Artist/ Designer

Karl Aspelund has been working as an artist and designer since graduating with a degree in 3d Design (Theater) from the Wimbledon School of Art in London in 1986. As a designer, his credits include over 40 theatrical productions, 4 films and numerous other commissions. This has involved sets and costumes, couture, exhibitions, graphic design, murals, lighting, installations, art direction and production design.

Teacher

Karl has taught art, design and CAD since 1991. In 1994, he was commissioned to create, and head for its initial year, a Department of Industrial Design at The Reykjavik Technical College in Iceland, where he taught a number of design related courses from '91-'96. He currently teaches Apparel Design at the University of Rhode Island's Department of Textiles, Fashion Merchandising and Design (from '96), as well as Portfolios and Presentations,  (from '98). He has also taught Apparel Design ('96-'00) and An Introduction to Illustration and Design for Apparel  ('04) at the Rhode Island School of Design's Department of Continuing Education.

Art, Design and Computing

Karl has been designing for - and collaborating with - the artist Brower Hatcher at the Mid-Ocean Studio in Providence, Rhode Island, since 2001. In his collaborative efforts with Brower he has focused on researching cellular automata and natural morphology with a view to applying these to the formation of artwork. Karl has also been developing algorithms and other computerized methods for the auto-generation of structural forms obeying organic principles. As a result Karl was the liaison between the Mid-Ocean studio and Brown University’s SHAPE Lab, a multidisciplinary project supported by Brown and the National Science Foundation. This collaboration focused on the development of biomimetic sculpture and he Mid-Ocean Studio continues to develop the artistic concepts resulting from that work.

Publications

The Design Process

A cross-disciplinary design textbook, published by Fairchild Books, New York, NY 2006.

More information from the publisher here.

Here on Amazon.com)

Computational Schemes for Biomimetic Sculpture

B. Hatcher, K. Aspelund, F. F. Leymarie, A. Willis, J. Speicher, D. B. Cooper,  5th Int. Conf. on Creativity & Cognition, ACM, London, April 2005. The conference was hosted at Goldsmiths College in London, by The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. Go here to find a PDF of the paper.

Links

University of Rhode Island, TMD dept

The Mid Ocean Studio

Brown University's SHAPE lab

Fairchild Books