Ruth has been collaborating with the textile designer, Trish Belford over the past 6 years.
Initially their work aimed to make hard things soft - their motivation emerged out of a longstanding critical position towards the built environment.
The work has led to the development of a spin out company, Tactility Factory, which exploits the technologies (patented) that have emerged from their collaboration. The work is documented in tactility factory's website and new blog (previously in the 'girli concrete' blog)
Related Papers/Publications:
Sept 10 R Morrow and T Belford. A hybrid practice - between Design and Craft. Design and Craft : a History of Convergences and Divergences. 7th Conference of the International Committee for Design History and Design Studies. ICDHS 2010. 20-22 September 2010 Brussels, Belgium
Sept 08 R Morrow. Alberti’s Missing Appendix in Field-Journal, vol.2 (1) pp63-74 University of Sheffield. ISSN: 1755-068
July 08 R Morrow and T. Belford Soft Garniture: Developing Hybrid Materials between academia and industry in S Roaf and A Bairstow (eds) in the Oxford Conference: A re-evaluation of Education in Architecture, pp357-361. ISBN: 978-1-84564-206-8
Dec 07 Ruth Morrow, Trish Belford, Donna Campbell. Soft Construction. In Conference Proceedings of Tectonics 2007 Conference: Making Meaning, Eindhoven TU, Holland ISBN 978-90-386-1186-0
R & D Funding includes:
June 12: Creative Industries Innovation Fund £10K for Big Textiles project.
July 11: E-synergy PoC funding - TF Skins and Thermal Mass £10K
Nov 09: Tactility Factory contracted (£22K) in EPSRC funded project with University of Sheffield and University of the Arts, London called ‘Extreme Collaboration’. The work involved was also supported by an Invest NI innovation voucher £4K.
Sept 09: Creative Industries Innovation Fund £47K
Sept 09: Overall winner and category winner (clean-tech) of the 25K award 'the Next Big idea' funded by Invest NI and Bank of Ireland
Dec 08 Overall winner of the Big Idea Award organised by Advantage NI and Invest NI -£15K
Dec 07, UUTech Proof of Concept Funding, £8K
March 07 ‘Woven Concrete’, AHRC Practice Led and Applied Scheme, (£16,410)
Dec 06 UUTech Pre-Proof of Concept Funding, (£6,000),
Interface Research Centre, Oct 06 (£5,000)
UU Research Institute, Aug 06 (£2,350)
Higher Education Innovation Fund for Academic Enterprise, May 06 (£3,000),
NI Arts Council, Nov 05 (£2,000)
