I am delighted to announce that Springer has released a new book Experiential Walks for Urban Design: Revealing, Representing, and Activating the Sensory Environment, edited by Barbara E. A. Piga, Daniel Siret and Jean-Paul Thibaud.

Tassia Joannides and I have a chapter included in the book, titled ‘Urban Flâneur: A Site-Responsive Walking Methodology for Fashion Design‘, as part of a section on Experiential Walk for Informing Urban Design and Favoring Citizens’ Engagement.

You can read the ABSTRACT for the chapter here:

Walking is fundamental to how we occupy and navigate our world. Our streets are populated by walking, dressed bodies yet the role of walking has been largely overlooked by the field of fashion design. This chapter examines how fashion can play a role in producing experiences and understandings between (dressed) social bodies and urban environments. Firstly, it proposes that walking the city is a critical activity for fashion practice that can be utilised by creative practitioners to build embodied and situated knowledges of place through a methodology of ‘urban flâneurie’. Secondly, it demonstrates how a critically reflective approach to walking can enhance how fashion presentations—such as runways and public events—contribute to place-making through engagement with urban environments. These concepts are explored through a case study of a site-responsive fashion project in Victoria Harbour, Australia, entitled Urban Flâneur, which resulted in two creative public events. Here, walking becomes a method for fashion designers to study complex relationships arising between fashion, culture and place, and to produce outcomes that activate the urban site.

ABOUT THIS BOOK:

“The edited volume explores the topic of experiential walks, which is the practice of multi- or mono-sensory and in-motion immersion into an urban or natural environment. The act of walking is hence intended as a process of (re-)discovering, reflecting and learning through an embodied experience. Specific attention is devoted to the investigation of the ambiance of places and its dynamic atmospheric perception that contribute to generating the social experience. This topic is gaining increasing attention and has been studied in several forms in different disciplines to investigate the particular spatial, social, sensory and atmospheric character of places.

The book contains chapters by experts in the field and covers both the theory and the practice of innovative methods, techniques, and technologies. It examines experiential walks in the perspective of an interdisciplinary approach to environmental and sensory urban design by organising the contributions according to three specific interrelated focuses, namely the exploration and investigation of the multisensory dimension of public spaces, the different ways to grasp and communicate the in-motion experience through traditional and novel forms of representation, and the application of the approach to urban participatory planning and higher education. Shedding new light on the topic, the book offers both a reference guide for those engaged in applied research, and a toolkit for professionals and students.”

PURCHASE is available through the publisher here: SPRINGER

Re-opening Friday 5 November 2021 until 30 January 2022

Como House and Garden

Corner Williams Rd & Lechlade Ave
South Yarra, Victoria 3141

Tickets: https://dollhousecomo.com/about

.

Due to changes in COVID-19 restrictions, Como House will be re-opening on Friday 5th November 2021and the exhibition, ‘Doll House: Miniature Worlds of Wonder’ will be extended to the end of January 2022.

My miniature work, Baba Yaga Hut, is featured in the exhibition! I do hope that you will be able to see the show.

“Get up close to over 40 doll houses, many previously unseen from the 1880s to the present day. Together with furniture, accessories, ephemera and virtual experiences, Doll House: Miniature Worlds of Wonder unlocks the imagination of makers, collectors, activists and players and reveals the stories hidden in their worlds.”

Source National Trust of Australia (Victoria)                    

.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

https://dollhousecomo.com/about

Critical Fashion Studies Conference

27 – 29 February 2020

School of Culture and Communication

University of Melbourne  

.

I will be presenting a paper on research at the upcoming conference on the collaborative project Dr Tassia Joannides and I have been undertaking on relationships between fashion and walking.

.

Abstract: Designing urban site-responsive fashion.

Urban spaces and places offer up the potential for dynamic site-responsive design and presentation approaches. Yet in fashion, site-responsive design practice has been largely overlooked. Despite an increasing interest in localism there has been a surprising lack of practical inquiry into how disciplinary understandings of locality can be formed and how a sense of place can play a role in fashion design and presentation. Through a case study of two fashion design courses run by Tarryn Handcock and Tassia Joannides, located in (and responding to) Brunswick and Victoria Harbour, it is proposed that becoming an ‘urban flâneur’ can be a methodology for building  understandings of the local in fashion design and pedagogy. By reconceiving Walter Benjamin’s nineteenth century flâneur as an embodied subject who actively observes and produces fashion in the urban environment, practices of ‘urban flâneurie’, including inhabiting, observing and engaging with urban sites, are presented as a methodology for fashion designers to recognise, develop and communicate situated knowledges. Drawing out these knowledges, which might reflect specific material, historical, political, and disciplinary circumstances, as well as socially embedded narratives of place, could enable designers to build critical understandings of how fashion practice can mitigate, control, inform and enhance experiences (Potvin 2009) and perceptions of space and place. This methodology demonstrates the potential for fashion to expand interdisciplinary spatio-cultural discourse of site and contribute valuable understandings to how local practices can actively shape an urban context, including through public engagement events.

.

FURTHER INFORMATION:

Critical Fashion Studies Conference website

DESIGN LAB TALK: BODY FUTURE

16 January 2020, 11.20am for 11.30am start

Design Tasmania

Corner of Brisbane St + Tamar St

Launceston TAS

Free MONA FOMA event

.

Design Tasmania invites you to a conversation between artist Tarryn Handcock and curator Claire Beale, as a part of the Body Future exhibition presented by Design Tasmania for MONA FOMA:

“Tarryn Handcock is a cross-disciplinary design practitioner and lecturer within the School of Fashion and Textiles at RMIT University (Melbourne). Her practice integrates jewellery and object making techniques as well as critically reflective design process strategies including writing, drawing, and speculative scenarios. The Dust Project asked 100 people to participate in a practice based investigation collecting 200 dust samples, a ‘culture’ that combines particulates from living human bodies, garments, and the spaces they inhabit. This ongoing speculative project is a launching point for thinking about three key themes in the context of design: the duration of human bodies and dress, how dress can wear and be worn in relation to a changing body, and the ethics of bodies and dust.

The skins and cells of our moving, breathing bodies disperse into the world, mingling with foreign matter and waste as we pass through space. It is an unsettling and permanent presence, marginal and transitional, without site or bounds.
–Tarryn Handcock”