Frances Joseph

Auckland University of Technology, Textile and Design Lab, Faculty Member

Auckland University of Technology, School of Future Environments, Faculty Member

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Frances Joseph is Professor of Material Futures and Director of the Textile and Design Laboratory at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) New Zealand. Her research focus on materiality and textility involveswork on smart textiles, environmental dress, fabric structures, sustainability, more-than-human-collaboration and creative practice. She studied visual art at the University of Tasmania, majoring in sculpture, and has worked professionally as an artist and designer for puppetry and large scale public performances. Frances has an MFA from the University of New South Wales and a PhD from Auckland University of Technology. She teaches courses in design research methods, material futures, and media aesthetics and supervises Masters and PhD students in the Schools of Future Environments, Art and Design and Engineering.
Address: Private Bag 92006, Auckland, New Zealand

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Papers by Frances Joseph

Material-aesthetic collaborations: making-with the ecosystem

CoDesign

This article reflects on the conceptual frameworks central to the project Phenomenal Dress and as... more This article reflects on the conceptual frameworks central to the project Phenomenal Dress and aspects of its methodological approach and realisation. Through a localised, practice-led process, informed by material thinking, posthuman theory from Māori perspectives and processes of 'making-with' we collaborated with the environment through relational entanglement. Engaging with nonhuman phenomena, cultural and scientific experts, we developed mediated materials and textile surfaces as new forms of dress. These were not functional, fashionable products, they were matter flows, formed at a junction of diverse perspectives and collaborative processes. This process recognised dress as material-aesthetic activations, opening pathways towards coemergent understanding. Through this approach, the ecosystem was recognised as the primary collaborator, repositioning human and more-than-human relationships. This strategy was informed by mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge and ways of knowing), through perspectives of kaitiakitanga (stewardship) and deeper relationship with the lifeworld through acts of sensing, noticing, making, and following. The methodology was grounded in an ontological shift away from human-centredness, focussing on matter as vital collaborator and place as habitat where interconnections between things could be explored and articulated. These conceptual framings are discussed in relation to artefacts and assemblages produced through this collaborative process.

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Wireless Sensing Systems for Body Area Networks

Smart Sensors, Measurement and Instrumentation, 2016

ARTICLE HISTORY

CoDesign, 2020

This article re ects on the conceptual frameworks central to the project Phenomenal Dress and asp... more This article re ects on the conceptual frameworks central to the project Phenomenal Dress and aspects of its methodological approach and realisation. Through a localised, practice-led process , informed by material thinking, posthuman theory from Māori perspectives and processes of 'making-with' we collaborated with the environment through relational entanglement. Engaging with nonhuman phenomena, cultural and scienti c experts, we developed mediated materials and textile surfaces as new forms of dress. These were not functional, fashionable products, they were matter ows, formed at a junction of diverse perspectives and collaborative processes. This process recognised dress as material-aesthetic activations, opening pathways towards co-emergent understanding. Through this approach, the ecosystem was recognised as the primary collaborator, repositioning human and more-than-human relationships. This strategy was informed by mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge and ways of knowing), through perspectives of kaitiakitanga (stewardship) and deeper relationship with the life-world through acts of sensing, noticing, making, and following. The methodology was grounded in an ontological shift away from human-centredness, focussing on matter as vital collaborator and place as habitat where interconnections between things could be explored and articulated. These conceptual framings are discussed in relation to artefacts and assemblages produced through this collaborative process.

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Redressing Perspectives: Mediation, embodiment, and materiality in digital fashion and smart textiles

Digital technologies have not only introduced different ways of designing and producing textiles ... more Digital technologies have not only introduced different ways of designing and producing textiles and garments and changed their systems of distribution, they have led to new fields of practice and inquiry including digital fashion, wearable technologies, and smart textiles. Bringing together disciplines as diverse as engineering, textile science, health science, design, and materials science, these new interdisciplinary fields have required collaboration and demand new perspectives extending beyond their initial scientific frameworks. While early research was dominated by functional and technical concerns, utilising scientific approaches, the area of smart wearable technologies warrants diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks to better support the development of these particular new forms that combine dress and device, material and digital, bodies and technologies. Curiously, the fields of fashion and dress theory, and of media studies, have been slow to engage with the emerging field of 'wearables'. Established framings of fashion and dress have tended to focus on systems and symbolism, positioning fashion as an industry that manufactures and sells commodities, or a socio-cultural system of signification that can be 'decoded'. The field of media studies has focused on culture and communication in relation to media technologies, but has tended to ignore their techno-material conditions. In this essay concepts of mediation, embodiment, and materiality, drawn from areas including media studies, fashion theory, embodied cognition, and new materialism are discussed in relation to digital fashion and smart textiles. These theories introduce new ontological perspectives that help articulate the particularity of these new fields, the ways they contest traditional subject/object relationships, and open up new methodological approaches. Three examples of recent practice-based research projects conducted at the Auckland University of Technology are discussed in relation to these new frameworks and associated design methodologies.

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Mnemotechne of design — ontology and design research theories

This thesis commences with the premise that while design practices may be said to have a very lon... more This thesis commences with the premise that while design practices may be said to have a very long, perhaps ancient, history, ‘Design’ as a discipline is of more recent origin, while ‘Design Research’ as a disciplinary practice emerged mid-way through the twentieth century. This inquiry is concerned with the discipline of design from the perspective of the emergence during the past half century of design research, with particular focus on the development of design research theories. The research sets out from the well-established premise that the discipline of design is heterogeneous, with diverse paradigmatic claims as to its epistemological ground, with a concomitant range of ontological implications for what is considered to be within the disciplinary domain of design. In tracing a genealogy of the emergence of design research theories from the 1960s, the research recognises the early predominance of design science and positivist frameworks in defining the disciplinary boundaries of design. Given the predominance of design science within frameworks of formal attempts to define design research theories, approaches to the heterogeneity of the field were concerned with defining a unified field through meta- or supra- categorisation. The emergence of cybernetics and computational analysis in design processes strengthened this position. The thesis recognises a fundamental dualism that has tended to define the heterogeneity of the field, dividing it between design science and design aesthetic, with the former more easily engaged in defining formal design research theories and the latter more easily working in atheoretical emphasises on individual expression and intuition. The project adopts a critical hermeneutics in order to approach analyses of design research theories with an aim to maintain a heterogeneity to the field while yet recognising a series of primordial structures that construe relationality across diverse frameworks. In undertaking this, two competing understandings of ‘ontology’ are engaged with, one opening particularly to ontology as a questioning of the grounding (the meaning of the being) of entities categorised as design, the other emerging from knowledge engineering and computational science, that understands ontology in the formal and syntactical sense of categorisation and hierarchisation. With a critical hermeneutics of design theories, the former understanding of ontology is foregrounded; with respect to engaging with information hermeneutics and semantic web capabilities for information relationality and retrieval, the latter framework is recognised. A key part of this process has been an investigation through the prototype development of a web deliverable design research resource framework to enable researchers to review and cross-reference at a granulated level the models, structures and key terms of a wide range of design research theories. In this respect, the thesis deals with comparative analyses of twenty key design research theories that have emerged over the past half century. A second hermeneutical engagement elicits a series of deep structural relations that work across these theories, eschewing a project aimed at meta-theoretical unification. Correlations are then sought with the literature in the broader understanding of theories of research, as well as information hermeneutics. The project recognises that the discipline of design has matured to the extent that it currently seeks to define its foundational frameworks from within an implicit recognition of its disciplinary integrity and identity. A Mnemotechne of Design, envisaged through semantic web technologies, aims to overcome the dualistic thinking that has dominated design discourses in a project that serves design researchers in assaying the plurality of methodological frameworks that have emerged in the discipline’s approaches to research theories.

Future Professionals: Teaching digital textile design

Digital textile printing now sits alongside screen based print processes in both education and in... more Digital textile printing now sits alongside screen based print processes in both education and industry. This technological shift has led to significant changes in print appearance and its application. As the repeating print textile became an integral part of the development of the modern fashion system, so digital processes are contributing to its ongoing evolution. Corresponding education systems have to develop new approaches to engage with these changes.
Increasingly there is a demand to go beyond established departmental divisions, as new ways of working draw upon specialist knowledge from across a range of areas. Longstanding binary distinctions - between artisanal practice and industry, designer and manufacturer, producer and consumer, are being eroded. Interoperable modes of production, distribution and consumption support new customization strategies, forms of participatory design practice and more sustainable ‘on demand’ printing, within distributed manufacturing and marketing systems. Within the New Zealand context, a digitally based fashion system can support onshore production and offshore distribution.
This paper explores some of the social, environmental and economic impacts and opportunities enabled by digital textile printing technologies, in the dual contexts of a new textile design degree and a series of projects conducted with industry partners. These are discussed as a series of case studies. Such impacts and challenges, including the development of a new print design curriculum that engages staff, students and industry partners, is analyzed in the context of these emerging and profoundly different ways of working through digital textile printing technologies.

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Re-distributed Thinking: Paradigmatic shifts in textile design technologies and methodologies

New technologies such as digital textile printing have led to significant shifts, not only in des... more New technologies such as digital textile printing have led to significant shifts, not only in design processes and print aesthetics, but in the development of new modes of production, distribution and consumption. This paper draws on examples from current literature and from projects developed at the Textile and Design Laboratory (TDL) at the Auckland University of Technology. The differences between traditional screen printing and new digital textile printing technologies and some of the effects of these changes on design, education and business practices are considered: Firstly in relation to design processes and associated aesthetic shifts; Secondly in terms of sustainability; And thirdly, through a number of new business models that exemplify some of the social and economic implications of these new approaches. Within these new frameworks longstanding binary distinctions - such as between industrialised mass production and unique craftsmanship; designer and producer; producer and consumer - are blurring. Taking advantage of these new and rapidly evolving systems requires approaches that recognise the value of personalisation and ‘on demand’ supply rather than traditional mass production strategies.

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Evolving brain-gene ontology system (EBGOS): Towards integrating bioinformatics and neuroinformatics data to facilitate discoveries

… , 2007. IJCNN 2007. …, Jan 1, 2007

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Drafts by Frances Joseph

Title: Addressing Place

by Frances Joseph and Miranda Smitheram

DESIGNA2018 / DESIGN+TERRITORY Proceedings, 2019

Historically, the relationship between clothing and place has been interpreted in terms of cultur... more Historically, the relationship between clothing and place has been interpreted in terms of cultural identity or role, associated with specific geographies, materials, activities or positions. The globalisation of the fashion industry has eroded this specificity, stifling the remarkable pre-industrial diversity of localized forms of dress and associated techniques of making them, and having a significant negative impact on the environment. In response, our project Phenomenal Dress, calls into question definitions of dress as a form of human demarcation and notions of territory as possession. Informed by posthuman theory, indigenous New Zealand Māori perspectives and a speculative design process that involves collaborative making, territory is reconsidered as a rich multi-agent habitat and dress as a form of collective environmental expression. This approach recognises that holistic thinking based on traditional Māori values and beliefs (Mātauranga Māori), has increasing relevance to environmental and societal problems and synergies with emerging western perspectives that seek to reposition the human as part of rather separate from the world. Methodologically the project involves a process of making-with where agency is co-constituted and emerges within the complex and changing relationships of human and non-human things. Matter is recognised as history and narrative, bodies as individual and incorporated entities, and place as having intertwined material and spiritual dimensions. The project involved different modes of working through these complex relationships with collaborators from distinctive disciplinary and cultural domains. Dress-like forms have been created-with and activated by localised phenomena including human, biological and material agents in a critical engagement with issues of interconnection and place The first iteration of the project was based in Karekare, a west coast black sand beach in the Waitakere Ranges Regional Park, forty kilometers from Auckland. The project engages with an ontological shift away from a focus on the human subject, reorienting attention to the interconnectedness of our material world through design, collaboration and making.

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Material-aesthetic collaborations: making-with the ecosystem

CoDesign

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Wireless Sensing Systems for Body Area Networks

Smart Sensors, Measurement and Instrumentation, 2016