Sheffield Hallam University
PROJECTS | 2021
The Living Sponge
Hannah Morley, Inés De Cueto Escobar, Xiaozhao Ban, Xiaoyue Ma
The Living Sponge is a speculative project and horror tale that imagines a future where aquatic sponges have been harnessed by communities to absorb and purify water. Over time, the sponges take over people’s bodies.
Finalist Team
InstructorS - 2021
Eve Stirling
Having trained as a product designer at Northumbria University, Eve Stirling worked in the design industry in interiors and game design before entering academia. She is interested in the proliferation of digital spaces within our everyday lives and the relationship between time and space within these. Her current work takes a speculative design fiction approach to explore agency and making.
Jackie Leaver
A common thread throughout the projects Jackie Leaver has been part of is narrative – enabling people to tell their own story in their own way. This theme is also apparent in her personal research interests, but here the narrative extends to the stories of places and things as well as people. She is currently involved in research that looks at how practices of care and maintenance might be used to extend the life of particular objects and domestic spaces. Jackie's expertise lies in Product, Furniture, & Interiors.
Mel Levick-Parkin
After abandoning a teenage crush on photography, Mel Levick-Parkin studied visual communication and graphic design, then re-incarnated as an advertising creative for a number of years before sidestepping into an academic career. His research interests revolve around design anthropology, co-design, and other participatory approaches, which he is exploring in relation to projects focusing on heritage, archaeology, and cultural tourism with a feminist, post-colonial lens.
Paddy McEntaggart's work is based around inquiry that explores relationships between technologically-mediated memory and the ways in which narrative might consequently be (re)constructed. Paddy's expertise lies in Graphic and Interaction Design.
Slipping between the notions of art and design, Kate Langrish-Smith’s practice transcends disciplines, drawing upon contemporary fashion, ceramics, and sculpture. Kate has adopted traditional craft techniques and expanded upon them by incorporating synthetic compounds, assemblage, balance, and performance to create a new lexicon with her work. This has engendered a unique semiotics of object; allowing a reappraisal of the body in the context of familiar, ubiquitous, and overlooked commodities. Her practice seeks a rapprochement between our dislocation from the makers, materials, and provenance of objects that were shaped for a relationship with the human form. Kate draws inspiration from the history of health, beauty, and art from which surprising and compelling ‘stuff’, ‘things’, and traditions are illustrated. These forms – vessels, tools, and artefacts – are the starting point for collections and clusters of objects which reconnect and elevate disparate places in time through a common language of ritual, desire, and fascination.