Taslima Begum
Transtechnology Research,
Room B312 Portland Square,
University of Plymouth,
Drake Circus,
Plymouth,
PL4 8AA.

Taslima.begum@plymouth.ac.uk
Taslima999@hotmail.com

TASLIMA BEGUM is an Interaction designer, a lecturer at the University of Wales, and a PhD researcher at the Trans-Technology Research Centre, at the University of Plymouth.

As a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Taslima is an experienced lecturer who has been teaching and supporting learning in Higher Education since 2004. She has over six years of academic teaching experience, initially as a visiting lecturer in Multimedia delivering lectures, workshops and seminars on Design and New Media and more recently since 2008, in the position of Senior Lecturer in Design and Interactive Media at the University of Wales, Newport.

In her most recent role she made a substantial contribution to the delivery and management of both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at the School of Art, Media and Design, delivering over 10 modules in the year 2008-09 spanning programmes such as MA Design by Practice, BA (Hons) Interactive Media and MA Creative Sound and Music.

Taslima recently worked on the curriculum development for a newly validated programme, BA (Hons) Design for Digital Media to be delivered in 2011, for which she integrated considerations of Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship within two new theory modules. She also held the role of Special Needs Co-ordinator for the Screen Media cluster in the Design department between 2009-10 encouraging support for diversity in higher education.

Taslima has undertaken numerous freelance projects within the design industry over the past few years working with and managing convergent media designers, small businesses and clients. Her previous professional experience includes published work as a 3D animation artist and website designer with New Media developers. She has worked collaboratively alongside other teachers, animators, web designers and games developers to produce educational curriculum-incorporated games software for GCSE students in schools across the UK.

Taslima originally studied new media for her Bachelors Degree in Design Futures, wherein she developed a creative, multi-disciplinary practice encompassing expertise in 3D modelling, Animation, Virtual audio-augmented environments, Website Design, and Interface design. In 2008, Taslima gained a distinction in her Masters degree in Design, New Media and Technology from the University of Wales, for which she developed a number of practice-based interaction design projects including a Digital Music Box and the Synaesthesia Project which explored sonic motion mapping. In 2010, Taslima went on to gain her Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education alongside her teaching and research responsibilities.

Taslima’s primary research interest has remained in the field of Interaction design and she is currently pursuing her primary research focus – an investigation into the cultural construction of design solutions in high-end technological products – as a topic of doctoral research. Her project was originally funded by the AHRC. Her work proceeds from the terminus-a-quo that design is not intrinsic to a product but a result of forces and factors acting on it externally. By reinterpreting technological formations in light of research emerging from post-colonial studies, she is attempting to understand how product design relies particularly upon western [hegemonic] aesthetic and deep cultural archetypes. The purpose of this enquiry is to highlight the potentials that exist to explore a synergy between east and west in industrial design with a prospective vision for global design.