Journal & Book Publications

Ethics must consistently guide our profession, and the impact of social media and social interest on community arts therapy practice must be strategically attended to. This presentation will highlight the pragmatics of planning, delivering and documenting large-scale community art(s) projects within ethical frameworks that foreground community, compassion and integrity. Challenges and successes from practice will be discussed.    
Citation:
Lay, Ronald. “Community, compassion & integrity: Consideration to ethics within art(s) therapy community projects.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Arts Therapy, vol. 13, no. 1, 2018, pp. 47-53.

Emphasis on processes does not necessitate discipline-specific definitions of an expected final outcome, but relies on the synergetic impact of the combination of diverse expertise and experiences of the participating members of the team. Results are created and defined as a consequence of constant communication and feedback between team members. For realisation and evaluation of such an approach the determination of a set of rules on which such a system is based is critical. This paper evaluates process-oriented pedagogy within a tertiary arts education organisation with a selection of case studies from LASALLE College of the Arts (LASALLE) in Singapore. These interdisciplinary pedagogical arts practices range from structured improvisation as a creative laboratory, use of technology to inform practice, playing with spatial geometries, through to creating templates to shape or codes to sequence performance and durational arts practice.  The paper proposes a system design for arts pedagogy based on the potentialities of collective collaboration rather than the individual artist and on the multiplicity of outcomes made possible by focusing on process rather than product or object. 

Citation:
Muench, Wolfgang and Amanda Morris. "System Designs for Arts Pedagogy." Cumulus Conference Proceedings Paris 2018, no. 03/18, 2018, pp. 1140-1158.

thinking as “a spirit that permeates a culture or an organization”. This paper examines design thinking in Singapore through investigating the way in which three of the country’s most critically acclaimed design firms, FITCH, IBM iX and Chemistry, have adopted and adapted design thinking principles in different contexts: retail design, systems design, and social design. The methods used here can be linked to the design thinking methodology as incepted by Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, also referred to as d.School. The pragmatic characteristics of d.School’s design thinking process makes it easy to adopt. However, the key question which this paper will raise, is whether or not design thinking can unite a greater range of stakeholders in Singapore, given that the country’s Ministry of Communications and Information has elevated design as a key driver through the Design 2025 Master Plan which was issued in 2015. This initiative builds on the other definition of design thinking, the notion of a spirit. This paper discusses how expanding the collaborative attitudes within culture and society can potentially promote design thinking as a ‘spirit’ within a nation. Could design thinking be reframed to become a language-like concept that connects people and societies in their shared ambition to shape future lives? What are Singapore’s prospects with respect to this endeavor?"    

Citation: 
Lim, Stanley and Matthias Hillner. “Design Thinking as a Meta Language." Cumulus Conference Proceedings Paris 2018, no. 03/18, 2018, pp. 852-871.

This implies that designers will need to be equipped with project management and teamwork skills.

In the case of the Faculty of Design in LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore, the push for interdisciplinarity manifested itself in an initiative in the Bachelor’s programme termed Clusters. Students from different design programmes worked in interdisciplinary groups on briefs that were designed to harness the strengths of the various disciplines. Teamworking challenges were observed and reported during the inaugural run of Clusters. It is commonly assumed that students will develop teamworking skills organically in the process to overcome these challenges (Larson, et al., 2015). However, without equipping students with these skills, issues are bound to surface that can affect the success of such interdisciplinary projects.
The paper focuses on the teamwork-oriented approach of the second cycle of Clusters, during which workshops were introduced to prevent and circumvent teamwork problems identified. Tucker’s (2016) “Input-Process-Output Framework of Effectiveness in Student Design Teams” was adapted to develop a model that categorises various tools and exercises aimed at addressing challenges during the different processes of a teamworking experience.
This paper concludes with the insights gathered from the teaching of teamwork skills. The model, tools and exercises pre sented are of value to design educators and curriculum managers who seek to improve students’ perception of teamwork and development of teamwork skills.
Citation:
Lim, Stanley and Joselyn Sim. “Introducing Teamworking Workshops to Enhance the Effectiveness of Interdisciplinary Design Education.” Cumulus Conference Proceedings Paris 2018, no. 03/18, 2018, pp. 872-891.

This 60-minute lesson uses drama improvisations with its philosophical roots based on Paolo Freire's critical pedagogy, Augusto Boal's forum theatre, and Dorothy Heathcote's process drama.    

Citation:
Chow, Edmund. “Performance appraisal on the hotseat.” Teaching Human Resource Management: An Experiential Approach, edited by Suzanne C. de Janasz and Joanna Crossman, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018, pp. 134-144.

This humanistic perspective leads to questions of how design education should adapt and change to enhance the implications of socially conscious design and the designer’s position as social leader. Through a discussion of participatory and co­creative design, this paper attempts to identify how design education can respond to social needs through innovative solutions for social change. This paper reviews the experiential processes of design activities through a series of case studies to evaluate the impact of introducing the social innovation agenda as part of the design curriculum through collaborative and collective projects.    

Citation:
Sim, Joselyn and Harah Chon. “Social Innovation through Design. A Model for Design Education.” Cumulus Conference Proceedings Paris 2018, no. 03/18, 2018, pp. 362-381.

The vast majority experience fashion today is through a screen, as we scroll on social media, encountering endless global information. We have shifted from glossy magazine images, taken by professional photographers where supermodels pose while being styled, edited and retouched versus the supposedly candid snapshots of popular influencers we find on social media, that share experiences of fabricated lives, overuse hash-tagging labels and finished with love heart emojis. Do values start to shift or become lost in translation where garments are being translated from a foreign perspective and it’s meanings?

We accept that fashion is a complex system of ambiguities and even more with the developments in media technologies, fast fashion, and consumerism on the rise has created a new generation of fashion storytellers, image-makers, and curators that produce and share a pastiche of perspectives. These communicators provided the world with uninterrupted white noise, highlighting the discourse of fashion language and its many shifting values. The intent of fashion is two-fold: both informative and communicative. An audience must know what the communicator means to convey where garments are being translated from foreign perspectives and meanings something. Society needs to question the aspect of communication in these times of change, keeping in mind it is not relied upon being fully understood. In the East, we look to the West to be informed and attempt to translate the creativity into a language that we do not fully grasp, re-communicating it as a foreigner. With this research, I aim to examine the power of social media influence on fashion and how it is generating a disjuncts fashion language, the loss of knowledge and heritage across time and space, subsequently creating a local voice through craft and culture changing the global dialog of fashion."    
Citation:
Bonney, Martin. “Craft and Culture, Changing the Global Dialog of Fashion.” Fashion Futures Conference Proceedings, edited by Li Jun, Donghua University, pp. 362–370.

Consequently, the “services sector” (which included the arts) was identified as a potential future growth engine for Singapore. It is important to place the ACCA Report in a historical perspective against developments in the arts and cultural scene of Singapore in the 1980s, particularly movements and activities occurring ‘on the ground’ that were driven by artists and other cultural workers. The chapter will firstly discuss the key recommendations of the ACCA Report in the context of Singapore’s arts scene then, and in view of the economic imperatives that underlie Singapore’s cultural policies, offer a perspective on how the ‘arts workforce’ has emerged and been nurtured since the 1980s, partly through stimuli from the state’s arts and education policies.     

Citation:
Wong, Audrey. "The Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts.” The State and the Arts in Singapore, edited by Terence Chong, World Scientific, 2018, pp. 111-126.