TU Dublin School of Creative Arts Research Groups

ARG is a support structure for artists within academic research culture. It thinks about the field of art and research with attention to the specifics of member’s artistic methodologies. The group explores shared artistic interests and performs occasional acts of collaboration

ARG is experimental in form, producing and making public collective projects, exhibitions and discursive events that simultaneously perform as art, research, artistic research, and as ways of knowing and unknowing.

Establishing group included: Brian Fay, Mark Garry, Barbara Knezevic, Mick O’Hara, Niamh O’Malley, Ronan McCrea, Conor McGarrigle, Amy Walsh and Naomi Sex who all work at TU Dublin in the School of Creative Arts and Graduate School (GradCAM.)

Under the heading Create Lab the School has been active under a number of fronts in this field. Listed below are the key activities the group is involved in:

The Future of Work Research Group - Contributors: John Walsh, Robert Tully, Peter Mac Cann
This research group looks at the Future of the Workspace, with particular reference to the impacts of new technology on work, conflicts between communication, collaboration and concentration in open- plan spaces and the influence of the physical environment on productivity, information exchange and tacit knowledge transfer.

Materiality, Manufacturing and Sustainable Design Research Group Contributors: Anthony O’Connor, Peter Mac Cann, John Walsh, Thomas Raven, Orla Keane
This is a broad research group which looks at manufacturing, materials and materials culture and includes research into additive manufacturing and 3D printing, sustainable design and analogue objects.

CreateLab, Contributors: John Walsh. Under the title CreateLab, the school has brought in approximately €60,000 in Innovation/ Commercialisation funding over the last 4 years, for projects which look at Ergonomics at School, Wireless Charging and Smart surfaces, Better Healthcare Furniture.

This research group looks at Design Pedagogy including such areas as the development of creativity in third level students and the use of multimedia and new technologies in design education. TU Dublin staff members currently conduct Doctoral Research in this area include:

Neville Knott is actively working on his PhD titled “TV Interior Design and its impact on Irish Domestic Interiors” which looks at Interior Design in Ireland from 1990 to 2014, specifically the genre of Interior design programmes, produced, filmed and broadcast in Ireland.

Kerry Meakin is actively working on her PhD in the Modern Interiors Research Centre at the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture at Kingston University, London. The working title of which is ‘The Emergence of Window Display as an Art Form: Design and Practice in the UK and Ireland (1909-1959)’, which looks at the emergence of display design as a career.

Orla Keane’s PhD title “The Sustainable Design Curriculum” takes an International Comparative Analysis of Best Practice and Development of a Pedagogical Methodology to Teaching Sustainable Design at Undergraduate Level

Meaning making in public space takes as its material emerging modes of spatial production and their associated social, cultural, technical and economic processes. It questions how artistic practices can intervene in the economic, social and political processes of place making, developing both pragmatic and critical responses to current challenges in the development of public space and public culture. These issues are addressed through a multi-modal approach that incorporates new formulations of public art and participatory models, changing formulations of public-ness manifested through critical art practice, interdisciplinary collaborations, with methods including sound, performance, digital media and computational processes, as well as curatorial and exhibition-making practices.

This wide-ranging research forms partnerships across disciplines with urban planning architecture, computing and geography using art practice as a vector/vehicle for sustained investigation that produces new insights into spatiality, movement and habitability in the city.

As digital technologies and networks permeate all aspects of contemporary life this research strand seeks to develop new approaches toward aesthetics that emanate from the intersection of technology and the everyday in a post-digital world. Post-digital is understood as a scenario in which the digital is embedded in all aspects of our social, cultural, political and economic lives so that it is increasingly difficult to identify practices not mediated through digital technologies in some aspect. This research strand will concentrate on contemporary art and experimental artistic practice. While it has a particular interest in the role of contemporary media and computational technologies it transcends disciplines encompassing questions of the material-turn and critical making as evidenced in a return to making, craft and skill.

This research strand proposes interdisciplinary collaborations with for example computer science, data analytics, media, and digital humanities. It will develop training and discursive programmes within the proposed Hacklab facility and will integrate with ongoing research in the Gradcam Digital Studies seminar group.

Typographic and Visual Communication

This research area has been active in the field of Typographic and Visual Communiction, organising key events in collaboration with some of the leading stakeholders in the field. Listed below here is an overview of some of these events and activities:

DESIS (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability) is a network of design labs, based in design schools and design-oriented universities, actively involved in promoting and supporting sustainable change. A DESIS hub was established in Ireland www.desisireland.com coinciding with a conference hosted by DIT Grangegorman in November 2015. Founders of the Irish DESIS group are Brenda Duggan (TU Dublin), Muireann McMahon (University of Limerick), Simon Rafferty (University of Limerick) and Sam Russell (NCAD).

A joint collaboration between Dublin Institute of Technology, University of Limerick and National College of Art and Design and was part funded by ID2015. Establishing a DESIS Lab in Ireland allows Irish institutions to connect into the international DESIS network that involves leading design schools such as Parsons New York, Northumbria School of Design, Royal College of Art, Politecnico di Milano.

International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD): Research for publication as a book. Lead researcher: Brenda Dermody, Co-researcher Louise Reddy.

An examination of the impact of the professional body on typographic education and practice in Ireland from 2002–2015. Typography has been established as a significant area of research within DIT and nationally: This research aligns with the following objectives set out in the DIT Research Action Plan 1. Concentrate and consolidate research activity, including PhD study, in fields of verifiable strength and national significance in order to achieve greater coherence and enhance competitiveness and sustainability. 2. Ensure greater integration between research, innovation, teaching and learning. The research examines the role and impact of The International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD) on typographic education and on professional design practice in Ireland and internationally. Participating institutes include: Dublin Institute of Technology, University of Ulster, Limerick School of Art and Design, Institute of Art Design and Technology Dun Laoghaire, National College of Art and Design, Letterkenny Institute of Technology and Athlone Institute of Technology. Case studies from participating institutes in the UK, Lebanon, Australia and South Africa will also be included. The research will draw from case studies of student work gathered annually at the assessment since 2002. It will also comprise a survey of selected graduate career paths, interviews with students and graduates of the scheme, as well as input from participating educators and professional designers.

Typography Ireland: Typography Ireland aims to provide a focus point, resource and forum within which to promote typography along the lines of practice, education, history, theory and research. Typography Ireland is supported by the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media (GradCAM). This seminar group, was co-programmed and founded by Mary Ann Bolger (Visual Culture, PhD Candidate RCA) and Clare Bell (Visual Communication, PhD Candidate, DIT). Its attendees, members and collaborators include participants from both international and national schools and professional organisations (see attached). It has also developed a practice-based forum group, TypeClub (see below) and by popular request from its members, a social professional/student social meeting group, Type Pub.

Type Club: Typography Ireland/DIT/GradCAM/NCAD: Typographic Practice Forum Group (Bi-monthly): Co-organisers, Co-Chairs, and Co-Founders: (2013–present) Attracts a number of professional practitioners; course students, alumni and graduates from all of Ireland’s third level design and art institutions

Type Pub: Tri-annual social meeting group for industry practitioners, researchers and students of typography in Ireland: Co-Founders and Co-Organisers, along with Simon Sweeney (Bong International) Shauna Buckley

Typography Ireland has convened two major international typography conferences under the auspices of the DIT: Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI) 2010 ‘The Word’ (400 international delegates), and the inaugural conference of Face Forward 2015 with Rathna Ramanathan, Course Director, Visual Communication, Royal College of Art, (300 international delegates) for which it was successful in the following funding calls:

Year of Irish Design 2015: Funding Call 1: Call for funding: Symposium/Conferences. Award of €6000 received for proposal submitted in response to call for Symposium/Conferences for the Year of Irish Design 2015. Funding received to instigate, organise and stage inaugural annual Face Forward International Typography Conference[1][2]. Co-organiser with colleagues from DIT and The Royal College of Art, London.

Year of Irish Design 2015: Funding Call 2:Call for funding: Exhibitions. Redrawing Typographic Horizons: Award of €1000 Exhibition included up to twenty typefaces designed in Ireland or by Irish designers active abroad. This exhibition was intended to showcase the work of a growing number of Irish typeface designers and provide an opportunity to discuss their work with leading international practitioners and foundries, and to contribute to a discourse—sharing knowledge with international respondents on the real issues relating to the development of the industry and practice of typeface design in Ireland.

[1]http://www.irishdesign2015.ie/programme/single/face-forward
[2] http://typography.ie/call-for-papers/

Research interests include the relationship between design and national identity, typography and identity more generally, the visual culture of the everyday and overlooked, and the material culture of religion; the history and criticism of contemporary art, in particular the organisational turn, systems aesthetics, artistic uses of play and games, and convergences of art and design through ornamentation and information design; contemporary art, the history of art, museum studies and cultural analysis, with focus on the relationship of art to collective histories and representations of grievous histories in visual culture; aesthetic and educational theory of Critical Theory, including challenges to aesthetic, educational and political institutional norms and narratives gain recognition over time; aesthetics of the avant-garde, curatorial practice, vandalism and the relationship between contemporary aesthetic theory, practice and policy; digital aesthetics, heritage studies, aesthetics of sport, theories of interpretation (hermeneutics); continental aesthetic philosophy, performance studies, digital studies, feminist theory, and the influence of neoliberalism on artistic production.

Draft thematics Recent & Current Postgrad Research Topics Supervised:

Digital Practices and Systems Theory

Museums & Commemorative Exhibitions

Visual Culture of Contemporary Music

Protest/Campaign Cultures

History of Irish film