School staff
Simon Downs initially trained as an illustrator, in a particularly traditional school of painting as illustration: as such he can tell you all about the application of fresco, the correct use of pigments to last the test of time and how to etch printing plates with nitric acid…
…none of which had any relevance when the design world went digital.
He retrained; firstly as a digital illustrator, then worked in animation, then multimedia and interactive graphics, editorial design, web design, logo design and on one memorable occasion he designed the MediaWeek award. As such he has a peculiarly wide view of the tangled web of workflows and production methods that characterises the modern design world: and strangely enough this mass of conflicting working modes has been held together by the self-same visualisation skills he learnt as an illustrator.
These twin strands of visualisation and webs of knowledge form the kernel of his research interests, which are:
- Visual Communication and Visual Culture as emergent self-generating networks formed in a Complex Adaptive System.
- Political Communication as visual communication (as an attempt to control this Complex Adaptive System).
- Drawing as an emergent product of the Complex Adaptive System of visual culture + draughtsman + media + surface.
This research feeds into his teaching practice, which earned him the Loughborough University Lecturer of the Year award (2011-12), as voted for by the student body.
Teaching
SAA421 Developing Processes of Graphic Design
SAB424 Graphic Design for Society
SAB427 Applied Graphic Design
SAP101 Visual Thinking & Communication
Research
Simon's personal research interests originally lay in the formation of graphic communication culture, which has led to the development of the following questions:
- how the image is physically formed (e.g. production technology)
- how a production technology gains meaning and value in a culture (e.g. why a blog is 'so last year', why print is not dead, why watercolours are a genteel media, etc.)
- how the symbolism of the image is formed, how it is communicated and understood
- how the value of the image slides and mutates
These many stands take on a common and interrelated set of origins and values through the lens of Emergence theory, Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) and Network Theory.
The fruits of this research have productively fed back into Simon's teaching practice as a guide to student's personal design development. This research has also led to a personal commitment to the improvement of networks of knowledge in design research. To this end he is:
- The lead Editor of The Poster journal – the journal of visual rhetoric in the public sphere. If it is a playing out of visual cultural attempt to create a social position we're interested in hearing about it. <tinyurl.com/theposterjournal>
- Co-editor of TRACEY – the journal of contemporary drawing and visualisation. <http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sota/tracey/>
- Author of The Graphic Communication Handbook – a review and guide to the practice of modern Graphics. <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Graphic-Communication-Handbook-Media-Practice/dp/0415557380/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332427859&sr=8-1>
- A Director of the Drawing Research Network.
- Member of the Design Research Society's Special Interest Group in Design Pedagogy.
Recent papers have included:
- The Truth – an argument for developing an epistemological guide for graphics practice.
- Culture is Feedback – an argument that culture is an emergent phenomenon from the CAS of people's daily behaviours.
- The Gordian Knot and the Invisible Hand – an argument that when seen from the perspective of a CAS such cultural problems as Modernism vs Postmodernism are resolved as issues of scale. (presented at the International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society – in press)
Projects in preparation include:
- The Drawing Research Conference 2012
- Issue 3 of The Poster journal
- The Invisible Hand in Graphics – A journal paper laying out a emergent model of the formation of symbolism.
Postgraduate Research Supervision
Current Research supervisions include:
Violetta Dajanev Open Source and Free software tools as an aid to creative visual literacy
Salman Al-Hajri Developing strategies to improve creative working in Omani graphics students
Penelope Andrews Visual tools for addressing negative behaviours in disruptive youths
Joe Graham Phenomenology of drawing
Featured Publications
The Poster – The journal of visual rhetoric in the public sphere
The Truth – an argument for developing an epistemological guide for graphics practice.
Culture is Feedback – an argument that culture is an emergent phenomenon from the CAS of people's daily behaviours.
The Graphic Communication Handbook
Links
The Poster – http://tinyurl.com/theposterjournal
The Graphic Communication Handbook – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Graphic-Communication-Handbook-Media-Practice/dp/0415557380/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332427859&sr=8-1
The Drawing Research Network – http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=drawing%20research%20network&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.drawing-research-network.org.uk%2F&ei=W4dsT6P8Ec3b8QOjneW_DQ&usg=AFQjCNHH8BvR3WdDBPoghTRK-rrExp_oYA&sig2=wOJFb5kVOu7M0Oq3G8GPQQ
TRACEY – http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sota/tracey/
Academia.edu page – http://lboro.academia.edu/SimonDowns
REF friendly home page – http://www.design-without-frontiers.eu
