MA Research

Peter Lamb

Peter Lamb is chronicling notable pottery made in Ireland in the 1950s within its material, cultural and social context. He is focussing on that of John ffrench, Grattan Freyer, Philip Pearce, Peter Brennan and Valerie Landon, and those who worked with them in Kilkenny, Arklow, Shanagarry, Terrybaun and Banagher. Sources include potters' archives, diaries, newspapers and other printed sources, interviews and private collections, his own included.

Shane Whelan

"A Language for Play"

The motivation for taking up this research lies in the fact that as a game designer, I felt that the descriptive tools I had in writing, drawing and animation were too limited to describe the fluid, dynamic components of play. The hypothesis is that play should be understood in its own language and its own sensory mode. If we can do this, then we can use play to design playable media, in much the same way as we use drawing to design 2D images or music is designed by playing and experimenting with music.

Currently, we don't have any formal playable tools, either real or conceptual, for designing play, and so are forced to use other forms of communication to do it. So my research aims to find some useful ways to communicate by purely using play in ways that are descriptive for analysis and prescriptive for design of playable systems. Discovering whether this is even possible is also part of the agenda.

To date, I have concentrated on broadly defining the components of all forms of play, such as behaviour, intelligence, choices, and rules. I have been studying theories like Gardner's Multiple Intelligence Theory and the theory of Emergent Behaviour and seeing how concepts like these can be integrated.