Toni Rutherford
Toni Rutherford is a design historian in training, having worked in art and design education for 12+ years. Toni is the recipient of The Jordan Bequest Scholarship from the Victoria and Albert museum which has allowed her to take the next challenging step in her career as a researcher, maker and educator.
Degree Details
School of Arts & Humanities
Toni’s research looks into the exchange of information between makers and education systems. Her dissertation will trace the skills, education, material and technological information exchange in the nineteenth century making sector. With the focus object of the dissertation being armatures used within sculpture, Toni will look at the use and history of the word ‘armature’ in this context. Using case studies to allow analysis of material supply routes, manufacture, geographic and ethnical data to gain a better understanding of the networks involved in sculpture workshops.
In March Toni and her family all became remote learners and teachers navigating many digital platforms to educate, research, entertain and generally stay sane. The Digital Discomforts group project for the RCA2020, has allowed Toni to navigate the world of collaborative public facing projects. Showcasing how design historians start conversations about hushed topics and ask awkward questions before diving into full blown research projects.
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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.
