Our Experts
Alison Davies
Alison is chartered architect with over 20 years post-qualification experience as a practitioner, educator and advocate. During her career Alison has established a national reputation for her skills as an award-winning architect, design champion, conference speaker, writer, technical advisor, RIBA assessor, awards judge, and educator.
Alison currently runs her own practice – Urban Fabric Architects – and leads an undergraduate design studio unit at Nottingham University School of Architecture. A former CABE Enabler, she is an expert panel member for both OPUN and MADE architecture centres.
Bobby Niven
Bobby Niven is one of the founding initiators of the Bothy Project, a growing network of small shelters across Scotland (and soon, further afield). Designed in collaboration with artists, architects, and designers, each of these simple structures is a unique response to the landscape which houses it, and an invitation to artists to spend time ‘off-grid’ exploring the environment and histories which hold them.
For Edinburgh Art Festival, Niven created a temporary studio workshop within the Johnston Terrace Wildlife Garden. Niven’s studio structure incorporates hand-carved anthropomorphic sculptural elements into a timber framed transparent structure. Accompanied by a hand-made mud oven, the project is conceived as a social sculpture, a space for production, and for sharing and exchanging conversation, plants, cooking, food and other activities that collectively invite exploration of the particular context and value of this oasis of urban wildlife.
Dejan Mitrovic
Dejan Mitrovic is a creative entrepreneur and founder of Kidesign, London-based creative studio specialised in educational toys, games and activities for children. Kidesign aims to inspire the next generation of creative problem solvers through its curricular projects with 3D design and 3D printing. Dejan also lectures in design, enterprise and sustainability at the Royal College of Art, Imperial College and City University (Cass Business School) in London.
Francis Kéré
Diébédo Francis Kéré is the principal architect at Kéré Architecture based in Berlin, and the architect of the Serpentine Pavilion 2017.
Kéré was born in 1965 in Gando, Burkina Faso, west Africa and trained at the Technical University of Berlin. As an architect, Kéré is committed to socially engaged and ecological design in his practice, as evidenced by his award-winning primary school in Burkina Faso, pioneering solo museum shows in Munich and Philadelphia, and his immersive installation in the 2014 exhibition Sensing Spaces at London’s Royal Academy.
Helen Stratford
Helen Stratford is an artist with a background in architecture. Located between live art, visual art, architecture and writing, Helen’s work is collaborative – working with architects, artists, curators, diverse communities and publics to develop site-specific interventions, including live events, video-works, speculative writing and artists’ books, that explore everyday processes of place-making. Part-time practice-led PhD candidate in ‘Performative Architectures’ at Sheffield University, Helen has recently worked with national arts organisation METAL, Cambridge Junction, Yorkshire Sculpture Park and National Theatre, London.
James Norton
James Norton is an architect working and living in Sheffield for the practice Robin Ashley Architects LLP. He was born in Sheffield and went to University there and has occasionally has returned to the University to review work students work.
He specialises in low energy and low environmental impact buildings and in gaining planning permission in sensitive locations. He enjoys building as well as designing and has built two eco houses in Sheffield, one for his family to live in.
Matt McKenna
A co-founder and director of Dress for the Weather, Matt is involved in a range of projects, predominately focused on work to existing buildings. This includes residential conversions within listed buildings, converting industrial spaces to arts venues, repurposing community spaces, and developing arts and interior strategies for healthcare buildings. He has significant experience with tenement buildings. This includes architectural alterations and research into the characteristics and design that define a building’s typology.
Matt’s sculptural work in metal frames, which includes projects like the Architecture Bar and Kilsyth Patterns, has led to funding for the design and fabrication of a range of architectural ironmongery specific to Glasgow. Matt is also the chair of Streetland, a community arts organisation working in Glasgow’s Southside.
Sean Mannion
Sean has many years’ experience delivering art and design solutions within DLA Design, one of the North’s biggest architectural and design practices. He has exhibited his paintings both locally and nationally. He utilises his skills as artistic head of DLA Graphics and has been actively involved in educational and creative workshops, working alongside arts organisations and theatre groups.
Sean was lead artist in the ‘Wakefield Cybercity’ project, an innovative multidisciplinary media art project between Wakefield Council, Wakefield College, Hemsworth Arts & Community College, Beam and three artists based in the Ruhr district in Germany, it formed part of a wider transnational art and public realm project, ‘The Third Eye’.
More recently he has been actively involved in the ‘Park Here’ and ‘Park Here and Play’ projects in the centre of Leeds. The latter transformed the Cities Victoria Gardens outside the art Gallery into a space for play and creative activities, Sean assisted with design, branding and construction.