Personal profile

Research interests

My research is situated in the wide-ranging field of cybernetics, with focuses in its intersections with architecture and systemic design including historical connections and contemporary relevances.

For me, cybernetics is a form of recursive thinking and acting for exploring recursive patterns in and between multiple domains. Cybernetics is concerned with moving across contexts (including living systems, organisations, technologies, and practical activities such as designing, researching, and conversation) and amongst self-references (e.g. the design of design, the context of a context, etc.). My research focuses on intersections between cybernetics and design disciplines. Through my work, I am attempting to recover aspects of cybernetics' perculiar forms of transdisciplinarity and the possibilities it provides for articulating paradoxical dilemmas, to situate these historically, and to make these available in the context of contemporary design challenges.

Supervisory Interests

I am interested in supporting doctoral research that addresses how design disciplines work within complex systemic contexts. I have experience with creative, theoretical, and historical research and have examined doctoral research internationally.

Scholarly biography

I studied architecture at the University of Cambridge (MA) and UCL (DipArch, MArch, PhD). I completed the PhD by architectural design in 2014, supervised by Neil Spiller and Ranulph Glanville, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Following this, I was appointed as Mellon Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal (2014-2016), as part of a collaborative research project. I have taught at Brighton since 2007, first as a visiting lecturer (2007-2008) before being appointed to a lectureship (2009-present).

At Brighton, I have worked as Course Leader for MRes Architectural Research (2020-2023) and BA(Hons) Architecture (2014-2019), and undertaken leadership roles such as Learning and Teaching Co-Lead in the School of Architecture, Technology, and Engineering (2021-2022) and Deputy Head of School (Learning and Teaching) for the School of Architecture and Design (2020). My teaching currently focuses on introducing research practices to postgraduate design students.

I am active in editorial work, peer review, and contributions to scholarly societies. I was awarded the Heinz von Foerster Award by the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) in 2014 and subsequently became a member of the ASC Executive Committee (2018-2023). I am the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Enacting Cybernetics, which is published by the Cybernetics Society and hosted by Ubiquity Press. I led the organisation of the 11th Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD11) Symposium, which was hosted at the University of Brighton in 2022. I am joint principal investigator of the project Enacting Ecological Aesthetics (2023-2025) funded by the AHRC and the German Research Foundation (DFG), which explores the ecological ideas of cybernetician and anthropologist Gregory Bateson in relation to contemporary challenges in architecture and design.

Approach to teaching

Drawing on ideas from cybernetics and radical constructivism that have been influential in pedagogy, my approach to teaching and learning is based on understanding learning, designing, and researching in terms of each other. In teaching undergraduate design studio, I use the conversational format of teaching as a model of the conversational design processes that are being taught and learnt, moving between form and content. Students develop insights through experience which can then be consolidated in retrospect, with the role of the tutor becoming one of managing this process through the introduction of supportive insights and new challenges (i.e. adjusting requisite variety). By periodically shifting to a meta-conversation (a conversation about the conversation), the implicit connections between form and content can be made explicit. As students progress, many of the conversations that are initially played out verbally between them and their tutors become internalised in students' practices. 

I have further developed this approach in the context of introducing research methods to designers at postgraduate level. Rather than encountering research as something other to design, the approach is to ground new theoretical insights in experiences from the familiar contexts of design projects and everyday experience. Through a process of critiquing the research elements of what they already do, students develop an understanding of research from the inside, re-articulating the design expertise they are already developing at postgraduate level as expertise in research.

Education/Academic qualification

PhD Architectural Design, University College London, 2014

20062014

MArch Architecture, University College London, 2006

20052006

DipArch Architecture, University College London, 2005

20032005

MA (Cantab) Architecture, University of Cambridge, 2002 (BA) and 2006 (MA)

19992002

External positions

Editor in Chief, Enacting Cybernetics, The Cybernetics Society

2023 → …

Editorial Advisory Board, Kybernetes, Emerald

2021 → …

Editorial Board, Cybernetics and Human Knowing, Imprint

2021 → …

Scientific Committee, V!RUS journal, Universidade de São Paulo (USP)

2019 → …

Member at-large, Executive Committee, American Society for Cybernetics

Jan 2018Dec 2023

Mellon Researcher, Canadian Centre for Architecture

20142016

Part Time Lecturer, University of Greenwich

20102012

Hourly Paid Lecturer, London South Bank University

Oct 2008Jan 2009

Part Time Lecturer, Kingston University

Apr 2008Jun 2008

Research Assistant, University College London

20062007

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