Doctor Alison Gill

Dr Alison Gill lectures in visual communication design at the University of Western Sydney in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts. Her PhD, titled “Wearing Clothes”, was completed in 2003 at the University of Sydney and explored intersections in fashion writing, critical theory and philosophies of embodiment. While teaching in a Visual Communication design and researching in fashion studies and critical theory, Alison has developed an interdisciplinary design expertise across a range of media and a capacity to position design in trans-disciplinary problem contexts/settings. Alison has written about the dynamics of design, visual and fashion cultures (analysing the application of conceptual or critical theory frameworks to design practice or technologies) for the journals “Fashion Theory,” “Form/Work,” and the book “Fashion Theory: A Reader” (Routledge). Her research interests in material culture, branding and consumption have been explored in two articles on sports shoes for the anthologies “Shoes: A History from Sandals to Sneakers” (Berg, 2006) and “Design Studies: A Reader” (Berg, 2009).

Her current research interests are at the intersection of material culture studies, design research and social theories of practice, as she seeks to develop critical frameworks – both theoretical and practice-based – that nurture the contextual and temporal sensitivities necessary for supporting everyday sustainable practices. A co-authored publication with Abby Mellick Lopes titled “Recoding Abandoned Products” (2012) analyses the pedagogical setting of a sustainable design project for visual designers learning to shift product value away from ready disposability and support product life extension. This undergraduate student project emerged from a broader ongoing research project conducted by the authors called ‘On Wearing’ which investigates ‘wearing’ as a multimodal concept that points to enduring products and product-user relationships as important signs of extant sustainable practices (Gill and Mellick Lopes 2011). An overview of this and other design related research has been presented at conferences in the UK, US, Cyprus, and the Australian cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra.

Alison has supervised and examined many honours level projects in design and is currently supervising several postgraduate design research projects on the subjects of Sydney-based graffiti and stencils, urban photography, type design, and sustainable fashion. HDR supervision is equally challenging and rewarding and a central platform for actively renegotiating the teaching and research nexus which Alison enjoys.  Alison has experience on the advisory boards of Australian journals such as Visual Design Scholarship and is currently on the advisory board of the research project “If The Shoe Fits: Footwear, Identity and Transition” at the University of Sheffield (2011-13). 

This information has been contributed by Doctor Gill.