Emma O'Regan-Reidy
Before pursuing her MA at the V&A/RCA, Emma completed a BA in English Literature and Film Studies at University College Dublin. As well as completing her MA in History of Design, Emma is a freelance writer and digital illustrator. She has worked with various publications, such as ScreenShot Magazine (London, UK), Ephemera Magazine (Toronto, Canada), FAC Magazine (Dublin, Ireland) among others. Previously, Emma has worked at Rolling Stone as a Graphic Design Intern in addition to working as a freelance designer for multiple art collectives in Dublin, Ireland. Once finished with her MA, she hopes to continue to pursue a career in cultural journalism, focusing on contemporary music and fashion.
Degree Details
School of Arts & Humanities
Emma is a student of the V&A/RCA MA History of Design programme. Over the course of this degree, she has written about 19th Century Food History of London through the close investigation of a Mansion House lunch menu from 1849. Furthermore, she has written on the class and environmental catalysts behind 'distressed' fashion from the 90s to today, emphasising designers such as John Galliano and trends such as Golden Goose Footwear. For her dissertation, she is currently researching the audio-visual projects of Solange Knowles. By focusing on key works such as "Don't Touch My Hair" (2016), "Cranes in the Sky" (2016), and When I Get Home (2019), she hopes to investigate the production, design and cultural impact of Solange’s expansive artistic output.
As first-year students, our contributions to RCA2020 form a work-in-progress encounter with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. This serves as a springboard for collecting, discussing and sharing ideas on the topic of Digital Discomforts. The project explores issues brought about by the impact of digitization and the web, such as structural inequalities in digital access, the design of sites and content encountered online, user experiences in the internet and evolving conversation channels.
Resulting from intense weeks of collaborative work, the following diagrams are representations of our practice as design historians, intended to reflect real-life corridor-conversations we would have usually had in person as part of our studies. Impromptu, spontaneous and intellectually unpredictable these conversations embrace spelling mistakes and thematic jumps as characteristic of the method of communication. Our diagrams show the twists and turns of such informal, creative encounters. You may find them sometimes difficult to navigate, or even difficult to read. This is a deliberate dramatisation of the experience of digital inequality, bringing with it digital discomfort.
