Recent Publications
Boyd Davis, Stephen (2025) Change has marked the face of all things: the problematic landscapes of Thomas Hardy. In: Papadimitriou, Fivos and Kühne, Olaf (eds.) Deviant Landscapes. Springer. ISBN to be confirmed (In Press)
Two themes on landscape in the writings of Thomas Hardy are reviewed and developed. One is landscape as a place of loss both to time and to industrialisation. The other is landscape as a site of projection of subjective states, including landscape as cruelly indifferent or treacherous. From this emerges the idea of landscape as deceiver, aligned with Hardy’s wider concern with illusion and reality. The overriding importance of visual perception, its multiple subjectivities, and its relation to depiction, is used to draw attention to the previously under-researched importance of Hardy’s practical, working experience of drawing.
See this item on the RCA Research Repository (full text not yet available)
Boyd Davis, Stephen (2024) Design as an interesting phenomenon: George Mallen and the Royal College of Art. In: Mason, Catherine (ed.) Creative Simulations: George Mallen and the early Computer Arts Society. Springer. 131-158. ISBN 978-3-031-50619-2; e-book ISBN 978-3-031-50620-8
The chapter traces the story of George Mallen’s time at the RCA from 1971 to 1983, asking what Mallen brought to the pioneering Department of Design Research there, and how the RCA changed along with him. It connects his innovations to the intellectual concerns of the time including cybernetics and systems thinking, to which Mallen brought his own unique contributions.
See this item on the RCA Research Repository (full text not yet available)
See this item on Springer’s website
Boyd Davis, Stephen and Vane, Olivia (2020) Design as Externalization: enabling research Information Design Journal, 25 (1). pp. 28-42. ISSN 0142-5471
The article is concerned with a central contribution of designing to information visualisation in the digital humanities. The activity is characterised as one of externalisation, instantiation in visible or tangible form of ideas that might otherwise be internal to the minds of the designer and other participants.
Boyd Davis, Stephen; Vane, Olivia and Kräutli, Florian (2021) Can I believe what I see? Data visualisation and trust in the humanities Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 46 (4). pp. 522-546. ISSN 1743-2790
Questions of trust are increasingly important in relation to data and its use. The authors focus on humanities data and its visualisation, through analysis of their own recent projects with museums, archives and libraries internationally.
Boyd Davis, Stephen and Gristwood, Simone, (2017) ‘A dialogue between the real-world and the operational model’ – The realities of design in Bruce Archer’s 1968 doctoral thesis Design Studies, 56 (May). pp. 185-204. ISSN 0142-694X
The article centres on a single document, the 1968 doctoral thesis of L. Bruce Archer. It traces Archer’s earlier publications and the sources that informed and inspired his thinking as a way of understanding his influential work at the Royal College of Art from 1962.
Boyd Davis, Stephen; Vane, Olivia and Kräutli, Florian (2016) Conference or Workshop, Using Data Visualisation to tell Stories about Collections at Electronic Visualisation and the Arts, London, UK, 12 - 14 July 2016
The paper explores visualisation of “big data” from digitised museum collections and archives, focusing on the relationship between data, visualisation and narrative. A contrast is presented between visualisations that show “just the data” and those that present the information in such a way as to tell a story using visual rhetorical devices; such devices have historically included trees, streams, chains, geometric shapes and other forms. The contrast is explored through historical examples and a survey of current practice.
Boyd Davis, Stephen and Gristwood, Simone (2016) Early Design Research at the RCA: The Royal College of Art in the 1960s and 1970
This online exhibition introduces a project to document and evaluate the early history of Design Research in the UK, focusing on the Department of Design Research and its predecessors at the Royal College of Art, London. The exhibits illustrate a number of themes, many of them concerned with the varied roles of the leader of the Department, Professor L Bruce Archer. They are organised around a series of images, highlighting important themes, and not necessarily presented in chronological order.
Links to websites of my co-authors (and former PhD students):
Florian Kräutli: www.kraeutli.com
Olivia Vane: oliviavane.co.uk
My blog about Chronographics