Design Research Collective / Body & Space Research Lab
Practices of Care:
Radical Expressions through Scarcity & Inclusion
This research exhibition explores design as a radical, responsive, and relational act of care. Acts of care are celebrated as critical gestures of design thinking and making, from mending found objects to co-habiting with living organisms. It challenges conventional definitions of design and beauty, shifting the focus toward compassion, diversity, improvisation, and co-existence. The exhibition reclaims waste not as a deficit, but as an opportunity—fuel for radical expression, which is presented through assemblages of waste, worn, frayed, and found materials. Research artefacts made from discarded and everyday materials reveal new stories of value, utility, and meaning. The exhibition features research that pushes boundaries—connecting human and non-human sensory diversity with inclusive design practices. It positions fashion and textile design not merely as aesthetic or functional pursuits, but as agents of social and ecological transformation.
Practices of Care is a group exhibition proposal of design research team at The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, Sweden. The project consists of five artistic research projects: Designing & Living with Organisms by Svenja Keune, Value: Transformation, Adaptation and Poetic Reinvention by Anna Lidström, Sound to Wear by Vidmina Stasiulytė, Acts of Care by Helga Lára Halldórsdóttir, Resilience & Assemblage: Disorientation & Improvisation by Clemens Thornquist.
Designing & Living with Organisms (DLO)
Svenja Keune
Designing and Living with Organisms (DLO) highlights the potential of textiles and textile thinking to foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of the more-than-human world, thus contributing to more sustainable ways of designing and living. This postdoctoral research project was funded by the Swedish Research Council under the reference number 2020-00459 and was hosted by the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. It explores textile-based artefacts that invite engagement with non-human neighbours like insects and birds, reflect the rhythms of the local ecosystem, and inspire the human neighbours to observe, contemplate, reflect, be patient, and follow up on observations. DLO promotes a design practice that uses artefacts as inquiry tools, and employs multiple approaches to engage with nature and methods to explore complexity and diversity, nature’s core principles. This approach challenges the conventional view of designers as the sole creators and controllers of a situation, positioning design as a personal development journey that fosters sensitivity toward the world of insects and encourages multi- and transdisciplinary collaboration. DLO positions designers as partners in a co-creative process that honours the agency, integrity, timing, seasonality and expression of the more-than-human. As an additional result of this research, Svenja Keune established networks such as the VIBRA Research Network and the I.N.S.E.C.T. community and summer camps. These bring together researchers and practitioners from e.g. insect vibrational communication, inclusive information practices, and artistic research to connect human and non-human sensory diversity to design and co-create more inclusive living environments for all. These outcomes collectively position DLO as a significant contribution to the design field, pushing boundaries and encouraging a more ethical, inclusive, and collaborative approach to designing and living with living organisms.
Technical details
Installation of a mixed media: 3 design objects (textile & ceramic) and 4 videos. Object 1: crochet from cotton yarn and cellulose fibres, dipped in blended bacterial cellulose grown from Kombucha. Size: W20cm x D20cm x H25cm; weight: 300g. Object 2: crochet with orange cotton multi strand yarn and carded wool. Size: W20cm x D20cm x H45cm; weight: 600 g. Object 3: crochet with wool yarns complemented with hand-shaped ceramic tubes. Size: W30cm x D30cm x H45 cm; weight: 600 g. Objects can be suspended from the ceiling or exhibited on the podiums. Video works can be shown on 4 TV screens or on 1 TV screen/projector as a compilation.
Short Bio
Svenja Keune, PhD, researcher, artist and weaver of networks and initiatives at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås. Her work focuses on multispecies cohabitation, seasonal designing, and multispecies auto-ethnography. She facilitates co-creation events as a tool for staying with unpredictability and complexity, uncovering new fields and building complex multidisciplinary knowledge communities.
Value: Transformation, Adaptation and Poetic Reinvention
Anna Lidström
This exhibition is exploring human created objects and their transformation, adaptation and poetic reinvention. This exhibition explores value and expression in everyday materials, such as waste. Waste is connected to notions of value that are ever shifting, a state through which things pass. It is a conversation around (re)design, not as a compromise or reaction to waste, but as a radical, expressive and necessary movement in contemporary design. Blending stylistic and structural qualities of existing elements by embracing unpredictability, material scarcity, and improvisation. The exhibition is a visual dialogue, encouraging a creativity shift where the poetic and aesthetic disposition of trash has the potential to be re-categorised, reclaimed and ascribed with fresh value. It asks - how do we situate ourselves in relation to the objects around us? What do they reveal about our place in the material world? The photo camera is used as a mediator between material reality and artistic vision, offering a story of renewal, resilience, and creative ingenuity - a testament to the passion of making things out of things that are already things. The work is an investigation of the tension between old and new, chaos and order, and it pinpoints the thin line between what is to be considered useful and useless.
Technical details
Installation of a mixed media: 5 photographs in A0 size format (printed on both sides), exhibited on stands (included in the parcel), and various assemblages made from waste material and objects. Installation of photographs and assemblages could be exhibited on a low platfor, approx. size: W 200cm x D 1000cm x H 20cm. Optionally it could be exhibited on different sizes podiums. Installation weight: 15 kg.
Short Bio
Anna Lidström, PhD, senior lecturer, researcher, designer, and artist, whose work focuses on sustainable fashion design. Her specialisation is in the field of redesign, reuse, and resource recovery from a design and practitioner perspective.
Sound to Wear Vidmina Stasiulyte
The toolkit Sound to Wear is a collection of various sound-tools that are centred around listening and sounding practices. This investigation into sonic expressions is seen as a disruptive fashion practice; it could be described as a process of ‘unlearning’—encouraging one to leave behind pre-existing knowledge of fashion expressions by focusing on something else when defining and designing. It takes a radical approach to fashion by bringing the non-visual, temporal expression—sound; it critiques the defining and designing practices by suggesting ways to include marginalised and differently-abled bodies towards a more inclusive and democratic fashion. The educational set of sound-tools is one of the outcomes of the doctoral research Wearing Sound: Foundations of Sonic Design (2020). The tools are body-based objects, and could be considered to be ‘object- stimulators’—objects that generate ideas. The tools are complex material-discursive apparatuses assembled from everyday objects and centred on two main practices: (i) listening and (ii) sounding. Each sound-object was designed to enhance a particular movement or behaviour. The notion of sound-tools is open and the tools facilitate exploration; they are playthings similar to the exhibits in one of the cabinets of curiosity, allowing a wearer to explore these tools in her/his own way or follow the provided instructions. As in the “aesthetic of the strange” (Grabes, 2008, p. xii), designed objects are not concerned with visual appearance, but rather function, interaction, and emitted sound, the “third aesthetics” (Ibid.) and anti-fashion (Stern and Troy, 2005) refer to ‘strange’ aesthetics and argue for ‘forgetting’ what is visually ‘beautiful’, and so the main focus was on sonic thinking and the sonic dimension of the object-subject relationship.
Technical details
Installation consists of 10 interactive sound-tools, that are assembled from found materials and objects. Objects can be exhibited on the table (not included in the parcel, approx.size of the table could be: W 130cm x D 300cm x H 100cm ) or exhibited on various sizes podiums. Installation weight: 6 kg. Exhibition visitors are invited to interact with sound tools, listen and make individual sound or co-sound together with other visitors.
Short Bio
Vidmina Stasiulytė, PhD, leading researcher, senior lecturer, and artist who is pioneering the field of sonic fashion. Her work merges the field of experimental aesthetics, sonic expression, and social inclusion. Vidmina received her Ph.D. from The Swedish School of Textiles, where she continues working as a senior lecturer and leading researcher of the project Sonic Fashion granted by The Swedish Research Council (grant agreement ID: 2021-01399).
Acts of Care
Helga Lára Halldórsdóttir
Acts of Care investigates how care can be re-problematised as an act in encounters with everyday material objects. This initiative seeks to assist consumers in understanding their relationships with material objects and how to engage with them through acts of care, by utilising the inherent smart qualities of materials to create intelligent objects without relying on technology. This has been explored through care acts such as hugging, petting, combing and holding from the perspective of consuming intelligent objects in embodied acts of care. As a means to reclaim care, I have focused on what can make an object intelligent by design by exploring facets such as tactility, embodied material reaction, and emotional affordance as expressions of bonding between the body and object. By doing so, the object can become demanding and, by association, intelligent, as it requires action and attention from the body, regardless of whether it is technological. By extending agency through demand, intelligent objects can create a sense of urgency to care and, consequently, concern and a corresponding need to react. The intelligent objects presented here are based on discursive design, a field that prompts and encourages reflection, discussion, delicate consideration, questioning, and even dissensus. Such a provocation can be confrontational and subtle, argumentative or playful. This project is focused on the subtle playfulness of mundane everyday care acts to entice, spark interest, and fetishise the way we care for material possessions. The project is made in collaboration with fashion designer Marta Heiðarsdóttir.
Technical details
Installation of two interactive research objects. Object 1: a cap made from cotton and fur, size: W 30 cm x D 25cm x H 15cm; weight: 200 g. Object 2: a table cover made from fur, approx. size of the table to dress: W135cm x D35cm x H70 cm (the table is not included in the parcel); weight of the table cover: 1 kg. Both objects are accompanied by the care accessories, such as various combs, hair accessories, etc. Exhibition visitors are invited to interact with the objects, take care of them, comb, style, caress, braid, etc.
Short Bio
Helga Lára Halldórsdóttir, PhD candidate at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås. Within her PhD, she explores the effects of care acts in body-object relationships, such as combing and caring for hairy pet objects or needy objects that demand to be held or hugged. Helga investigates the potential to abstract expressions of bonding in product-owner relationships by drawing parallels with the nurturing bond seen in pet-owner relationships.
Resilience & Assemblage: Disorientation & Improvisation
Clemens Thornquist
This work investigates the aesthetics of human resilience through a constellation of found materials, photographic fragments, and sculptural improvisations. The work focuses on the visual-structural language of resilience, not as triumph, but as endurance, vulnerability, and the makeshift architectures a collective build to hold themselves together when one is confronted with uncertainty, scarcity, and distress. The sculpture, an irregular structure of branches, wood, and rope acts as a spatial anchor in dialogue with the gestures of the photographic works of more blurred abstraction emotions, a plastic-draped forest shelter, and remains of actions in the night. Resourcefulness is found in adversity. A fragile, improvised shelter, assembled from whatever was available, reflects human adaptability, the instinct to create safety and order. However, where life becomes indistinct and to move on means navigating ambiguity, instability and emotional disorientation, a blur presents the direction. Together the pieces explore resilience as a condition that resists formal coherence. Instead of strength defined by monumentality, the works propose a model of resilience as improvisation, adaptation, and the quiet insistence of presence amid confrontation. The materials—found, worn, frayed—speak to a kind of embodied memory, where resilience is not a performance of strength, but a gesture of continuity. Here, real-life resilience does not to appear neat or elegant, but rather holding together despite fracture.
Technical details
Installation consists of 4 photographs and sculpture made of assembled wooden brunches and rope. The size of all photographs is W70 cm x D70 cm. The size of the sculpture: W 200cm x D 200cm x H 160cm; the weight of the sculpture: 14 kg.
Short Bio
Clemens Thornquist, Professor in fashion design at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås. Clemens ́ research spans fashion, art and organisation with the aim to
develop fashion design through experimental research methods. His work explores the role of aesthetics in body-textile-environmental interactions and how clothing can perform – act and interact – in body-based behaviours and activities.