- Title
- Habitus, tacit knowledge and design practice: the context of the designer as illustrator
- Creator
- Chand, Ari
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This exegesis is an articulation of Qualitative practice-based research (Candy 2006)- as a pragmatic and auto-ethnographic study- that correlates with the creative body of work entitled ‘The Art of Illusio’. This exegesis seeks to better understand and outline a theoretical framing of the context of the illustrator as designer. The research presents a perspective on how illustrators interact with experience and approach design through a reflexive engagement with theoretical concepts: habitus, tacit knowledge, and the design process. The notion of habitus condenses the designer’s system of dispositions and sense of place towards the world. I examine how habitus and tacit knowledge orients that system of disposition towards the perception of experiences. This research combines contemporary discussions of the seminal work of Pierre Bourdieu (Habitus- The Rules of Art, Distinction, Outline of a theory of Practice, The Field of Cultural Production), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Perception-Phenomenology of Perception) and Michael Polanyi (Tacit Knowledge- Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, The Tacit Dimension), to propose that a combination of these conceptual understandings, along with their related concepts, work in a complex generative structure that frames design and illustration practice. The exegesis seeks to interrogate this framing through an exposition and positioning of academic literature, the analysis of professional literature, and the analysis of others practice through qualitative semi-structured interviews (Crouch & Pearce 2013), and the auto-ethnographic and reflective examination of my own illustration practice (Collinson 2009). It is intended for design researchers. It is also intended for design and illustration students, early career design researchers, and ultimately anyone undertaking practice-based research. My original contribution to knowledge is a framing for how Illustrators embody their experiences. Illustrator as a designer sits in the world of experience; the word ‘experience’ encapsulates most aspects of the context, outcomes, processes and elements of designing. The embodiment of experience is a fundamental device in the way illustrative imagery and visual communication translate and perpetuate ideologies, metaphors, mythologies, allegory, narratives and in particular the anthropomorphisation of the human condition. Illustrators translate experiences, and the perceptual synthesis of those experiences into the illustration and the design of fictitious, but representational, narratives, worlds, characters and environments. Drawing becomes a crucial part of articulating the world and capturing perception of experience and reality. Drawing has a long established history of being described as a way of thinking (Minichiello 2005). Illustration practice, as a resolved outcome of drawing, permeates a large scope of different forms of visual communication as a resolution of the design process. Contemporary and seminal discussions of design express that design is a transformative process (Roxburgh 2013, Crouch & Pearce 2013:2,15, Simon 1981), acting as an instrument for the transformation of the artificial world. Uniquely the illustrator not only responds to experience of the world by articulating it, but also is actively engaged in the perpetual transformation of it.
- Subject
- habitus; design; tacit knowledge; Bourdieu; Polanyi; creativity
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1387903
- Identifier
- uon:32687
- Rights
- Copyright 2018 Ari Chand
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 13 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 4 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |