In an era of increasingly available digital resources, many textile designers and makers find themselves at an interesting juncture between traditional craft processes and newer digital technologies. ...Highly specialized craft/design practitioners may now elect to make use of digital processes in their work, but often choose not to abandon craft skills fundamental to their practice, and aim to balance the complex connection between craft and digital processes. The essays collected here consider this transition from the viewpoint of aesthetic opportunity arising in the textile designer's hands-on experimentation with material and digital technologies available in the present.
Craft provides the foundations for thinking within the design and production of textiles, and as such may provide some clues in the transition to creative and thoughtful use of current and future digital technologies. Within the framework of current challenges relating to sustainable development, globalization, and economic constraints it is important to interrogate and question how we might go about using established and emerging technologies in textiles in a positive manner.
This book brings together contributors from multiple disciplines, such as crafts, design, art education, cognitive philosophy, and sociology, to discuss craft and design practice from an embodied ...perspective.
Through theoretical overviews of embodied cognition and research-based cases that involve the researchers' making experiences, different phenomena of human-material interaction are presented, analysed, and discussed. The practical cases exemplify ways in which embodied notions show up in action. Contributors examine topics such as the embodied basis of craft activities and material manipulation, experiential knowledge and skill learning, reflection in and on action, and material dialogues. Several chapters specifically discuss the hybrid forms of analogue and digital crafting that increasingly takes place in the field of crafts and design, and the changed notions of material engagement that this entails.
The book will appeal to scholars of crafts, design, art education, anthropology, and sociology.
Practice-led research has been under debate for three decades. One of its major issues concerns how the researcher who is also the practitioner documents and reflects on her creative process in ...relation to a research topic. This article reviews and discusses documentation and reflection in practice-led research through three cases of doctoral dissertations that were completed at Aalto University in Finland. Through the cases the article examines the role the documentation and reflection of creative processes and products in these studies. In conclusion, documentation in the practice-led research context functions as conscious reflection on and in action. Any means of documentation, for example diary writing, photographing, or sketching, can serve as a mode of reflection.
This article aims to discuss the position of art and design artifacts, and their creation, in a practice-led research process. Two creative productions and exhibitions featuring my textile artifacts ...were intentionally carried out in order to tackle a specific research problem, and these will be examined here as case studies. These cases cover the production and exhibition of two sets of artworks, named Seeing Paper and Paper World, that were created as part of my completed doctoral research entitled Paperness: Expressive Material inTextile Art from an Artist’s Viewpoint. The study examined the relationship between a physical material and artistic expression in textile art and design. Both cases exemplify the roles of creative productions and artifacts situated in the process of inquiry. Throughout a practice-led research process, art and design artifacts can serve as inputs into knowledge production and as outputs for knowledge communication. As inputs, both art productions and artifacts can be the starting point of a research project from which the research question is formulated. They can also provide data for analysis from which knowledge is constructed. Asoutputs, artifacts can indicate whether the research problem requires reformulation, demonstrate the experiential knowledge of the creative process, and strengthen the findings articulated in the written output. Creative practice in a research context can contribute to generating or enhancing the knowledge which is embedded in the practice and embodied by the practitioner. This knowledge or insight can be obtained from the artist creating the artifact, the artifact created, the process of making it, and the culture in which it is produced and viewed or used, all taking place at different stages of a research process.
Practice-led research in the field of art and design usually involves a study of the interplay between a researcher-practitioner and her artistic work in process. This article seeks to illustrate ...that documentation of art practice can be a means to record that interplay and it can be used as relevant material in practice-led research. The article will present an account of documentation in practice-led research highlighting two principal aspects: phases of documentation and the role of documentation within the overall research process. The account will capture reflections of the author’s own practice-led research in fiber art, which investigates the relationship between materials and artistic expression, in the context of contemporary art.
Ways of Being Strands Nimkulrat, Nithikul; Matthews, Janette
Design issues,
10/2017, Volume:
33, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This article presents a collaborative project between a textile practitioner-researcher (Nimkulrat) and a textile practitioner-mathematician (Matthews). Mathematical investigation of Nimkulrat's ...craft knots through mathematical knot diagrams by Matthews revealed knot properties which were indiscernible from the work alone. This approach led to a way of visualizing knot designs using more than one color prior to making. The result of this current research phase illuminates the role of mathematics in making the knotting process explicit. It demonstrates the influence of mathematical analysis on craft practice and the significance of cross-disciplinary collaboration on the development of knotted pattern design.
Through an exemplary design case study, we look at how mediating bodily disturbances and cultivating perspective transition from first-to second-person perspective amplifies somaesthetic awareness. ...The paper focuses on the less explored aspect of soma design, which is the mediation of disturbing experiences that disrupt the everyday flow i.e., pain. The design process illustrated a transition between first- and second-person perspectives to cultivate and externalize the experience with pain as a wearable bodily interaction. The externalized pain experience was translated into an interactive wearable, ‘Squeaky/Pain’, that augments the wearer’s somaesthetic awareness via sound, tactile, and kinesthetic sensations. This paper makes two main contributions to soma design: introducing the implications of disturbing experiences for augmenting somaesthetic awareness and exemplifying how inner bodily disturbances can be materialized through the cultivation of first-and second-person perspectives.
This Special Issue examines collaboration within research teams of professionals, researchers, and other stakeholders with diverse disciplinary expertise. It aims to understand how individual ...experiential knowledge - or knowledge gained by practice - is shared, how collective experiential knowledge is accumulated and communicated in and through collaboration in interdisciplinary research. The experiential knowledge generated through collaborations between experts in various fields are discussed in four studies that illuminate the relationships established within the collaboration, the approaches used, and the new knowledge gained and transferred within the team. This should contribute to a more systematic approach for studying and integrating experiential knowledge exchange in collaborative practice and research.
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