Patricia Flanagan

Dr. Patricia Flanagan is an artist, designer and academic whose work is represented in private and public collections in Australia, Ireland, Germany, Italy and China. Tricia has an extensive international exhibition portfolio including the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien Berlin and was the representative for Oceania at the Tournai Contemporary Textiles Biennial Belgium.

Tricia's work has, at its foundation, a systems thinking approach. Her practice includes, critical and speculative wearables, site-specific sculptural installation, social sculpture and performance installation, often combining hand crafted art and design practices with digital technologies.

Tricia established the Wearables Lab at the Academy of Visual Art at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2009. She currently works as a Lecturer for the University of New South Wales in the School of Art and Design, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture where she is the co-director of the Interactive Media Lab and Lead Researcher Wearables at the Creative Robotics Lab.

Research Activities

Tricia investigates hybrid practices emerging at the intersection of digital technologies and traditional art and design practices, specialising in new materials, wearables, and generative design through research projects such as:

• Femufacture in collaboration with the Japan Foundation of Sydney, Sydney Design Festival, and Art Month Sydney

• The Peripatetic Institute for Praxiology and Anthropology

• The Haptic InterFace Project

• Research Creativity – Praxis

Tricia is on the steering committee for the World Craft Council affiliated, Knowledge House of Craft and is the founding member of TTIGOC (Tracing the Intangible Gestures of Craft) a collaboration with Chinese ethnic minority master craftspeople and researchers at GYPEC Guiyang, China.

Areas of supervision

Art and Design; Textiles; Wearables; Tangible Embodied HCI; Future Materials; Generative Design; Agile Manufacturing; 

New Materialism; Speculative Critical Design; Posthumanism; Co-Design; Public Art; Design Anthropology;

Craft; Intangible Cultural Heritage; Environmental Humanities

Tricia supervises candidates in the following areas of research:

critical, speculative, generative, experimental creative art, design or craft practice-based research; research regarding future materials and/or emerging technologies, wearables or crafts-based human-computer interaction; exploration at the intersection of art/science, post-human and non-human perspectives, or material agency; investigations into materials and making, traditional craft, tacit knowledge, hybrid materiality; theories and methodologies in relation to environmentally sustainability, rethinking materials and skills in volatile futures. If interested in MFA, MPhil or PhD supervision, please review my publications to assess whether your research topic is situated within my field of research.