 I research, practice, and engage, exploring creative practices as feral care. |
| I'm a shapeshifter. I'm a researcher and creative practitioner among many things. I'm also an Associate Professor in Civic Interaction Design at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Before coming to Amsterdam, I was based in Naarm (Melbourne), heading the Care-full Design Lab and working as Associate Professor and Vice-Chancellor's Principal Research Fellow in Design and Social Contexts at RMIT. From there, I was lucky to be able to collaborate with fascinating researchers and practitioners across the world on many different projects. One such work was the EU Horizon 2020 project, CreaTures: Creative Practices for Transformational Futures, which I co-conceived; I then led the Engagement programme in the project. Previously, I was the Director of the QUT Urban Informatics Research Lab and one of the rascals who started what is now known as FoodCHI (Food-Computer-Human-Interaction). I've always been transdisciplinary in my work. I situate ‘care’ at the core of transformational encounters in different settings ranging from cities as complex cyberphysical networks to forests as moving creatures (see our Open Forest Collective work). I build on this to explore how radical transformation can materialise care-fully through creative-critical engagements. My work is often experimental, multisensory, playful, and participatory, and starts from the margins to understand and create just futures. I'm particularly interested in the dynamics of creative practice as feral care. So I'm currently exploring 1) its potential to arouse societal transformation in different cultural and more-than-human contexts, and 2) experimental and co-creative ways to form relational spaces to make sense of indeterminacy, plurality, and entanglements towards change. I intentionally share my work in many different ways, ranging from texts in scholarly books and journals across fields (e.g. design, engineering, humanities, and cartography) to invited talks and creative works showcased at exhibitions and festivals, such as the UNESCO Creative Cities, Helsinki Design Week, National Gallery Prague, and Venice Architecture Biennale. Currently, I'm not involved in coursework teaching, though I had a lot of fun doing it over the past 20+ years in various roles and capacities. I'm always interested in collaborative work and postgraduate practice-based research supervision, broadly - both understanding and designing - around:
Other specific areas of interest include empowering the margins, healing, awe, and entanglements. Feel free to look at some of my projects, what I've produced, and wonderful research students I've been privileged to supervise to date, and see if our interests align. Please propose a radical idea for collaborative creative practice, research, education, and more, in relation to or outside of these, if you'd like. I enjoy working with feral creatures who are curious, committed, creative, collaborative, and caring. Get in touch. Come & play! |