David Sanchez Ruano

PhD title

Designing with-in Nature: Using biophilia, biomimicry and resilience thinking as foundations for a ‘symbiotic design practice’

How can design education move from using nature as a source of aesthetic inspiration, applied simply as a catalyst to artistic problem elaboration, to the act of designing symbiotically with nature?

Geoff Lucas

PhD title

Towards a Concrete Art: A Practice-Led Investigation

This study aims to identify a consistent position for Concrete Art, relevant to an understanding of, and highlighting its vital importance in, contemporary practice.

Gill Emslie

PhD title

The Braided Way: From Conflict to Community Social design tools for sustainability

This heuristic study uses ‘Process Work’ as a lens to evaluate the facilitation of a shift in perspective, consciousness, or meta-design.

Iwona Hrynczenko

PhD title

Periodic Table of Movements: A Reference Framework for Expressive Movement and Gesture

The research, ontological in character, analysing and mapping body language, aims to contribute to future interactive applications, based on movement recognition technology.

Joanna Bletcher

PhD title

Curating design innovation: an exploration of curatorial methodologies for an emerging design museum

The thesis argues that communication and recognition of design as an intellectual and practical activity remains underdeveloped within industry and academia.

John Dummett

PhD title

Paper Publics: An exploration of visual, textual and verbal representations of ‘the public’

With many urban redevelopment projects, either completed or in their developmental stages, it is an opportune moment in which to critically interrogate and creatively open up and reconfigure contemporary visual, textual and verbal representations of ‘the public’.

Kieran Baxter

PhD title

Topographic vision: The creative application of aerial photography and digital visualisation for built heritage and archaeological narrative

This practice-based enquiry draws from the researcher’s training in digital media and practice in low altitude aerial photography techniques.

Saskia Coulson

Saskia's research focuses on participatory social innovation and she is developing co-creation methods for the selection, application, iteration and evaluation of project indicators.

Steven Birnie

PhD title

Local and Global Explorations Through Design Research

The work aims to understand and communicate through a series of case studies how participatory action research can be applied locally