Seminar: 'Theatre and Translation' by MI Visiting Fellow, Dr. Alinne Fernandes
2017-02-23 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Theatre and Translation
Dr Alinne Fernandes’ talk will reflect on an ongoing practice-based research project, which aims to contribute to the dramaturgical study and dissemination of a number of Irish and Northern Irish women’s plays in Brazil. The project is motivated by the relative lack of study and translation of contemporary female voices in Irish and Northern Irish theatre, such as Patricia Burke Brogan, Christina Reid, Geraldine Aron, Anne Devlin, and Marina Carr, to name a few, and the desire to promote intercultural understanding through performance. Some of these playwrights, more noticeably Marina Carr, have enjoyed considerable success in Ireland and abroad, and yet remain un-translated and thus unknown to the Brazilian Portuguese-speaking world. In this talk, Dr Fernandez will go through her experiences working as translator and dramaturge on Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…, Mary Raftery’s No Escape, and Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed.
Bio
Dr Alinne Fernandes is a Lecturer at the Department of Modern Languages at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil. She completed her PhD in Translation and Dramaturgy at Queen’s University Belfast in 2012, during which she translated Marina Carr’s play By the Bog of Cats… (1998) as a case study for developing a methodological framework for theatre translation. Her translation, with an introduction by Marina Carr and notes on her extensive study on the play, is forthcoming with the São Paulo-based Rafael Copetti Editor (2017, Coleção Atemporais). She has published articles on theatre translation in international peer-reviewed journals, such the Journal of Romance Studies (Berghahn Journals), Quaderns: Revista de Traducció, Cadernos de Tradução, Aletria, Tradterm, and Scientia Traductionis. She also has an article forthcoming in Dramaturgias (University of Brasília, Brazil), and a book chapter co-authored with Dr Maria Rita Viana forthcoming in Vidas Irlandesas – O Cinema de Alan Gilsenan em Contexto (2017), a collection organised by Dr Beatriz Bastos and Prof José Roberto O’Shea. Besides Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…, Fernandes has translated and worked as dramaturge on the production of several plays for performance and staged readings, such as Mary Raftery’s No Escape, Esteve Soler’s Contra el Progreso, W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (with Dr Maria Rita Viana), and Patricia Burke Brogan’s Eclipsed, as well as directed several rehearsed readings. She is the Vice-Coordinator of the research cluster on Irish Studies at UFSC, ad hoc reviewer for the international journal Ilha do Desterro, and a member of the International Federal for Theatre Research.

CAMPS Lab
2017-02-24 12:00 - 14:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Dr Kieran O’Connor (Archaeology, NUIG)
‘Temple House Castle – from Templar castle to New English mansion’

Digital Scholarship Seminar Series - Spring 2017
2017-02-24 12:00 - 14:00 | Seminar Room GO11, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Lizzy Williamson (Folger Shakespeare Library)
‘Material Texts and Digital Provenance: Opening a Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama’

'The Early-Modern Book as a Historical Object' by Prof. J.P. Pittion (TCD & Tours)
2017-02-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Prof. Jean-Paul Pittion, fellow emeritus at TCD and former professor of Renaissance Studies in the Université François Rabelais, Tours, has published widely on the history of the book, Protestant academies in France, Huguenot emigration to Ireland, intellectual history, the history of medicine and medical publishing in the early modern period.

Sport & Exercise Research Group Seminar Series: Professor Philip Dine “The World Comes to One Country: Migration, Cultures and Professional Rugby in France”
2017-03-01 14:15 - 16:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
French rugby is a sport historically practiced in the ‘wrong’ place, for the ‘wrong’ reasons and in the ‘wrong’ way. Its most abiding social function has been as a marker of frequently belligerent local identities, with investment in the game, both moral and material, being almost always parochial in nature. This was reflected for much of the nominally amateur era by the French tolerance of both institutionalized violence and illicit payments to players. Crucially, this national distinctiveness has also included an authentically creative approach to the game on the pitch and intense scrutiny of its myriad meanings off it. Such debates have traditionally centred on the performances of the national side, but more recently have also highlighted both the commercial prioritization and the competitive attrition of the two club competitions that dominate modern French rugby, namely the Top 14 tournament and the European Champions Cup. In a related development, the increasingly transnational diversity of French teams in the professional era suggests that rugby may finally have joined the country’s other major athletic disciplines in crossing social boundaries in ways not possible in other spheres.

History Graduate Research Seminar
2017-03-01 16:00 - 17:00 | The Bridge, Room 1001, First Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Mr Michael Kavanagh
‘Protestant Secondary School Education in Co.Galway: Galway Grammar School, 1895 – 1932’

“Archives in Teaching: New Pedagogies and Practice”,
2017-03-02 14:15 - 15:30 | Seminar Room GO11, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Full details and schedule.

ERC Information Event: Applying for an ERC Starter Grant - by Dr. Ian Campbell, QUB
2017-03-03 11:00 - 12:30 | The Bridge Room 1001 First Floor Hardiman Research Building, University of Galway, Ireland
In October 2015, Dr. Ian Campbell was awarded a Starting Grant of €1.3 million by the European Research Council to pursue the research project ‘War and the Supernatural in Early Modern Europe’ over four-and-a-half years. He will lead a research team of two research fellows and one graduate student to examine the relationship between debates inside the early modern European universities on the proper limits of the natural and supernatural and the character of religious warfare in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. www.war-and-supernature.com
Ian will talk about his own experience in formulating a successful proposal and provide advice on how to manage the process efficiently.

CAMPS Lab
2017-03-03 12:00 - 14:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Dr Jessica Cooke (Independent Scholar)
‘Saint Meldan, Saint Fursa, Saint Cuanna: Saints of Lough Corrib’.

Visiting Speaker: Dr. Ian Campbell, QUB 'Magna Carta, Limited Monarchy, and the Ancient Constitution in Early Modern Ireland'
2017-03-03 14:00 - 15:00
In October 2015, Ian was awarded a Starting Grant of €1.3 million by the European Research Council to pursue the research project ‘War and the Supernatural in Early Modern Europe’ over four-and-a-half years. He will lead a research team of two research fellows and one graduate student to examine the relationship between debates inside the early modern European universities on the proper limits of the natural and supernatural and the character of religious warfare in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. His project hypothesizes that the mistaken imposition of the modern categories of sacred and secular on early modern religious debate has obscured not only the way that early modern Europeans thought about God and politics at extremes, but also the way that modern ways of speaking about religion slowly emerged during the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment invented the secular, the category without God; but just as important to Enlightenment was the enlargement of the natural, the category in which God left humans free to pursue ends impressed in them by him. The supernatural was that category in which God intervened directly. The arguments of militant Christians, whether Protestant Calvinists or Catholic Franciscans, are important to this story, but so too are the responses of moderate Catholics and Protestants who feared that holy war had the potential to destroy all human government, and not just the government of unbelievers. These debates and disputes were conducted in Europe’s learned language, Latin, without regard for national borders. Drawing on the disciplines of both History and Neo-Latin Studies, this project will recover this discourse by publishing analyses and parallel-text translations. But this project will also track the extension of this discourse of natural and supernatural in vernacular political debate outside the universities. These new editions of early modern Latin texts and analyses of discourse within and without the universities will help to eliminate the assumption among historians of religious violence that early modern people were less rational than ourselves, will redefine our category of religious warfare during Europe’s early modernity, and will re-orientate our understanding of European secularization.

www.war-and-supernature.com

Research Interests

Early modern British and Irish history; political thought and intellectual history; the history of race.

Roundtable Discussion: The Northern Ireland Assembly Election: Where to from here?
2017-03-06 12:00 - 13:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Participants
Dr. Rebecca Barr (English)
Dr. Brendan Flynn (Political Science & Sociology)
Dr. Laurence Marley (History)
Dr. Kate Quinn (Spanish)
Dr. Niall Ó Dochartaigh (Political Science & Sociology)
Dr. Kerry Sinanan (Moore Institute Visiting Fellow)

History and the Politics of Memory: Winifred Carney, 1887-1943-2017 by Helga Woggan, MI Visiting Fellow
2017-03-06 16:00 - 17:30 | The Bridge Room 1001 First Floor Hardiman Research Building, University of Galway, Ireland
Winifred Carney was an active feminist and a significant figure of the 1916 Rising. Born in County Down, she became James Connolly’s personal secretary after he was appointed Belfast organizer of the ITGWU. She arrived in the GPO on Easter Monday with a typewriter and a Webley revolver, and held the rank of adjutant throughout the week of the Rising. On her release from prison, she returned to active politics in Belfast, standing for Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election, and subsequently joining the Socialist Party. In this seminar, Dr Woggon will present Winifred Carney’s biography in the light of some new material and of the changing perceptions of her life.
Helga Woggon is a historian of Irish labour, Central American cultures and National Socialist terror. Her works include a study of James Connolly’s politics and impact (Integrativer Sozialismus und nationale Befreiung, in German, 1990); Silent radical – Winifred Carney, 1887-1943 : a reconstruction of her biography, and (ed.) Ellen Grimley (Nellie Gordon): Reminiscences of her work with James Connolly in Belfast (both Dublin 2000).

Celebration Event for Conor Newman (School of Geography & Archaeology)
2017-03-07 16:00 - 17:30 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
You are cordially invited to a celebration event for
Mr. Conor Newman
(School of Geography & Archaeology)
marking the conclusion of his role as chair of the Heritage Council 2008-2016
Speakers: Dr Kieran O’Conor and Prof. John Waddell
Conor has been instrumental in major policy initiatives put forward by the Council, including the publication of the National Landscape Strategy, the Heritage Officer Network, and the €1 million increase in the Heritage Sector’s capital allocation for 2017.
Tuesday 7 March
4pm
Moore Institute Seminar Room
Hardiman Research Building (G010)

All welcome!

History Graduate Research Seminar
2017-03-08 16:00 - 17:00 | The Bridge, Room 1001, First Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Dr James O’Donnell (NUIG)
‘Political economy and professional networks in the nineteenth and twentieth-century British and Irish press.’

Visiting Seminar: Dr. Niamh Whitfield 'Early Irish Metalwork'
2017-03-08 16:00 - 18:00 | Seminar Room G011 the Hardiman Reserach Building, Ireland
RSVP Required: kim.loprete@nuigalway.ie
Dr Niamh Whitfield, a well-published independent scholar (http://independent.academia.edu/NiamhWhitfield), is a leading expert on early Irish metalwork in a European context. After completing a BA Hons in Archaeology & French at UCD, where she studied with the esteemed Dr Françoise Henry, inter alia, Niamh moved to London, where she raised a family and completed an MA & PhD in Medieval Archaeology & the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art/UCL. She has taught at TCD and been a regular contributor to the MA Medieval Studies at NUIG since its inception.

‘Democratic Theory: Beyond the Pale’ By Dr Mark Devenney and Dr Clare Woodford
2017-03-08 17:00 - 18:30 | Room 333, Aras Moyola
This event is hosted by the School of Political Science & Sociology’s Power, Conflict and Ideology Research Cluster.

Medieval Ireland was physically divided by a palisade separating an English-ruled enclave stretching from Dublin to Dundalk, from a Gaelic-speaking area whose inhabitants were considered uncivilised, ‘beyond the pale’. In this paper we put this notion of the ‘pale’ to work to rethink the paradoxes of democratic theory, and in so doing to rethink democratic politics. Democratic theorists struggle with the apparent paradox that the demos, in exercising sovereign power, must draw boundaries which violate the equality democracy presupposes. In our view the various paradoxes of democracy – of boundaries, of legitimacy and of founding – only arise because democratic theorists assume that democracy must be a regime. We reject this assumption. Democracy, we contend, is an anarchic ‘instantiation of equality’ which upsets all institutionalisation or ordering. Democracy begins with the assumption that all are equal. It is undermined whenever and wherever equality is limited. All regimes will, then, struggle to determine who belongs to ‘the people’, how to justify these limits, and how to discipline the impropriety let loose by the promise of democratic equality for all. We contend that equality cannot be contained and that democracy is always in excess of any attempt to bind, legitimate or found it. Democratic theory in trying to justify the boundaries of democracy misunderstands its own object. It functions like the English pale of old, demarcating an established distribution of property and behaviours and preventing any reconfiguration of proprietary order. Existing debates fail to account for the specific ways in which propriety as well as property are instrumental to the maintenance of inequality. This is bought into focus by our re-reading of Rousseau’s defence of ‘proprietary order’ which traces the paradox of politics back to the paradox of property in a manner that theorists of the political paradox (Mouffe, Honig and Connolly) have simply ignored. Democracy, we conclude, occurs wherever there is an enactment of equality against proprietary order.

Dr Mark Devenney is the co-director of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Economics and lectures in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Mark’s research covers two primary areas: first, contemporary political philosophy, and second improper forms of political action including occupations, theft, squatting, and terrorism. Mark’s recent publications include: ‘The politics of antagonism’ in Contemporary Political Theory (2016); ‘Property, propriety and democracy’, in Social Justice Studies (2011), and Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory (Routledge, 2004) in which he critically examines the points of ethico-political difference and convergence between Post-Marxist radical democratic theory and Critical Theory’s deliberative account of democracy.

Dr Clare Woodford is lectures in the School of Humanities at the University of Brighton. Her research interests include theories of gender, ideology and pedagogy, Marxism and post-Marxism, queer theory, psychoanalysis, democratic struggle, activism and the arts, and performance studies. Clare’s recent book Disorienting Democracy: Politics of Emancipation, was published by Routledge in 2016, and is concerned with drawing out the transformative potentialities of thinking democracy as dissensus in light of the work of Jacques Rancière, for not only left politics, but for society as well.

(Contact: l.farrell7@nuigalway.ie)

Visiting Sminar: Dr. Niamh Whitfield 'The Book of Durrow & the 'Northumbrian Problem''
2017-03-09 09:00 - 11:00 | The Bridge Room 1001 First Floor Hardiman Research Building, University of Galway, Ireland

Nineteenth Century Trade Periodicals: Transnational Perspectives A Symposium Featuring IRC Research Partners
2017-03-09 14:00 - 17:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
19th C Trade Periodicals poster

Visit of writer Azouz Begag in Ireland
2017-03-10 13:00 - 15:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
As part of The Month of La Francophonie in Ireland, French writer, politician and researcher Azouz Begag will tour the Universities in Ireland : Cork, Limerick or Galway. Seize the occasion to meet him and (re)discover his books and movies!
Azouz Begag was born in 1957 in Lyon. He is a French writer, politician and researcher in economics and sociology at the CNRS. He was the delegate minister for equal opportunities of France in the government of French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin till 5 April 2007. Begag has a doctorate in Economics from Lyon II University. He has combined the functions of researcher in economy at the CNRS and at the Maison des sciences sociales et humaines of Lyon since 1980 and the one of professor at the École Centrale de Lyon. A visiting professor in Spring 2002 at the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University, Begag was later made a honorary professor. Begag’s academic career, culminating in his place as a researcher at the CNRS, as well as his political career to date, have also centered around the problems of unequal opportunity for those brought up in industrial suburbs and ghettos. In his account in 2007 of his two years as minister, The Sheep in the Bathtub, he describes his research work as that of a sociologist.Begag has written approximately 20 literary books for adults and children, as well as songs and movie scenari.Begag’s best known literary work (he has published many novels often inspired by his childhood) is the autobiographical novel Le Gone du Chaâba, published in 1986.
Free events, open to the public (Online RSVP recommended)
In Dublin : Tuesday, March 7th, 6:30pmat Alliance Française, 1 Kildare streetRSVP here
In Cork:On Wednesday March 8th, 5pmat University College Cork (UCC), RoomL1, Electrical Engineering BuildingRSVP here
In Limerick:On Thursday March 9th, 5pmat Mary Immaculate College, room T1.11RSVP here
In Galway:On Friday March 10th, 1pmat NUIG, Moore InstituteRSVP here

The Abbey Theatre, Dublin Cinemas and the Film Company of Ireland, 1916-1920 by Dr. Veronica Johnson, Moore Institute Visiting Fellow
2017-03-13 12:00 - 14:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
This talk examines the relationship between the Film Company of Ireland and Dublin cinemas in the period 1916-1920. Formed in 1916 and releasing its first films in that same year the Film Company of Ireland is the first important film production company in Ireland. Established by James Mark Sullivan and Henry Fitzgibbon, this production company released its first feature film O’Neil of the Glen in August 1916 to a warm popular and critical response. A great part of its allure and of its respectability was the fact that many of the actors and directors of this film company were also members of the Abbey Theatre. In particular Fred O’Donovan and J. M. Kerrigan, actors at the Abbey went on to be both actors and directors with the Film Company of Ireland. This talk focuses on the role played by the Film Company of Ireland films in attracting a middle-class audience to Dublin cinemas in the years 1916 to 1920. It argues that the contribution of Abbey actors and directors lent a respectability to its films that was harnessed by the cinemas in their promotional drive to attract a middle-class audience.

Bio
Dr. Veronica Johnson has worked as a lecturer in Film. Her previous publications have appeared in Kinema, Studies in European Cinema and The Journal of European Popular Culture. Her research focuses on early Irish cinema and its relationship to the entertainment industry, the cinematic unconscious, film and narrative and the films of Krzysztof Kieślowski.

iBook Launch: Harmful Algal Blooms
2017-03-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
An iBook by Dr. Robin Raine (Marien Scientist, School of Natural Sciences, NUI Galway)
All welcome!
Refreshments will be served.

Talk by Prof Catherine O'Brien 'Travel in Sicily: 101 reasons to visit Sicily'.
2017-03-14 12:00 - 14:00 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Professor O’Brien is Emeritus Professor of Italian at NUI Galway.
The presentation will encapsulate the history, geography, culture, places, attractions, food and wine of the island that will be backed up with attractive images.

Digital Scholarship Seminar Series - Spring 2017
2017-03-14 12:00 - 14:00 | The Bridge, Room 1001, First Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Ronan Crowley (University of Antwerp)
‘Migrate It New: Challenges and Opportunities for Ulysees: A Digital Critical and Synoptic Edition.’

Manhattan’s Irish Waterfront Neighborhoods: From the Famine to the Movie Classic “On the Waterfront” by Dr. Kurt Schlichting, Fairfield University
2017-03-14 16:00 - 17:30 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Dr. Kurt C. Schlichting is E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in the Humanities & Social Sciences & Professor of Sociology & Anthropology
kurt@fairfield.edu

“Translation in the context of the commemorations of 1916 and the Great War” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Ireland Professor of Poetry
2017-03-14 17:00 - 18:30 | Seminar Room G011 the Hardiman Reserach Building, Ireland
Hosted by the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Eilléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942, educated there and at Oxford before spending her working life as an academic in Trinity College, Dublin. She was a founder member of Cyphers, a literary journal. She has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Irish Times Award for Poetry, the O’Shaughnessy Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute which called her “among the very best poets of her generation”, and the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her collections include Acts and Monuments (1972, winner of the 1973 Patrick Kavanagh Award), Site of Ambush (1975), The Second Voyage (1977, 1986), The Rose Geranium (1981), The Magdalene Sermon (1989) which was shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Award, The Brazen Serpent (1994), The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), Selected Poems (2008) and Legend of the Walled-up Wife (translations from the Romanian of Ileana Malancioiu, 2011). The Boys of Bluehill (2015) is her first collection since The Sun-fish which won the 2010 Griffin International Poetry Prize and was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emerita) at Trinity College, Dublin and a member of Aosdána. She was recently appointed as the new Professor of Irish Poetry (2016).

Margaret Heavey Memorial Lecture by Prof. Richard Seaford, University of Exeter “Does the inner self exist?” ancient insights from Greece and India
2017-03-14 18:15 - 19:30 | Siobhan McKenna Theatre, Ireland
Richard Seaford is Professor Emeritus of Greek at the University of Exeter. He is an expert on Greek Tragedy and on the Marxist/Structuralist interpretation of early Greek literature and world-view. His publications include Reciprocity and Ritual, Money and the Early Greek Mind, and Cosmology and the Polis. He has also published on the work and thought of George Thomson/Seoirse Mac Tomáis, who was Professor of Greek at University College Galway in the early 1920s and a noted Marxist exponent of Hellenic studies.
All welcome. Reception to follow. This event is generously supported by the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies

'Moving while doing, nomadic artistic perceptions in socio-environmental transitory times' a project by Visiting Fellow Seila Fernández Arconada
2017-03-15 04:30 - 17:30 | Seminar Room GO10, Ground Floor, Hardiman Research Building
The relationship between human beings and the notion of place is changing constantly; we are always in “natural” transition. Therefore observing, mapping, experiencing and analising the limits between the tangible and intangible while addressing socio-environmental (contemporary) concerns become relevant.
This project has been an experimental form of work – like moving-while-doing – as an attempt to unleash new forms of art research exploring the limits between place-identity, migration, belonging, the notion of home, the visible-invisible, the natural, etc.
This presentation is an artistic conclusion of this project after a month Fellowship at the Moore Institute.
Seila Fernández Arconada is an independent artist-researcher based in Bristol (UK). She is Honorary Research Staff in the Department of Civil Engineering of the University of Bristol; recently selected by Gasworks London to direct a project at pARTage (Mauritius). Seila has delivered numerous cross-disciplinary workshops and interventions including Communities Development in Post-Crisis Regions (Ukraine) and exhibited internationally, recently in Imagined Landscapes (RWA, UK), In Between Storage (Latvia) and ENCLAVE Land Art (Spain). Her work focuses in exploring artistic methodology, its boundaries and new social approaches. www.seilafernandezarconada.net

Drama Theatre and Performance PhD Reading Group
2017-03-15 11:00 - 13:00 | Mezzanine, O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance
Chair: Prof. Patrick Lonergan, O’Donoghue Centre of DTP
Text: Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version’.

History Graduate Research Seminar
2017-03-15 16:00 - 17:00 | The Bridge, Room 1001, First Floor, Hardiman Research Building
Dr Annemarie Brosnan (Mary Immaculate College, UL)
‘The education of freed slaves in the American South’

Arts, Humanities & Innovation – Speaker Series: Designing for good
2017-03-16 12:00 - 14:00 | The Moore Institute Seminar Room G010 Ground floor The Hardiman Research Building, Ireland
As part of the Arts, Humanities and Innovation – Connecting with Industry series, Leon Butler, research fellow on the TechInnovate program at NUI Galway, will talk about design, and how PhD students might user their research skills in industry once they qualify.
This series of talks is aimed at researchers from the Arts & Humanities, and will be of particular interest to PhD students considering options for future career development.
Talk overview
Leon will talk about the importance of research in the design process. Design is no longer limited to visual designers with a flair for creativity but open to all who wish to engage in the process to understand the user and to address how we design for their needs. Human Centred Design focuses on serving rather than selling the product or service, to achieve this you must empathise with the user and define their needs to create a rounded User Experience (UX). These type of UX projects are generally broken in to five planes, most of which are not visible to the end user but provide a conceptual framework for talking about UX problems and the tools we use to solve them. Leon will discuss this conceptual framework for UX projects and present a Human Centred Design approach to solving them.
Leon’s Bio
Leon has worked across a broad range of positions in the media industry as a visual narrative designer, filmmaker, and educator. Since setting up his practice, he has also worked with clients as diverse as Starbucks on their global holiday campaign, Druid Theatre on promotional film for their iconic productions to musician Macklemore, who commissioned Leon to document their 2014 visit to Dublin’s o2 for two sold out shows. He has also developed many personal projects in animation, typography, children’s illustration and documentary. His research interest areas include adaptive interactions and experiences using available data in the public sphere and generative typography and in 2015 he completed a residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York in this field. In 2016, Leon received a ‘Certificate of Typographic Excellence’ from the Type Directors Club in New York. The Design and Craft Council of Ireland listed Leon as one of their ‘Future Makers’ for 2016 and completed a three month residency in Los Angeles with digital agency 72andSunny. Leon is currently a research fellow on the Techinnovate program at NUI Galway.
