Welby Ings is a Professor in Design at AUT University. He holds a Ph.D. in applied narratology and is an elected Fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts. He has published and spoken widely on issues relating to practice-led research and methodology. He has also been a consultant to many international organisations on issues of creativity and learning, and is himself an award winning designer, illustrator, filmmaker and playwright. His short films have won numerous international awards and have screened at many of the world’s leading festivals including Cannes and Berlin. In 2006 his narrative film poem boy was short-listed for Academy awards. In 2001 he received the inaugural New Zealand Prime Minister’s award for Tertiary Teaching Excellence and in 2013 he was awarded the AUT University medal for his contributions to research and pedagogy.
Title of the keynote
Productive unknowing: Materiality, imagination and the design of a fictional world
[Abstract] [Full paper]
In 2010 Tim Ingold suggested that the process of genesis that gives rise to a form is more important than the form itself. With such a proposition he touched upon the idea that as designers our most significant thinking may occur, not in the realisation of forms but in the ideation and development that underpins their journey towards tangibility.
In examining this idea, this paper uses a case study of the short film Munted (2011), to illustrate how processes of thinking in a realm of immersive drawing may lead to very nuanced and highly responsive forms of ideational way-finding. Munted was an unusual film that was developed through a process of indwelling where thinking unfurled through the instability of brushed ink, the absorbance of paper and the quiet scratching of pencils. Set free from the constraints of script writing, the hand and the designer’s unknowing joined with and followed the flows and forces of materials in a process that lead to very deep and nuanced levels of discovery. Through this seemingly nebulous process, the film’s lyrical diegesis was incrementally drawn into being.
