Ashley Hall actively researches through practice-based design projects. He writes and publishes in the a range of areas, including experimental design, industrial design pedagogy, non-linear systems in design, cultural transfer, design in developing economies, design and geographically liberated difference and design thinking.
Ashley’s practice-based design projects include ‘Translocated making’, which explores the concept of design and geographically liberated difference and its mediation between digital and analogue methods for creative cultural exchange between remote cultures of making. Recent fieldwork at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad and in the Rann of Kutchchh in India developed a number of experimental engagement models with craftsmen in a variety of materials and techniques to explore emerging methods in how difference can be liberated from geography.
He has been jointly awarded an AHRC grant ‘We are all designers’ with Northumbria University that seeks to explore the disciplinary landscape, activity range and boundaries of design as a behavioural phenomenon. The project is engaged in the process of mapping the complex inter-connected relationships between communities and practices of non-designers and designers characterised by fluid, evolving patterns of practice that regularly traverse, transcend and transfigure disciplinary and conceptual boundaries.
He is also collaborating with fellow academics and commercial partners on a number of papers in the broad area of design thinking and the publication of two edited books on the IDE GoGlobal projects in India and Korea.
AHRC We are all Designers Network Grant with Northumbria University 2012
British Council India – for GoGlobal book publication and travelling exhibition 2011
British Council Korea – for exhibition, GoGlobal book publication and accommodation 2012
Seoul Design Foundation – for exhibition and GoGlobal book publication 2012