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Residual structures of feeling are the lived values, emotions, habits, and ways of understanding the world that persist from an earlier social and cultural formation, even after the material conditions that produced them have disappeared. This project explores how deindustrialisation has fractured identity and narrative within a post-industrial town, using design as a primer to surface unspoken histories and create new forms of dialogue between generations, providing the prompt for reflection, connection, and understanding.
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Rather than presenting the project chronologically or by discipline, Residual Structures of Feeling is structured through the language of cinema. This filmic framework became a way of communicating the project as a narrative, allowing research, making and exhibition to unfold as interconnected chapters rather than isolated outcomes.
The Prologue introduces the archive: family photographs, industrial artefacts, oral histories and documentary material that establish the social and cultural landscape of Clydebank. Like the opening sequence of a film, it sets the atmosphere without attempting to explain everything, inviting the audience into a world assembled from fragments.
The Story is the design process itself: Conversations, photography, moving image, material experimentation and object-making exist in constant dialogue with the archive, generating new work that continually reshapes the research rather than simply illustrating it.
Finally, the Epilogue takes the form of the exhibition: Rather than concluding the project, it creates the conditions for new conversations to emerge between visitors, objects and the archive. In this way, the exhibition becomes another chapter in the project, extending the narrative beyond the gallery and allowing the methodology to continue evolving.
The project is therefore not presented as a finished body of work, but as an ongoing dialogue between archive, making and audience; one where the story continues long after the exhibition ends.
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As Residual Structures of Feeling developed, it became clear that the project was producing more than a series of objects and images. It was revealing a way of working with people, places and histories that can no longer be directly experienced. From this, Designing in Absence emerged.
Rather than treating the archive as a static record of the past, the methodology positions conversations, images and objects as equal participants within the design process. Family archives, oral histories and industrial artefacts become points of departure, while every new object, image and conversation generated through the project feeds back into the archive, allowing it to continually evolve.
At its core, Designing in Absence asks how design might move beyond preserving history to actively working within conditions of its absence. Instead of attempting to reconstruct what has been lost, it creates opportunities for fragments of memory, material culture and lived experience to enter into dialogue, generating new narratives and new ways of understanding the past through contemporary practice. Although developed through the context of Clydebank, the methodology proposes a transferable approach for engaging with communities, cultures and histories where direct access is no longer possible.
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Conversations operate as a living archive within the methodology. Alongside watching documentaries and listening to archival interviews, I entered into my own conversations with people across generations in Clydebank, discussing changing industries, places, memories and everyday experiences of the town. These exchanges were not undertaken simply to gather information, but to establish an ongoing dialogue between the past and the present. Each conversation informed new images and objects, which in turn prompted further conversations, allowing the archive to continually expand. In the absence of many of those who directly experienced Clydebank’s industrial past, conversation becomes a way of accessing knowledge that has never been formally recorded, revealing the quieter narratives, cultural codes and personal testimonies that continue to shape the town today.
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Images provide another point of dialogue between the archive and the new work. Historical photographs, documentary stills and personal family images were brought together with my own photography, often layered directly onto industrial materials through UV printing. Alongside these archival references sit contemporary cultural symbols, including the Clyde Shopping Centre logo, Jobcentre signage and references to Still Game, acknowledging that identity is shaped as much by everyday culture as by industry itself. Rather than separating past and present, these visual layers allow them to coexist, constructing a portrait of Clydebank that moves beyond documentation. The archive is therefore not reproduced but reactivated, enabling new work to emerge while remaining in constant conversation with the histories that inform it.
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Objects are produced through a dialogue with those that once defined Clydebank’s industrial landscape. Their forms draw upon elements such as the shipyard access ladders, the Singer Clock Tower and the cranes that dominated the skyline, while their methods of production reference the industrial techniques that once gave rise to them. Welding, hot riveting, sheet steel fabrication and chemical blackening echo the processes of heavy engineering, while the blackened surfaces also reference the japanning used to finish Singer sewing machines. These decisions are attempts to embed the objects within the same material language as the archive. The resulting pieces exist somewhere between past and present, carrying traces of industrial culture while functioning as contemporary domestic objects that invite reflection, conversation and the continued development of the archive.
The exhibition is conceived not simply as a display of completed outcomes, but as the final stage within the methodology itself. Rather than presenting resolved answers, it is designed to continue the dialogue established throughout the project, encouraging visitors to encounter industrial histories through material, spatial and emotional experience. Its physical arrangement is informed directly by the archive.
The layout draws from a photograph within my personal collection showing my grandfather asleep in his living room, surrounded by the ordinary domestic objects that shaped his daily life. Domestic space becomes a framework for discussing industrial history, suggesting that the effects of deindustrialisation continue to exist not only in former factories and shipyards but within homes, families and everyday routines.
The objects occupying this space are similarly rooted in archival reference. Their forms, materials and methods of production draw upon industrial processes, while their contemporary function places them firmly within the domestic environment. By bringing these industrial traces into the home, the work proposes that objects can operate as prompts for memory, conversation and reflection. Rather than reconstructing the past, they create opportunities for people to recognise its continued presence within contemporary life.
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Filmic Framework
Designing in Absence Structure
Conversations
Images
Objects
Grandpa’s Default Position, 2012
Exhibition Layout
Sketchbook Scan
Full Collection
Vase for Grace 2.0
Dish
Tray
Grandmother Clock
Weave Table
Spare Chair
Flim Primer