An Octonary Book Launch

2) Charles Reeve: Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Rennaissance and Back

Reading life writing that runs from Tracey Emin, Faith Ringgold and Judy Chicago to Marie Bashkirtseff, Benvenuto Cellini and beyond, Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back investigates the intriguing doubled truths of artists’ autobiographies: truth in life and truth in art; authorial truth/s and the truth of their art as they saw it.

3) David Griffin: Drawing Music, Making Time

Marking down the complexities of musical pieces on paper allows them to become portable, shareable, and eminently teachable, but how are the simple geometries of a music notation unfolded into space and time?

This book will attempt to de-code music drawings, untangling their strange knots of graphic and linguistic elements. Using a series of visual examples, Griffin presents background information on how the staff notation developed as an inter-linguistic inscription, a drawing that slips through the mere denotation of pictorial or diagrammatic graphics to become a connotative system, with which we may craft subtle and powerful elements of musical poetry.

4) Kate Hartman: Make Wearable Electronics

Enhance Your Style with Wearable Electronics! Welcome to the amazing world of wearable electronics, where tech and fashion combine to explore art, style, utility, and new forms of human interaction. Social Body Lab Founding Director and OCAD University Associate Professor Kate Hartman teaches the concepts and techniques behind wearables electronics, from choosing the right materials for a project to explaining how components can be combined to create dynamic costumes and couture.

5) Lesley-Ann Noel: Design Social Change

Who are you? What motivates you as a changemaker? What forces are preventing you (and others) from thriving? These questions are essential to the work of creating social change, and they are exactly what this book asks you to explore.

Designer and educator Lesley-Ann Noel shares the essential design strategies for creating lasting impact. This work starts with knowing yourself and builds outward into making change in your community and the larger world. Design Social Change gives you the tools to tailor your approach to design, considering your history, personality, ethics, and goals for a better future.

6) Michael Prokopow: Reside: Contemporary West Coast Houses

Stunning contemporary houses illuminate the enduring and evolving influence of the West Coast Modern architectural style in B.C. Decades after gaining international recognition through the work of practitioners such as Barry Downs, Arthur Erickson, and Ron Thom, the West Coast Modern style remains widely celebrated and highly influential for residential architects in British Columbia and beyond, even as its expressions evolve and adapt to contemporary contexts. What are the contours of its legacy today - and has a new regional style emerged?

7) Nithikul Nimkulrat: Craft and Design Practice from an Embodied Perspective

This book brings together contributors from multiple disciplines, such as crafts, design, art education, cognitive philosophy, and sociology, to discuss craft and design practice from an embodied perspective.

Through theoretical overviews of embodied cognition and research-based cases that involve the researchers’ making experiences, different phenomena of human‑material interaction are presented, analysed, and discussed. The practical cases exemplify ways in which embodied notions show up in action. Contributors examine topics such as the embodied basis of craft activities and material manipulation, experiential knowledge and skill learning, reflection in and on action, and material dialogues. Several chapters specifically discuss the hybrid forms of analogue and digital crafting that increasingly takes place in the field of crafts and design, and the changed notions of material engagement that this entails.

8) Peter Jones: Design Journeys Through Complex Systems

Design Journeys through Complex Systems combines systemic design, leading thinking practices, and years of the combined authors’ experiences into a practitioner’s handbook for design thinking. By drawing upon the authors’ Systemic Design Toolkit, this book provides detailed knowledge of systems science, expanding upon essential systemic design texts in order to demonstrate the power of visual sensemaking.

No matter if you’re a design professional or have never come across design systems, these pages allow the user to reassess, reorientate, and address complex issues. By using these methods, you’ll be able to visualize socio-technical systems, democratizing engagement as you simplify complex thought processes.

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This event is organized by the Office of Research and Innovation.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to research@ocadu.ca 🙂

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