Centre for Design Research

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https://hdl.handle.net/10292/14930

The Centre of Design Research is hosted in Te Kura Toi a Hoahoa, the School of Art and Design at Auckland University of Technology. Our aim is to expand interdisciplinary research, engagement and discourse surrounding the theoretical, practical and commercial frameworks that embody design, art, media, and the creative industries.

We are profoundly engaged with makers and making, connecting academia to industry so that research makes a difference in the wider world through writing and writers, painting and pixels, the hand-made and the automated. Through our projects, public engagement and published research, we seek to challenge and redefine what it means to be a designer.

The projects we showcase have a strong commitment to inclusion and diversity. They are intersections: between design and art; Māori, Pacific and Indigenous knowledge and world views; science and technology. They connect with communities and celebrate the diversity, culture and methodologies of indigenous design practice.

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Browsing Centre for Design Research by Author "Ings, Welby"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Illuminativa - The Resonance of the Unseen
    (Auckland University of Technology, 2017) Ventling, Friedrich Derek; Ings, Welby; Bathurst, Ralph
    This practice-led creative arts thesis investigates the metaphysical notion of light as an activating principle and how this is subjectively experienced. Light is phenomenologically explored as a catalytic agent that is interactive yet ephemeral, influencing perception and consciousness. Light is also the research tool used to capture, develop and articulate personal discoveries through designed environments. Philosophically, the research is founded upon the medieval spiritual concept that illumination is a key transformational aspect of our cognitive journey (Bonaventure, 1996; Hayes, 1996; McAdams, 1991; Miccoli, 2001; Schumacher, 2009). This process begins with a sensory experience from making, and leads through philosophical thought to wisdom. In metaphysical terms, light may be understood as a connective agent and a force that provides stimulus and developmental capability. Of particular interest within this context is lumen, described as a state where archetypal light activates beings and radiates through them. This threshold between metaphorical and visible light is explored from the personal perspective of the contemporary artistic researcher. By conceiving material arrangements as sedulous yet unstable conjunctions of texture and light, I seek to creatively apprehend the vestiges of the unseen. As the observer and the observed, I am physically immersed in these experimental arrangements, actively probing and apprehending the deliquescent relationship between making, an embodiment in light and the conscious self. As resonant moments surface, these are captured as photographic documents. Selected images are then reorchestrated as a filmic narrative of sensory expression. Light then carries this projection within a designed installation, engaging viewers through an embodied experience of their own. The aim of this research is to invite a discourse on the potential of light, its generative manifestation and its tangible influence on our creative consciousness within contemporary artistic practice.
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    Paradox: how New Zealand culture enables creativity, yet mitigates against its spread
    (Auckland University of Technology, 2015) Hutcheson, Mike; Ings, Welby; Woods, Christine; Shepherd, Deb
    This practice-led thesis examines the concept of creativity in the context of contemporary New Zealand business. The thesis project comprises two complementary components. The first is a 30-minute video documentary that constructs interviews with four prominent creative business people. It can be seen on Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uN1TLQl8aow This text is designed specifically for non-commercial television broadcast, On-Line or Intranet Video and business or business school audiences. The documentary is accompanied by a series of three short video podcasts (for on-line viewing by business and business-school audiences). These podcasts reconstitute key insights from the interviews. Drawing on interviews with significant New Zealand business leaders and existing literature, it considers how creativity is fostered, if it exists as a distinctively national phenomenon, and if so, how. The thesis project is accompanied by this exegesis that unpacks critical ideas from the practice, discusses the methodology developed for their realisation, and contextualises the ideas in relation to existing academic and professional knowledge.
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    Paradoxical Realities: A Creative Consideration of Realismo Maravilhoso in an Interactive Digital Narrative
    (Auckland University of Technology, 2019) Tavares, Tatiana; Ings, Welby; Nelson, Frances; Harris, Miriam
    This artistic, practice-led thesis is concerned with the potentials of polyvocality and interactive digital narrative. The practical project, Saints of Paradox, is formatted as a printed picture book that can be expanded through the use of AR (Augmented Reality) technology. The technical structure of the book allows for the reading of different versions of a story told by three distinctive narrators (saints). These saints are syncretic and they interpret a story through changes in illustrative content and monologue. The artistic artefact is formatted as a series of pictorial sets 'in potentia'. Once engaged with through a mobile device, animated characters populated a luxuriously illustrated world accompanied by a complex cinematic soundscape. In the development of the illustrations, I draw syncretism and photomontage into artistic relationality and explore ideological tensions and mysteries resulting from decontextualisation and recontextualisation. Conceptually, the research project is concerned with storytelling and realismo maravilhoso (a distinctive form of Latin American magical realism), so the exegesis reflects on certain socio-cultural constructs that permeate divisions between belief and actuality. Methodologically, the project emanates from an artistic research paradigm (Klein, 2010) that supports a heuristic approach (Douglass & Moustakas, 1985) to the discovery and refinement of ideas. Thus, the research draws upon both tacit and explicit knowledge in the development of a fictional narrative, its structure, and stylistic treatments.
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    Veitalatala: Mātanga ‘o e Talanoa
    (Auckland University of Technology, 2015) Toluta'u, Talita Kiume; Ings, Welby; Tu'itahi, Sione; Manu'atu, Linita
    This study is concerned with representation. It considers the nature of a culturally located, discursive form called veitalatala and its creative translation into designed artifacts that consider the lyrical and graceful nature of Tongan women’s talanoa. The designed outcomes of the project consider the memories of three hou’eiki fafine (Tongan women) who left their homeland to settle abroad. Veitalatala: Mātanga ‘o e Talanoa is a creative synthesis of their talanoa, into new forms of artistic narrative, designed to capture the cultural and emotional resonance of their identities. The lyrical works orchestrate photography, animation, musical composition, sound design, filmed interviews, graphic design, sublimation printing on ngatu, and extensive postproduction experimentation, into unique texts that move the parameters of traditional documentation beyond conventional audio/visual interview. In so doing, the ngatu portraits and filmic veitalatala conceptually, contribute to the Tongan concept of luva (giving). Although Churchward (1959) defines veitalatala as a distinctly poetic form of talanoa, recent interviews with Havea (2014), Puloka (2014), Taliai (2014), Manu’atu, (2014), Taufa (2014), and Taumoepeau (2014) suggest that veitalatala is a complex and nuanced form of communication with diverse origins. Significantly, Tongia (2014) associates the term veitalatala with hou’eiki fafine. He suggests that it is a harmonious form of communication historically and socially related to the female gender. This thesis proposes through practice, that the tenets of veitalatala may be extended into artistic artifacts to create a contemporary, lyrical, yet culturally consistent means of representing histories and memories of Tongan hou’eiki fafine.
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