This thesis ‘Making places: performative arts practices in the city’ results from a research project focused on a practice of placemaking informed by performative and social practice artforms. The research is concerned with grassroots arts-led interventions in the urban realm, participated in by citizens with an aim to improve the urban lived experience and to form and cultivate connections between people, place and community. This has come to be termed in the course of the research ‘social practice placemaking’ (social practice placemaking3), a practice observed in the placemaking sector as an approach that is informed by social practice arts and an attention on these arts as a means of urban revitalization. Operating at the intersection of arts, placemaking and urban theory, and place attachment thinking, the research has used a comparative approach based on participant observation and interviews at three case study sites: Art Tunnel Smithfield, Dublin, an outdoor art gallery and garden space; The Drawing Shed, London, a social arts practice predominantly operating in housing estates in Walthamstow and Wandsworth; and Big Car, Indianapolis, an arts organisation operating across the whole of this Midwest USA city. Findings are along three themes. Firstly, of the art practice and process of social practice placemaking, revealing the collaborative social practice placemaking art experience. Secondly, of urban space and place and social practice placemaking as a means of reinterpreting both spatial and cultural activities of the city. Thirdly, of place attachment and social practice placemaking and its role in and citizenship conscientisation and the politics of social practice placemaking activity in the urban public realm. The research presents an original typology of practice for the placemaking sector and examines the practice, process and role of arts in the placemaking sector and positions social practice placemaking in the social practice arts field. Significantly, the presentation of data includes the voice of the artist and non-artist protagonists. The research has various implications for the sector. Firstly, for creative and urban professionals and communities, by revealing how social practice placemaking can deepen an understanding of the relative agencies of the various modes of arts in place. Secondly, how this practice may advance placemaking practice as a whole by its use to better understand differences and similarities between placemakings within the placemaking sector, and from this, better communicate its practices to constituent stakeholders in the creative, urban design and community sectors. Thirdly, how this practice can inform the understanding of collective progressive citizenship in the urban realm and inform generative planning practices.

The opening of the Commonwealth Institute in London in 1962 was a striking expression of confidence in the emergence of a united and diverse Commonwealth. For its director Kenneth Bradley, the ambition was to create a building that would be “a worthy expression of the Commonwealth of today and tomorrow”.1 For Bradley, the Institute’s hyperbolic paraboloid roof and its displays inside were positive representations of the political and social ideals which marked the emergence of the new Commonwealth. However, despite the such a forward-looking ethos, the building was also a legacy of Britain’s imperial past; many of the exhibits inside were developed by the Commonwealth Institute’s predecessor, the Imperial Institute, where they had long supplied material for the domestic imagination of the British Empire. This thesis is the first diachronic study of the Imperial Institute and the Commonwealth Institute’s exhibition galleries, starting with their establishment in 1887 and ending with their closure in 1997. If the display of Empire depended on the encyclopaedic assemblage of natural resources, then the presentation of the Commonwealth depended on the legibility of distinct national cultures assembled within an equitable framework. It analyses the manner in which such imaginative projections shade from one to the other in order to understand how the transition from Empire to Commonwealth was articulated to the British public. Drawing on a interdisciplinary framework including museum studies and critical postcolonial theory, this design-historical study locates the Institute’s exhibition galleries as significant spaces through which ideas about imperial trade, national identity and belonging were communicated during processes of imperial rule and decolonisation. Paying close attention to the methods by which the concepts of Empire and Commonwealth are ‘imagined’ reveals important clues about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, can convey powerful messages. This thesis shows how the Institute specialised in immersive display technologies which engaged visitors through the senses, and argues that such techniques reinforced the sustenance of an imperial political economy. Moreover, it demonstrates how such displays could, nonetheless, be destabilised by the political negotiations that characterised the processes of decolonisation. In doing so, this thesis locates the ambiguities of imperial discourse and investigates how colonial stereotypes continue to resonate long after the end of Empire. As representations of both Empire and Commonwealth, the Institute’s exhibition galleries were simultaneously powerful and unsteady projections of British influence.

In this practice-based research the writer compares the metaphysics of the Hindu temple and the museum, and studying the role of the Hindu deity in these two contrasting settings through her artworks. By exhibiting them in a multi-sensory, and meditative environment created in the museum building, she invites the visitor to physically engage with her artworks and consciously experience the tensions between the religious and secular identities of the deity.

An enquiry into the significance of the ceramic vessel has led to an investigation of its historical and contemporary social purposes. Daily use of this object to hold substances essential to life connects it materially to the land and to the human body. This connectivity has created tradition and led to ritual expression in many parts of the world. The research analyses the manner in which individuals and societies have imbued these vessels with memory: aiding memory, obscuring it, telling stories, connecting people, embellishing tales and creating myths.

This thesis examines what literary theory can bring to the practice of visual story telling. Through praxis it examines underlying systems and techniques relative to works of fiction, investigating what impacts and advances narratology can bring to visual communication approaches and methods. This thesis will argue that literary concepts and methods produce new thinking and perspectives on visual methodologies, by establishing a dialectical relationship between the visual and verbal in creative practice; and in respect of literary theory and visual communication.

This research is led by an arts practice, and examines the relevance of the Bataillean concepts of uselessness, excess and non-productive expenditure for contemporary visual and performance practices. Deploying the model of Practice as Research the project investigates these terms through and against Catherine Clément’s concept of Syncope, her science of pauses and the philosophy of rapture. The key terms are investigated through a set of live performance interventions which are conceived for specific sites, and reconfigured in their translation to other sites. The written thesis traces this dialogue between the performed works and Clément's and Bataille’s philosophies. The chapters are interspersed with texts which select one theoretical notion at a time, and critically situate these within ethnographic, psychoanalytic and philosophical debates. Five close-up images and a Schema document each of the performed projects, and are dispersed throughout the chapters or included in the Appendix. A video DVD accompanies the thesis with documentation of Slow Races, the last performance project, a compilation of scenes of expenditure and loss. The Prologue outlines Bataille’s critique of the pervasive, utilitarian economic framework that is characteristic of capitalist modernity, based as it is on an idea of scarcity, and which harnesses individual agency for the sake of profitmaking. Bataille’s contribution to this debate, his core contentions that all exchanges are accompanied by excess, and that societies need to allow for a meaningful expenditure through socio-cultural and wider economic frameworks, forms the backbone of the enquiry. To explore this claim the live interventions look like work but do not produce anything, they disturb one system by performing another. Chapters 1 to 4 analyse a first set of performed works through Clément’s concept of Syncope, a philosophical project which challenges Western philosophical concepts of the subject and returns to what was advanced by Bataille. This discussion gives rise to the notion of the artist’s pursuit of the inconsequential, which is contextualised in Chapter 5 through relevant arts practices and art criticism of the 20th and 21st century. Chapter 6 critically investigates Clément’s contribution to the canon. The final chapter, Chapter 7, documents a departure from the earlier task-based interventions in the practice, and reflects on a new set of works which deploy a more radical notion of uselessness and sovereignty, and which conclude with a proclamation of the Universal Declaration of the Human Right to Uselessness. The research concludes that a pursuit of uselessness is not only a powerful method for arts practices that are concerned with a reflection on the human condition, but is an apposite engagement if art is to break through the limitations imposed by the claims of the Enlightenment and the economy of capital.

This study asks: what are the internal rewards associated with amateur making, and how do they offer satisfaction and fulfilment to those who participate in the activity? People considered in this research make furniture, jewellery, model engineering projects, canoes and cars. They all maintain and make use of an amateur workshop of some kind, and use a variety of tools, machines and materials in their constructions, carrying out work-like activity as a form of leisure. The research aims to understand amateur making not purely as a form of symbolic production – as the fabrication of signs and symbols that have a life after the making process is complete – but to focus instead on the experience of making, and the material interaction that occurs as part of practice.

This thesis provides an account of material objects which are related to the nation in their design and consumption. Addressing a major gap both in design literature and in theories of everyday nationalism, the study focuses on the processes of design and consumption in which material objects are nationalised, rather than on objects as representative of nations. For this purpose, a material-semiotic theoretical framework is developed, contributing to current debates on the use of STS-based approaches in design research. Accordingly, design and consumption are viewed as two sociotechnical settings where a variety of actors-engineers, designers, users, other objects as well as nations-are brought together. In application of this framework, design and consumption of a nationally charged kitchen appliance, the electric Turkish coffee maker, was investigated for the ways in which Turkish nation is evoked in discourse and practice by the actors involved. To this end, interviews were conducted with the managers, designers and engineers involved in the development of electric Turkish coffee makers. Together with the documents collected, the data is used to piece together the processes of product development and design. These were complemented and contrasted with interviews, focus groups and participant observation sessions, organised with users of the product. The analysis shows that electric Turkish coffee makers are conceived as a national project, which translates Turkish coffee to national tradition, and global commercial success via its mechanisation to national responsibility and pride. Accordingly, design practice attempts to produce and maintain the products as objectifications of national cultural authenticity. In the analysed consumption setting, however, users appropriate the products not as authentic replacements of, but as convenient supplements to the 'authentic', which they instead utilise to improve sociability. The study suggests and illustrates that a comprehensive understanding of everyday nationalism in particular, and politics in general, requires taking seriously the material agency of objects- conceptualised as symbolic and material assemblages with politically substantial meanings and affordances. It thus emphasises the significance of designed objects as nodes in and around which relations of power are shaped and stored, and the political role of design practices in assembling these objects by mediating such relations.

The primary aim of this practice based research was to develop, for the first time, a new combination of knitting methods which created knitted garments for larger size women that uniquely did not rely on stretch to fit their body shape. Through working with real women, an innovative capsule collection of custom-fitted knitwear toiles incorporating 3D knitted shape was produced which positively demonstrated the originality, effectiveness and significance ofthe outcomes. This research therefore focused on developing knitwear with an improved fit for the individual body shapes of a cohort of women over a UK size 16. In 2004, publicly available information from SizeUK indicated that the average women's size in the UK was a size 16. However following a literature search, and in conjunction with primary data from this research, it became evident that women over a size 16 were experiencing dissatisfaction with clothing fit. This disjunction formed an early driver for the research idea and helped to form the research framework that spanned three main areas: clothing fit, larger female body shape and mass knitwear manufacture. The research has been necessarily set in the wider context of debates on larger women's self-image and their relationship with fashion. Interviews and an online survey provided primary data on clothing fit, clothing choices, shopping experience, body image, body cathexis and self perception in relation to clothing. A case study research method was developed that resolved ethical issues which arose when working with participants. Prior to knit sampling, a hierarchy of desirable technical and aesthetic knit qualities was established, and a design process comparable to that in industry adopted in order to place this research in a 'real' commercial context. The knitwear was developed from manually acquired measurements and 3D body scanned data, using specific measurement protocols developed by the research for measuring larger size. Objective and subjective evaluation of the knitwear employing wrinkle-analysis, fit and comfort tests informed a final design development process that ran parallel to commercial examples. Amongst the final outcomes of this research is a library of visual digital templates derived from the knit programming, which offers a transferable new resource for future industrial developments of this process. Their particular and unique value is to contribute information to the emerging field of mass-customisation of knitwear and larger sized clothing as recommended for EU development by the SERVIVE report of 2010. This research concluded, as a significant contribution to new knowledge in the field of larger sized fashion knitwear, that improving the fit of knitwear for larger women by removing the fit-by-stretch factor (a major style and psychological drawback for these consumers), enhanced wearing experience and enthused the wearer towards the garment.

Since the establishment of the Society of Industrial Artists (SIA) in 1930, the professional identity of the designer has been a subject of critical debate. This thesis uncovers the histories of this debate, paying particular attention to the structures, organisations and social practices that have governed, represented and given meaning to the identity of the designer in Britain, 1930-2010. Principally informed by close scrutiny of the archive of the Chartered Society of Designers, (CSD), the thesis argues that the design profession is constructed through reflexive social practices, in which the designer has been, and remains, an active agent. It contends that the structure, organisation and identity of the design profession is not fixed or immutable, but fluid, responsive and contingent upon shifting dynamics, internal and external to the profession.