Peter+Crowe

My career path might best be described as serpentine: painter, sculptor, footnote 80s indie music legend, graphic designer, manager of multimedia companies, design lecturer, business mentor and tango dancer. Nonetheless, I draw on over 20 years marketing communications and management experience, including positions in London, Milan, New York, Sydney as well as Auckland.

A former AUT lecturer in Graphic Design and theory, I combine experience in design, education and business. I hold a BA (Hons) in Fine Art, a Diploma in Psychosynthesis Counselling, a GradDip in Art & Design and an MPhil in Management. My MPhil employed Soft System Methodology to examine the discourse around biofuels development in New Zealand.

I believe design processes provide the means for critical reflexivity and challenging paradigmatic thinking. Such transformative conversations can be structured aesthetically in order to connect design with management, art with business, government with innovation. While this may sound like the intellectual equivalent of the splits, I contend that an integral/phenomenological approach offers a rigorous methodology for engaging with complexity, challenging suppositions and exploring communicative co-creation of the ‘lifeworld’, and whatever lies beyond that. I was fortunate enough to explore these ideas in the development of AUT’s pioneering Design major for the Bachelor of Business programme, which I wrote in 2007.

Broadly speaking, my research is concerned with exploring the dialectic between communication and organization: a transformative agency mediated through dialogue. I am currently a PhD candidate at Waikato School of Management, studying marketing and the psychology of evolutionary consciousness. My particular interest here is in the cultural interface between marketing media and social psychological development. My research utilizes communicative and participatory action to examine the dynamics of individuation and inter-subjectivity within organisations that espouse ethical and sustainable positions.

An active researcher, if somewhat reluctant academic, I divide my time between consulting, researching and painting. I am on the steering committee for ‘antipodes’, a proposed New Zealand journal of design research.

Peter Crowe Upstart Ltd PO Box 78020, Grey Lynn Auckland New Zealand Email peter@upstart.co.nz pcrowe@aut.ac.nz
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