Our theory workshops are a space in which to learn, talk and reflect on the day’s theme.

Everyone is welcome.

Forthcoming dates:

Our next workshops are designed to stimulate debate in and around

“Making the Myths Visible – Sustainable Thinking in Design & Design Education.”

Each workshop presents the latest in Design, Design Education, Psychology, Well-Being Theory, Sociology, Visual & Material Culture and Semiotics in a new format for study and dialogue. Each has the latest in fashion and textiles-related themes as a central pivot around which to work, extrapolate and analyse.

The fee per session is £25 for members and £40 for non-members.

TO BECOME A MEMBER, CLICK HERE and then on the ‘BUY NOW’ button.

Annual membership costs 40 GBP (approx 66.81USD and 47.04 Euros) and enables special access and discounts.

The west London venue is GRACELANDS YARD, London NW10 5HD.

Booking will open in 2010.

Workshop 1 is being rescheduled to correspond with the 2010 launch of The Eco Fashion Handbook. Date to be confirmed:

Oppression and Dysfunction Through Design – A Window on to Destructive Social Aspects of Design

What might be the cumulative effects of rape to sell trousers be?

This workshop offers an introduction to the affects of advertising, gaming and fashion. It elaborates on a paper written by Dr Neuberg to be published in Sandy Black’s new book, The Eco-Fashion Handbook (Thames & Hudson) in 2010 (see Eco-chic: The Fashion Paradox: Amazon.co.uk: Sandy Black: Books).

The workshop addresses the destructive social aspects of design as manifest in “magical thinking” (Rosenfeld) youth crime and growing social health-related areas.

Dr Neuberg discusses viral advertising, gaming aesthetics and the rising trend in real/virtual identities – especially in the fashion industry – and  will analyse the interconnecting threads through the work of British psychologist Herbert Rosenfeld who created the terms “the internal mafia gang” and “addiction to death” to describe adult minds stuck in adolescent projective structures.

This talk is essential for designers, educators and everyone with an interest in the current climate of nascent real/virtual transitional identities where even an everyday experience such as watching primetime TV proposes an embodiment of Prototype, the killing machine that is a gaming avatar, alongside ads for joining the Royal Air Force and “Joining the Co-operative”.

A space will be nurtured for reflecting on these dynamics in terms of Professor Huppert’s Population Health Approach (see The Well-being Institute, University of Cambridge) and societal well-being.

On February 27th 2010 from 13:45 til 16:15:

Different Ways of Thinking – An Introduction to Making Thought Conscious

This talk elucidates the design implications of thinking. It focuses on the interchange between Structuralist and Post-Structuralist language and thought. The words of George W Bush and Barak Obama are compared to expose the thinking communicated and their resonant affect.

By keeping thinking unconscious in the design studio, silence, repression and fragmentation are encouraged. This has a direct affect on the design process and ultimately leads to design homogeneity and market saturation.

Participants will leave with a new language and structure for identifying and observing different thought patterns. Designers and visual image-makers can sometimes be less equipped at thinking in a sustaining fashion than they might be. This session opens up new creative avenues, outlooks and dialogues – both internal and external.

On March 13th 2010 from 13:45 til 16:15:

Identification of Designers’ Motivations – Locating & Giving Voice to the Designer’s Long-term Vision

This workshop reveals tools to help designers and design students locate and identify their design motivations. By introducing one-to-one exercises and group work, individuals can locate their own creative drives, concerns and needs.

Such exercise helps stir and elucidate the individual’s design ethos, voice and vision. It also promotes thinking that leads to cross-fertilisation, differentiation, consciousness, purpose and long-term meaning.

Participants will leave better-equipped to deliver their practice, with new tools for developing long-term vision, strength and standing.

On May 15th 2010 from 13:45 til 16:15:

Group Dynamics, Power Struggles &  Social Hierarchies  - Shedding Light on Old Patterns of Production

Airline company billboards, c.2007.

Groups vying for position.

This workshop demystifies the power struggles between established ideological groups and younger or less powerful ones. It explains the extremism expressed by minority groups and the aggression and closedness engendered by established groups.

By understanding inter-group dynamics, the designer and design student gain insight into the patterns that perpetuate our systems of production, from sub cultural “subversions” to cultural assimilation. Also explained are the reasons for warfare techniques in marketing, explicit content in advertising and viral seeding and divisive stereotyping in the media – all of which encourage destructive, projective cycles: regression, displacement, denial and more projection.

These dynamics encourage blame, envy and dualistic thinking. These lead to copy-catting, homogenisation, market saturation and more of the same – with all its environmental and societal implications – longterm.

On June 26th 2010 from 13:45 til 16:15:

Imperative Psychoanalytic Tools for Design Practice – Introduction to Projection and the Mechanics of Enactment

Twist womenswear ad, c.2008.

Clothing ad or a Twist Inc. showing us what they are hoping for with their promotion of “twist”?

This session introduces some basic dynamics that take place unconsciously in all of us. A key impulse that most of us experience is the projection on to other persons or objects feelings that are our own but that we mistake for ‘emanating from them’.

For many, this is an unconscious dynamic that can arouse all kinds of confusion. If the individual does not recognise a pattern of projecting then the likelihood is that they are acting on and acting out their distorted outlook.

Understanding this process can offer a key to the creative endeavour. The key opens a door on to understanding the work of others and one’s own creativity. With such insight, designers are more likely to make choices and decisions of a more tenable, autonomous and sustaining nature.

2010 date TBC, from 13:45 til 16:15:

Repression and Dysfunction in Design – A Window on to the Dark Forces Manifest in Products

Since the 1980s design has been heralded as the problem-solving ingredient for all products. However, for any concept to be heralded and unquestioned there must be an ‘opposite’.

This session creates space in which to reflect on design as problem-generating ingredient. It focuses on consumerables – from cars to clothes – that communicate regression and dysfunction in their very form.

In search of the next big thing and media story-telling, big brands and individuals have made their name and profits from designs that stem from regression, unconsciousness and denial. The ripple effects promote nihilism, narcissicism, delusion and dysfunction as winning ingredients for mass-production.

Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad Model will be used to encourage insightful, reflexive thinking around this subject.

2010 date TBC, from 13:45 til 16:15:

The Movement of Cultural Interpretation – Pattern is Now Good, Pattern is Now Bad

Einstein’s Relativity Theory was published in 1915. For many, however, it is still an abstraction: for an object’s characteristics to be dependent on its observer’s position still proves awkward for epistemic assimilation.

Unilaterlism and one-sided belief systems remain the face of cultural strength, integrity and coherence. Indeed, most of our ruling spiritual messages expound oneness. Coherence is the mask used to police the boundaries of a group or story. Multiple viewpoints are harder to embody, tolerate and sound-byte.

This session confronts the issue of cultural interpretation as movement and consensus. For design students this is often a hard reality to endure. If, however, fads and fashion can be seen in terms of ‘illusions of coherence’ then the foundations of a more sustaining design ethos can grow.

Participants will leave with greater insights into the social and cultural roles of fashion tribes, brand stories and their top-down structures.

2010 date TBC, from 13:45 til 16:15:

Imperative Psychoanalytic Tools for Critical Theory – An Introduction to Object Relations Theory

Denim advert or the promotion of a structural dynamic passed down the generations?

This talk introduces Object Relations Theory as an additional tool for reading our cultural artefacts. The theory comes from psychoanalysis and originates from interpersonal relations, primarily in the family and especially between mother and child.

In more general terms, it comes to mean the concept of enactments relating to the subjective experience of the original familial relationship.

Once unpacked, concepts of ‘Good Object’, ‘Bad Object’ and ‘Lost Object’ can be used to understand some of the choices and statements made in cultural expression. These allow insights into underlying psychic structures of some of our most celebrated designs thus facilitating new questions.

For example, “Was the didacticism of the Modernists a sign of trauma, displacement and repression?”,  “Were the black and white graphics of the Mods their own signage for their adolescent binary thinking?” and “Were the designers of the 1990s “cocooning” cartoon aesthetic relaying their separation anxieties?”

This session gives designers the key to bigger questions. They are then better equipped to read the design stories of their times and ‘make conscious’ the nameless aspects of their own practice – thus diminishing the frequency of blind, unhelpful enactments.

2010 date TBC, from 13:45 til 16:15:

Semiotics as Starting Place – A Designer’s Constructive Tool

This session introduces semiotic theory as starting point in the study of cultural aesthetics.

There are three key issues at stake:

(1), without insight into the visual and linguistic workings of the surrounding media, young designers float on a sea uncertainty, pulled by the manipulative tides of which they are ignorant, unconscious and susceptible;

(2), unconscious of the manipulation at play, complacency, conformism and denial are compounded – leading to unthinking behavioural (design) cycles. In view of group analytic theory (Foulkes et al), where the social influences the individual, this is detrimental to the development and practice of critical thinking in young and old alike, suggesting that, once an unconscious designer, always an unconscious designer;

(3), if every designer copies the latest trend they are contributing to market saturation and landfill.

Semiotics have been largely seen as a tool for deconstructing visual culture. This session proposes it as a key constructive tool.

The west London venue is GRACELANDS YARD.

We look forward to welcoming you.