History of Design Research Student Co-Curates Rare Faucheux Exhibition in Paris
History of Design research student Catherine Guiral has co-curated a rare exhibition on graphic designer and architect Pierre Faucheux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Entitled The Crystal Maze, the three-week Pompidou show, part of a ‘new generation’ cultural festival, explored how Faucheux moved between different fields of design as an ‘an architect of the book’ and as ‘an author of space’ – a key aspect of Guiral’s MPhil work at the RCA.
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Curating Contemporary Art Tutor Wins Funding to Set Up Art and Armed Conflict Research Network
RCA tutor Michaela Crimmin has won funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council to set up a dedicated research network to explore the relationship between art and international armed conflict.
RCA Animation Leads Medical Researchers in Developing Interactive Health-Assessment Tool for Children
The Royal College of Art’s Animation head Joan Ashworth has teamed up with Great Ormond Street Hospital and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine to develop an interactive, animated health-assessment tool for children, funded by the Medical Research Council.
The aim is to give clinical researchers and health economists a way to easily obtain health status information directly from children and better evaluate treatment. The current system appraises the effectiveness and value for money of medical treatment for children through self-completed, written questionnaires, which some find severely challenging because they are too ill, incapacitated or don’t have the required standard of reading and writing.
The consortium’s research will develop an interactive assessment, featuring short animations to depict situations, and characters to express locations and types of pain. The aim is to glean insight directly from children into the state of their health, rather than relying on an adult’s interpretation.
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Printmaking Research Student Wins International Book Design Accolade
RCA Printmaking MPhil student Hans-Jörg Pochmann has taken the top accolade in the prestigious international book design competition, the Best Book Design from all over the World, for his first-ever book.
Pochmann pipped 13 other graphic designers, typographers and book designers from eight countries to the prize organised by German foundation, Stiftung Buchkunst. These were entered automatically after winning national book competitions in their home countries. Pochmann will receive ‘die Goldene Letter’ (an actual golden letter), awarded by Leipzig’s Deputy Mayor for Culture, Michael Faber, at the city’s book fair this Friday, 14 March.
Fallen, Pochmann’s first-ever book is self-published, and was his final project on Graphic Design at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. Plain, basic and typographically neat, it features two front pages but no back. There are two stories – one in German, and one in English – both read through to the end.
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Pionen Data Centre Architect Albert France-Lanord’s Thoughts on Curating Contemporary Art Graduate Show Theme of Digital Culture
As RCA programme Curating Contemporary Art holds its twentieth graduate show this week, we ask Albert France-Lanord, architect of the Pionen Data Centre (which is the subject of a major research piece in the exhibition) his thoughts on the show’s theme of digital culture.
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Pivotal Austrian Artist Makes UK Debut Through RCA Curating Contemporary Art Research Partnership
An Austrian artist whose work is pivotal to artistic research will make her UK debut through the College’s Curating Contemporary Art MeLa research partnership.
Ines Doujak will show her long-term artistic research project, Loomshuttles / Warpaths – a transformation of an ‘eccentric’ archive of Andean and Bolivian textiles spanning 30 years – as part of Not Dressed for Conquering, an exhibition at the RCA curated by head of CCA Ruth Noack and CCA students.
The exhibition and accompanying symposium form part of MeLa* European museums in an age of migrations – a strategic four-year research programme, of which the RCA is a partner and CCA research leader. One of MeLa’s focuses is curatorial and artistic research. To date the debate has explored how practice-based art research extends to issues of curating contemporary art, and how research methodologies often overlap.
According to Noack, Doujak’s practice, which looks at ethnographic, mostly textile material that has taken on complex ethical and feminist meanings, is a catalyst for debate around how a textiles archive can take on ‘another life’ in 'the world of display'.
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Research by Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design Informs Scottish Hospital's Arts Strategy
Research by a team from the RCA's Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design is informing arts strategy at one Scotland’s largest hospitals to enhance its mental health unit.
Forth Valley Royal Hospital, which opened in July 2011 following the transfer of the final phase of acute services from Stirling Royal Infirmary (now Stirling Community Hospital), invited the team to map out how patients and staff use space at the mental health unit and interact with one another. The research is informing a wider creative strategy to enhance the clinical environment through visual arts.
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Museum of Wales Acquires Glass & Ceramics Senior Tutor's Work
The Museum of Wales has acquired a major piece of work by the RCA’s Ceramics & Glass Senior Tutor, Felicity Aylieff. The piece, Still Life with Three Chinese Vases II, first shown at Porcelain City at the Victoria & Albert Museum in November 2011, arrived at the Museum of Wales today. It will go on display as part of the applied arts collection from the summer.
Comprising three large-scale thrown and glazed vases, the work is prized for its unique Fencai porcelain colouring and pattern, as well as for drawing and building on traditional Chinese Jingdezhen production techniques – all of which formed the basis of Aylieff’s esteemed research at the RCA.
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Research Student Raises the Banner for Arts Funding
A 23m high banner stating, ‘The Market Will Save Us’, will adorn the façade of the RCA in Kensington for two weeks from today.
The eye-catching billboard installation, by artist and RCA Critical Writing in Art & Design PhD student Bill Balaskas, features the ironic phrase in Perpetua, the same typeface as the RCA’s royal charter granted in 1967. It will be hung on the Darwin building in South Kensington, on the same spot where the College’s graduate show banner is hung annually.
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'Disruption' Shines Spotlight on Diversity of Art and Design Research
RCA research students are set to host their second biennial exhibition later this month, showcasing the broadest range of art and design practice-led research to date.
Disruption will present specially created work by 27 participants from programmes across all six schools at the RCA, including Architecture, Design, Fine Art, Humanities and Materials, and will be opened by the acclaimed artist, Patrick Keiller. Running from 21 to 27 January, the show aims to be a rare glimpse into art and design practice-led research, exploring how subversion and disruption are key to its evolution.
Student Publication Brings Together Body of International Art and Design Research
Students at the Royal College of Art have published a book stemming from their inaugural conference last year, pulling together a rigorous body of international art and design research.
The Edge of Our Thinking, is a collection of 13 papers by student researchers from colleges across England, Wales, Germany and Italy, distilling key topics that emerged at the multi-disciplinary conference of the same name in November 2011.
'It gives a strong overview of what research in art and design can do’, according to editor, RCA Critical Writing in Art and Design research student Florian Schmidt. Book content has been organised into themes exploring art and design research through notions of physicality and form, from the three-dimensional through to the linear and intangible. 'It draws a line from the more classical research through to the more experimental,' Schmidt added.
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RCA Announces Ten PhD Scholarships in Celebration of 175th Anniversary
The Royal College of Art has announced ten new individual PhD scholarships as part of its 175th anniversary celebrations.
The scholarships will be awarded to new students starting the academic year 2013-14 on the basis of an outstanding PhD proposal and relevance to the College's strategic research themes and centres. These include research across each of the College's six schools, the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, which specialises in themes such as ageing population and well-being, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Creative Exchange Research Hub, which explores the future of the digital public space.
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Liverpool Biennial Raises Standing of Curating Contemporary Art Research
Curating Contemporary Art tutor Ros Gray presented research as part of a symposium exploring the work of artist John Akomfrah and British cultural studies founding father Stuart Hall at the Liverpool Biennial in November 2012.
The symposium, Reconstruction Work, brought together Gray, David Scott, editor and director of Small Axe, a Caribbean platform for criticism, and Mark Sealy, director of photography charity Autograph ABP to explore notions of identity and solidarity.
The symposium took Akomfrah's work as a springboard for discussion about Hall’s contribution to cultural studies and a body of work in post-war Britain on identity, according to Gray.
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Image and Language Conference Strengthens Chinese Ties
A research conference at the Royal College of Art in November is set to strengthen UK ties with leading Chinese art colleges bringing together eminent visual arts theorists, academics and artists to explore the interplay of language, image and translation.
The RCA has already offered two places on its MA Photography programme to students at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, and is mooting exchanges ahead of the two-day conference, The Shadow of Language. This will bring together representatives from the RCA, the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing, the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, Goldsmiths, the London College of Communication and the University of Essex.
The Shadow of Language is the College’s response to a dynamic international conference held last year at the Central Academy of Fine Art, in Beijing, which explored the idea of the ‘shadow image’ – the direct translation of the Chinese word for photography, according to Professor of Photography at the RCA, Olivier Richon, organiser of the UK event.
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RCA Fine Art Research Breaks Ground in Foundry Sphere
The Royal College of Art's Fine Art Research has broken ground in foundry practice, bringing together the field’s art and commercial facets for the first time ever in a two-day knowledge exchange event.
RCA Fine Art Research Leader Dr Patricia Lyons, with RCA foundry manager Irene Gunston, convened more than 100 delegates – practitioners, historians, educators, artists, founders and students – for two days of talks, roundtables, a pop-up exhibition, film screening, a London tour of public commissions and a private view of the Royal Academy of Arts’ landmark exhibition Bronze.
Harvard research curator Dr Francesca Bewer, the Victoria & Albert Museum’s senior curator of sculpture Peta Motture, and Fashion Architecture Taste director Sam Jacob were among the keynote speakers.
Bringing together all facets of the foundry arena for a knowledge-sharing event has been groundbreaking, according to Dr Patricia Lyons, because ‘it is a competitive practice that has a long-standing tradition of secrecy stemming from the days of alchemy and secret recipes’.
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Symbolic Value of Fashion and Shifting Media Control Among Discussion at Fashion the City Symposium Day One
The symbolic value of fashion, the role of flagships in fashion retail, and the shift in fashion media in developing economies were key discussions at the RCA’s Fashioning the City symposium’s this morning.
The three-day symposium, organised by Fashion research candidate Nathaniel Beards, has attracted delegates from both academia and industry, from as far afield as Brazil to Portugal and across the UK.
Earlier in the day, Ellen Loots from the University of Antwerp in Belgium presented research commissioned by the Belgian government into how fashion is valued through cultural worth.
The findings, gathered from 1,000 respondents, suggested that in terms of values including personal development, social dimension and creativity, fashion was generally less culturally regarded than music and design, but higher than advertising. Fashion was regarded highly for its social dimension.
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Fashion Research Hosts Major Academic Conference
The Royal College of Art will hold a major academic fashion conference in September 2012, convened by Womenswear research student Nathaniel Beard.
The aim is to offer a contemporary perspective on current issues impacting the fashion industry. The conference is an advance for fashion research at the College in that the only academic events to have addressed fashion recently have stemmed from a Materials/Textiles perspective or from the Critical & Historical Studies programme.
Fashioning the City: Exploring Fashion Cultures, Structures and Systems will bring together 50 papers, 60 speakers and an audience of around 100 academics from across the globe.
Together, they will lead theory and debate on how the dominance of the world’s five fashion capitals – Paris, London, Milan, New York, and Tokyo – is being challenged by innovations in technology, new processes of manufacturing and the emergence of the BRIC economies.
From the ability of technology to broadcast and disseminate live catwalk shows to concerns around the origin and authenticity of ‘Made In’ labels, the conference will explore the construction of fashion cultures and systems today, and how cities including Amsterdam, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Dakar, Seoul and Sao Paulo are gaining recognition.
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The Royal College of Art Wins Three New Collaborative Doctoral Studentships
The Royal College of Art has been awarded three new collaborative doctoral studentships from the Arts & Humanities Research Council across Visual Communication, Vehicle Design and Critical & Historical Studies.
The first of this year’s collaborative studentships, starting October 2012, is a partnership with Tate Modern. Led by RCA Head of Programme for Critical Writing in Art & Design David Crowley, and Tate Modern curator Jessica Morgan, the studentship will explore Pop Art in the former Eastern Bloc – its perceptions, impact and production at a time when communism dominated. The aim is to generate fresh insights and interpretations that will feed into a major Pop Art exhibition – The World Goes Pop – planned by Tate Modern for 2015.
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Landscape and Perception
The source of the Stonehenge bluestones is widely accepted to be the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, southwest Wales, a heritage site seldom studied but rich in sonic phenomena, notably the lithophones that litter Carn Menyn, the main rocky outcrop on the Preseli range.
A central premise of the Landscape & Perception project is to question the hierarchy between vision and sound in the building of prehistoric monuments, in particular the sacred sites of Avebury and Stonehenge, whose acoustic dimensions have never been properly assessed.
Supported by the Royal College of Art, Jon Wozencroft and Paul Devereux present this updated report on their findings. The website is designed by Rebels in Control and represents five years worth of research into these two 'power spots'.
www.landscape-perception.com
AHRC Skills Development Award for Researchers in Design Practice
The successful partnership of three major national and world-leading institutions in art and design, the Royal College of Art, Kingston University and University of the Arts London, has led to an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to fund an 18-month skills development programme for PhD students and early career researchers in Design Practice at the participating institutions.
The consortium, led by the Royal College of Art, will focus on delivering an innovative programme to help build a critical mass of researchers in design and stimulate growth in the field for the benefit of society and the economy. The planned programme for 2012–13 will offer a dedicated and rigorous collaborative skills development package which will also highlight the AHRC’s themes of Care for the Future, Digital Transformations and Science and Connected Communities.
This new programme is structured around six one-week cross-disciplinary thematic workshops, a work placement/seminar scheme, a series of public lectures 'Keynotes in Design Research' and a residential summer school. The workshops will explore the areas of Design Ethnography, Commercialisation, Design against Crime, Materials Futures, Writing Design and Inclusive Socially Responsive Design and will be led by experts drawn from all three institutions. Work placements will be modelled around the researcher’s training needs, supported by a framework of seminars (pre- and post-placement) to evaluate their impact. Collaborative seminars will be held on how researchers can integrate their work placement experiences into their research degree or project. The scheme will also enable researchers to reflect on the needs of industry, commerce and other public/private stakeholders to promote new ideas in design and strengthen the impact of the research at universities.
The 'Keynotes in Design Research' will feature three special public lectures by visionary thinkers in Design Research. These high-profile events will form the major public face for the programme.
It is hoped that the Skills Development Programme for Researchers in Design Practice will create a major forum for advanced level research in design in London and the South East, which will firmly secure the region as a national centre of excellence in the field.