In light of current environmental challenges, it often seems that optimism is a required emotional state for addressing our future. This can be seen in how different technological fixes are assumed to sort our futures out at the same time as requiring minimal change in our daily lives. Moving beyond our existing high-carbon and material lives requires not only that we deal with the optimistic end of the spectrum but also that we envision fragile and uncertain futures. In response, this article proposes a designerly format for supporting public anticipation that attends to and cares for tensions between hope and grief, with the aim of nurturing grounds for living with uncertain futures. In contrast to abstract and decontextualized visions and images of the future that can be hard to relate to, the format situates anticipation in lived futures, that are ongoing, emerging and situated in specific locations, environments and experiences. By tending to anticipated losses related to the transition to a post-carbon future, the workshop format created space for confronting shared difficulties and vulnerabilities. Despite the lack of easy solution, the format also opened up for articulating alternatives and less tech-oriented hopeful engagements and practices.

The fashion collection is a primary format in fashion design. Nevertheless, literature on the phenomenon is limited. In the transition towards new sustainable ways of designing and producing fashion garments, it is important to understand (1) how designers can promote change through their core collection design practice, and (2) how collection practices manifest within life cycle strategies for design. The study is constructed as a qualitative comparative analysis of interview data from three designers in a company context. The data is analysed in two modes: first through a framework for sustainable collection practices and second through a life cycle strategy framework. The study contributes with insights on how designers work with sustainability strategies in their collection building design practice and the key role that both material choices and design for garment longevity play in driving the strategies. Furthermore, it shows that the represented approaches to sustainability: circular system, slow fashion and fibre sourcing, reside within technical life cycle strategies with slowing and closing circular loops objectives, and that strategies solely in biological life cycles appear nonexistent. The study is small scale, and insights are therefore indicative.

A product’s form and related affordances, together with interaction possibilities, have a significant influence on the user’s emotional response. Although interaction influences the user’s product experience, little is known of how product interaction may best provide opportunities for novel yet understandably familiar product-user experiences. The purpose of this study is to contribute to understanding the contradictory relationship between novelty and acceptability in product design, with a focus on product interaction. Adopting a research-through-design approach, four bottle designs were developed and prototyped. Two dichotomous theoretical constructs were applied to the four designs: Explanatory-Affordance, Exploratory-Affordance, Explanatory-DisAffordance and Exploratory-DisAffordance-Based designs. The four constructs broadly relate to the types of product interactions afforded through interaction with the four bottle designs. Affordance and DisAffordance-Based designs refer to the product’s ability to afford an understanding of use through form and other signifiers. Explanatory-Exploratory-Based design suggests the extent to which a user may exploratively interact with the product. The four bottle designs were used as stimuli to collect participants’ emotional response under controlled conditions. We confirmed the significant impact of an exploitive approach to product interaction for increased positive response and stimulation of novelty in product appraisal. Moreover, affordance, while not stimulating positive emotion on its own, may provide opportunity for reassurance and acceptability during product interaction when combined with an explorative design approach. This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The dichotomy between the figurative and the abstract has often been evoked as a key element in the understanding of the modern image, as it was the case, for example, in influential art historians such as Wilhelm Worringer and Clement Greenberg. However, if such a rigid opposition between the abstract and figurative has ever been qualified, an unlimited number of images after 1900 – whether painted, printed or screen-based – have significantly obscured any clear distinction between the two.Hence, if one wishes to understand the very nature of modern images it is indispensable to ask what it could mean to conceive of images beyond the opposition between the abstract and the figurative: How could we think of images that are neither figurative nor abstract, or perhaps are both at the same time? How could we think of images that are not either signifying and representational or non-signifying and non-representational but rather a-signifying and a-representational in the sense that they operate and find expression beyond the very question of signification and representation?The aim of this text is to explore some of the key elements in such imagery beyond representation. I will investigate the issue by revisiting a series of iconic images in early 1920s avant-garde film by the artists Man Ray and Fernand Léger. On this background, and in dialogue with film theorists and philosophers such as Malcolm Le Grice and Gilles Deleuze, I outline the basic properties and aesthetic potentials of what I term the generalized image as an imagery that operates and affects beyond the very question of representation.

Editorial

This paper discusses the affect of images, focusing on the notion in the art and theory of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that movement in painting corresponds with (emotional) movement in the spectator and with the imagination or creativity of the artist. It addresses the work of Signorelli, Morto da Feltro, Pinturicchio, and Sodoma (c. 1500) and, in particular, their grotesques. This art form, which became remarkably prolific in fresco decorations of the villas and palaces of the sixteenth century, was appreciated as a figuration of movement, understood both literally in terms of the grotesque’s composition as a figura serpentinata and metaphorically as generated by the turbulent imagination of the artist. It is argued that grotesques constituted a field within the visual culture of the time that, due to its marginality and its investigation of metamorphosis and monstrosity, challenged the boundaries between image and spectator and explored the creative power of the artist.

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts - Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation held a one-day conference discussing the design concept on 26 August 2016. This is Jude Chua's presentation of his article, "Design Without Final Goals: Getting Around Our Bounded Rationality."

Ida Engholm's contribution to the conference Conceptual Type – Type led by ideas, Copenhagen, 19. November 2010.Where are the idealistic fonts, the artsy fonts, the non fonts, the political fonts, the funny fonts, the difficult fonts, the fonts that do not look like fonts, fonts that are frontiers of new belief?We would like to focus on the ideas and concepts behind type. Rather than talk about type by asking who made it and what does it look like, we will start a new decade by asking why do we make it and what does it mean?In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes art.'Sol LeWitt. 'Paragraph on Conceptual art', Artforum, 1967.We would like to borrow from Sol LeWitt's vision and replace ‘art’ with ‘type’, looking for the idea-type-machines of our time.[From the conference call]

In this article we review and analyze rotions of productive play, reporting the results of a workshop held at the University of California, Irvine in May 2008.