No description available.

This thesis consists of an investigation of the current use of visual representations, and drawing in particular, when teaching and assessing within anatomy education in medical studies. Although we know a lot about teachers’ use of visual representations and increasingly drawing, especially in the context of science education, less is known about the use of those tools by educators in the anatomical domain. Drawing is not currently systematically being used within assessment in anatomy education in UK medical schools, and its potential in assessment has not been investigated in depth. Four studies were conducted to answer the research questions set for this thesis. The first study investigated the way in which the teaching staff understand the use of visual representations in teaching, learning and assessment in anatomy. To answer this, observations of seven anatomy demonstrators were conducted within Year 1 dissection sessions, and interviews were conducted with the same demonstrators. The second study employed a real-world experimental design to explore if students’ drawings reveal changes in their understanding after dissection. Drawings from 98 Year 1 medical students were analysed in a within-subject crossover design, where students in the first condition drew the exterior of the heart before dissection in Week 1 and drew the superior mediastinum after dissection in Week 2. The order was reversed for students in the second condition. All drawings were analysed for their content and form with an extensive coding scheme that was developed for this thesis, as the existing coding approaches towards drawings were judged as inappropriate. The third study investigated the use of drawing to reveal changes in understanding as the medical degree progresses. Drawings of the exterior of the heart from 46 Year 3 students were analysed and compared to drawings from the Year 1 students. Finally, the fourth study investigated the way in which anatomy demonstrators understand drawing in the assessment of anatomical knowledge; eight artefact-based interviews were conducted with anatomy demonstrators. The findings offer important insights into the way in which visual representations and drawing in particular are being used by anatomy demonstrators within anatomy education and their perspectives on the use of drawing in teaching, learning and assessment. A significant contribution is also made to the knowledge regarding the use of drawing to assess understanding in spatially intensive domains, such as the anatomical one. This thesis also contributes to our knowledge of dissection as a method of teaching anatomy and the need for drawing training within this domain. Finally, the scheme for drawing analysis that was developed, evaluated and employed in this thesis can be considered a methodological contribution to the approaches of analysing drawings in the current literature.

Ernest Alfred Walter George Aris FZS, SGA, (1882-1963) was born in Islington and moved to Bradford where he spent his formative years and attained a diploma at the Bradford Technical College of Fine Art in 1900. Aris was a professionally trained commercial artist, author, and prolific illustrator of 170 children’s and natural history books. He also illustrated over 250 books for other authors, including Enid Blyton, Beatrix Potter, and May Byron, as well as contributing to a number of leading periodicals, magazines and newspapers. Aris was not a member of any of the active artists’ clubs or societies and was possibly shunned by his contemporaries and peers, who considered him unoriginal and an unscrupulous opportunist. Volume I of this thesis seeks to examine these suggestions and assesses why Aris’s name, despite his significant output, has remained relatively anonymous and why much of his legacy appears to have been unidentified, overlooked or forgotten. Chapter 1 discusses the historical influences of anthropomorphism on Aris’s style and those of his immediate predecessors. I have categorised Aris’s books into three periods for this appraisal and examined his technical attributes and qualities, together with his trademark features and characteristics, with the purpose of identifying what makes Aris’s creative design instantly recognisable and his output of illustration so distinctive. Chapter 2 discusses Aris’s relationship with the children’s author and illustrator, Beatrix Potter. Aris holds a unique place in history in that he was commissioned by Beatrix Potter to provide illustrations for her book and was the only artist with whom she seriously contemplated a professional working partnership (1916). However, Frederick Warne and Beatrix Potter later accused Aris of plagiarism and of exploiting any opportunity to achieve a commercial advantage. There is an argument to suggest that Aris’s affiliation with Potter and the allegations of plagiarism had a significant impact on his long term reputation and was possibly the reason for adopting the pseudonym Robin A. Hood. Chapter 3 examines the creative scope and features of Aris’s prestigious commercial partnerships. These start from the beginning of his professional career at the turn of the twentieth century, which coincided with the technical development and advancement of the colour picture postcard. Aris was at the forefront of this revolution, designing several series of comic and humorous postcards for leading printers that are now associated with and representative of a bygone era. In 1915 Aris was commissioned to design six tram posters, which were selected by Frank Pick at London Transport, as part of the National Collection of Posters. Pick single handedly revolutionised poster art in Britain and was responsible for establishing the national collection, where these posters now reside and have remained forgotten and out of sight for the last century. In the 1920s the trend for collecting novelty cigarette cards enabled Aris to produce a number of outstanding natural history designs as well as the infamous Frisky series, where his mischievous sense of humour is much evident in his trademark characters. Perhaps Aris’s final and greatest legacy, however, lies in the legendary Cococubs campaign for Bournville Children’s Cocoa, which was described as ‘one of the cleverest publicity schemes of the year.’1 The success of the advertising campaign meant demand outstripped supply of the product, as youngsters eagerly sought the ‘free toy in every tin’ promotional figurines that Aris designed (1934-1936). Volume II of this thesis comprises of a unique catalogue of Aris’s creative output over fifty years and spans a range of commercial fields of art. The catalogue is divided into four parts. Part one consists of Aris’s literary publications, with a detailed bibliographic record and image of the cover of each book that he wrote and illustrated under his own name and pseudonyms, as well as prominent books Aris illustrated for other eminent authors and a compendium list of books Aris illustrated for authors and other publications. Part two is a record of Aris’s commercial work, including the early series of pictorial postcards that he completed for leading quality publishers at the start of his career (1904-1909) and the six pictorial natural history posters, which Aris was commissioned to undertake for the London Transport tram system (1915). Part three comprises of Aris’s collectables and contains the four unique series of cigarette cards that Aris designed for leading tobacco manufacturers (issued 1929-1935). Part four includes a comprehensive description of each of the limited editions and subtle colour variants of the Cococub lead figurines inserted into Bournville Children’s Cocoa (1934-1936). The aim of the thesis is to justify why I believe Aris deserves further merit for his contribution within the field of illustration and commercial artwork. I have sought to highlight the factors that make his contribution and the success of his creative designs within these different fields so significant. 1 The Grocery and the Provision Merchant Journal, November 1934, p. 276.

The aim of this research is to understand and explain designers - what makes them tick, what motivates them and why they do things in the way that they do. A research approach specific to people, being designers, and the social science framework associated with Pierre Bourdieu has been rigorously engaged. Designers have been spoken to face-to-face and given the opportunity to raise their concerns so that their engagement with design production is illuminated and considered. A series of interviews has been carried out with practising designers. The early interviews exposed areas of interest that could best be investigated by targeting older designers who could recount the changes in design production they had witnessed during their working lives. This life history approach has yielded social as opposed to technical descriptions of design practice and has identified significant technological and organisational changes that have affected designers in the past 30 years. The design habitus is a system of dispositions that enables designers to act as they do and be successful in such a complex, interactive activity as designing. Designers display the habitus through their practice and their interactions with other people, with the products they design and the machinery they use when designing. They make distinctions about the products of their activity on through designers’ continuous physical engagement with the objects of their work and their design colleagues. Their attitude to technology is typified by a willingness to embrace the new; they create new things themselves and this leads them to adopt new tools and adapt them to do their job.

Based on the fundamentals of visual art and function, this research has developed a product design methodology capable of quantification of the aesthetic qualities and proposing objective solutions to enhance the appearance related variables and characteristics of a product. The objective evaluation has been done via analysis of involuntary responses using eye-tracking data based on the visual perceiving process of design. The result confirmed the reliability of the methodology by generating constant results and a good match between the measured values and declared preference. In addition, the aesthetic enhancement methods based on quantified metrics with the sample designs have been provided. The result of the research suggests that eye-tracking technology is a reliable tool in aesthetic evaluation and has potential for further development.

The novel presents itself as a creative critical artefact, simultaneously fictitious and autoethnographic, borrowing from the disciplines of Fine Art and Film Studies to convey its troubling narrative. England has been torn apart in a civil war over immigration and ethnic minorities, the fighting long over but terrorists persisting in the knowledge that they are right. The Dogs, led by a disillusioned soldier from the traumatising conflict, recruit aimless adolescent boys wanting to be “men”, desensitising them to violence through film and ritualistic savagery. Lee struggles with the ease with which he excels in this world, far removed from his mother and young sister, Cissy, and it is only when he discovers that Muma is regularly prostituting the nine-year-old that his new aptitudes spill into his home. Lee and Cissy escape to the Dog’s base - a House that writes on its own walls, sitting close to the Wall bisecting the country, and it is here that Lee discovers the immolating roots of the faction, and the destructive impetus behind their acts. The artefact is sentient. It obfuscates its own text to protect Cissy, steals the words of other texts amidst scenes of torture to explain itself as it squirms and morphs within the reader’s hands, wrestles with its own abject content and sends endless warnings for the reader to stop and look away. This continues a theme of magical realism that sees animal totems as guardians and a landscape as emotionally scarred as any person by conflict and suffering. Reality is unstable, as are facile presumptions about justice and truth. Closer to Home is an example of practice-led research, wherein the text illuminates and examines the creative process behind writing physical violence, child sexual violence and simulacra violence, finding the domestic and familial roots of abject fiction writing.

Early 17th-century Antwerp, despite political and religious troubles, was a thriving European art centre and home of such renowned artists as Peter Paul Rubens and other painters of his circle, like Jan Brueghel I, Frans Snyders, Anthony van Dyck and Hendrick van Balen. This interdisciplinary thesis in Technical Art History, after a general introduction to this specific art scene, looks at how specific aspects of their studio practice, such as collaborations within and outside their studios or the many copies and versions of their paintings, found manifestation in their works but also in their theoretical concepts. For this an in-depth study and examination of c.20 paintings from mainly Scottish collections (National Galleries of Scotland Edinburgh, Glasgow Museums, Hunterian Art Gallery of the University of Glasgow, Talbot Rice Gallery of the University of Edinburgh, Hopetoun House South Queensferry) was conducted, using detailed photography, multispectral imaging, tracings, dendrochronology, polarised light microscopy and SEM- EDX-analysis of paint samples in cross-sections. The technical examination and analysis, informed by art historical research, significantly aided the answering of questions regarding these paintings’ materials and techniques, as well as they helped to authenticate sometimes contested authorship and date. Four main chapters discuss Frans Snyders’ studio practice focussing on reappearing motifs, Rubens’ tronies, Jan Brueghel’s minute staffage figures in collaborative works, as well as Rubens’ and Brueghel’s painting Nature Adorned by the Graces. An own chapter critically discusses the test results of the application of Stable Lead Isotope Analysis on paint samples, which were carried out at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre (SUERC).

Idioms, as multi-word units that contain literal and figurative meanings, are inherently complex and thus unsurprisingly difficult to acquire for second language learners. Though experimental studies on idioms have been carried out with pedagogically minded foci, none have examined the differential effects picture type has on correct interpretation of meaning or meaning recall. Because idioms have both literal and figurative senses, they can be pictorially expressed via either or both of their dual meanings. However, no one has yet tested whether figurative elements in pictures will aid or confuse second language learners when presented alongside idioms. Thus, the primary aim of this thesis is to experimentally test how different kinds of pictures affect the way in which second language learners interpret and recall the figurative meaning of metaphorical idioms. Furthermore, the role of semantic transparency and how it impacts the effectiveness of the picture type is examined. The overarching finding suggests that metaphorically imbued pictures overall facilitate the learning of idioms. However, highly contextualized pictures have the potential to mislead learners in specific and often unpredictable ways. In addition to the pedagogical implications uncovered, this thesis also addresses the nature of semantic transparency and teacher attitudes on idioms.

The science fiction cinema is often concerned about future, and presents to its audience possible alternatives for it. Each science fiction film about the future constructs a different idea in the audience&rsquo / s mind and supports a currently existing ideology at the same time. The science fiction genre extrapolates and speculates about future which results in a new world: Aliens, androids or clones become participants of this world, intergalactic federations regulate diplomatic relationships or natural disasters endanger the whole humankind. The indispensable factor in every case is that new objects surround the future. They are extrapolated or speculated as well from the objects of today in order to fit to and satisfy the needs of the future world of the science fiction film. The ideas about the future presented in the film are supported by the material existence of these future objects. This study demonstrates the ideas and ideologies in respect to future in the science fiction cinema and investigates how the future objects contribute to constructing them.

This thesis focuses on the material selection process in industrial design activity and existing material selection sources particularly used by industrial designers. Therefore, in this study, the knowledge about materials the designers need, and materials selection sources and the methods they use are explored. The aim is, to propose guidelines for a materials selection source basing on the designers&rsquo / needs and expectations from such a guide. The thesis consists of a critical review of the literature on existing materials sources and a field study conducted with 20 industrial designers practicing in Turkey.