Paul Wilson

Profile

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Design whose research explores the intersections of language, landscape, community and communication, with a particular focus on typography and on the cultural impacts of technologies of linguistic production. My work runs across two connected strands: a critical and speculative typographic practice concerned with how visual and typographic form carries social and cultural knowledge; and participatory design research conducted with and alongside marginalised communities. What holds these together is a sustained interest in how visual and typographic practice can articulate marginalised experience, situated knowledge and the textures of everyday life - particularly at sites of class experience and at moments or points of change and transition.

I am especially interested in the potential of critical and speculative methods as disruptive approaches to practice research, and in the power of storytelling and narrative to creatively engage community and place. Across this work I develop participatory and publishing practices as forms of cultural citizenship and a methodological vocabulary that includes attunement, reparative diagrammatics, boundary objects and correspondence (after Tim Ingold) as distinct from communication.

I am committed to non-extractive research that treats community knowledge as legitimate design material, and to knowledge flowing from marginalised and Global South contexts into UK design research rather than the reverse. This commitment runs through long-standing international collaboration including a sustained relationship with the University of São Paulo and with community partners alongside place-based work in West Yorkshire.

Research interests

Much of my research orbits ideas and ideals of utopianism, and the utopian impulse as it surfaces in everyday, vernacular and overlooked forms of action.

This has produced a broad range of activity: surveying the noticeboards found in the interior landscapes of Working Men's Clubs; mapping the route of the march that marked the closure of Britain's last deep coal mine; and tracing the post-Brexit significance of the Esperanto-English dictionary held in Keighley Library, West Yorkshire, reading its typographic traces for what they reveal about language, community and transnational belonging.

More recently this has extended into participatory and publishing practice as a means of collective sense-making, working with communities to respond to overlapping systemic crises, developing the workshop as a critical medium and publication as a form of cultural citizenship. In parallel, long-running collaboration in Brazil - with the University of São Paulo and partners – pursues participatory design research as a kind of correspondence rather than extraction, with a commitment to marginalised and Global South knowledge informing UK practice.

Throughout this, I am interested in design research conducted in and through landscapes of class experience and situated knowledge, rather than in landscape as a disciplinary object. I have worked with colleagues across the University and have sought to forge new links with communities and organisations who might otherwise disregard
design's transformative power.

Co-investigator (Co-I)

• Participatory tools for human development with the youth
• Visualising the UK General Election 2015 TV Debates

Qualifications

• PhD Design
• BA (Hons) Visual Communication

Professional memberships

• Graphic Design Educators' Network (founding member)

Student education

My teaching spans the School's undergraduate and postgraduate taught programmes and is research-led and practice-based.

I have taught across subject areas including typography and typographic design, graphic and communication design, service and social design, and interdisciplinary art and design. I work with students through large-cohort lectures, studio and seminar teaching, project and dissertation supervision and have led and managed modules at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.

I bring my research in typography, visual communication and participatory design research directly into the studio, encouraging students to approach design as a critical and speculative practice as well as a professional discipline, and to work confidently with communities and real-world contexts.

Current postgraduate researchers

• Lujain Ahmed Zehairy
• Deema Merdad
• Barbara Urrutia-Badilla
• Denise Startin
• Furui Yang
• James Thompson