project outline

Project rationale
Notions of design are shifting from a linear product/user-oriented perspective towards a more open-ended and participatory practice. The concept of emergence identifies approaches that acknowledge the complex and shifting context of design practice. Design thinking and performance knowledge intersect particularly where we consider the potential for an expressive and affective interaction between the designed object and the human subject. In this project, we consider the designed object as an 'objectile', where the temporal modulation of the object implies the beginning of a continuous variation of matter and a continuous development of form: the object becomes an event, always in the process of becoming (Deleuze 1993). We are investigating fluid, malleable, emerging or invisible interfaces through focussing on direct kinaesthetic engagement and playful, embodied experiences in different stages of the design process. The aim is to avoid submission to technology, whether through fetish or by disconnection, and to investigate interfaces which are responsive, which facilitate communication and expression and which consider the users as participant-performers. The research seeks to designer/user, user/product, designer/performer unsettle the dominant binary relationships.

Project Objectives

To influence design thinking and practice through exploration and articulation of the emergent and performative nature of the interface between technological object and human.
To investigate how performance knowledge can help us to understand and facilitate emergence in the context of design processes and how performance practice and theory facilitate interdisciplinary communication, knowledge exchange and collaboration in a design context.
To establish how engaging with embodied experience and kinaesthetic understanding can inform the design of invisible interfaces between humans and technological objects, leading to interfaces which are fluid, malleable and emerging and offering expressive and creative engagement between the user and the designed object or system.
To apply practice-based methods used in performance research to three different design contexts at different stages of emergence.
To develop a parallel dialogue between three sub-projects within the frame of a meta-level investigation in order that local knowledge generated in each of the sub-projects can be disseminated to a wider design audience of academics and practitioners.
To use performative events as the principle means of disseminating the research.