Independent Researcher

About

I was Professor of Design at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia from May 1996 until my retirement from full-time education in 2001. As the coordinator for the Higher
Degrees by Research in the School I was responsible for supervising Doctoral and Masters by Research students. In addition, I developed the coursework Master of Design program into distance education mode that was subsequently made available for study through Open Learning Australia. It was the first professional design course in the world to be offered in this mode.
My focus has been on post-graduate design education but my background is in graphic design with a special training and interest in typography. To that expertise was added linguistics when I gained an MA in Applied Linguistics at Lancaster University in 1986 and combined the two disciplines in the student publication Language and Typography (1991; Lund Humphries). A continuing interest is in the communication of language in its spoken and printed forms and my teaching program in this field is quite distinct from that of other typography teachers. This more theoretical approach is in some senses, a complement to the previously visually oriented student
text Techniques of Typography (by the same publishers, 1969).
I have been a designer and educator in England and Australia throughout the last five decades and my career is split between the two countries. In 1989 I was appointed Head of the School of
Design in South Australia (Professor of Typographic Design in 1995), having previously held similar positions in the UK as Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Art & Design at Liverpool
Polytechnic. Consequently, my leadership and management responsibilities have embraced Fine Art, Fashion and Textiles, Communication Design, Interior Design and Product Design. I was Head of Graphic Design at Saint Martin's School of Art in London from 1981–86 and enjoyed the daily contact with many of Europe's leading designers. I became a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia and continued my membership as a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers (UK) until I retired from full-time education in 2001. As a Swan song, I convened an
international conference Re-inventing Design Education in the University held at Curtin University (December 2000) that was intended to signal ideological changes in terms of teaching
and learning in design within that university environment.
I have been invited to present papers in numerous international conferences and institutions in the last ten years, including contributions to the two ICOGRADA Congresses (1995, Portugal; 1997 Uruguay) where I represented the Design Institute of Australia. I am on the Advisory Board of Design Issues, the international refereed design journals published by MIT.

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