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Editorial Vision
First Issue | Call for Paper
Events
Dr Niloofar Amini, Lecturer in Environmental Design, University For Creative Arts
Dr Gareth Jones, Senior Lecturer in Design & Media: Research & Theory, University For Creative Arts
Dr Jorge Valdovinos, Lecturer in Design & Media: Research & Theory, University For Creative Arts
Dr Laura Yuile, Lecturer in Digital Media Arts, University For Creative Arts
Associate Editors | Alphabetic Order
Dr Matteo Aimini, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Design, University For Creative Arts
Dr Francesca Brunetti, Lecturer in Design & Media, ISI Florence
Sebastian Campos, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication Design, University For Creative Arts
Daniel Harding, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication Design, University For Creative Arts
Ruehl Muller, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication Design, University For Creative Arts
Dr Mohammed Ali Sharieff, Principal Architect CHAND Associates, Coimbatore, TN, India
Raynal Somiah, Lecturer in English For Academic Purposes, University For Creative Arts
Zihong Yue, Lecturer in Environmental Design, University For Creative Arts
Contact Us | studionote@uca.ac.uk
ISSN: 2978-8080 (Print)
E-ISSN: 2978-8099 (Online)
STUDIO NOTE
IN CONVERSATION - 01
We are pleased to announce the inaugural StudioNote Journal roundtable, to be held in April 2026 at ICI.
Titled “Coastal Assemblages: Art, Design and Environment,” this first conversation brings together complementary approaches that explore how cultural, social, and environmental conditions are observed, interpreted, and transformed through practice.
Bridging artistic research and design methodology, both speakers engage deeply with situated knowledge—whether through maritime histories and culinary narratives or ethnographic observation and participatory technologies. Their shared focus on processes of exchange, adaptation, and collective experience reflects the core ambition of StudioNote: to create a platform where disciplines intersect, methods are rethought, and new forms of knowledge emerge through dialogue.
SPEAKERS
Dr. Gabriel N. Gee
An art historian whose research engages maritime cultures and interconnected global histories, Dr. Gee reflects on his 2025 visit to Kinmen and Xiamen. His work explores how maritime heritage, agriculture, and culinary traditions intersect across landscapes. Through the concept of “disciplinary cannibalism,” he blends geography, history, anthropology, and culinary arts, using recipes as narrative and methodological tools to investigate coastal spaces as contact zones shaped by circulation, memory, and habitation.
Zihong Yu
A lecturer in Environmental Design at ICI and a UK ARB registered architect, Zihong Yu’s practice applies ethnographic methods to examine local social, cultural, and economic conditions. His work translates these observations into participatory design strategies and “socially constructive technologies” that foster community-based innovation and long-term place-making, rooted in local traditions and collective practices.
Mediator
Raynal Somiah, Lecturer in English for Academic Purposes
STUDIO NOTE
IN CONVERSATION - 02
For the purpose of the second roundtable, Liminal Critique: Negotiating Agency Between Art, Design and Property brings together two critical perspectives that examine housing not simply as architecture or real estate, but as a contested spatial, and representational condition. Moderated by Dr. Jorge Valdovinos, the roundtable explores how practitioners and researchers negotiate agency within systems increasingly shaped by financialisation, speculation, and exclusion.
On the 29th May, Kent Mundle, from Hong Kong University, will present By Us, For Us, a cooperative initiative developed through Architecture Land Initiative (ALIN), which investigates alternative and collective models of housing beyond speculative development. His lecture repositions architecture as a form of support rather than commodity, questioning how design can reclaim housing as a social and ecological infrastructure.
In this conversation, Dr. Laura Yuile, through her project ASSET ARREST, approaches financialised housing from the perspective of artistic and spatial practice. Using performative property viewings and podcast-based counter-publicity, her work exposes the atmospheres, rhetorics, and exclusions embedded within luxury real estate.
Together, the session frames liminal critique as a mode of practice operating between art, design, research, and activism—opening space to rethink how housing is imagined, represented, and collectively contested.
SPEAKERS
Kent Mundle
Architect, educator, and researcher specialized in housing, infrastructure, and community development within emerging economies. He is a member of District Development Unit (DDU), an impact enterprise that develops architectural prototypes and implements community infrastructure in countries such as Nepal and the Philippines. At the University of Hong Kong, Kent teaches in the Department of Architecture and contributes to the Rural-Urban Lab, focusing on affordable housing innovations and cooperative building strategies.
Dr. Laura Yuile
An anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and educator from Glasgow. Her practice moves across installation, video, performance, writing and curatorial projects, investigating the cultural infrastructures of real estate, retail and global commodity systems - how surfaces, systems and speculative futures shape the environments we inhabit. Long-term projects including ASSET ARREST and Museum of Modern Shopping function as research platforms, combining fieldwork, exhibitions, podcasts and public interventions to examine and expose the spaces of contemporary capitalism.
Mediator
Dr.Jorge Valdovinos - researcher in Social Sciences specializing in Media, Communication, and Culture, and a lecturer in the Creative Foundation department at ICI.