Update you browser

For the best experience, we recommend you update your browser. Visit our accessibility page for a list of supported browsers. Alternatively, you can continue using your current browser by closing this message.

Stephen leads staff research activities in the School of Design, helping individuals and groups to develop research projects and to secure funding, developing the School's – and the College's – research environment, and engaging with the wider world of research and innovation.

Stephen’s personal research is centred on questions of visual representation and forms of knowledge. He works on the representation of historical time, especially in interactive digital media. His research combines historical investigation and the development of new practice. He is researching the early days of design research at the RCA, looking at the 1960s origins of the Department of Design Research headed by Professor Bruce Archer.

Stephen has worked and taught in design since 1976, specialising in digital media from the 1980s when he pioneered the integration of computing into UK art and design education. In 1987 he was a founding member of the Association for Computing in Art and Design Education. In 1992 he cofounded one of the first Master’s programmes in the world dealing with interactive media; its graduates have influenced industry and education worldwide. He is a committee member of the Computer Arts Society which explores the history of the computer in visual and other art forms and encourages new work. From 2005 to 2011 he was head of the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, inspired by the work of Professor John Lansdown, a pioneer of the use of creative computing from the 1960s to his death in 1999.

Key themes of Stephen's own research include spatialised media, visualisation, depiction and forms of knowledge, centred on his fascination with representation. His point of view is a pragmatic one, focusing on the effectiveness of particular representations as much as on their alleged truth.

Stephen is extensively involved in the evaluation of research through peer review for UK Research Councils, journals and conferences. He was a panel member for the UK Research Excellence Framework: REF 2014.

Stephen has a BA Hons (1st) in Printed and Woven Textiles from Camberwell School of Art and Crafts (now part of the University of the Arts London), a PGDip in Woven Textiles from Leeds University and a PhD from Middlesex University, where his dissertation explored the uses of space in depiction across a variety of media.