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* Kingsgate Workshops’ Millimetre Project curation including work by: Finlay Taylor, Nina Royle, Dana Sherwood, Mark Dion, Steven Claydon (2024).
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Carrier of Connections is a pedagogical intervention designed for graduate diploma graphic design students undertaking a unit on semiotics and visual research. Drawing inspiration from Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, and the Kingsgate Workshops’ Millimetre Project (among others), the unit invites students to curate constellations of personal, found, and archival images in order to explore themes of identity, urgency, and power.
This project positions the archive not as a static repository, but as a dynamic, contextually situated site of knowledge, one where meaning emerges through adjacency, juxtaposition, and relational interplay. Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, a constellation of image panels guided by his “Law of the Good Neighbor” rather than explanatory text (Steinberg, 2012), serves as a key model for this non-linear, image-led inquiry. As in Warburg’s work, students are encouraged to move beyond traditional modes of narration and to critically examine how meaning is constructed, encoded, and transmitted over time through visual forms.
Equally foundational is Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which challenges dominant, hero-driven narratives by proposing the story as a container – open-ended, inclusive, and receptive. (Le Guin, 1986), This metaphor shapes the ethos of Carrier of Connections, which resists rigid hierarchies in favor of multiplicity, collaboration, and the nonlinear nature of creative inquiry.
Influenced also by the Kingsgate Workshops’ Millimetre Project, which highlights the value of small-scale, shared exhibitions as sites of informal knowledge exchange, this intervention foregrounds the pedagogical potential of curating and exhibiting work in communal spaces. (Kingsgate-workshops, 2025). In doing so, it nurtures a sense of dialogue, allowing meaning to surface through process and encounter as much as through individual outcome.
The project is shaped by my own interdisciplinary liberal arts background, my collage based studio practice – that draws from both personal and collective memories, and a deep belief in making space for diverse epistemologies in the classroom. It arises from reflections on the limitations of traditional academic structures – particularly their tendency to marginalize visual, spatial, and relational forms of knowledge. Collaboration and curation have profoundly influenced my own practice, enabling growth in ways that solitary work could not have allowed.
Carrier of Connections also builds upon two case studies developed during the first Postgraduate Certificate unit. The first explored embodied and relational learning as a support for neurodivergent students; the second reflected on my experience as a creative companion to an individual living with mid-stage dementia. Both case studies explore memory as a collective, situated process, and continue to inform the values underpinning this work.
Although designed with a specific cohort in mind, Carrier of Connections is adaptable to a range of studio-based or theory-led contexts. It supports students in developing a critical understanding of visual research while offering multimodal pathways into academic discourse that is underscored by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, and Donna Haraway’s notion of multi-species entanglement – as a way to honour pathways in complexity, connection, and care. (Crenshaw, 1989) (Haraway, 2016).
Inclusive Learning
*Sze, S. (1999). Seamless.
Within art and design education, inclusion is not simply about representation – it is about rethinking how knowledge is produced, shared, and valued. Traditional art history curricula often centre canonical, white, Eurocentric, and text based narratives. Visual research is still often framed around the solitary artist, echoing the “myth of the isolated genius” (Connor, 2015). To quote Barthes in Mythologies, myth is “a type of speech” – a constructed narrative that naturalizes power (Barthes, 1972). Similarly, the lone genius or “original” image is a myth that obscures the relational and collective nature of cultural production.
The Carrier of Connections deconstructs these myths. Like VVORK, it treats visual culture as “networked and iterative” (Connor, 2015), foregrounding influence, co-authorship, and repetition. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s writing on use (2019), the project invites students to examine how images gain meaning through co-presence – how their “traveling companions” reshape their significance.
By emphasizing citation and contextualization, the intervention also responds to Ahmed’s and Misslin’s critiques of academic and design practices that erase or decontextualize marginalized perspectives. Students are asked not only to cite sources but to reflect on how their own positionality shapes their selection and interpretation of visual material. This is especially critical in multimodal assignments that might otherwise encourage aesthetic appropriation without accountability (Misslin, 2025) Ahmed, S. (2012).
Artists like Andrea Büttner, Renee Green, Sara Sze, The Atlas Group, Liz Johnson Artur, etc, similarly interrogate the boundaries between the personal, political, and aesthetic through fragmentary, layered reflections on ‘the archive’. Their work resonates with the project’s emphasis on the shifting and situated meaning of images. The Kulshov Effect – the cognitive phenomenon in which viewers derive different meanings depending on image sequence and juxtaposition – is also a useful metaphor here, reinforcing how visual context can shape understanding in complex, unpredictable ways. Like VVORK, this intervention resists singular authorship, proposing instead that visual culture be treated as a living, relational ecosystem.
The methodology aligns with inclusive teaching principles articulated by Advance HE (2021), supporting differentiated learning strategies and valuing multiple modes of expression (visual, textual, oral, spatial). It also addresses Davies’ (2022) concern about the dominance of written text in higher education, offering alternative forms of knowledge-making that support neurodiverse learners.
Reflection
*Andrea Büttner (2014). Images in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement.
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My thinking was supported by tutorials, and peer-to-peer presentation sessions, where I received feedback highlighting both the strengths and potential risks of the intervention. Colleagues appreciated its inclusive design and intersectional potential but advised more structured scaffolding for students unfamiliar with open-ended, non-linear tasks. In response, I have developed optional thematic prompts (e.g. belonging, silence, legacies, the body in public) and reflective questions (e.g. How does this arrangement speak differently than the images on their own? etc .).
One of the most challenging tensions seems to be balancing openness with clarity. Non-linear, relational thinking can feel disorienting – especially for students who are conditioned to seek “right answers.” Drawing on Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development, I incorporated scaffolding to guide students without narrowing the outcomes. (Vygotsky, 1978).
Another concern was avoiding the perpetuation of “bad habits” in visual research, such as poor citation practices. Here, Misslin’s analysis of the mood board as a risky yet potentially subversive practice was crucial: the project’s power lies in treating images as texts – with provenance, politics, and histories to be acknowledged. (Misslin, 2022)
A final inspiration also came from my friend and colleague Barbara Mueller, whose work on the MA Global Collaborative Design Practice course at UAL included a parallel intervention where students co-curated a visual archive in response to Sitterwerk’s dynamic material archive. (Sitterwerk, 2025). Their emphasis on co-authorship and collective meaning-making helped reinforce the importance of relational practice in design education.
Action
*Renée Green, Lesson, 1989, Installation view, Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, 2022. Photo by Guang Xu.
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The Carrier of Connections unfolds in three iterative phases and can be delivered across a semester or in shorter intensives. The project begins with a critical engagement with semiotic theory and archival practice through a powerpoint presentation introducing them to relevant artists, designers, and theorists. We will discuss the archive as an expanded notion, one that encompasses multiple forms – the internet, book, body, ecology, etc.
Students then visit the Warburg Institute or engage with its digital archive, reflecting not only on the structure of the Atlas but on Warburg’s own positionality – an upper middle class, male, German – Jewish scholar who living between 1866 – 1929. Students are prompted to consider: Whose histories are included or excluded in this archive? What did Warburg choose to preserve, and why? We will also consider the importance of the medium itself – what is it about the printed reproduction that Warburg was particularly interested in, and how might the concept and outcome of the archive change with its medium? We will talk about the act of collection, translation, and dissemination as being crucial to the development of visual language – how translation includes this act of juxtaposition but also it’s through the misremembering / reinterpretation / ‘queering of use’ that something new emerges. (Ahmed, 2019).
This reflexive framing encourages students to interrogate their own positionality as image-makers and curators. What are they choosing to show or withhold? What visual inheritances are they working within or against? By situating Warburg’s legacy within a wider political and epistemological framework, students are better equipped to understand these decisions not as a neutral act but as a situated one.
From here, students will gather image-objects – personal photographs, internet finds, archival scans, etc – and will arrange them into curated panels / displays on themes of urgency such as silence, migration, or resistance, etc. These ‘panels’ may be physical (shoeboxes, vitrines, zines, etc) or digital (Miro boards, websites), depending on the context and format of choice. Students are supported with peer critique sessions and prompted to write short curatorial statements that cite sources and reflect on visual and spatial decisions.
The project encourages the use of embodied research methods – such as sensory walks, material handling, and object interviews (Hough, 2013) especially effective for students who engage with tactile or spatial learning. If further developed – I plan on collaborating with PgCe peer, Adam Gibbons who is developing an intervention based around intentional ‘walks’ as generative, pedagogical tools. Both projects support multimodal, neurodiverse, and intersectional approaches to knowledge-making, encouraging students to move beyond the mood board into deeper practices of citation, accountability, and reflection. (Dennison, 2010).
Finally, inspired by the unfixed and dynamic nature of Warburg’s Atlas, the Carrier of Connections has the potential to grow iteratively over the coming years – visually mapping how urgencies overlap and shift with time.
Evaluation and Conclusion
*The Mnemosyne Atlas at the Reading Room of the Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 1927
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This intervention reframes the archive as a critical, ethical, and inclusive pedagogical act. Its success is measured not by aesthetic resolution, but by depth of inquiry, reflexivity, and student engagement with complex questions. Reflective journals, annotated image collections, and peer feedback are used to assess learning outcomes.
Key indicators of success include:
- Increased student confidence in engaging with theory through practice
- Evidence of intersectional analysis and visual citation
- Willingness to dwell in ambiguity, contradiction, and tension
This work has shown me that to teach visual research is not only to decode meaning, but to make space for different ways of arranging, holding, and troubling meaning. It has deepened my commitment to designing interventions that are spacious, ethical, and attentive to difference, care and connection.
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References
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