DESIGN RESEARCH

Presented by Prof Kate Sweetapple

Prof Sweetapple is head of the uts school of Design, australia

Wednesday 26 April 2023 in S07_1.23 | 6:00pm - 7:30 pm

Kate is a design academic and head of the UTS School of Design. She has an interest in visualisation as a tool to make sense of complex systems by revealing patterns and relationships that are otherwise hard to see.

Her research is increasingly focused on the role of design in shaping systems, services and social practices in the contemporary care space, including in health, disability and aged care environments. Here, Kate emphasises visualisation’s capacity to give form to invisible states and intervene in existing systems to create change. She is currently part of a collaborative project in partnership with disability services provider Northcott to create a visualisation tool that reveals the impact of care decisions on Northcott clients’ quality of life.

In her previous research, Kate advocated for an expanded visual language that recognises the value of qualitative data representations as a means for producing knowledge. This work, the foundations of which now informs her inquiry in the supportive care space, spawned a range of projects spanning literary studies, intellectual and natural history, and ocean science, in partnership with UTS Associate Professor Jacquie Lorber-Kasunic. Each project responded in different ways to the proliferation of different types of data and broadening of contexts of use.

 Major pieces of work include Writing Rights, a partnership with Humanities + Design at Stanford University that uses experimental diagramming to interpret the text of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789). Adrift, a collaboration between UTS Design and Science and funded by the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, produced an intuitive online visualisation tool to enable citizen scientists to collect and analyse ocean data.

Within the School of Design, Kate is a core member of the Designing for Social and Service Transitions research group and a member of both the Visual Knowledges group and the UTS Visualisation Institute. More broadly, she participates in the UTS Ageing Research Collaborative (UARC) and the Disability Research Network, two cross-faculty research groups that draw together expertise from across UTS.

 Kate has published widely, including in the Open Library of Humanities, Studies in Material Thinking, and the Routledge Companion to Design Research. Her exploratory data mining research and creative work has been featured in numerous exhibitions; her experimental cartographic series, Map of Sydney: Avian Surnames, has been acquired by the National Library of Australia, National Gallery of Australia and the National Maritime Museum of Australia.Additionally, this presentation will be streamed via Team for Staff and Students who are unable to attend in person. 

This event is supported by Deputy Director Research, Professor Susan Best, QCA.

Event organisation by Dr Laini Burton, HDR Convenor, QCA.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Dr Burton at l.burton@griffith.edu.au.