Design + Making and Materials
RESEARCH THEME
Design + Making and Materials is one of three strategic research themes in Northumbria School of Design, which cuts across all of our core areas of design expertise.
Our design research on making and materials concerns materialities, the cultural value and benefits of making in society, and the effects emerging technologies and materials may have on design, making and craft practices.
Research in this theme cuts across the whole range of design disciplines – product, industrial, interaction, service, textile, interior, and fashion – using their disciplinary knowledge and maker expertise to explore the application of new and advanced material technologies and entrepreneurial design making. Our activities brings the act of making to centre-stage of design research, focusing on its artefacts, processes, and practices and recording and reflecting research through design projects. The outcomes of our projects include descriptions of technical applications, methods, processes and insights emerging from designing, as well as the actual products and artefacts. These descriptions help us to better understand the opportunity of design making research to address particular problems and contexts of concern.
Please see the projects below for examples of our Design + Making and Materials research.

Art/Science Hybrids

Bauhaus Open Studio

Bespoke

Breaking the Binary Oppositions of the Interior

China’s Creative Communities

Chronotopic Cartographies

Colour Trans:Form:Ation the Application of Knit as Knowledge

Community Conversational

Connected High Street

Crafted Futures

Critical Theory and Interaction Design

Cutters Context

Deep Discoveries UX/UI Design

Design Beyond Traditional, Contemporary and Digital Craftsmanship

Digital Originals

Drawing a Line

Emotional Objects

Enabling Ongoingess

Enhancing Product Design Quality through Crowdsourcing

Envisioning Fashion’s Invisible Woman

Ephemera

Establishing Trust through Storytelling

Experience Centered Security

Fashion Journalism Practices

Funology

Hand Thought

Heritage in Contemporary African Fashion

Hybrid Digital-Physical Objects

Immersive Technology Applications

Inflection

Interactive Newsprint

Interioractive

Izzy Gizmo

Jordanian T-shirt

Legacy of the Lost (Textiles)

Let’s Start

Localised Spatial Experiences

Love After Death

Makamap

Making Things Up

Mapping Wordsworth

Mediating Trust: Co-creative Making Workshop Resources

New Saint Cuthbert’s Banner

A Design-Led Enquiry into Parametric Product Design for Dementia Care

Placing in Age

Playing Out with IoT

Policymaking and HCI

Probing into Research through Design

Wearable Technology from an Apparel Designer’s Perspective

Research and Design Fiction

Research Through Design conference

RTD Comics

Spatial Diorama

Speculative Enactments

Suits and Subcultures

Sun, Sex, and Style in Smart Cinema

The Design of Poetic Things

The Glass Electric

The Lens, the Mirror and the Frame

The MIT Museum Glassware Prototype: Visitor Experience Exploration for Designing Smart Glasses

The para-disciplinary role of Design

The Speculative Gaze

The Trust Map

Tools for Everyday Life

Transforming the sequential process of fashion production: Where zero-waste pattern cutting takes the lead in creative design

Transnational Fashion Storytelling

Unblocking the Circular Economy

User Experience, Design Innovation and AI

What Do We Know Through Making And Wearing Clothes

Women Climbers and Their Clothing

Worn