University of Sunderland

Gurpreet Singh

Born in 1963, Gurpreet Singh was originally trained as an architect. He developed his passion for the digital side of design, into the field of multimedia and moving image. Singh and his research partner Dr Mike Pickard together developed a field of research using scientific knowledge to enhance design practice.

Research Interests

Vision Directed Design (VDD) is an emerging field that utilises the latest understandings about human perception and cognition to enhance the communication and visual impact of pictorial design. It is an interdisciplinary field bridging the gap between the visual sciences and design.

Following extensive research to identify areas in which design practice could benefit from scientific understanding of human vision, the group focused on one main research question. How can understanding from the visual sciences inform the next generation of designers and be made accessible to them in practice? This question has led the researchers to explore a number of related subjects.

A refereed paper delivered at the SeFUN conference in Helsinki showed how VDD impacts on the study of semiotics, demonstrating practical interactive tools developed by Singh and Pickard for analysis of images in a semiotic context. This was subsequently selected for publication in a book.

A refereed paper delivered at the DEFSA conference in Capetown focussed on the pedagogical and educational issues underpinning VDD, based around a combination of experiential learning and mental modelling approaches.

A refereed paper delivered at the IASDR conference in Hong Kong, discussed the interactive research methodologies Singh and Pickard employ to explore this field. The paper focuses on their toolset exploring the effects of equiluminant colour in design work (one of more than fifty fully interactive toolsets they have developed). This allows designers for the first time to produce their own equiluminant colour palettes for use in industry standard software.

This ability to apply vision science knowledge to design practice is a key focus of their research, and has not only been demonstrated through a number of other international refereed conference papers, but importantly has also led to commercial applications. Currently this research is developing the range of potential applications for VDD and also starting to explore the impact of VDD on the moving image.