Northumbria University

Graduate Student, School of Design

artist, designer, writer

Thesis Title: Working with Mercury

About

My background was originally in psychology. I trained at Newcastle University, UK (BA with First Class Honours, psychology), and worked in neuroscience for some time before sneaking into the dogged, mongrel semi-discipline of design. Since then, I've combined research, strategy and design work with large-scale organisations with more experimental work - which, as you're reading this on Academia.edu, is probably of more interest to you. So, something about that. 

At present the mainstay of my noncommercial efforts reside under the banner of my PhD work (at Northumbria, submitting Spring 2011). It's an account of 'the designer' as a suspicious figure, dangerous because the skills used to manipulate matter into artefacts might be as applicable to human beings as to wood, metal, pixels and plastic. This is a story with a long history and mobile geography, from early modern Europe to ancient Greece, African trickster myths to dynastic China, the Victorian factory to the operating theatres of the near future.

In these sites, we find emphasised the dimension of design that concerns the elicitation of improbable effects from unpromising materials, an unsettling force in every sense as it is the means by which the weak come to prevail over the strong - although, of course, weak and strong only sometimes coincide with those deemed 'good' and 'bad'. The figure of this cunning artificer, often only half-conscious of its actions, is developed through cases as diverse as superempowered activist groups, alibi agencies, surrogacy farms, unelected mandarins, colonial pacification strategies, and other social adventures by turns comic, poetic, and disturbing.   

This is an account that stands in vivid contrast to suggestions, well-intentioned but unsophisticated and perhaps too quick to congratulate themselves, made to date by proponents of 'service design', especially in its offshot branches of 'transformation', 'community-led' and 'socially responsible' design. I hope it's a trigger for more supple, adventurous and savvy practices than they, fired by a decidedly critical spirit.   

In another mode, I'm engaged in a range of dabblings, including, at present, an expansive speculative project with the architect Stuart Munro dubbed The 'It' In 'It Is Raining. Other irons in elsewhere fires grow unhandleably hot while I finish up my dissertation. Alongside this strand of experimental practice, and largely as a result of it, I've been a visiting lecturer and/or critic at the Bartlett, the AA, the Interactive Institute (Stockholm), Parsons, TU Berlin, and others.