Blick Creative Talk - Maureen Laverty Product and Fashion Designer

Join us on 5th May for our next Creative Talk with Blick Resident Maureen Laverty as part of Belfast Design Week.

Maureen is a product and fashion designer, and inclusive design researcher. She works on a variety of design meets disability projects. At the heart of her practice is the relationships that she builds with people’s diverse lived experiences. She believes in co-creating knowledge collaboratively to empower people to have ownership over how design can improve their quality of life. She carries this ethos into product development through embodied ethnography and participatory prototyping with those who resonate with the design solutions in their everyday life.

In the last year Maureen has relocated back to Belfast after almost a decade working with inclusive participatory design methods in Norway. Currently she lectures part-time at NCAD in Dublin within their Department of Design for Body & Environment. She guides students through human-centred design practices and speculative future fashion systems that care for each other and our environment.

Maureen will talk about her practice-based PhD research that explored the sensory experience of clothing with neurodivergent communities. Clothing is traditionally conceived as a two-dimensional static visual statement; a conception that is at odds with the dynamic actions it mediates in our everyday lives. The outputs of such a practice are garments that restrict and fight against the body, causing sensory overload and discomfort. This is a universal experience, but particularly heightened for neurodivergent individuals. Maureen will share the results of an extensive ethnographic study on how clothing sensations are experienced by her research participants. She will then discuss alternative design processes that prioritise the tactile, sonic, and kinaesthetic senses.

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