IFAI International Design Exhibition, North Carolina, USA 2008 - Acoustic Girli Concrete

This exhibition celebrated the achievements that design can bring to our lives, which fit the ethos of Girli Concrete: that design, creativity and craft have an agenda and vision beyond a purely visual aesthetic. Curator Marie O’Mahony Professor of Advanced Textiles at The University of Technology, Sydney, after hearing a paper delivered by Belford at ‘The New Craft Future Voices conference in Dundee(2007), invited Girli Concrete to develop a product specifically for this International exhibition focusing on Health & Safety within the sector of the Built Environment. This body of work developed the acoustic potential of embedding textiles in concrete.Girli Concrete is a collaboration between Patricia Belford and Ruth Morrow Professor of Architecture at QUB. This body of work looked specifically at the acoustic enhancement of concrete through technologies used by Girli Concrete; three of these technologies have published patents. A proof of concept award (£8280) facilitated the research. Collaborating with Professor Jian Kang at Sheffield University, the textile technologies developed were tested under lab conditions and the results used to develop further the merging of aesthetics with acoustic benefits. The publicity created from the exhibition, evident on the blog site, resulted in invitations to submit work and citations. WISE (Woman in Science Engineering and Construction) commissioned five unique pieces in celebration of Women in the Construction Industry (one was presented to HRH Princess of Wales, Patron of WISE). The acoustic potential of the product was discussed in material innovation, a Belgium publication, Basics: Interior Architecture by Ro Spankie, Sex & The City: Gender (site event of Woman’s Design Service), and the Girli Concrete Blog placed on the Intute website. A 25K award was won on the grounds of the potential in the acoustic profile of a normally hard urban material, which is now being supported by the University of Ulster's Office of Innovation as a spin-out company.