On April 28th, 2021, at the seventh Transmission in Motion seminar, fashion designer Pauline van Dongen and Media and Culture scholar Lianne Toussaint discussed their PhD projects relating to wearable technology. As the title of the session, ‘When Designer Meets Academic – Theory and Practice of Smart Clothing’, suggests, the seminar focussed on the intricate…

During the most recent Transmission in Motion (TiM)-session, Pauline van Dongen and Lianne Toussaint presented their academic and non-academic endeavors in – to put it very succinctly – the field of clothing design. During this session, somewhat of a moral discussion came up, as one of the attendees asked how he could best go about designing things…

In the latest TiM seminar, we were joined by designer Pauline van Dongen and academic Lianne Toussaint. When they met during their PhD projects, one thing stood out for them both: they approach creative processes differently, based on their backgrounds. Van Dongen told us about the transition from design practice to academic practice, which involved…

Pauline van Dongen’s clothing designs take postphenomenology as inspiration, aiming to highlight how materials and technology mediate our experiences in the world. Van Dongen describes her work as merging “use” with “being.” We often use clothes, or simply wear them without second thoughts, but this designer aims to reveal the capability of clothing to mediate…

The synergy between academia and industry has always been productive, innovative, yet frictional.  Pauline Van Dongen, a fashion designer, and Lianne Toussaint, a scholar of media and culture, have been collaboratively working together and mutually inspiring each other with their own specialty. As both “design thinking” and “theory-inspired practices” have been addressed several times in…

Living through various lockdowns and pandemic limitations for over a year now, I have not (either have not been able to or have not dared to) paid a visit to a museum for what seems like a personal record length. Fittingly, Utrecht University research group Subjects in Interdisciplinary Learning (SILT) has crafted a beautiful online…

This week’s TiM seminar addressed notions about serendipity. Serendipity was first defined by British writer Horace Walpole in a letter to indicate the art of discovering phenomena “by accident and sagacity while in pursuit of something else” (Van Andel & Bourcier 2009, 27). In their paper “Interdisciplinary Research Boosted by Serendipity” (2014) Darbellay, Moody, Sedooka…

At the last Transmission in Motion seminar, the participants navigated a virtual museum. By virtually navigating the online platform, participants could interact with different curated positions towards the theme/phenomenon of serendipity. As a word, serendipity describes an aptitude to encounter a positive or valuable object, space, occurrence, etc. My experience with ‘Designing for Serendipity’ (Utrecht…

March 31, 2021, was the day when something quite wonderful happened. Or, one should rather say, serendipitous. Serendipity is a notion that some students might have already had contact with; some students might have encountered this notion for the first time during the seminar session that took place on this day. Serendipity, as originally defined…

At first glance, the phrase ‘designing for serendipity’ comes across as an oxymoron. Serendipity, a situation underscored by chance. Is it possible at all to design for serendipitous encounters? Is there a science behind serendipity? These were some of the questions that rang in my head as we were introduced to the virtual exhibition created…