John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

of a range of people: architects, furniture designers, multimedia designers,
exhibition designers and over the last couple of years we’ve exhibited at
Designers Block – part of London Design Festival. We have exhibited at The
Lighthouse and plan to take it to Milan this year. So, there are a few things that
I’m currently involved in.
To provide you with a little bit more context at present I’m Programme Director
of a course called Interdisciplinary Design. It is a Masters course and we also
have an undergraduate course which filters into this which is titled Design
Futures. It is fairly unique in the sense that they take a social and cultural
approach to design and less of an emphasis on commercial and technological
aspects. So it has been relatively successful. Also, in the last couple of years I’ve
published a couple of books and really that have focused on the diverse and wide
ranging nature of contemporary design practice. The first was this one called
‘Crossing Design Boundaries’ which was published by Taylor and Francis and
this was the result of a conference which the aim of was to get a wide range of
people who were involved in many fields related to design. So there is a lot of
contributions in the book from anthropologists; from psychologists; and people
involved in the ‘soft’ aspects of computing (HCI), but also people that are
perhaps under-represented in conferences and books of this nature – people
that are jewellery designers or that design wearable products. Really we were
trying to show how best those skills, knowledge and techniques could be
exploited within a design context. The second book which is more recent than
the first is ‘Inspiring Designers’ which is published by Black Dog in London and
that is based on eighteen interviews that I conducted with what I think you
could accurately describe as incredibly successful designers. In total I actually
interviewed thirty designers across the world in Tokyo, Paris, the Netherlands,
London and New York - it is important that I actually conducted each interview
in the designers’ own studio. The interviews were an attempt to reveal what
drives them as designers and ask them to question why they think they’ve been
successful; how they have got to be where they are; where they want to go; and
what are the major influences that affect their work.
I thought I’d show you a number of recent past projects from our design
students. I think these four or five slides illustrate well the emerging nature of
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