V2_ Knowledgebase

Craftivism is the practice of engaged creativity, especially regarding political or social causes. By using their creative energy to help make the world a better place, craftivists help bring about positive change via personalized activism. Craftivism allows practitioners to customize their particular skills to address particular causes.

The Department of Design | Media Arts is located within the School of Arts and Architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. We are committed to educating responsible designers and artists for the information age by teaching the fundamentals of Design, Media, and the Arts, and encouraging experimentation and innovation. We provide an extensive education in Design and Media Arts practice, history and criticism, and the department fosters a critical and creative exploration of emerging forms of visual communication, typography, interaction and interface design, ubiquitous computing, virtual environments, information spaces, networked agents and other pertinent areas of research.

The course provides a creative and intellectually stimulating environment where students and staff can explore relationships between people, design and emerging technologies in different contexts of practice (industry, design studios, think tanks and research labs), through different design approaches (practical, experimental, conceptual and critical), and by tackling different design roles (maker, strategist and critic).

The Digital Media Master of Research (MRes) programme is a flexible, creative course in the latest interactive technologies, new media theory, and exploratory media art practice. Working closely with Digital Media staff members, the course offers a supportive community for practice-based research, encouraging innovation and active engagement with the wider cultural sector.

Thesis: This thesis consists of a series of extensive projects which aim to explore a new designer role for fashion. It is a role that experiments with how fashion can be reverse engineered, hacked, tuned and shared among many participants as a form of social activism. This social design practice can be called the hacktivism of fashion. It is an engaged and collective process of enablement, creative resistance and DIY practice, where a community share methods and experiences on how to expand action spaces and develop new forms of craftsmanship. In this practice, the designer engages participants to reform fashion from a phenomenon of dictations and anxiety to a collective experience of empowerment, in other words, to make them become fashion-able. As its point of departure, the research takes the practice of hands-on exploration in the DIY upcycling of clothes through “open source” fashion “cookbooks”. By means of hands-on processes, the projects endeavour to create a complementary understanding of the modes of production within the field of fashion design. The artistic research projects have ranged from DIY-kits released at an international fashion week, fashion experiments in galleries, collaborative “hacking” at a shoe factory, engaged design at a rehabilitation centre as well as combined efforts with established fashion brands. Using parallels from hacking, heresy, fan fiction, small change and professional-amateurs, the thesis builds a non-linear framework by which the reader can draw diagonal interpretations through the artistic research projects presented. By means of this alternative reading new understandings may emerge that can expand the action spaces available for fashion design. This approach is not about subverting fashion as much as hacking and tuning it, and making its sub-routines run in new ways, or in other words, bending the current while still keeping the power on.

Since the advent of cinema, visual art has tended to be perceived as if it were in motion. Artists now create less often in fresco or carved stone and more on film and tape, on the dance stage, or in the ever changing, ever moving medium of clothes. In this remarkable collection, Anne Hollander ranges over art of the twentieth and other centuries with unusual depth of historical insight to explore these rich, diverse visual treasures and the underlying themes that connect them.

Acting as creative artists and researchers, students learn how to advance the state of the art of current interface technologies and applications. Through interdisciplinary research and team work, they also develop new aspects of interface design including its cultural and social applications. The themes elaborated under the Master's programme in relation to interactive technologies include Interactive Environments, Interactive Art, Ubiquitous Computing, game design, VR and MR environments, Sound Art, Media Art, Web-Art, Software Art, HCI research and interaction design.

Johnny Holland is an open collective of creatives who want to share and learn from each other. Everybody who wants to share something about the interactions of experience design is invited to join. Below you find a list of all the Johnnies that are currently involved.

Loop.pH is a multi-disciplinary creative collaboration, who create and develop new surfaces & structures, conduct an extensive range of research activities and collaborate with industry.

In Making is Connecting, David Gauntlett argues that through making things, people engage with the world and create connections with each other. Both online and offline, we see that people want to make their mark on the world, and to make connections. During the previous century, the production of culture became dominated by professional elite producers. But today, a vast array of people are making and sharing their own ideas, videos, and other creative material online, as well as engaging in real-world crafts, art projects, and hands-on experiences. Gauntlett argues that we are seeing a shift from a 'sit-back-and-be-told culture' to a 'making-and-doing culture'. People are rejecting traditional teaching and television, and making their own learning and entertainment instead. Drawing on evidence from psychology, politics, philosophy, and economics, he shows how this shift is necessary and essential for the happiness and survival of modern societies.

In 1998 Sabine found Moondial Inc in New York, which resulted from her research and role as an educator, and her previous engagements with Razorfish, R/GA, and Hewlett-Packard. Projects focus on fashion, design, branding, and technology. They include prototypes for intelligent clothing, concepts and creative direction for online or networked environments, strategies for the integration of wireless technologies in clothing and equipment, go-to-market strategies for wearable products, and trend scouting. Since 2005 Moondial is based in Vienna with an office in New York

-Amanda Parkes' Piezing generates power using the natural gestures of the human body in motion. Around the joints of the elbows and hips of the garment is piezoelectric material that generates electricity in response to applied mechanical stress. The electricity is then stored as voltage in a centralized small battery and later can be discharged for use. - Muk Lux Flux boots change shape depending on the speed and motion of the wearer.

From Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin's inspirational photography of the 1970s, through Kate Moss's recent collaborations with yBas and Nan Goldin for Vogue, to the use of reworked catwalk footage and mutilated magazine images by young artists, this crossover is fertile ground for the creative and the original. Whether covering an art installation in a SoHo boutique, Cindy Sherman's complicity with the tools of mass-media, a Keith Haring image advertising vodka, the use of street-art graffiti on a Louis Vuitton bag, or Tracey Emin as a Vivienne Westwood model, author Chris Townsend shows how the alluring, illusory faces of fashion and art are fused in the new mix.

Organised by independent textile specialists, SPINEXPO presents a truly international top level offer in the field of fibres, yarns for knitting, circular knit and weaving (fabrics and upholstery), socks, laces, labels and technical textiles. It takes place twice yearly in Shanghai -China. It covers also creative machinery for knitwear and circular knits.

The Patchingzone is a transdisciplinary laboratory for innovation where Master, doctor, post-doc students and professionals from different backgrounds create meaningful content. In our laboratories the students and researchers work together, supervised by experts, on commissions with creative use of high-tech materials, digital media and / or information technology.