archives and exhibitions
DIID, 2021
The article is focused on the value of design archives as resources to be enhanced through exhibitions, and as heritage for innovation based on process of knowledge re-use, especially for creative industries. Starting from the background of the debate on the new dimension of the archive (especially the one focused on the relation between art and design practices and the archive), the article will focus on a specific context as the one of design archives which have been in recent years particularly vivid realities. Focusing on designer’s archive (in between the broader system of design documentation), and through a case study such as CSAC of University of Parma, we will examine how these archives are not merely repositories of drawings and how they can be connectors for creative industries, through exhibitions and other programs. In the second part of the article, we will focus on three exhibitions devoted to design which are expressions of a huge patrimony organized in structured ar...
Design, Daily Life and Matters of Taste
Routledge Companion to Design Studies, 2016
This chapter looks at design culture, and the tastes that animate it, from the perspective of everyday life. I argue that an everyday life perspective must work to see taste as ordinary, as a feature of everybody's life, and not the prerogative of a particular social group or a particular aesthetic proclivity. Instead of thinking about "good" taste and "bad" taste, a sociologically sensitive approach to design should look at the way that all people fashion their world through their material culture, and look at the qualities that such fashioning articulates. The chapter also suggests that taste is accentuated by the confidence (or lack of it) with which it is deployed, and that the level of confidence doesn't symmetrically correspond to the hierarchies at work in society.
Design as a non-formal education tool
Instituto Politécnico do Cávado e do Ave (IPCA), 2019
This article presents part of the research carried out under a master's thesis, which aimed to launch research bases for an interdisciplinary study between three areas: Design, Education and Museology. In this context, Design is seen as a facilitator and as a methodology that aims to mediate between museological contents and children, through design-based educational processes. The Museum as a privileged space for non-formal education is, therefore, a stage of excellence for this analysis. We consider Design as a fusion between Art, Engineering and Management, taking advantage of its multi and transdisciplinary work capacity, valuing the immaterial, the experience and the process as essential parts of Design discipline and as a reflection of post-industrial society. We also make a parallel between Design and the curation process, by approaching methodologies and tools used in both areas.