I am an Associate Professor of Design at Emily Carr University, a co-founder and co-director of the Material Matters research hub, and an active member of Emily Carr’s DESIS lab (DESIS is an international design research network for sustainability and social innovation).
From 2013 to 2018 I led a research initiative called cloTHING(s) as Conversation. More recently I have developed a Textile Adaptation Research Program (TARP) connected to Material Matters. My work explores how new approaches to the design, making, use of material objects - understood as companions - might be used to reframe and expose colonial/modernist assumptions that currently limit design’s capacity to address needed care for the ecosphere and environment.
clothing cultures, decoloniality, interdisciplinary, ambiguity, dialogic, storytelling, material practice, more-than-human, ecological practices, disruption, and...
As a designer, and design educator, I seek ways of decolonizing design practices. I am interested in objects and material capacities in relation to and as a means of shifting and reframing understandings of place and identity away from Western rationalist traditions. As a design researcher and maker, I am concerned with addressing issues pertaining to sustainability and invested in studying means of engaging with regional materials (and the objects made from them) toward the support of local, decolonial community and land based initiatives.
This website is an archive of my wayfinding - a tracking of my making-thinking with/through: material, objects, markmaking, collective gathering - together with others!
CV
