Darren Browett

  • Technical Tutor in Wood and Plastics

Darren Browett’s career encompasses that of both practitioner and educator in the capacity of Technical Tutor at Loughborough University School of the Arts from 2007 and previously at Staffordshire University from 1997, concerned with the specialisms of working with wood and plastics materials. He completed a Masters postgraduate study in Three Dimensional Design at the Manchester Institute of Research and Innovation in Art and Design, Manchester Metropolitan University in September 2010.

Darren’s scholarly practice, Fortuitous Novelties, aims to further contextualise his professional work through research, making and reflection and has come to represent a succinct example of crafted objects in a given context. A critical design exercise where understanding is reached through experiment that is best described as ‘Thinking through Making’. Throughout this practice has been a philosophical ideas-based approach alongside an investigation of materials and processes. This has been explored through the practice of making objects that come from the background tradition of skill and the ‘well-made thing’.

Scholarships

Darren’s scholarly practice elects to create meaningful objects that aim be cathartic in situations of enforced change. These outcomes are founded within a real-life healthcare setting in a collaborative venture between Arts for Health at Manchester Metropolitan University, and Derbyshire Primary Care Trust, offering him the opportunity to develop a number of devices to support therapies concerning the wellbeing of patients experiencing dementia. This project produces objects that stimulate, provoke and excite and aims to test them with people, bringing to light the immediate work that can be done to enrich the lives of those experiencing dementia and those who care for them.
 
Citations for Fortuitous Novelties recently published online on ixia – art in the public realm and to be included in the forthcoming academic work, The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, edited by Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal (Berg, 2013).

His role supports the Learning and Teaching of School of the Arts and University-wide students at foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate levels and additionally, in support of the research and enterprise activity of academic staff.

  • SAA123 Introduction and Development of Fine Art
  • SAA300 Materials and Processing
  • SAA301 Creativity and Functionality
  • SAA304 Design: A Product of Negotiation
  • SAB306 Atelier to Factory
  • SAB308 Research Strategies for Design and making
  • SAC310 Consolidating Interests
  • SAC311 3D: Major Project
  • DSP704 Enquiry and Development