Senior Lecturer, History of Art & Design.
Specialisms: Design and Material ‘cultures’.
Background
I graduated from Nottingham Trent University with a BA (Hons) Social Sciences and also completed a PhD there (an 'anti-spatial' reading of the work of Henri Lefebvre). Early teaching spanned both social science disciplines (particularly philosophy of science and social science) and design studies. This second interest developed and was consolidated as a Contextual Design Studies lecturer for five years at Goldsmiths College. From there I moved via De Montfort University to Lincoln University as a lecturer in History of Art and Design. I currently teach across a range of programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, contributing to a number of art and design history survey units. At postgraduate level I co-ordinate the Research and Enterprise in Design unit on the MA Design and also mentor a number of students. I am also Pathway Leader on the MA Design for 'Design; Cultures and Society', a pathway specifically tailored to students wanting to consider theoretical, historical and contextual approaches to design practice broadly conceived. The pathway also focuses on the Creative Industries, Entrepreneurship and interrogations of the relationship between design practice and design theory.
I supervise a number of postgraduate Research Students, most of them engaged in research for a PhD. I would be particularly keen to receive MPhil and PhD applications in the areas of material culture, design practice and theory, and ethics (broadly defined). The following websites capture something of my own approach to these subjects:
www.aut.ac.nz/material_thinking/materialthinking2
www.desphilosophy.com/dpp/home.html
http://designphilosophypolitics.informatics.indiana.edu
Research Interests
My current research interests lay in two broadly defined areas: 1) Creative practice, pedagogy and creative business and, 2) Design and material culture.
Creative Practice, Pedagogy and Creative Business
This is strongly related to my postgraduate teaching, specifically on the MA
Design (see above). This Master’s programme has provided a fertile environment
for the development of research-engaged teaching. Interest in design research,
pedagogy, the nature of creative practice, and the creative industries has been
consolidated through much discussion and has led directly to both 2008’s jointly
authored book ‘Soul Food and Music...’ and the forthcoming, jointly authored
‘Understanding Creative Business...’ (see publications list below).
Design and Material Culture
In particular, I am interested in the material nature of many different kinds of
humanly produced objects from instances of vernacular fabrication through to the
design-led objects of much consumer culture, as well as all manner of
architectural environments. My engagement with particular objects of material
culture are made through empirical, artistic, literary and philosophical
encounters. As a result, I am drawn to a number of questions which explore the
relationships between conception, design, production, exchange, consumption and
use in relation to material culture:
- The nature of usefulness and uselessness.
- An examination of the material, rather than symbolic, qualities and properties of designed objects.
- A critique of the wasteful and pernicious aspects of the professional design industries.
- Investigation of the kinds of action -labour, work, play- which comprise creative practice be it art, design, architecture, craft or engineering.
- Children and material culture.
- The material culture found in representations of Utopian societies.
Research on ‘things’ and ‘stuff’ is currently being pursued through two
complimentary vehicles. The first is an ongoing project which is critical of
professional consumer design, the idea of the ‘power’ of design, the
proliferating over-elaboration and obsolescence of products and the increasingly
free-floating nature of the term ‘design’ itself.
The second research project is called ‘Friendly Things: Modesty and Material Culture’. It comprises two main themes: firstly, an investigation into why some objects of material culture come to be regarded as usefully friendly with the emphasis, again, being on material rather than symbolic qualities. The second theme pursues the development of a theory of modesty in relation to the apprehension of objects of material culture. An extended essay on ‘friendly things’ is in preparation as well as fragments of an academic text which brings together the ideas of both research projects.
One aspect of my research into these topics involves the photographic documenting of various aspects of material culture. This gives me a chance to engage in one of my hobbies (the other main one being cycling) and claim some modest 'creative practice' for myself. As befits my research interests I tend to be drawn to photographing the banal, the prosaic, the run-down and the left over.
Other published topics of research interest include Henri Lefebvre, photography and its relationship to everyday life and my specialist subject on Mastermind would be 'the works of Patrick Hamilton'.
A Selection of Publications
Understanding Creative Business: Values, Networks, and Innovation, Maycroft, N. & Shorthose, J. (Forthcoming 2011) Gower.
‘Lifestyle(Urban)’, ‘Lifestyle(Suburban)’, ‘Insulation’, ‘Garden Tools and Appliances’, ‘Durability’, and, ‘Tools’. Authored entries in SAGE eReference The Green Series: Toward a Sustainable Environment, Volume VI: Green Consumerism (forthcoming).
‘Not Moving Things Along; Hoarding, Clutter and Other Ambiguous Matter’. The Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Special Issue on ‘Unpacking Disposal’, 8(5), Winter 2009.
Soul Food, and Music: Research and Innovation for Creative Business, Errington K., Maycroft. N. & Shorthose J. Nottingham Creative Network, December 2008.
‘Labour, work and play: mapping action in creative practice’, in The Labour of Art. Lincoln, The Beehive Press 2005.
‘The 'objectness' of everyday life: consumer design and the eclipse of use-value?’, in Geoforum, Vol 35, No 6, November 2004.
‘Cultural consumption and the myth of ‘life-style’ in Capital & Class: Special Issue on Cultural Production, Consumption and Resistance. No 84, October 2004.
‘Hamilton’s ‘Impromptu in Moribundia’', in Historical Materialism 10.4, January 2003.
‘Smith, Le Corbusier and Lefebvre: a critical commentary’, in Ethics, Place and Environment, Volume 5, No. 2, June 2002.
‘Henri Lefebvre: alienation and the ethics of bodily appropriation’, in L. Wilde (ed) Marxism’s Ethical Dimension: from Kautsky to Heller. Palgrave, November 2001.
‘Re-valorising rubbish: some critical reflections on ‘green’ product strategies’, in Capital & Class Special Issue; Environmental Politics: Analyses and Alternatives, No 72, Autumn 2000.
'Herbert Marcuse and the politics of practical Utopias’, in A. Chryssis et al Marcuse: The Philosopher of Liberation. Athens, Stachi Publications 1999.
Recent Conference Contributions
‘Reading “Hangover Square”: Ideology and Inversion in the Novels of Patrick Hamilton’ Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture, 1890-1945, University of Oxford, September 2009.
‘In, Through, Up and Down: Research for Creative Practice. Leeds College of Art, Research Event, University of Leeds, June 2009.
‘Behind, In/Through and In Front Of: Research for Cross-Disciplinary Creative Practice’, NCN Autumn Conference Who Do I Get Into Bed With?: A Tool-Box for Understanding the Structures and Management of Collaboration, Nottingham Trent University/Broadway, November 2007.
‘Everyday life in the real world’, an empirically focused account of the consequences of temporal and spatial restructuring of railway timetables and Nottingham railway station. Political Studies Research Seminar, University of Lincoln, November 2007.
‘Whatever happened to normative drawing’, in The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity, University of Lincoln November 2007.
The links below will direct you to our Institutional Repository from where you can view and download a number of published and non-published research papers.
Latest papers
deposited on the University of Lincoln Institutional Repository
(click on the links below to open
the Repository):
Photographs
