My practice draws on twenty years of industry experience, but I am also constantly informed by up-to-date design, communication and creative industry research, as well as my own ongoing academic research practice.
My research has used unique interdisciplinary methodologies to investigate everyday professional relationships between designers and stakeholders such as editors, salespeople, printers and developers. This has led to new findings about designers’ professional relationships with stakeholders. My research seeks to expand these approaches, to help designers and non-designers work together more efficiently and collaboratively.
I also research and publish on numerous related topics.
Recent academic publishing
Looking at things strangely: Defamiliarisation as a design approach for media literacy education.
Design thinking | Standing on the shoulders of … graphic design!
What a funny looking video | Using allegorical representations of technological change to reflect on future digital communication and design challenges.
Artificial intelligence in design education | evaluating ChatGPT as a virtual colleague for post-graduate course development.
Responsible Design Thinking | discussing methods for integrating responsible design into design thinking education.
Graphic design and artificial intelligence | Interdisciplinary challenges for designers in the search for research collaboration.
What’s the Brief? | building a discourse around the graphic design brief. PDF version of this article.
Terminology and Design Capital | Examining the status of graphic design through its practitioners’ perceptions of graphic design job titles.
Coca-Cola and design | Chapter from recent book about the Coca-Cola brand.
Re-performing design | Study looking at graphic designers’ professional interactions with stakeholders, using performative methodologies.
Photographic (In)authenticity | Discussion that looks into traditional photographic debates which sometimes occur within design and photographic practices.
Other output
Sometimes referred to as non-traditional research outcomes, these are some recent projects that may be of interest.
I post occasional articles about design research on the blog Communication Design Academic. These are thoughts and snippets emerging from my research, as well as the broader discipline.
Photo-books
Instant reflections, Crunchy Spaces, Melbourne, Australia. ISBN 978-0-6482486-3-7
Fragments of abstraction, Crunchy Spaces, Melbourne, Australia. ISBN 978-0-6482486-1-3