One of the aims of the residency was also to resolve issues with the existing website, built in Flash, so difficult to update, slow to download and temperamental in terms of navigation. This is the new site made in iWeb and detailing all projects, with links to papers and including a blog taking over from this one.

www.sarahkettleydesign.co.uk

After the fantastic success of the Scotland Girl Geeks Dinner launch in
Dundee, we are proud to announce the launch of Edinburgh Girl Geeks Dinners!

Details are listed below. But be quick – we’re expecting the event to be a
fantastic night!

Edinburgh Girl Geek Launch Night

14th May 2009, 7pm – 10pm, Mini-Forum 2, Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton
Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB

Cost – £10 including hot buffet and soft drinks

Girl Geeks Dinners has arrived in Edinburgh! Come to our launch night, where we hope to gather the region’s brightest female computer scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs and techies for good food and good company. The evening will be chilled, friendly and informal. We hope to attract students, as well as professionals across the Lothians.

There will be 2 speakers on the night – Danielle Wilde (bio below) and another TBC. But there will be plenty of time available to mingle and chat throughout the evening. We hope you can join us in the first ever Edinburgh GGD!

Tickets are limited (40 available), so please book soon to avoid disappointment.

Tickets available at:

https://www.epay.ed.ac.uk/events/eventdetails.asp?eventid=114

Confirmed Speaker:

Danielle Wilde is an artist and design researcher at Monash University Faculty of Art and Design (Melbourne, Australia) and the CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Engineering (Belmont, near Geelong). She is engaged in practice-based doctoral research, at the nexus of performance, fashion, fine art, critical (technology) and interaction design. Her projects include highly visible, extended and extending interfaces in addition to “invisible”, embedded and distributed systems, which allow the wearer to actuate and control changes in sound, colour, light, shape and form. She is currently travelling through Europe on a series of visiting fellowships, working in collaboration with the Open University’s Pervasive Interaction Lab, STEIM in Amsterdam, and the Technical Textiles Research Group at Nottingham Trent University.

Girl Geeks Scotland and Space & Place are thrilled to welcome Stephen Barrass to Dundee. Bring a mug and hear him talk:

Monday 6th April 11am

Lower Foyer Gallery, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art

Assoc. Prof. Stephen Barrass lead research on Advanced Audio Interfaces at the CSIRO ICT Centre in Canberra from 2000-2004, before joining the University of Canberra. His creative research interests include mixed reality, interaction design, interactive museum exhibits, wearable interfaces, data sonification, and generative art. His Welcome Dancers is a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of Australia, and Zizi the Affectionate Couch (pictured above) is in the private collection of the Museum of Old and New Art. Other works have appeared at the National Gallery of Australia, the Sydney Opera House, the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, ISEA in Singapore, and the Seoul Digital City Biennale.

Only two or three weeks left! I have been offered a chance to talk at DJCAD’s regular Space and Place on the 1st April, 12.30 – 1.30. Although there’s not much time to prepare, it will be a valuable opportunity to tie together these various strands that have characterised the placement. There is an element of risk in this of course, given that I chose to pursue a handful of projects simultaneously, and all remain ongoing.

Here is the blurb that is being used, as at the CraftResearch blog:

Sarah has been attached to the AHRC Past, Present and Future Crafts project since January through the pilot SAC Crafts Development Bursary scheme. In this talk she will reflect on her time in the Masters of Design studio at DJCAD with reference to the original aims of the residency, outlining the ‘Little Stories’, or strands of research, that she has been pursuing. Funding was awarded to support “a practice led investigation of craft through engagement with the emerging needs of critical and functional interaction design”, and the subsequent demonstration of craft as a discipline to other fields of creative practice.

The Little Stories that have emerged include Early Moves, the design of attachments for body worn sensor networks for pre school children in a project investigating rich motor control development, and Migration, starting points for a lo-tech formal design method for working with state change materials. In addition, the residency has provided a valuable space for reflection on the development of a new area of practice, and Sarah will take the opportunity here to pull out some of the commonalities in her work in fashion and textiles, jewellery and interaction design, to create new directions for research and creative outputs, and to create a positive narrative of an interdisciplinary and experimental practice.

So far in Early Moves, we have tested some sketch prototypes for their broad aesthetic appeal with 4 and 5 year olds, for their ability to keep the sensors in place reliably, and for their robustness in the face of throwing activities in the playground. In this way we are trying to unite works like, looks like and behaves like, as well as introducing a higher level of interaction in the form of engaging the children in choosing their wearables and decorating them with stickers. To involve everyone, we plan to provide wearable ‘looks like’ prototypes for the data capture sessions proper, although supplying stickers worked very well this first session. The opportunity to make these other non-working prototypes allows me to explore ideal aesthetics for the technology were it to be redesigned for wearability.

I’ve just got into the studio to hear the masters students have been blowing up balloons again to visualise their design projects. It’s a really interesting concept, to physicalise, and not just visualise, design thinking, and it works to inform the designer herself as well as to act as a focal point in communication with other stakeholders. A fun example from my own experience can be seen in the atelier I took part in at the 2005 European Convivio Interaction Design summer workshop, where prompt questions took the form of large visual dice and completed questionnaires were configured as pyramids, sometimes hanging from an upside down umbrella. Like the clusters of balloons here in Dundee, the use of a large prop changed the studio space itself, and our relationship with the data we were engaging with.

What has been really helpful here, has been the chance to see how such physicalisation and visualisation is encouraged as a part of the teaching and learning process, both in terms of my own immediate management of what often feels like a fragmented practice, and in terms of insights into design pedagogy. Strategies include knowledge swatches (a concept being worked on by Hazel White), visual reviews to draw out persistent threads, and ‘patient’s notes’, bundled records of conversation and and mind maps drawing on the well known HCI affordances of paper in medical practice, where the thickness of the bundle and the markings on the papers in it are immediately telling. I am making use of all of these just now, and can see them continuing to be useful tools – they at once organise multiple interrelated strands of work, and demonstrate work being done when much design activity can be frustratingly intangible. And of course they are particulary important as we grapple with service design and complex collaborative projects rather than the autonomous shiny finished object.

Here is another of the Little Stories I knew would play a part in the residency – a project with the Research Consortium for Speckled Computing to design wearable with a good acceptance level for four different patient groups. One of these is Early Moves, a research project looking at children’s development of rich whole body movement with and without pedagogical intervention. The Speckled nodes will capture the movements of three children over the course ten weeks activity sessions, focusing on throwing. This is one of those projects that could take up as much time as you have to give it, and it’s taken me quite a while to realise that I am not designing the HCI element of this at all, but am to sketch prototype desirable and functional attachments for the existing technology packages. Now I know this, I can enjoy myself, and four year olds are a great age range to design for. This evening I press ganged my own children into playing with fimo clay and began getting my hands dirty with cardboard, sticky tape and other blue peter type materials. Lots of themes from other work is raising its head as I go along – building experience with polymer clays (after Fran Priest’s clay workshop last year, and the precious metal clay jewellery), the feathered elements of Stille, and the perennial design problem of minimising the size of the pieces. PDFs of presentations given in December last year are available on the specknet website here, the most relevant being from the sessions on the 11th.

As part of the NESTA Starter for Six training I took part in last year, delegates worked to identify blocks to their business idea – one of mine was actually getting work out there so it can reach potential audiences and buyers. Well, in a bid to revisit more earlier work, I have finally managed to list some items on Etsy, the US based craft sales website. The beaded work up there dates from my fashion jewellery phase, and was originally sold through CrazeTwo in London. Perhaps Etsy will become a valuable outlet for work that is experimental too, and may be an opportunity when sale or return hurts so many makers.

detail of Stille textile collar

The Netherlands Media Art Institute asked me back in September to think about ways of effectively showing Stille on a catwalk with the aim of including it in the Amsterdam Fashion week later this year. Well, thankfully the catwalk format has dissolved along with the fashion week’s commitment to a fashion tech strand. Instead, Sabine Seymour has stepped in as curator of a week of demonstrations, talks and shows. This opens up the piece for some more in depth reconsideration. The original piece looked at the moment of gathering that can often mark a transition between private and public space, between unthinking action and performance. It was developed at reSkin in early 2007, and has thrown up some interesting issues concerning showing interactive works. In this case, the piece has a sound output, but it is intimate, in that only the wearer can hear it. So although the piece has quite a significant visual presence, what it actually does is far more subtle. For the catwalk, this was leading towards the creation of sound files that could be played when the model interacted with the piece, either in real time or in a wizard of oz set up, but I have to say it felt like a compromise.

sequential stills from the first flickbook

Now I can approach the problem differently, taking it forward a bit. I’ve always thought it can be hard for a craftsperson used to dealing with the emphatically tangible to design formally with materials that shift over time, whether that is human behaviour, as in the networked friendship jewellery, or whether it is the more obvious material of, for example, thermochromic inks. I find it hard to visualise desirable formal properties at many stages, let alone the formal property of the change itself (slow, tentative, speedy, rash?), so digging back down into design methods is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. The problem can be that each stage in the wearable tech design process is very time consuming, and to date I have concentrated on realisation, with no time left over to learn packages like Final Cut Pro and so on. There are various ways to approach this, but to keep it very tangible, I am starting to make flickbooks using photocopied images with movement of colour and form taking place across them. These are beginning to suggest themselves as useful for many stages of the design process, including communication with clients and users, and even as end products in their own right. I’m looking forward to producing a lot more towards a new version of Stille that makes use of colour movement – Migration.