Approach
Over the next three years cloTHING(s) as conversation will be concentrating its efforts in three areas: material artifact explorations, social construct events, conversation and evaluation. Making activities within the studio help us externalize insight. Combined with social construct events our material output (the artifacts we make) provides mechanisms to voice, share and explore with our colleagues, peers and friends. The material artifact and social construct spaces serve as invites that enable experts with disparate working expertise and expectations to touch and influence one another. They open up a meaningful space for conversation and a means of evaluating and reconsidering the clothing we wear.
This latest phase of the cloTHING(s) as conversation is an opportunity to implement and evaluate a methodology that intentionally pulls on both abstract and pragmatic making activities and modes of communication in order to externalize insight.
Our approach draws on our previous work exploring creative based research methods in both academic and industry based contexts (Collected Experience, Intelligent Forms Design Inc., Safety Lab, DnA, Creatives with Intent).
We have developed a generative research practice that pulls on the use of participatory events in conjunction with practice led, action and reaction-based inquiry and considered forums for response and riposte. We regularly use these nodes of exploration in combination as a means of navigating a space of ambiguous inquiry that does not preclude pragmatic agendas and prescriptive narratives.
The diagrams below illustrate this dynamic and map out our intended route through to Spring 2017. If you would like to know more about our approach please do not hesitate to get a hold of us at clothingasconversation@ecuad.ca.
Our timeline:
material artifacts: generative research prototypes, tools, and new methods of construction created through the exploration of production platforms and making.
new propositions: material output, systems and processes that result from acts of making. We use these assets to instigate new sets of responses and ways of looking at our problem space.
novel methods of construction: systems and processes derived through explorative acts of practice led making.
impact assessment: evaluation of our work (including processes, approaches, and artifacts) in relation to sustainability needs (environmental, social, cultural, political). Also, the development of new tools for assessing and accessing design for sustainability.
conversations: the informal interchange/exchange of thoughts and knowledge, as catalyzed by Material Artifacts and Social Construct scenarios.
social construct: constructed scenarios to instigate conversation through interaction with material artifacts.
social scenario: an event.
trigger: prompts, used to provoke and elicit new ideas and routes forward.
synthesis: process of taking in and reconfiguring the work we have done – a means of coming to new understandings – combining ideas to from new ways of looking at responding to our design systems, new composites, blends, combinations.
discovery: the things we uncover, the new insight that turns up and changes the way we look at any given problem space.
dissemination: sharing the things we have found, the work we have done .
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