Browse Books

Critical Digital Art History
Interface and Data Politics in the Post-Digital Era
Digital Art History has often aligned itself with the practical concerns of digital technology and the responsibilities of art institutions and associated institutional roles such as collection managers information specialists curators and conservators. This emphasis on practicalities and implementation while undeniably important has often meant that there is little room for critical examination of the broader implications of digital technology and computational methodologies in art history.
This anthology seeks to address the dearth of critical reflection by approaching the use of digital technology in art history from a theoretical perspective and critically assessing specific case study examples. This book also considers the political dimensions associated with the large-scale digitization and the application of digital tools within museums and collection management.
A long-standing concern of the field—and also a major focal point of this book—is museum and collecting practices in the digital era. While there is a certain degree of continuity in the field there are some important shifts and changes too. One of the key changes is the widespread uptake of artificial intelligence tools and an increased attention to both the broader historical and societal aspects of the use of digital tools within museums and collection management.

Call Me by Your Name
Perspectives on the Film
Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release.
A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and set in 1983 ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’ Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative thematic and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity.
This edited collection addresses how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general between the open and the hidden and between the past and the present? The contributors to the collection explore these questions in stimulating and contemplative manners.

Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art
Some have called this an age of absurdity and as such Contemporary Absurdities Existential Crises and Visual Art presents the contributions of artists theorists and scholars whose words and works investigate the absurd as a condition of a tactic for and a subject in the contemporary.
The absurd is a lens on the disturbances of our moment and a challenge to the propositions about and solutions for the world. The absurd shakes off the paralysis that what we know must be the only thing we (re)produce. Those willing to recognize that and confront it rather than flee from it are thereby introduced to the political writ large.
This edited collection adopts ideas and practices associated with the absurd to explain how the contemporary moment is absurd and how absurdity is a useful potentially radical tool within the contemporary.
Critical art allows the absurd a space within which audiences can observe their own tendencies and assumptions. The absurd in art reveals our inculcation into hegemonic belief structures and the necessity to question the systems to which we subscribe. Today we see the absurd in memes performative politics and art expressing the
confusion and disorientation wrought by the endless emerging crises of our 24/7 relations.

Consent Practices in Performing Arts Education
This book explores consent as a foundational principle to guide practices and policies in university level performing arts education. It includes descriptions of the structural power dynamics present in educational spaces as well as tools for defusing them. It adapts the consent-forward protocols that are foundational to intimacy training in order to apply them to classroom and rehearsal spaces across performing arts disciplines.
This includes opening lines of communication actively discussing personal boundaries and modeling behavior that respects those boundaries. Additionally the book uses experiential reflections to address the real-world challenges that teachers face as they work to reshape their teaching habits and processes to include consent practices.

A Cultural History of The Punisher
Marvel Comics and the Politics of Vengeance
If the Punisher became a valuable piece of intellectual property during the closing decades of the twentieth century he has become a global icon in the twenty-first. In this pathbreaking study Kent Worcester explores the sometimes ridiculous and often socially resonate storyverse of the most famous rageaholic in popular culture: Frank Castle aka the Punisher.
Worcester pays particular attention to nearly five decades' worth of punishment-themed comics and graphic novels published between the 1970s and the present day. These texts provide the material resources for a close reading of the Punisher's distinctive and extreme form of justice discourse. Punishment after all is a political and social construct. Violence does not imply or claim legitimacy. Punishment does. To talk about punishment is to ask who deserves to be punished who decides who deserves to be punished and what form the punishment should take. All costumed heroes have their political moments; the Punisher is political.
Frank Castle inhabits the most politically engaged corner of the entire Marvel Universe. His adventures should attract our interest for precisely this reason.

Contemporary Design Education in Australia
Creating Transdisciplinary Futures
This book offers a range of approaches to teaching higher education design students to learn to design collaboratively and creatively through transdisciplinary multidisciplinary cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary learning experiences.
It highlights that the premise of traditional disciplinary silos does little to advance the competencies needed for contemporary design and non-linear career paths. It makes the point that higher education should respond to the impacts of a changing society including fluctuating market demands economic variations uncertainties and globalization.
Chapters highlight approaches that address this changing landscape to meet student industry and societal needs and reflect a range of design education contexts in which the authors have taught with a focus on experiences at the Queensland University of Technology Australia but also including collaborations and comparative discussions elsewhere in Australia and globally spanning Europe Asia the Middle East and the United States.
The book is positioned not as a definitive theoretical model for transdisciplinary design education but instead as a collective of chapters in which many forms of learning are explored through overarching themes of curriculum design and experiential and authentic learning and collaboration transforming professional identities and design cultures.

Community Arts Education
Transversal Global Perspectives
This edited collection offers global perspectives on the transverse boundary-blurring possibilities of community arts education.
Invoking ‘transversality’ as an overarching theoretical framework and a methodological structure 55 contributors – community professionals scholars artists educators and activists from sixteen countries – offer studies and practical cases exploring the complexities of community arts education at all levels.
Such complexities include challenges created by globalizing phenomena such as the COVID-19 pandemic; ongoing efforts to achieve justice for Indigenous peoples; continuing movement of immigrants and refugees; growing recognition of issues related to equity diversity and inclusion in the workplace; and the increasing impact of grassroot movements and organizations.
Chapters are grouped into four thematic clusters – Connections Practices Spaces and Relations – that map these and other intersecting assemblages of transversality. Thinking transversally about community art education not only shifts our understanding of knowledge from a passive construct to an active component of social life but redefines art education as a distinctive practice emerging from the complex relationships that form community.

Copenhagen Chic
A Locational History of Copenhagen Fashion
Copenhagen has long been celebrated for its unique fashion design innovation and sustainability practices and yet there has never been a comprehensive history of Copenhagen fashion and its current innovation and sustainability drive.
This book fills that gap assembling a multidisciplinary roster of contributors to examine all aspects of Copenhagen fashion and culture. Grounded in a broad context of Danish culture industry media technology sustainability and innovation practices within the wider cultural and economic fields of fashion the book helps us understand what makes Copenhagen unique.

Constructions of the Real
Intersections of Documentary-Based Film Practice and Theory
Constructions of the Real features a wide range of writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who undertake theoretically informed practice and think through making. These global filmmakers and writers straddle the divide between the academy and industry and they reflect on interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relationship to questions of form content and process.
The book is in four sections. The first is on intimate first-person works where memory and identity are explored. The second features responses to and interventions in historical and dominant relationships to place. The third explores multivarious forms of essay films. In the final section filmmakers discuss the precarity of non-fiction filmmaking in its form and financial rewards. This book is anti-colonial in that it offers diverse new voices and new practices promoting hybridity and experimentation and makes claims for knowledges that fall outside of traditional scholarship. This book presents the silenced and the marginalized.
It engages with current debates about the role of creative scholarship and makes a claim for non-fiction filmmaking as a knowledge-making practice for revealing critiquing and interpreting the world.
Contributors include Kaveh Abbasian Judith Aston Nicholas Andueza Elisabeth Brun Joanna Callaghan Gerda Cammaer Philip Cartelli Lorena Cervera Jill Daniels Kath Dooley Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz Andréa França Catherine Gough-Brady Robert Hardcastle Alex Johnston Elizabeth Miller Ros Mortimer Kim Munro Minou Norouzi Stefano Odorico Rebecca Ora Sheersha Perera Christine Rogers Isabel Seguí Jeni Thornley and Masha Vlasova.

Crafted With Pride
Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain
Explores queer craft and the material cultures of LGBTQ+ activism in Britain since the 1980s. From handmade clothing and protest banners to radical self-published zines and manifestos there is a long history of using craft and DIY processes to explore identities bring communities together and encourage social and political change. Yet many of these histories remain undocumented and are insufficiently researched.
This collection sheds light on these important histories and includes a range of contributions from academics artists activists curators and heritage professionals. Case studies discussed include Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp the Museum of Transology Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners (LGSM) the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt Islington’s Pride Queer Zine Library Glasgow Women’s Library Queer Journeys and more. These critical essays and oral histories are complemented by short reflections from contemporary creative practitioners including Matt Smith Tanoa Sasraku Sarah-Joy Ford Rachael House and Raisa Kabir.
Taken together this collection weaves together an important web between craft queerness and activism in Britain. As the first book of its kind it will likely be of interest to a range of students and academics as well as cultural producers and creatives more broadly.

Contemporary British and Italian Sound Docudrama
Traditions and Innovations
The book focuses on radio and sound docufiction and docudrama through comparative analysis of the British and the Italian output from post war years to the 2010s from both a historical and formal point of view. It sheds light on a rather neglected area of study providing a systematic survey of the development of the form and of its current status and perspectives and at the same time constructing viable analytical tools that can be used to investigate individual productions.
Considering the different docudramatic output in formats and quantity in the two countries the book explores case studies from BBC Radio which continue to air a high number of programmes with a great variety of formats and subgenres and Italian case studies from both independent bodies and the Radio RAI whose docudramatic production has declined since the late 1980s.
Specifically the study seeks to explain how radio language in its purely acoustic dimension allows access to unpredictable layers of truth often complementary when not overtly alternative to the documental truth of declaredly journalistic or scientific programmes.
A well-researched resource for university students scholars researchers and educators in media sociology of media and history. In-depth analysis of an original topic.

Canadian Critical Luxury Studies
Decentring Luxury
Canadian Critical Luxury Studies: Decentering Luxury is a dynamic new contribution to the study of luxury. The essays in this collection challenge Euro- and US-centric perceptions that bind luxury to either a colonial past or a consumerist present. The book announces a new collective of thinkers who focus on Indigenous and Canadian instances of luxurious production experiences and sites to propose a new definition of luxury that includes a plurality of regional practices highlighting that Canadian luxury centres on community and connection.
Each of the interdisciplinary contributions analyse luxury from different vantage points to understand why luxury has succeeded or failed in the Canadian context. From the history of the fur trade to the latest Indigenous fashion movement from the T. Eaton Co.’s 1920s Made-in-Canada campaign to the on-again-off-again Toronto Fashion Week from Vancouver public art commissions to Montréal’s future-forward fashiontech sector the essays in this volume explain what makes and breaks Canadian luxury.
These original case studies redefine luxury for Canada – a former colonial possession and contemporary second-tier cultural market – and lay the foundation for the critical study of luxury in other historically secondary geographies that produce consume and circulate material and symbolic luxuries. The collection ultimately challenges old myths and the mystique surrounding European luxury to give it a new lustre that shines light on those actors who have been historically excluded from its privilege: Indigenous peoples immigrants the working classes. It sheds light on the reasons that conventional expressions of luxury may fail in secondary markets and offers guidance for fashiontech innovations that invest in the individual without imposing dehumanizing values of efficiency and rational measurement.
Although focused on the Canadian context the book will appeal to an international audience of scholarly and industry readers. Its interventions about broadening the focus of luxury studies beyond traditional sites in Western Europe make it an important text for global audiences. It offers an alternate reading of conventional luxury histories sites and practices; in doing so it models a national approach to luxury that can be applied to alternate national markets.
Jessica P. Clark is a historian of Britain and empire with a focus on gender consumption and labour and an associate professor of history at Brock University Ontario Canada. Nigel Lezama is an associate professor of French studies at Brock University and works at the intersection of fashion luxury literary and cultural studies.
Contributions are drawn from a number of fields including but not limited to Indigenous studies museum studies business management cultural studies fashion studies technology and industry. Contributors include Kathryn Franklin University of Toronto; Rebecca Halliday Toronto Metropolitan University; Riley Kucheran Toronto Metropolitan University; Valérie Lamontagne Concordia University; Marie O'Mahony Ontario College of Art and Design; Julia Polyck-O'Neill York University Ontario.
This is a primarily an academic book. It is of great relevance to scholars within the subfield of critical luxury studies as well as scholars of consumer and commodity cultures more broadly and those working or interested in Canadian studies media studies critical studies and historians.
Researchers and postgraduate students studying luxury as well as those studying the history of the development of Canada its colonial past and the marginalization of Indigenous people and with the development of fashion technologies will also find it useful.
Academics and practitioners concerned with the development of city and nation branding will find the book of value.

Crafting Luxury
Craftsmanship, Manufacture, Technology and the Retail Environment
The idea of luxury has secured a place in contemporary western culture and the term is now part of common parlance in both established and emerging economies. This book explores the many issues and debates surrounding the idea of luxury.
This new research addresses contentious issues surrounding perceptions of luxury its relationship to contemporary branding as created by the marketers and the impact this has on the consumer and their purchasing habits.
Crafting Luxury considers work within the field of luxury and luxury brands encompassing established companies with a long heritage: from conglomerates and small independents to 'new' luxury and emerging models with innovative practices. It examines the industry structures with respect to production as well as the hierarchies that exist and the impact these have on both internal and external perceptions of luxury from the makers to the sellers and consumers alike. Attention is also given to the working structures of the ateliers production facilities origin of materials manufacture and the impact of technology on consumption the retail environment and sales all providing a true insider’s view of this complex world.
The authors – a designer of product and jewellery a brand strategist and a fashion designer an architect and a sociologist and specialist in business management – are practitioners and academics. Their approach to dissecting the complex world of luxury brings distinct viewpoints to the debate offering different perspectives thoughts and interpretations of luxury.
Crafting Luxury will appeal to academics and educators industry specialists and anyone interested in luxury as a concept. It will appeal to those in a variety of academic and industry disciplines: art history history social sciences and humanities with an interest in luxury fashion studies design business cultural studies and textiles. It will also be valuable to students and researchers in social sciences humanities business design branding consumption retail architecture cultural studies fashion studies and textiles.
May also appeal to industry practitioners in retail design technology marketing the supply chain and manufacture as well as design professions including architecture fashion and interior design.

Clothing Goes to War
Creativity Inspired by Scarcity in World War II
Clothing Goes to War: Creativity Inspired by Scarcity in World War II is the story of clothing use when manufacturing for civilians nearly stopped and raw materials and workers across the globe were shifted to war work. Governments mandated rationing programmes in many countries to regulate the limited supply in hopes that the burden of austerity would be equally shared. Unfortunately as the war progressed and resources dwindled neither ration tickets nor money could buy what did not exist on store shelves.
Many people had to get by with their already limited wardrobes often impacted by the global economic depression of the previous decade. Creativity courage and perseverance came into play in caring for clothing using handicraft skills including sewing knitting mending darning and repurposing to make limited wardrobes last during long years of austerity and deprivation.
This fascinating page-turner is the first cross cultural account of the difficulties faced by common people experiencing clothing scarcity and rationing during World War II. In person interviews of women from over ten countries are contextualized with stories of the roles played by newly developed textiles gendered dress in the workplace handicraft skills often forgotten today romance and weddings rationing represented in war era film and the ever-present black market. Period photos from private collections magazines and periodicals add dimension to this captivating account of the often overlooked role of clothing during World War II.
Clothing Goes to War will appeal to present day readers interested in curtailing their consumption of clothing in an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fueling climate change. Adopting the conservation techniques of the World War II generation who: 'made do' and 'wore our clothes until they wore out' will help to curtail the fashion industries negative impact on the environment.
'We made do.'
'We wore patches on our patches.'
'We wore our clothes until they wore out.'
'I was so excited when they had a feed sack with a border print!'
These are just a few examples of the amazing first-hand experiences of women from over ten countries faced with clothing shortages represented in this book. Governments regardless of which side they were on enforced rationing and restrictions on clothing so that scarce textiles could be diverted to outfit the military leaving limited resources for civilians. Many people had to get by with their already limited wardrobes often impacted by the global economic depression of the previous decade. Creativity courage and perseverance came into play in caring for clothing using handicraft skills including sewing knitting mending darning and repurposing to make limited wardrobes last during long years of austerity and deprivation.
Seventy-five years later the lifestyle of Western culture has become more focused on a sense of entitlement and overuse. Recently a 'slow fashion' movement promoting growing awareness of the negative effects of over consumption on the environment has motivated people to voluntarily restrict their clothing consumption.
This movement echoes the efforts of civilians during World War II to sustain their limited wardrobes. A great deal about leading a more sustainable lifestyle can be learned from the cultural knowledge presented here in the stories of people who lived through the Great Depression and World War II.
Clothing Goes to War represents an important contribution to the history of textiles and clothing sociology environmental studies material culture and the history of World War II.
This is a book that will have genuinely wide appeal. Local historians and craft groups may want to include this in their libraries many craft groups maintain libraries that discuss fashion and craft in wartime.
Academic readership will be among researchers educators scholars and students in fashion studies history cultural studies and feminist studies who will particularly value the thorough documentation.
General readers will particularly enjoy the personal stories and close examination or rationing and alternative methods of clothing families. History-loving readers will like to see war from the consumer side of conflict. The current COVID-19 situation provides an unexpected context for many potential readers who until now have never faced lack of consumer goods hoarding and market-price manipulation.

Creative Infrastructures
Artists, Money and Entrepreneurial Action
Creative Infrastructures is a new collection of connected essays that examines the relationships between art innovation entrepreneurship and money. Essig uses her extensive knowledge of the field of arts entrepreneurship and puts it to broader practical use and greater impact by offering a theory for arts entrepreneurship that places more emphasis on means over ends. Essig uses illustrative case studies to show how her theoretical framework explains a number of innovative efforts in culturally and racially diverse communities.
The Ouroboros the serpent eating its own tail is a visual metaphor deployed by Essig in the opening essay to shift commonly held perspectives on especially the relationship between art and money. Art is the head; money is the tail feeding and nourishing the head in a cycle that enables the organism to not only survive but also thrive.
Between the art and the money is the body: innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation is understood to be a novel idea that is implemented and has impact on a domain. For that is what the artist does: create something new and unique that has impact. Entrepreneurship is conceived of as the discovery or creation of a mediating structure that can convert the artistic innovation into capital (financial and other types) that can be re-invested in the artist and the making of more art. This book endeavours to untie the knotty relationships between artists and entrepreneurship in order to answer the question 'How can artists make work and thrive in our late-capitalist society?'
Other essays in the collection consider a range of topics including how aesthetic and cultural value are transmitted from the artist to the audience; the complexity of the tension between what art fundamentally is and the reproduction of that work and the recent foregrounding of the idea that art can produce positive social change – through current and late-twentieth-century trends in 'social impact art' or 'art for change'.
As in sports business and other sectors the star artists the top 1 per cent have disproportionately influenced the public expectations for what 'a successful artist' means. It isn’t necessary to retell the stories of the one per cent of arts entrepreneurs; instead Essig looks instead at the quotidian artist at what they do and why not what they make. All too often artists who are attentive to the 'business' of their creative practice are accused of 'selling out'. But for many working artists that attention to business is what enables an artist to not just survive but to thrive. When artists follow their mission Essig contends that they don’t sell out they spiral up by keeping mission at the forefront.
The closing essay is a work of speculative fiction based in all that comes before both in the preceding essays and in Essig’s work as an artist arts advocate and scholar of cultural policy. Returning to the symbol of the Ouroboros it connects the head (art) to the tail (not money specifically but resources) and back again. It is a 'future imaginary' in which she profiles three fictional artists in the year 2050.
The field of arts entrepreneurship is growing – thanks in large part to the work of Linda Essig. The case studies in the book are US-based but the issues addressed are universal.
This book is ideal for use in training programmes for arts administrators and advocates; policy analysts and business schools that are looking to add in arts programmes. It will be of great interest and significance to people working in the cultural industries in the United Kingdom and Europe especially Germany where there has also been some recent research interest on similar topics.
It is also relevant to the many artists who participate in training and professional development programmes in their community as well as those who are just starting out.

Columbo
A Rhetoric of Inquiry with Resistant Responders
This book presents an analysis of Lieutenant Columbo's investigative method of rhetorical inquiry as seen in the television police procedural Columbo (1968-2003). With a barrage of questions about minute details and feigned ignorance the iconic detective enacts a persona of ‘antipotency’ (counter authoritativeness) to affect the villains' underestimation of his attention to inconsistencies abductive reasoning and rhetorical efficacy. In a predominantly dialogue-based investigation Columbo exhausts his suspects by asking a battery of questions concerning all minor details of the case which evolves into an aggravating tedious provocation for the killer trying to maintain innocence. Based on the Ancient Greek ideal of Sophrosyne (temperance restraint) and the Socratic method of questioning to discover truths the Lieutenant models effective rhetorical inquiry with resistant responders: shy secretive anxious emotionally-disconnected angry arrogant jealous and in this case murderous conversants. While designed to be critical and theoretical this text strives to be accessible to interdisciplinary readers practical in application and amusing for Columbo buffs.

The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race
Why Are We All Gagging?
Insightful provocative and now in paperback The Cultural Impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race is a collection of original material that goes beyond simple analysis of the show and examines the profound effect that RuPaul’s Drag Race has had on the cultures that surround it: audience cultures economics branding queer politics and all points in between. Once a cult show marketed primarily to gay men Drag Race has drawn both praise and criticism for its ability to market itself to broader straighter and increasingly younger fans. The show’s depiction of drag as both a celebrated form of entertainment and as a potentially lucrative career path has created an explosion of aspiring queens in unprecedented numbers and had a far-reaching impact on drag as both an art form and a career.
Contributors include scholars based in the United Kingdom the United States Canada and South Africa. The contributions are interdisciplinary as well as international. The editor invited submissions from scholars in theatre and performance studies English literature cultural anthropology media studies linguistics sociology and marketing. What he envisaged was an examination of the wider cultural impacts that RuPaul’s Drag Race has had; what he received was a rich and diverse engagement with the question of how Drag Race has affected local live cultures fan cultures queer representation and the very fabric of drag as an art form in popular cultural consciousness.
This original collection with its variety of topics and approaches is a critical appraisal of RuPaul’s Drag Race at an important point of the programme’s run as well as of the growing industries around RPDR including DragCon and drag queens' post-show careers in the on- and offline world.
Primarily of interest to students scholars and researchers in media and communication studies gender and sexuality studies popular culture queer theory LGBTQ history media studies and fan studies. Will also appeal to fans of the series.

The Cultural Meaning of Aleppo
A Landscape Recovery for the Ancient City
The book documents the history and morphology of the Ancient City of Aleppo outlining first the urbanistic development of the city and then focusing on the architectural heritage with specific focus on the domestic architecture addressing the initiatives to reconstruct and rehabilitate the urban fabric. The author argues in favour of the safeguarding and rehabilitation of the architectural heritage to protect the cultural memory of the inhabitants of Aleppo despite of the destruction of architecture due to the recent war.
Through a capillary documentation of the palimpsest of Aleppo – the peculiar characteristics of its courtyard houses and the neighbourhoods of Bayyada Bab Quinnesrin and al-Farafra – this is a theoretical and practical handbook for architects urban planners and restorers alike. Through this analytical discussion of the city’s urban fabric it introduces the concept of the cultural urban landscape acting as a 'cohesive territorial organism' nourished by different cultures in which contrasting scales of land city and neighbourhood are interconnected in a fractal state. With a focus on retaining the uniqueness and diversity of this residential typology which bore witness to the rich cultural history of Syria and the Middle East as a whole Neglia maps a future reconstruction that focuses on cultural continuity tradition and the re-establishment of a crucial social memory.
Of particular interest and relevance to cultural heritage experts urban planners architects and designers. Also to researchers scholars and students interested in studies on urban morphology and building typology UNESCO and ICOMOS. Scholars and students interested in the Middle East.
Will also be of significant interest to professionals dealing with the implementation of rehabilitation measures in other cities inscribed on the Word Cultural Heritage List or cities with a sound historic fabric which has been destroyed due to war or other events.

Cross-Cultural Design for Healthy Ageing
This book is based on many years of research and practical pedagogical experiences around cross-cultural and multidisciplinary design for healthy ageing. It provides important insight into origins design implementation and impact of cross-cultural design student study tours and takes an original approach by foregrounding pedagogical practice for exploring healthy ageing solutions.
The populations of Australia and many other countries in the Asia Pacific region are ageing. The next few decade will see up to half of the population in many countries represented by the over 65s. The impact of this change in population balance will be profound and it represents a potential global shift in design for society. This will challenge designers planners and health care professionals to develop solutions to better meet the needs and harness the capacity of our growing and diversifying populations of older citizens in relation to housing community interaction and co-operation health and well-being and the integration new technologies. Different disciplinary and cultural perspectives can be a means to create new ideas and approaches that provide a deeper understanding of the needs of the global ageing population.
This book examines some of the challenges associated with ageing in multi-cultural societies. We explore some of the major issues facing society in the area of ‘healthy ageing’ and propose a method of working with cross-disciplinary groups of health practitioners designers architects and cultural practitioners. Through case-studies of a series of workshops run in China and Singapore with Australian Chinese and Singaporean students we review the benefits of this approach and provide a framework for engaging designers planners and health professionals in the process of creating new design solutions for the growing global ageing population.
This book is especially useful for academics and educators in the design and health areas. Design professionals in urban architectural interior industrial graphic multimedia fashion interaction service and user-experience design will find many useful ideas. Health professionals across the range of disciplines including medical practitioners nurses physiotherapists other allied health professionals and carers practising in different settings such as aged-care facilities government offices and others will also find it useful.
It also provides insights and ideas for innovators businesses and everybody interested in exploring design and innovation for an ageing population which has been identified as a growing market. It may also be useful to anyone who wants to understand how to provide care for ageing members of the family and friends or for anyone who wants to better understand issues around their own ageing.
Although there are many articles and books on social design there has been very little work on the methods to combine the discipline areas of Health and Design in the creation of concepts and artefacts around design for healthy ageing. There is also very little on the understanding of ‘Cross-cultural Empathy’ in design. This book takes an original approach to ‘Design for Healthy Ageing’ by combining not only a varied discipline group of practitioners from design and health but also presenting cross-cultural methods to deal with issues associated with the social cause.
The primary readership will include professionals and academics in the areas of cross-cultural design health ageing and related policies government institutions and gerontologists. It will also be of interest to tutors and lecturers across design practice internationally and the case studies are useful for those with a specific geographical interest (Australia Singapore China) including clinicians carers and other health professionals in those areas.