Dr Claude Dutson
- Tutor (Research)
- Design Products MA
Claude is an interdisciplinary media artist and researcher whose work investigates architecture, technology, and labour from a feminist critical perspective.
Claude trained in Architecture at the University of East London (2005) and the Royal College of Art (2008), completing a PhD (RCA) by practice in Architecture in 2016. Claude also has a background in Media Studies, working in new media consultancy at the height of the dotcom boom – and subsequent bust – in the 1990s.
Claude is an experienced design studio tutor and has been a unit leader on the Experimental Design Pathway (XD) on the MA Information Experience Design at the Royal College of Art, and on the BA and MA Architecture (RIBA parts I and II) at the Canterbury School of Architecture.
After graduating from MA Architecture at the RCA Claude worked in the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design on a two-year project co-funded by Megaman Charity Trust Fund, on artificial light in architecture. The outcome of the research project was a book Light Volumes: Dark Matters, published in 2008.
Claude’s work is published in Industries of Architecture (Routledge); Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies Economies Technologies (Routledge) and the journal E.R.O.S., Issue 7, The Interior. In March 2017, Claude was named one of an important new generation of thinkers in feminist spatial practice in Architectural Review. Claude is on the editing team of the journal Architecture and Culture, and is co-editing with Igea Troiani a special issue ‘Space to Learn/Think/Work: The Contested Architectures of Higher Education’ (March 2021).
Claude regularly lectures at the RCA, and on architecture and design courses in the UK and Europe, including School of Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), and Chelsea College of Art. Claude also takes part in public events and talks about the architecture of work and Silicon Valley, at IKON Gallery, Birmingham, and the Design Museum, London.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Expertise
Gallery
More information
Practice
Claude’s practice is grounded in the architectural techniques of physical model-making, digital prototyping and drawing, and also brings in the interdisciplinary practices of art practice, video, performance and virtual reality.
Claude has trained in performance techniques and theatrical methods such as ‘actioning’, verbatim theatre, Augusto Boal’s forum theatre and script-writing for performance.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Exhibitions
‘The Model Worker’, VR piece, Radical Immersions, Watermans Arts Centre, Sep 2019
VR+A Manifestation, Royal College of Art, May 2019
Show 2017, The Workshop, June/July 2017
Disruption, Royal College of Art, Jan 2013
CLOSEUP: 10 Years of European Design Projects by the Helen Hamlyn Research Associates at the Royal College of Art 1999–2009, October 2009
Performances
Heated Exchange, Performance, Chelsea Theatre, Jan 2015
Publications
Dutson, C., ‘The Entreprenuerial Self’, in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies Economies Technologies, Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting (eds) (Routledge, 2018)
Dutson, C., ‘Private Passions in the Silicon Valley’ in E.R.O.S. Journal: The Interior, Sami Jalili (ed.) (E.R.O.S. Press: November 2015)
Dutson, C., ‘Performativity and Paranoia: or How to Do the ‘Internet of Things’ with Words’, in Industries of Architecture, Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff, Nick Beech (eds), (Routledge Critiques Series, 2015)
Dutson, C., Light Volumes, Dark Matters, (Royal College of Art, 2010)
Symposia
Virtual Realities and Alterities (VR+A) Cross-College Symposium, 9 May 2019, convenor and chair of the Other Spaces panel
External collaborations
Co-editor with Igea Troiani of Architecture and Culture Special Issue, ‘Space to Learn/Think/Work: The Contested Architectures of Higher Education’ (March 2021)
Current and recent projects
Virtual Realities + Alterities, and the Alterities research cluster
Research funding
AHRC Doctoral Studentship (2011–14)
Interiors Group Bursary (2011–14)
Research interests
Architecture, Silicon Valley, Workplace, Labour, Feminism, Critical Theory, Spatial Design, Experience Design, Virtual Reality, Performance, Politics, Ecology, Environment
