As Head of the Textiles Programme at the Royal College of Art, Anne Toomey leads a team of expert specialist staff and over 130 postgraduate students working at the creative interface between materials, making and meaning. Their focus is innovation that impacts and spans across many sectors, exploring new territories for the 21s century Textiles specialist.
Under her leadership, the Textiles Programme has established the Soft Systems Research Group whose remit includes the following:
- An exploration of the way that our SOFT material world resonates with the human condition to find new opportunities and solutions involving human interfaces, user acceptance and experience.
- Concerned with affective and sensory material values within a technological landscape.
- Developing innovative processes, surfaces, structures and soft systems to form products that reimagine our relationships with materials
- Incorporating aspects of advanced materials into a textile led approach to design
- A Design-Led Interrogation of Graphene & 2D materials to develop a platform of material formats for Designers
- Bridge the gap between lab and manufacture
Anne is a textiles specialist with national and international experience in research-based design, product development, manufacture and student centered education. As a design researcher, her research questions and challenges the role of new materials and fabrication technologies in Design for the 21st century.