Kirsteen Aubrey SFHEA

Education Lead: Design Department

Kirsteen leads the new MA/MSc Design for Health and Wellbeing Programme, developing projects and networks across the creative and healthcare sector. This builds on her role as the first Education Lead for the Design Department at Manchester Metropolitan University from 2017-2021. Working across the postgraduate and undergraduate provision, she teaches and combines her skills as a glass specialist and collaborative, cross-disciplinary practitioner.

Kirsteen's Doctorate of Education focuses on the pedagogy of creative practice, and her research explores student engagement, methods to develop communities of practice and the role of objects in facilitating peer knowledge.

She is a Senior Fellow of HEA, and regularly mentors staff across the university through the HEA application submission and assessment, helping others to achieve recognition and realise their ambition.

Since joining MMU in 2004, her roles extend beyond a glass specialism and include Programme Leader, Principal Lecturer for Employability, External examiner and Departmental Lead for Education. Kirsteen is Editor of Contemporary Glass Network, a biannual publication promoting international glass practice.

Research:
Her pedagogic vision is supported by Kirsteen's collaborative engagement across disciplines that highlight the innovative agency of glass. Collaborations across craft, design, science and poetry have resulted in the production of written work, photographs, textiles, installation and projections.

Commissioned by Crafts Council (2016), Kirsteen co-designed and facilitated exploratory workshops to promote ‘Innovation through Collaboration' with Prof Alice Kettle and Lesley Raven. In 2018, she showcased work at Bluedot (Jodrell Bank) that explored crystal transformations with an Atmospheric scientist. She also collaborated across-Institution, uniting science, poetry and glass to explore the UK coastline.

Kirsteen's current research explores 'Ways of Seeing', creating handblown glass optic lenses that challenge perspective and ways of encountering the world. The results showcased in Radical Responses as part of IASDR (2019): https://iasdr2019.org/uploads/files/RR-catalogue.pdf


Selected papers, exhibitions and conferences:
Object handling: Interrogating, revealing and uniting a community of practice- abstract acceptance) (2022) Eurosotl 2022.

‘Successful transitions: engaging creatives with employability.’(2022)in 3 Es for Wicked Problems: Employability, Enterprise and Entrepreneurship: Solving Wicked Problems’,
Advance HE (edited by Stuart Norton and Andy Penaluna)

Centre for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching (CELT) (2015)
European consortium on applied research and professional education (2013)
Group for Learning in Art and Design (2015, 2018).

New Technologies in Glass (feature) (Cutler 2012) https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/new-technologies-in-glass-9781408139547/

'Exploring the role and impact of Art and Design Education to facilitate Healthcare Initiatives'. European Conference on Design4Health (2015):https://research.shu.ac.uk/design4health/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/D4H_Aubrey.pdf

'Made in Translation' Collaboration with Alice Kettle,Portico Library (2017). https://www.theportico.org.uk/event-calendar/2017/9/15/bittersweet-legacies-of-slavery-abolition-in-manchester-xw33b

'Undisciplinarity: Exploring the disciplinary nature and pedagogic assumptions of Art and Design practice' (2018) https://www.celt.mmu.ac.uk/ltia/Vol13Iss1/2_Aubrey_Undisciplinarity.pdf

'Student Engagement in Community Innovations: How does design&craft education engage with social design issues?'
Co-author and co-presenter with Joe McCullogh (2019)

'Value of Creativity' https://globalnetwork.onehe.org/topics/8946/media_center

Dezeen Virtual Design Festival 29/04/20- 30/06/20:
Her work forms part of 'Radical Response', Dezeen Virtual Design Festival in association with Ventura Projects/Milan Design Week
https://www.art.mmu.ac.uk/events/2020/radical-response/
https://www.dezeen.com/2020/04/28/manchester-school-of-art-radical-response-ventura-projects-vdf/-