Centre for Media, Art & Design Research and Engagement
Associate Member Profiles
Joanne Greenhalgh
Joanne Greenhalgh is a design practitioner who has managed a successful design business and worked as a design consultant for over 20 years. Designing for many major Arts organisations such as The Royal Exchange Theatre and bands such as Simply Red. For the past four years she has invested this knowledge intoteaching, research and academic enterprise at the University of Salford, as the communication pathway leader on the BA Hons Graphic Design programme. She is also actively engaged with academic enterprise events, live-projects and national student competitions and has a consistent record of awards with MPA Roses Student Creativity Awards, YCN, and D&AD awards. Joanne is the founder member and organiser of DNA - Designers Northern Alliance. Formed in June 2010, the first DNA event included an inter-disciplinary graduate exhibition between 11 North West Universities with participation from 35 design companies, portfolio surgeries and guest speakers. Joanne continues to organise and run regular major networking events for design professionals, educators and students.
Nicholas Hall
My primary research interests are centred around several key areas: Design Management, Sustainable and ecological approaches to design, The social impacts of design. My research work so far has covered many issues in these areas as I develop my knowledge. I have been contributing to research where possible to improve my expertise and research capabilities in my chosen subject areas. My intension is to regularly attend more national & international conferences specific to my interests, developing a suitable research focus.
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Karen Heald
Karen Heald is part of a research team at the University of Salford, focused on narrative and sensory intelligences. Working with Professor Paul Haywood, the Principal Investigator, delivering a three-year AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship programme on kinaesthetic learning through creative frameworks. Karen’s current research explores “In-between-ness: Contemporary Art Practice in the Chora within Descriptions of Time and Sleep” and is created through video, performance and installation. Painting, as a source of language, is extremely influential in her films. Evolving her own poetic visual language she engages with the differences and similarities between painting and film, creating a language of “painterly video” that communicates difficult and personal issues with subtle, oblique visual stanzas. These issues along with her background in time based media and site-specific often means that her videos and photography are presented on or through objects, offering sculptural qualities to the artworks. In addition to her own practice she has been working collaboratively and negotiating dialogues with a variety of professionals. This has formed part of her interdisciplinary practice. Current R&D (2010-2013) is a collaborative Art & Science Research Residency. Karen is also an Associate Member: Communication, Cultural & Media Studies.
Timothy Isherwood
Current research interests and investigations include a continued dialogue, developed in varying forms over several years, into the design, usage, social intervention and interpretation, quantitative assessment, digital development, democratisation and beauty of typographic forms. A developing area of research is that of ‘open source typography’, the ability of file sharing software to negate traditional forms of font purchase by producing free downloadable, typeable fonts for practitioners to design with and comment upon. This current investigation intends to provide a forum within which design professionals, students and amateurs alike can work with provided fonts to design and exhibit outcomes generated, both physically and digitally, also providing a platform for typeface designers, both professional and amateur to submit fonts for genuine analysis.
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Debra Leighton
Debra Leighton, Director of Postgraduate Studies in the School of Art and Design, a former VC research scholar, and founder member of the heritage group focuses on research issues in heritage management, visitor studies and marketing with associated publications and conference attendance. She was instrumental in the development of the recent highly acclaimed ‘Mills and Looms’ exhibition at Salford Museum and Art Gallery (in collaboration with the Centre for Heritage Studies and the Creative Capital Group). She is a steering group member of the University’s Creative Capital group and advises on heritage matters. Debra is involved in a number of collaborative projects including a joint digital research project specifically for Ordsall Hall, an Elizabethan Mansion, in conjunction with the Creative Technology research group. She has also completed a recent study of the role of mobile phone photography in informing interpretive decision making in museums and galleries (with associate publication) with the Museum of Football, Preston.
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Helmut Lemke
Helmut Lemke - Sound, the audible, the inaudible and the imaginable, is the basis of Helmut Lemkes' research and work. Since 30 years he presents process based results of his investigations into site-specific sound. Lemke has performed Concerts and Live Art Performances and exhibited Sound Installations all over Europe and Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore. His activities include organisation and management of festivals, projects and symposiums. Since 1989 he runs the label "edition el C." for the purpose to document contemporary sound art practice. Lemke has collaborated internationally with musicians, visual artists, dancers, poets, scientists, sound artists, performers and filmmakers. Lemkes' most recent research interest is described in this excerpt from his AHRC fellowship outline: The Sound the site requires This project examines the proposition that sound is a valuable medium for recording and interpreting physical and social landscapes and will be a project to use sound as a sculptural medium for the interpretation of locations.
Pam Panas
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Gary Peploe
A graduate of Interactive Arts B.A. at Manchester Metropolitan University and M.A. Creative Technologies at The University of Salford, he has worked in the media industry, notably with musicians New Order and The Doves. He was Creative Technologies Director of IDEA (Innovation in Digital and Electronic Arts). He has lectured in Art and Media and at Manchester Metropolitan University 2001-10. He has spoken at Art and Media conferences both at home and abroad and his video/film and video installation work has been shown nationally and internationally. He has taught at the National School of Art in Bulgaria. He founded and is Creative Director of ‘Interval’ established December 2005 and co-directs with Karen Gaskill. Gary is also a founder member of ‘Loosecollective’ an innovative design initiative with 21st century business model. He has worked as a consultant for Manchester’s ‘Bellyfeel’ interactive media company, which was awarded a Webby for 2007’s Crimeface, transmedia online narrative. He also won a ZKM award for Urban Cycles an international collaboration, which he instigated between Interspace, Bulgaria and IDEA, UK.
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Mik Pieniazek
Mik Pieniazek - Future personal practice is focusing on issues of our ageing society. This design practice adopts strategies of assisted living, using ambient technology to facilitate enhanced and accessible care regimes that deliver social and sensory enrichment as a compliment to conventional medi-therapy. To underpin this practice, I have a developing body of research into user-centred design methodologies, emotional design and the development of ‘adaptive’ product interfaces. Ours’ is a period where pivotal ‘change phenomena’ are surfacing across social, economic, political, technological and environmental parameters. These phenomena provide fertile reason and opportunity for a searching, proactive debate of the ethical, entrepreneurial and cultural potential of product design practice. This characterises my approach and ambition for postgraduate curriculum.
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Dr Jacques Rangasamy
Jacques Rangasamy - The following inform my research interests: (a) the political and cultural impacts of foreign influences on indigenous European, Asian and African cultures (b) the ensuing influence-processing and adjustment in human, cultural and aesthetic terms, (c) the ways the same influence-processing and adjustment manifest in contemporary art-making. Broad Research outcome: (a) an informed understanding of the varieties of sensibilities, perspectives and cultural beings and cultural activities that thrive and struggle under the umbrella of globalisation, and that inform and make diasporic existence possible/tolerable. (b) the evolving of pedagogical materials and teaching strategies that enable students to see the world in their cultural beings and find their places in the world (c) develop the cultural and spiritual competencies for living with diversity meaningfully.
John Rooney
John Rooney's current PhD research is focused on the question of how to visualise the creative gesture of a city. The subject matter to be explored in this project will be curated from recordings of past and present narratives. Data will then be transposed using digital technologies with the aim to present a gallery of coded interconnected emotional information that is revealed from the content of a creative space. Detailed research will reveal the local content, this will include a wide range of creative commentary including, sculpture, poetry, visual arts, architecture, pop culture and film. The information will be treated as datum taken from the city space, which can then be viewed as a creative laboratory or an experimental area. The gesture is recorded with image and sound; though these elements do not have to be presented together in the final piece. Narrative image or trace is revealed when creativity is discussed. Outcomes can include abstract, figurative or typographic results. There will be a strong collaborative element to this project. Links are already in place with national and local creative industries, and also across the University.
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Mark Scargill
Mark Scargill is Course Leader for the BA (Hons) Design for Digital Media Course. The course pursues the balance between design application and encompassing new technologies within a commercial communications field toward 'convergent' strategies of distribution. The course has built up a strong profile within a short period of time, having collaborations and links with the BBC, TBWA, GyroHSR, BJL and other regional creatives and galleries. Mark's activity at present is concentrated around enterprise links with industry, the commercial sector, and galleries. To support the T&L and enterprise activities of the course, Mark is applying for MA study with a focus on interactive display and audience interaction within gallery, museum and urban environment spaces. The intention is to work alongside both educational and industrial links in investigating and implementing audience engagement and response via digital methods of information and display. Mark has had a background in the development of 'visual resource' areas working with gallery curators and outreach officers on projects with local galleries (Oldham) and regional museums (Urbis).
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Dr Angharad Thomas
Dr Angharad Thomas is a founding member of the Cardiff Group, which explores the relationship between design and development, in a global context, and especially in low-income economies. The work of The Cardiff Group is presented via the “Thinkcycle” website - a website linked to the Development by Design (dyd) conferences held at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and in Bangalore, India. Thomas received an ESRC award in 2005 from the “Educating Designers for Global Citizenship programme” seminar series award which brings together design educators, academics and practitioners, from India, Brazil and Southern Africa, the UK, Spain and Finland. It provides a unique opportunity for a global interchange of ideas, and contributes to the discourse on design in a ‘Third world’ context.
