Clive Dilnot

Bio: Clive Dilnot is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 14 citations.

The Critical in Design (Part One)

Abstract: The paper concerns the critical in design which is examined under three headings: structurally, as an internal aspect of the processes of designing; economically, in terms of the internal collusion between (weak) design and the strength, persistence and lure of market forces and private interests; historically, in terms of the emergence of a situation—the artificial becoming the horizon and medium of our existence—that now marks our times as one where design takes on new critical dimensions, above all in relation to securing and creating the conditions that can support a humane sustainable global futures. I: The indispensability of the critical ‘Criticality’ trips uncomfortably off the tongue, feels instinctively awkward in use. No surprise then that its use is unfamiliar, and not only in everyday speech. For design, ever unsure how to treat the critical, the connotations are in any case difficult: it is one thing to deploy criticism (in an operational context – to make it useful to designers as in a studio critique), it is even permissible (just) to be a critic (in a professional sense) – there is, after all, if in embryo, a field of design criticism. But what are we to make of the critical when we deploy it as a noun? What does criticality describe? And what would it be to have the critical not just as an occasional moment, but as that which defines the very state of being of a practice? It was perhaps these uncertainties that prompted, in December 2007, a rare silence on the Ph.D.-Design list-serve. Kaja Gretinger, a designer, researcher and writer from the Jan Van Eyck Akadamie sought help in understanding the potential of the ‘critical’ of design. (The epigraph reproduces the essence of her request.) But though pregnant with implication, for practice as much as for theory, her questions evoked little response. They were, as Barthes might have put it, the ‘motor of no development’. Nor did they provoke what many might think long overdue, namely a debate (or at least a discussion, a symposia) around the role of the critical in design.1 177 JWCP 1 (2) pp. 177–189 © Intellect Ltd 2008 1. It should be noted that Kaja Gretinger has recently answered her own questions in a short but telling paper Thinking Through Blind Spots, 2008. (Unpublished at time of writing) Keywords

The Production-Consumption-Mediation Paradigm

Abstract: “This is a pre-copy-editing, author produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Journal of Design History following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/content/vol22/issue3/index.dtl .“

Doing language together : collaborative writing practice for design teams in higher education

Abstract: This thesis offers and evaluates collaborative writing practices for teams of Design students at M-Level in Higher Education (HE). The research begins by asking why writing is included in current art and design HE, and identifies an assumption about the role of writing across the sector derived from a misreading of the 1960 and 1970 Coldstream Reports. As a result, drawing on recommendations that were made in the Reports for non-studio studies to be complementary to art and design practice in HE, I focus on how teams of design students can complement their design skills with collaborative writing. Some studies for addressing how design students learn from writing in HE already exist, but none have established a practice-centred teaching method for collaborative writing for design teams at M-level. My research captures the effects of my Approaches, Practices and Tools (APTs) across three case study workshops. I compare these with the most common writing model in HE designed for text-based study in the humanities. My APTs use participants' designerly strengths to redesign how they can use writing to complement their practice. This provides learners with a means of identifying and creating their own situated writing structures and practices. I document how my practice-centred APTs position collaborative writing practices as a designerly mode of communication between design practitioners working in teams. I show it to be more complementary to practice and so more effective in comparison to models imported from the humanities. My explorations are carried out through two thesis sections. Section One is an in-depth literature-based rationale that critically informs my investigations. Section Two presents my methodologies and reports three case studies, in which I explore the emergent data collected through a range of qualitative methods, mapping and evaluative techniques. The findings are of importance to those teaching M-Level design courses.