Biography
I am Head of Design, Photography and Advertising at Edinburgh Napier University, responsible for delivery of undergraduate and post graduate programmes within the School of Arts & Creative Industries. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), and a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College. I currently hold the position of external examiner for the MA Global Innovation Design programme at RCA/Imperial College. I was previously Programme Director for Design at Loughborough School of Design and Creative Arts, have been a visiting tutor on Masters degree courses at the Royal College of Art, Central St. Martins and Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, a guest lecturer at Umeå Institute of Design (Sweden) and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico), and a thesis advisor at Aalto University (Finland) and Savannah College of Art and Design (USA). I am a consistent advocate of practise-based research in design, both in my own research and the direction given to my PhD students, which is grounded in an understanding of professional practice established through more than 20 years experience as an industrial designer, design manager and creative director.
My work is broadly situated within the field of Design Futures, generating speculative, plausible scenarios to challenge the ‘preferable’ futures advertised by those invested in the technological status quo. Increasingly this has centered on the transition to Responsible Design. By utilising research methods from the discipline of User Experience Design, my work places the needs of all stakeholders in the future of our planet, both human and other, at the centre of movements for change. I use observational research, design probes, co-design workshops and conceptual provotypes to reveal insights for the development of fictional scenarios, personas and customer journey maps. These scenarios have previously considered issues such as consumer interventions within circular economy models of production, models of localisation of digital manufacturing, the future of creative work, the secret lives of ‘smart’ products, the ownership of data and its usage, and the UX of consumer design toolkits.
If you are interested in undertaking a PhD in the areas of Responsible Design, Sustainable Design Futures or Design Education, please contact me at the email above for an informal discussion.