My research is situated in both the commercial and academic sectors.
As a commercial design researcher, most recently I was the Cultural Research Lead on the project to name the six lines of the London Overground, commissioned by Transport for London and the London Mayor’s Office. I won a D&AD Wooden Pencil award for it.
Other projects in the last few years that I have led and conducted research for include exploring the future of intensive care units to help a global healthcare corporation strategise its new product and service developments; attitudes to visual impairment within the British Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities to help a third sector client understand how one of its programmes could help more people; and constructing consumer profiles of Europe’s longest continuous high street shoppers to help 500 small and medium size businesses better understand how to market their products and services.
I have also co-led a research project investigating the future of the home and the office of our post-Covid worlds, in the first three months of the UK Covid-19 pandemic for an international property developer; and at the height of the #MeToo movement, I was the cultural analyst and semiotician researching the contemporary model of masculinity, with a specific focus on exploring the discourses around men, relationships and sex, for a global pharmaceutical corporation.
For other clients, I have explored topics as diverse as the cultural meanings of twenty-first-century television; contemporary discourses around parenting; and the relationship high-net-worth individuals have with technology and the concept of luxury.
My academic research is centred on the field of critical materialities, which combines my expertise in design history and theory, with philosophy, critical theory and cultural studies.
I am currently working on a project called The Coral Notes, centred on the desire for a neon re-enchantment with the subterranean. The project includes writing, film-making and printed objects.
It began with a chapter I wrote called ‘Look at Me/Don’t Look at Me: A Voyage and a Journey Around High-Vis Materials; or Explorations in Fluorescent Matters’, published in the book Tupaia, Captain Cook and the Voyage of the Endeavour: A Material History, edited by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll (Bloomsbury, 2023).
The Coral Notes now includes three more works including:
- The Drowned Book, a set of prints made during a visit to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Norwegian hytte in Skjolden;
- Dynamite Hidden Under The Peachy Skin, a short moving image piece inspired by the philosopher Catherine Malabou’s book The Ontology of the Accident; and
- The Diagonal (Don’t Look at Me), a set of prints reworking a painting by the twentieth-century British artist Euan Uglow.
My previous long-term academic research interest was slime, its cultural meanings and its design histories. It meant I watched far too many Dr. Pimple Popper videos, tracked down early twentieth-century ectoplasm in archives, and often found myself thinking about Cold War fears and the idea of the blob. I gave performance lectures, made a radio show and ran workshops with artists.
I am currently creating a set of embroidered tea towels on slimey matters called Cleaning Up The Slime, to be carried as protest banners, objection to the demands of the domestic, to be exhibited later this year.