Dave joined ECA in 2024 to teach into the MA Interior, Architectural & Spatial Design and BA(Hons) Interior Design programmes. His teaching approaches in the design studio encourage experimentation and ‘thinking through making’, supporting students to embrace imagination, curiosity, speculation and uncertainty. The teaching places value on practice-based methods of design and research, as well as hybrid approaches that engage with or integrate a range of disciplinary contexts.

Dave is particularly interested in strategies to integrate emerging digital technologies, workflows and tools (AI, XR, AR & VR) into the student learning experience and the development of new creative processes. Dave brings his research expertise in this area to encourage creative and imaginative approaches which can define new disciplinary contexts, practices and audiences.

During his time at GSA, Dave designed and delivered the Worlding Fictions & Fictional Worlds 20 credit postgraduate elective module, a unique program to allow students to draw upon a variety of fictional contexts, including speculative worlds, scenarios, and narratives. Dave also lectured across the school on ways of thinking and creative approaches contextualised by Feminist New Materialism philosophies, and convened the Worlding Matters reading group. Broadly sited under the umbrella of ‘worlding’, these modes of thinking and being embrace posthumanism, object orientated ontology, speculative realism, agential realism, accelerationism, geophilosophy, xeno-feminism and much more.

Dave has also been Visiting Lecturer at Ulster University and Kingston University, teaching across a variety of creative disciplines including Fine Art, Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

As a practice-based spatial researcher, Dave works fluidly across installation, interiors, architecture, landscape and sound. His artistic research practice concerns by ‘worlding’ and the aesthetics and in/visibilities of spatiality, with a focus on the infrastructural logics and prosthetic technologies – from monuments and cartography to machine sensing and platform urbanism – with which spatiality can be engaged. Contextualised by notions of territory, migration, nomadism, habitation and imagination, Dave’s practice produces outcomes that emerge as platforms, tools and speculative artefacts which choreography imagined and alternative situations.

Recent and ongoing research themes include;

The Mediated Interior - This research is contextualised by the post/digital condition of the contemporary interior across a range of settings and encounters. Current practice-based investigations deploy tools of machinic visioning, such as photogrammetry, to propose strategies of counter-mapping to resist the regimes of surveillance capitalism the contemporary interior is subjected to. Most recent projects focus on the domestic condition and speculate on the experience of the home as (re)distributed and (re)mediated via digital technologies and platform ecologies, and includes published research on Airbnb accommodation sharing platform.

Critical Infrastructuralism - This ongoing research seeks to develop a critical definition for infrastructure, with a particular attention towards tools and methodologies that reveal the collision of local with planetary scale encounters which underpin the structures of the everyday.

The Future (of) Monuments - This research interrogates the spatial and temporal conditions of the category of the monument under the discourse of the Anthropocene, interfacing with contexts including landscapes of land reclamation, the 'geology of media' and the 'techno-sphere', decoloniality and post-conflict narratives, and speculative futurisms.

In 2021 Dave founded the Image|Imaging|Interior inter-institution (ECA/GSA) research cluster that explores new cross-disciplinary practices and frameworks of knowledge-making through which to interrogate the interior, its image, and its imaging. The research group proposes timely and urgent investigations to explore how virtual and physical spaces, and their design and fabrication, directly engage and inform each other, to present arrangements at the interstice of 2d and 3d, image and actual.