This research explores the role graphic design can play in the national branding of emergent nations, and takes the multiracial, multicultural state of Malaysia as the principal object of study. Contemporary Malaysian society and culture are reviewed in the context of present views of globalization and postcolonialism, and the phenomenon of ‘glocalization’ emerges as an important one in Malaysia. A variety of design research methods are used to identify the nature of graphic design practice in Malaysia, including the examination of the national government framework of design practices and networks, the design-led method of cultural probes, and participatory observation within several Malaysian design agencies. A questionnaire survey was also carried out with a sample group of design practitioners and interviews conducted with key professional design practitioners in the country and members of the Malaysia Design Council. These methods reveal that the professional and personal outlook of local designers is highly influenced by government policies and the support systems provided by government departments. The findings lead to reflective practice aimed at developing graphic design processes that enable designers involved in national identity projects to better understand and communicate the required historical and cultural features. The outcome of the reflective practice is A Nation’s Visual Language, a pilot handbook and Visual Identity Guide for Malaysian national branding, which can be further developed by others and adapted to the needs of other emergent nations. A major feature of the reflective process is the testing of the handbook by student designers, and discussion of the results with professional practitioners.

This thesis examines lace as a metaphor in contemporary art, comprising a practice-led inquiry based on the lace archive of Nottingham Trent University. Lace is placed in the context of creative art practice to establish an overview and understanding of the multifarious associations used to articulate ideas and concepts. This study explores the integration of lace themes into my current art practice while adopting methods of research that reflect on and challenge the tacit knowledge already present in my creative process. An action research methodology is implemented, introducing reflective activities to question my concept development and instigate change. Case studies are used to gain a deeper understanding of how and why the application of lace themes and metaphors are present in contemporary art. The research process has a cyclical form in that my art practice is a case study that informs and enriches my creative process. A theoretical inquiry is established, contributing to a philosophical framework built around ideas that encompass lace and the body, addressing the reappropriation from a fabric that once signified only wealth and status to a material that now adds a sexual charge to garments through the relationship it has with skin. The theoretical and metaphorical understanding of lace gained as part of this inquiry is clearly defined through the documented conception and manufacture of a new body of artwork, demonstrating the transformation of my practice through academic research. Artworks were developed that explored the emotive space between historical lace pattern and the surface of the skin with an aim to translate the ambiguity of lace while reflecting multiple layers of opposing themes. The artworks produced were displayed in a solo show entitled Lacuna in February 2012 at the Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.

The luxury fashion industry is closely intertwined with the phenomenon of brand extension. Italian labels have been particularly active in this regard, consistently associating their name with a variety of products and extending into sectors that are sometimes rather distant from the core where they operate, like in the hospitality business. This thesis gives an insight into this phenomenon that sees Italian luxury fashion labels expand their brands into hôtellerie by unpacking the relationship it holds with Italianicity. Examining the cases of two iconic Italian luxury fashion labels, Missoni and Moschino, and the hotels associated with their names, Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino, this thesis investigates the different ways in which they refer to Italy and its culture. It is contended that within Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino there are corporate strategies at play that are aimed at deploying their Italianicity as a means to increase their prestige and strengthen their association with the identity of their parent brands. Moreover, it is contended that the hotels employ strategies of cultural opportunism that see the deployment of characteristic traits associated with Italy and its culture as a way to augment their offerings, maximising the brand extension potential of those labels. However, while Missoni Hotel Edinburgh and Maison Moschino rely on traits of Italianicity for their identity, they also contribute to the construction of ideas of Italianicity. Through an exploration of the different versions of Italianicity portrayed by these hotels, this thesis posits Missoni and Moschino brand extension practices as pivotal sites for shaping and mobilising notions of Italian national identity. Italy is considered here as a narrative text from a semiotic perspective, acknowledging that it is constituted through a variety of discourses and entities, like the ones produced by Hotel Missoni Edinburgh and Maison Moschino, which actively contribute to negotiate and re-shape notions of Italianicity. As such, the thesis offers insight into the link between the fashion industry and national identity.

This research addresses the development of a computational facial language that enables systematic exploration of the external controlled human face with the aim to identify fundamental electro-facial choreographic patterns. Rewiring the human face to an external digital control system, has sparked a radical new way of thinking about the human facial display. Radical, as facial movement is now rooted in digital instead of neural computation. The human face has become an extension of a digital control system inheriting its characteristics: i.e. temporal accuracy, consistency of execution and high programmability. How do we conceptualize the thinking about the human face as a digital computational display device? What are the implications of the “regime change” from neural to digital? The research addresses these issues within the contextual framework where it also originated, in the practice of hacking. It uses the results oriented methods and strategies of hacking to analyze, explore and contextualize the human facial display as a site for digital computational expression. The contributions of this work include the following. 1) External facial control transgresses the neural performance limitations and enables us to think about facial movement from a digital computational choreographic paradigm. 2) A facial language, the Language of Facial E-motion, that allows systematic computational exploration of possible facial movement patterns. Choreologic probing of dynamic face space has brought about unseen facial movement patterns and has uncovered a latent expressive potential of the facial hardware. 3) An Electro-Facial Choreographic Nomenclature that describes the typical e-facial movement patterns in a binomial scheme that form the fundamental building blocks of electro-facial choreography. 4) External facial control has emancipated the human face from subjugation by the neural brain. Because the human face can be programmed at will, it can move freely, consistently and unencumbered; it metaphorically has attained Freedom of Facial Expression. 5) External facial control allows any external computational process to have unrestricted access to a possibly remote facial display. Consequently, the human facial display is made communist and has attained a Democratization of Facial Access on the hardware level. 6) On the meta level, the human face has found new uses, alienated from its original purpose of displaying the emotions, which is expressed by the German word “Zweckentfremdung.” 7) Facial hacking, as presented in this thesis, can be of value to the discussion about cross- or interdisciplinary artistic research as being clearly positioned in-between disciplines. 8) A facial control system that allows safe and concurrent facial muscle control by means of a multiplexed mono-polar muscle stimulus scheme.

The empirical focus of this thesis is the creative practice of a select number of contemporary British based high fashion women's shoe designers. The research responds to an existing gap in theoretical debates on fashion, in particular shoes, as to what creativity in design entails. Based upon a twenty month long ethnography with twenty three shoe designers and other informants, my thesis contributes original knowledge of what shoe designers do to create shoes. Through a holistic approach to the study of creativity, the research demonstrates that ideas are not always the starting point of creativity. The designers work as individuals and thus their creative process cannot be reduced to the strict linear sequence that design discourse can assume. My work contributes to material culture by demonstrating, in the context of shoe design, what materiality actually is. The thesis reveals the inspirational and agentic properties of the materials of shoe design, just as the practitioners act upon the materials so do materials act upon them. Through the study of materials creativity is presented as an embodied practice where the practitioner exists in a dialogue between materials, creative processes and forms. By showing how materials give life to shoes, I have produced a significantly mc e dynarric approach to material culture. The research has encompassed the creative network surrounding the shoe designer and reveals the complexity and relationality of the creative process. I have shown that creativity in shoe design moves beyond the realm of the individual to encompass a network of humans and materials. Inherent in the study of this practical process was the difficulty for designers to verbalise their creativity and in order to overcome this barrier, a phenomenological approach was required. This was achieved by learning to design and make shoes. The final part of the thesis traces my journey through the learning of these practical processes and in so doing reflects back upon the ethnographic findings. What emerges from my research is that creativity in shoe design is a sensorial, material and embodied process for these practitioners of shoe design.

The thesis covers Korean avant-garde art history and the dilemma that faced Korean artists at the end of the Japanese Colonial Period (1910-1945). Current literature adequately details avant-garde as progressive fine arts; however, there is limited literature on Korean art in this period. This thesis suggests the term avant-garde dilemma to indicate Korean artists‘ difficulty in style selection to follow a traditional aesthetical trend or progressive socio-political attitude for the foundation of Korean post-modernism. A salient démarche is found when Korean political avant-garde artists meet this dilemma in the midst of the Korean Demonstration Era (1976-1989) that initiates the decline of aesthetical activism and Demonstrative Art. Several styles of avant-garde dilemma after the Korea War are critiqued in the avant-garde evolution; subsequently, there arise hybrid styles between socio-political avant-garde and aesthetical avant-garde styles in Contemporary Korean Art. The examples included are Nam-Jun Baik‘s Video Art (a combination of art and technology), Do-Ho Suh‘s combination of meticulous sculpture with installation to satire Korean neo-capitalist society, Doo-Shik Lee‘s combination of oriental color with western gesture, and Suk-Chang Hong‘s free calligraphy to combine still-life, landscape, calligraphy, and scribbling. Related artistic, political, and social developments since 2000, illustrate the climax of the Korean avant-garde dilemma and my artistic motivation to create Iron Age through a medium of stainless steel & plastic with polyurethane pigments. Iron Age exemplifies the development of a new hybrid style (painting and sculpture) to resolve the ideological avant-garde dilemma. This thesis develops the hybrid term Aesthetical and Socio-political Avant-garde Art to satisfy two aesthetical and socio-political ideologies. For aesthetical development, we consider Clive Bell‘s philosophy to create 'significant form'. Iron Age combines theories of Italian Arte-Povera, French Nouveau Realism (Fire Painting), German Neo-Expressionism, post-structural Conceptualism with free expression and varieties of composition. Iron Age that develops from Adorno‘s socio-critical expression to describe a dystopia through Material Language, Destroy Structure, Dissipative Void, Metamorphosed Texture, Letters and Personages, Smoke and Shade, and Symbolic Coloring. A visual Socio-political message is developed through metamorphosis and deconstruction skills under Iron Age that form a core motif of Scrooge Repent as the mirror image of Scrooge‘s redemption of in A Christmas Carol to show a futuristic material paradise destroyed through war, terrorism, and spiritual desolateness.

This thesis examines the decline in Pakistani cinema during the last two decades. It examines the history of the cinema and exposes some possible, previously ignored, causes for that decline. This research led the author to ask “Can new and convergent media be helpful in reviving the Pakistani cinema?” The thesis introduces the ideas of established and emergent cinema, building on the work of Williams (1977) in discussing the ideas of dominant, residual and emergent culture. The exploration reveals two gaps in the film industry: first, the lack of training in the making of films; and, second, the change in possible production methods allowed by new and emergent technologies. The thesis addresses both of these gaps by suggesting new production paradigms which incorporate the new technology and by examining two scripts to develop methodologies for teaching. The scripts are produced into films as the practice section of the research. The first film, creative element 1, is developed using some of the new tehnologies, students as crew and the available resources of an educational establishment to test the methodologies that have been derived. The outcomes of the creative element 1 laid the foundation of the second film, creative element 2. It is shot on mobile phones and distributed from Pakistan through Vimeo with a negligible budget. The social networks helped to arrange equipment and locations and allowed extreme freedom to the filmmaker.

My research investigates the aesthetics of visual complexity in the practice and perception of visual art and design. The aim is to understand visual complexity in terms of the relationship between the objective properties of images and subjective properties of perception. I take a computational and empirical approach to this subject, incorporating methods from information theory, computer graphics, complexity theory and experimental psychology. For testing, I create cellular automata programs to generate stimulus images, and borrow other types of visual material from students and professional artists, designers and craftspeople. Visual complexity is measured in two ways: Firstly, an objective measure of complexity is based on the compression of digital image files, which provides an information-based scale of order to randomness. Secondly, psychophysical techniques are employed to measure the subjective complexity of the images and other aesthetic judgements. Research in complex systems theory and experimental aesthetics suggests that we can expect an inverted ‘U’ correlation between the two measures of complexity. This project makes an original contribution to knowledge with empirical evidence for the hypothetical correlation of information-based and perceived complexity. With cellular automata images from simple to complex the results show an inverted ‘U’ correlation; the measures diverge as images approach randomness. The file compression measure fares less well with art and design images in these tests, however, perhaps because of the wide variety of visual material. Preference is more variable than judgements of complexity, and art-trained participants rated images higher than untrained participants. The implication is that although the file compression measure does not entirely correspond with human perception, the correlation we have found tells us that we can understand visual complexity as a mixture of order and chaos. A balance of complexity allows for visual exploration and pattern-finding which contributes to aesthetic value. The findings also provide a basis for creative experimentation in art and design practice.

The activities of the Indian clothing industry supplying Western markets have been investigated, with particular reference to identifying where improvements could be made to supply chain management. Focus group discussions, case studies and questionnaire analysis established that long lead-times in pre-production areas were of great concern. However Indian apparel manufacturers were found to be more cost conscious and rather less conscious about the value of time in pre-production areas. It was found that pre-production activities constituted 73% of total manufacturing lead time and have high positive correlation (0.96) with total manufacturing lead time. Preproduction activities in India mainly consist of prototype making and pre-production sample development; of which approval processes were found to have a high correlation (0.63) with pre-production. A significant (more than 50%) time of all activities consist of waiting time, which has positive influence on total lead time (0.86). Improvements to sample approval processes such as streamlining iterations and bottlenecks could eliminate some non-value added activities and reduce total manufacturing lead times by as much as 12 per cent. The average loss of time due to intermittent work interruptions in skill-based activities such as grading ranged from 15% to 24%; this could be saved by prioritising workload distribution to resources. Implementation of critical chain methodology compressed the pre-production time by 40%, resulting overall improvement of lead time by 29%. A skewed distribution of workload on resources in the pre-production chain tended to result in unbalanced planning and inefficiencies. A multi-project Gantt chart when implemented through software could help rationalise the distribution of resources, levelling the workload with better prioritising of activities, thus leading to better management of bottleneck resources.

This thesis investigates the potential in applying a practice-orientated approach to women’s everyday hair care routines to inform sustainable design and sustainable consumption strategies. It seeks to develop an understanding of the multi-relational elements that make up the practice and to recognise how these elements influence what women do to their hair, and how often, and how these actions therefore impact on resource use. A practice-orientated approach is argued to provide insights into aspects of the dynamics of everyday life that can help design for sustainability to engage with the complexities of routines that are not accessible to current sustainability strategies. This thesis builds on Shove’s (2004; 2003) work on sustainable consumption. Shove (2004) has identified some limitations of current sustainable consumption approaches that try to address people’s behaviours and consider the environmental and social implications of products in their use phase. She has recognised that everyday routines are complex and difficult to change through approaches that only consider people’s attitudes towards the environment and choices they might make to change their behaviours. In order to overcome such limitations, Shove (2004) has advocated an alternative approach inspired by practice theory (Reckwitz 2002). Her recommendation instigated the need for this research study that examines whether explorative research orientated to practices remedies the current limitations. It does this by reflecting on the potential for design to change practices. A practice-orientated approach offers a way forward for sustainable designers to look beyond individual behaviours and products to the embodied skills, emotions, temporalities, cultural knowledge and ideas that Schatzki (1996; 2002) has identified as making a practice. This approach emphasises what people consider ‘normal’ ways of life and the performance of everyday routines. Cycles of the practice enactments rely on the co-evolution of the interconnected elements; their reconfiguration often leads to practices changing, with design implicated in such changes. A practice-orientated approach required that the practicalities and processes of hair care routines be witnessed. This could only be accomplished through an in-depth involvement in women’s lives by drawing on an ethnographic methodology. The research is based upon in-depth and evocative interviews in women’s homes, interviews with hair care ‘experts’ and a creative workshop at Boots the Chemist. The research into women’s hair care developed themes surrounding the role of products, the performance of hair care routines, the cycles of their enactment and the influence of social relations, that together, provided insights into aspects of the dynamics of everyday practices. The literature of material culture, practice theory and design aided the process of focusing on the materialisation of the practice of hair care. Using an explorative and practice-orientated approach, this thesis establishes a contextualisation and empirical verification of the identified deficiencies of current sustainability approaches through an examination of Boots’ product development process. In relation to practices changing, the thesis establishes a deeper understanding of the practice of hair care, including a detailed account of the interconnectedness of its elements, its stability and instability. This understanding has led to an identification of some key factors, including designs that stabilise and destabilise practices and can therefore reinforce current routines but also potentially can bring about change. The thesis argues that an understanding of these factors is not accessible to either Boots’ product development process or current sustainability strategies. It is anticipated that the research will be of particular interest to sustainable design researchers who are interested in changing everyday practices and academics who examine the conceptions of practice theory and the practice of hair care.