For OCAD University Professor Dr. Nithikul Nimkulrat, making is a way of thinking. A Thai-born, Toronto-based design researcher and textile artist, Dr. Nimkulrat explores what happens when we engage deeply and repeatedly with materials – and how those encounters can help us understand experiences that are difficult to put into words.
Her research examines craft as a way of thinking through materials, with particular attention to experiential knowledge, embodiment, material engagement, practice-led research, and the relationship between analogue and digital making. She is interested in how knowledge develops through interactions among the body, materials, tools, technologies, and the surrounding environment.
Her international trajectory has significantly shaped this work. She trained in industrial design and worked in the textiles industry in Thailand before completing her master’s and doctoral degrees in textile art and design at Aalto University in Finland. She later held full-time academic appointments at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom and the Estonian Academy of Arts. More recently, she was a visiting professor at Politecnico di Milano in Italy. These experiences have allowed her to work across different academic cultures and traditions of craft, design, and artistic research.
Her publications include the monograph Paperness (University of Art and Design Helsinki, 2009) and five edited books, most recently Craft and Design Practice from an Embodied Perspective (Routledge, 2024) and Prototyping and Experiential Knowledge (FrancoAngeli, 2025). Since 2013, she has convened the Design Research Society’s Experiential Knowledge Special Interest Group, through which she collaborates internationally to advance research in which designing and making form part of knowledge production.
OCAD University caught up with Dr. Nimkulrat to learn more about her current Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded research project, Crafting Memory: Toward a Theory of Grief and Nostalgia
Through Embodied Material Practices.
What is the focus of this research project and what inspired you to explore this
particular topic?
Crafting Memory investigates how sustained material practices can help people engage with memory, grief, loss, and change. While craft provides the project’s principal site of inquiry, the research brings embodied knowledge into dialogue with theoretical perspectives on memory, nostalgia, grief, affect, materiality, temporality, and care. Through this interdisciplinary framework, I examine how bodily movement, repetition, sensory attention, material resistance, and duration participate in remembering, grieving, and meaning-making.
The project developed from Remembered & Forgotten (2025), a research-creation project reflecting on my relationship with my father as he lived with Alzheimer’s disease. In this work, I reconstructed forms of ordinary objects associated with our shared memories through thousands of hand-tied knots. The prolonged process of making prompted me to consider not only how objects carry and evoke memory, but also how embodied interaction with materials may provide a way of attending to experiences that remain difficult to articulate.
The project therefore moves between practice and theory. Material practice generates situated insights, which are critically examined through relevant theoretical perspectives; these perspectives, in turn, provide new ways of interpreting what occurs through making.
The aim is to develop a theoretical account of how memory, grief, and loss are experienced not only cognitively or verbally, but through the body, materials, objects, relationships, and time. It also considers how nostalgia may emerge through encounters with familiar objects and materials, while recognizing that remembering does not simply recover the past but continually reconstructs it in the present.
What drew you into this field of study in the first place? Was there a turning point or defining moment?
I began my career as an industrial textile designer in Thailand, where I designed woven jacquard textiles for industrial production. During my graduate studies in textile art and design in Finland, my relationship with materials began to change. I became interested in materials not simply as substances used to realize a predetermined design, but as active participants that influence creative decisions and contribute to the meaning of an artefact.
Working intensively with paper string during my doctoral research was a defining moment. Paper string’s physical and expressive qualities – its stiffness, fragility, and capacity to be transformed into lace-like structures – continually redirected the making process. This experience showed me that thinking does not occur only before making; it also develops through bodily and sensory interaction with materials. This insight formed the basis of my doctoral research and subsequent monograph, Paperness.
My later international and interdisciplinary collaborations enabled me to test and extend this understanding in more specific contexts. In the United Kingdom, I collaborated with engineers to explore how textile structures and fabrication processes could contribute to wireless communication technologies. My work with mathematicians translated mathematical knot diagrams and tiling notations into methods for designing knotted textiles.
More recently, my collaborations at Politecnico di Milano have explored how prototypes mediate between abstract concepts and concrete experience. Together, these projects have expanded my research from the material agency encountered in my own practice towards a broader investigation of how embodied knowledge operates across disciplines, technologies, and educational contexts.
What problem or question is your research trying to solve or answer, and why is this important?
My broader research addresses a persistent challenge in design research: much of what practitioners know is tacit, embodied, sensory, and situated in action, while academic knowledge is often communicated primarily through verbal or textual forms. I therefore ask how knowledge generated through material practice can be critically examined and articulated without separating it from the bodily, material, and situated conditions through which it develops.
This question has guided my research on reflection and documentation, material thinking, expertise and connoisseurship, interdisciplinary collaboration, emerging materials, and prototyping. It also underpins my international work with the Design Research Society’s Experiential Knowledge Special Interest Group, which advances understanding of what constitutes knowledge – and a contribution to knowledge – when designing and making are integral to the research process.
The Crafting Memory project extends this inquiry into the context of memory, grief, and loss. It asks how embodied and material practices can reveal dimensions of these experiences that verbal accounts or visual representations alone may not capture.
By bringing practice-led research into dialogue with theories of memory, grief, affect, embodiment, materiality, temporality, and care, the project seeks to explain how bodily movement, repetition, sensory attention, objects, and material interaction participate in remembering, grieving, and meaning-making.
This is important because grief is not experienced solely as a cognitive or emotional response to loss; it is also lived through the body, everyday actions, relationships, places, objects, and time.
How do you see the research findings contributing to your field or affecting people’s lives in the real world?
The project will contribute a theoretical understanding of how material practices can support coping with and living with grief, rather than overcoming it or bringing it to a definitive resolution.
It examines how sensory interaction, bodily action, material attentiveness, and time can help people remain connected to memories while accommodating the changes and absences associated with loss.
In doing so, the research will position material practice as an epistemic and affective process through which memory, grief, and nostalgia may be encountered, interpreted, and carried forward.
The findings will be shared through scholarly publications, a symposium, and a participatory workshop. Workshop participants will bring materials and/or objects connected to their own memories and engage with them through personally appropriate forms of making and reflection.
These activities will provide insight into the different ways meaningful objects and materials may help people recall experiences, sustain connections, and develop individual ways of coping with and living alongside grief.
The project does not present making as treatment or suggest that material practice can resolve grief. Instead, it seeks to show how working with materials and objects of memory may create time and space for acknowledging loss, maintaining meaningful connections with the past, and continuing to live with memories as they change over time.
These findings will contribute new concepts and methods to research-creation, inform material-based teaching and public programming, and help cultural and community organizations develop thoughtful activities centred on meaningful materials and objects.
Are you working with any collaborators, institutions, or funding bodies on this project?
The project is based at OCAD University and funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Harbourfront Centre will host a one-day symposium and participatory workshop, bringing researchers, artists, designers, educators, cultural organizations, and members of the public together to examine how meaningful materials and objects can support remembering, coping with grief, and living with loss.
The symposium will also create opportunities to develop new relationships across research, creative practice, and community engagement. One anticipated outcome is to expand the project by identifying additional collaborators and institutional partners who can contribute diverse disciplinary, cultural, and community perspectives to its future development.
The project is further supported by my international research network to help situate the findings within wider interdisciplinary conversations and support their international dissemination.
What do you hope people, both inside and outside of your field, take away from your research?
I hope the project encourages people to understand grief not as a problem to be resolved or a finite process that ends, but as an experience that people learn to live with over time. Memories, meaningful objects, and materials can sustain connections to people, relationships, and experiences that have been altered by loss. Through material engagement, these connections may be revisited and transformed rather than simply preserved or left behind.
For researchers, I hope the project offers a new theoretical and methodological understanding of how active engagement with materials and objects – not only their preservation or symbolic meaning – can generate knowledge about coping with and living with grief and changing memories. For wider audiences, I hope it shows how meaningful materials and objects can help people sustain connections, carry memories forward, and make sense of loss in the present.
