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34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
Loughborough University
Craft Designer as Researcher: Theorising Design from Practical Perspectives
This book chapter published by School of Architecture Sint-Lucus (Belgium) and Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) was originally a multiple-blind peer-reviewed conference paper that was selected as a keynote presentation in Communication (by) Design Conference in Brussels, Belgium.
¶ The chapter examines a practice-led research process of an ongoing research project (entitled 'Paperness: Expressive Material in Textile Art from an Artist's Viewpoint'), in order to illuminate how a craft practitioner may situate herself as a researcher in the design research context and theorise design from practical perspectives through reflective practice.
¶ Reflective practice or looking closely into and methodically reflecting on creative processes with the help of other established theories (e.g. phenomenology) and questionnaires are the key research methods. The findings reveal that the role of practitioner-researchers (1) encourages a skilled craft designer to constantly and methodically examine, evaluate and document their own practice in relation to the production, the artefacts and the exhibition and to obtain existing theoretical concepts to discuss the practice, and (2) enables explicit and shared knowledge of craft design practice that tends to embed in the creative process.
¶ The chapter also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of practice-led/practice-based research in art and design; this part led to a blind reviewed conference paper examining the problems of this form of research in general (ISBN: 095-257-518-3) presented at the 2nd International Conference on Professional Doctorates (ICPD2) in Edinburgh in 2011.
¶ This book chapter provides a basis for further discussing the situatedness of art and design artefacts in the research context in a peer-reviewed paper orally presented at Making, Materiality and Knowledge Conference in Notodden, Norway in 2012 (https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/handle/2134/10711).
