Crafting Anatomies

The human body lies at the centre of our relationship to fashion and textiles. Crafting Anatomies explores how the body has become a catalyst for archival research, creative dialogues and hybrid fabrications in fashion design. Focusing on how our response to the corporeal has shifted over time, the book looks at how it is currently influencing design and socio-material practices. With contributions from a multidisciplinary range of scholars and researchers, Crafting Anatomies examines how new technologies have become integrated with traditional fashion and textiles techniques, bringing together art, science and biomedical approaches. Traversing the cutting-edge of design research, the chapters take us from the forgotten lives of historical garments to the potential of biofabrication to cross the boundaries between skin and textile. Illustrated with 120 images visualising original research, the book reveals how the human body continues to inspire future design, from historical wearables to prosthetic limbs and 3D-printed footwear. In doing so, it provides an inspiring account of how fashion and textile culture now impacts socio-creativity and the formation of contemporary identity.

The essence of research design is the ability to articulate your research question. The research question is the precursor to the study, and a well-crafted question encapsulates all of the design elements for that study. Based on more than 20 years of conducting research, collaborating with colleagues to formulate research projects, and experience advising doctoral students, author Dr. Elizabeth (Betsy) A. Baker forged a research design heuristic which she introduces in this book. She starts by dissecting the anatomy of a qualitative research question, outlines the role of paradigms in research design, describes strategies to use the anatomy as a design heuristic, and provides sample cases that track the decisions two researchers made while formulating a qualitative question. The book concludes with advice on how to move from the research question to the proposal. Throughout, the author provides handy worksheets that readers can complete as they work on crafting their own research question.

This volume examines the role of gestures in past societies, exploring both how meaning was communicated through bodily actions, and also how archaeologists can trace the symbolism and significance of ancient gestures, ritual practices and bodily techniques through the material remnants of past human groups. Gesture studies is an area of increasing interest within the social sciences, and the individual chapters not only respond to developments in the field, but push it forward by bringing a wide range of perspectives and approaches into dialogue with one another. Each exhibits a critical and reflexive approach to bodily communication and to re-tracing bodies through the archaeological record (in art, the treatment of the body and material culture), and together they demonstrate the diversity of pioneering global research on gestures in archaeology and related disciplines, with contributions from leading researchers in Aegean, Mediterranean, Mesoamerican, Japanese and Near Eastern archaeology. By bringing case studies from each of these different cultures and regions together and drawing on interdisciplinary insights from anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics, design, art history and the performing arts, this volume reveals the similarities and differences in gestures as expressed in cultures around the world, and offers new and valuable perspectives on the nature of bodily communication across both space and time.

Digital Health: Exploring Use and Integration of Wearables is the first book to show how and why engineering theory is used to solve real-world clinical applications, considering the knowledge and lessons gathered during many international projects. This book provides a pragmatic A to Z guide on the design, deployment and use of wearable technologies for laboratory and remote patient assessment, aligning the shared interests of diverse professions to meet with a common goal of translating engineering theory to modern clinical practice. It offers multidisciplinary experiences to guide engineers where no clinically advice and expertise may be available. Entering the domain of wearables in healthcare is notoriously difficult as projects and ideas often fail to deliver due to the lack of clinical understanding, i.e., what do healthcare professionals and patients really need? This book provides engineers and computer scientists with the clinical guidance to ensure their novel work successfully translates to inform real-world clinical diagnosis, treatment and management. Presents the first guide for wearable technologies in a multidisciplinary and translational manner Helps engineers design real-world applications to help them better understand theory and drive pragmatic clinical solutions Combines the expertise of engineers and clinicians in one go-to guide, accessible to all

Ordinary clothes have extraordinary stories. In contrast to academic and curatorial focus on the spectacular and the luxurious, Everyday Fashion makes the case that your grandmother's wardrobe is an archive as interesting and important as any museum store. From the moment we wake and get dressed in the morning until we get undressed again in the evening, fashion is a central medium through which we experience the world and negotiate our place within it. Because of this, the ways that supposedly 'ordinary' and 'everyday' fashion objects have been designed, manufactured, worn, cared for, and remembered matters deeply to our historical understanding. Beginning at 1550 – the start of an era during which the word 'fashion' came to mean stylistic change rather than the act of making – each chapter explores the definition of everyday fashion and how this has changed over time, demonstrating innovative methodologies for researching the everyday. The variety and significance of everyday fashion cultures are further highlighted by a series of illustrated object biographies written by Britain's leading fashion curators, showcasing the rich diversity of everyday fashion in British museum collections. Collectively, this volume scratches below the glossy surface of fashion to expose the mechanics of fashion business, the hidden world of the workroom and the diversity and role of makers; and the experiences of consuming, wearing, and caring for ordinary clothes in the United Kingdom from the 16th century to the present day. In doing so it challenges readers to rethink how fashion systems evolve and to reassess the boundaries between fashion and dress scholarship.

This international and multidisciplinary volume focuses on the male body and constructions of gender in a variety of cultural productions and formats. Locating the subject matter in relevant theoretical fields, it looks at representations of male bodies in various contexts through paranoid and reparative lenses. Organized into four major sections, the contributions assembled in this book feature engaging readings of ‘non/conforming bodies’, ‘fashionable bodies’, ‘passing bodies’, and ‘pioneering bodies’ that to different degrees foreground their critical and creative potentials. In its full scope, the book acknowledges the plurality of gendered experiences and the diversity of male bodies. The Male Body in Representation: Returning to Matter adds to Cultural Studies scholarship interested in the body and gender in general and contributes to the fields of Masculinity and Body Studies in particular.

There is widespread rhetorical agreement that the fashion industry must get itself onto a more ethical and sustainable footing. What does this mean in practice, and how can this be achieved in different regions around the world? This book brings together expert scholars and reflective practitioners via a network of dialogue and exchange to help drive forward an ethical and sustainable future for the fashion industry. With insights from fashion design, management, sociology, philosophy, education, heritage studies and policy, the book asks whether or not fashion can save the world. Enriched with illuminating case interviews and the perspective of experts, this book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the fields of sustainable business and the fashion industry, and provides a unique resource for readers seeking to understand more about the need for responsible fashion.

Design Materials and Making for Social Change spans the two interconnected worlds of the material and the social, at different scales and in different contexts, and explores the value of the knowledge, skills and methods that emerge when design researchers work directly with materials and hold making central to their practice. Through the social entanglements of addressing material impacts, the contributors to this edited volume examine homelessness, diaspora, migration, the erosion of craft skills and communities, dignity in work and family life, the impacts of colonialism, climate crisis, education, mental health and the shifting complexities in collaborating with and across diverse disciplines and stakeholders. This book celebrates the role of materials and making in design research by demonstrating the diverse and complex interplay between disciplines and the cultures it enables, when in search of alternative futures. Design Materials and Making for Social Change will be of interest to scholars in materials design, textile design, product design, fashion design, maker culture, systemic design, social design, design for sustainability and circular design.