Bochum, Univ., Diss., 2003. / Computerdatei im Fernzugriff.

Bochum, Universiẗat, Diss., 2003.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis is an exploration of women's domestic crafts in the Geelong region, between 1900 and I960, Through analysing oral testimony and the women's handicraft artefacts, the nature of the domestic production of handicrafts and the meanings the makers have constructed around their creations and their lives is illuminated. The thesis is organised around the themes of work, space, the construction of femininity, memory, time and meaning. The thesis argues that until recently, the discipline of history has privileged the experiences of men over those of women. It challenges the trivialising of women’s handicrafts. It also argues that within the restrictive social structures around them and within the confined nature of their situations, the women of my study asserted themselves to transform their environments and to improve their situations through labour in the home. In ‘making do’, recycling materials and creating functional and decorative needlework items for their homes and families, the women were often finding solutions to pressing practical and economic problems. Doing handicrafts was rarely just a passive way of filling in time. Rather, making and creating was for these women a multi-layered activity that similtaneously fulfilled a complex range of needs for themselves and their families. A multiplicity of deeply personal, aesthetic, familial, social, practical and economic needs were met in the making of domestic craft artefacts, whose symbolism reflected the values and meanings of the women's cultures, homes and families.

Exegesis (MA--Art and Design) -- Auckland University of Technology, 2005. / Also held in print (59 leaves, col.ill., 30 cm.) in Wellesley Theses Collection (T 746 BHA)

This dissertation exists in relation to the exhibition of design practice at the RCA, November 7th 2014 (documented in photographs accompanying the text); it is structured according to my construction of the exhibition. It therefore integrates the question of describing my practice-based research methods along with the descriptions of my research context, and case studies of other contemporary designers; the history of the Arts and Crafts ethos, as a precursor of modernity, is also reconsidered as of potential use for a crafts approach to textile sustainability. The methods used are a compound of the workshop method of experiments at the desk, drawing board, computer screen, loom and print room, along with a search for existing cases of similar textile-weave practice in current production, some historical research and some autoethnography, which documents the subjective experience of researching sustainability in one aspect of textile design. The thesis explores aspects of emotional durability through textile design. The meaning of emotionally durable textiles, particularly those using a Jacquard weave design, was encoded in the form of QR code (Quick Response code) patterns, which, when scanned by a smartphone, lead users through the digital portal to digital platforms which inform and network users. Considering the origins of the computer in the digital binary logic of weave and its mechanisation in the Jacquard loom, the use of the weave process as a medium for encoding the meaning of the material is especially interesting for the designer as a means of activating the agency of the maker and the user. The use of textiles in all aspects of everyday life ensures the proximity of textile as an interface between the familiarity and comfort of the material and the designer’s addition of the function of rationality in relation to others and to the world of knowledge, networking and activism. The research concludes with a range of prototype Jacquard designs, which activate the relationship between designer and user through the medium of encoded messages. Using the Jacquard code as a part of new digital media of twenty-first-century technology is a way for design practice to celebrate the industrial innovation of mechanised weave and to apply this to the challenges of sustainability.

This practice-led project explores the idea of in-betweenness through the physical and metaphorical aspects of glass. The starting point of the research is that glass, as an artistic medium, when examined with a focus on materiality and the making process on both physical and metaphoric levels, can be compared to the idea of cultural in-betweenness. My aim is to provide metaphoric and theoretical analogies that contribute to an understanding of in-betweenness. To examine the mechanisms of in-betweenness, this research integrates literature review with studio practice and object analysis to interpret the material and process of making objects in both literal and metaphorical dimensions. Historical glass artefacts are analysed to explore the idea of a trans-culture embedded in glass exchange between East Asia and Western Europe during the early modern period (roughly sixteenth to nineteenth centuries) and in practice today. Building on the preexisting scholarly analysis of objects from disciplines including anthropology, art history and archaeology, I experimented with glass and creative process in the studio to provide a fresh analysis based on the materiality of glass and the making process. Findings achieved through the conceptual and practical research reveal parallels between the idea of cultural in-betweenness and the materiality of glass. The analogies drawn from my studio practice and theoretical research for understanding the mechanisms of in-betweenness include: - In-betweenness is a fluid concept that is in a transitional state: the state of ‘becoming’. - In-betweenness is a gradual yet disruptive action that breaks the order of things. 4 - In-betweenness is a process of partial or selective abstraction to the extent where the awareness of origin remains whilst ambiguity is also present. - In-betweenness can be achieved through a mixture of control and chance. It is deliberate creation with an element of chance while some amount of control is maintained.

Through eight experiments this thesis investigated the divergence in children’s abilities in the domain of tool making. Despite being excellent tool manufacturers following full instruction, children displayed great difficulty in innovating novel tools to solve problems. Experiments 1 to 3 found four-to-seven- year-olds’ tool-innovation difficulty to be a robust phenomenon that extended to new tasks requiring different tools made by a variety of methods and materials. Experiments 3 and 4 aimed to discover whether some tool-innovation tasks are harder for children than others. Together these experiments suggested that the difficulty of tool innovation is due to the type of transformation required. Experiments 5 to 8 investigated why children find tool innovation so difficult. Experiments 5 and 6 ruled out singular executive functions as limiting factors on children’s performance. Experiments 7 and 8 found that young children have great difficulty in generating and coordinating the components of a problem even if aspects of the task are highlighted for them. Overall this thesis led to the conclusion that tool-innovation difficulty is due the ill-structured nature of the task. Additionally this thesis provides new definitions and frameworks with which to study tool-related behaviour that will benefit both the developmental and comparative literatures.