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

W Email: Taslima.begum@plymouth.ac.uk
W Email: Tbegum@cardiffmet.ac.uk
H Email: Dr.taslima.b@gmail.com

Academia.edu: https://plymouth.academia.edu/TaslimaB
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dr-taslima-begum-610444

Profile
Dr. Taslima Begum is a Senior Lecturer in Computing and Information Systems in the School of Management at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She is also a Visiting Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative Industries at the University of South Wales and an Associate Researcher with the Trans-technology Research Group at the University of Plymouth. In her own time, she works as an independent creative and academic consultant and an advocate in a charity that empowers vulnerable and disadvantaged people in the community.

Teaching
As a fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Taslima has been teaching and supporting learning since 2004, delivering lectures, workshops and seminars in further and higher education institutions across Wales on design, technology, computing and new media. Her current cross-disciplinary responsibilities include teaching on a number of programmes including MA Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, BA Game Art, BA Game Enterprise, BA Games Design, BA Animation, and BA Media Production and Broadcast at the University of South Wales, as well as modules on BSc Software Engineering, BSc Business Information Systems, BSc Computing and MSc Computing in the School of Management at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Taslima’s cross-disciplinary teaching focuses around design, technology and computing as well as socio-cultural studies. It spans interaction and interface design, HCI, physical and tangible computing, industrial design, cultural and postcolonial theory, digital media, animation, professional practice and research skills. Taslima has worked on a number of curricula developments pre-validation including the programme BA (Hons) Design for Digital Media at (UWCN, 2010), for which she integrated considerations of education for sustainable development and global citizenship within two new modules and she is currently helping develop the new BSc Computer Games Development programme (CMU, 2016-17).

Taslima teaching career started as a Visiting Lecturer in 2004. In 2008 she became a Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design teaching on BA (Hons) Interactive Media and made a substantial contribution to the delivery and management of a number of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes across the School of Art, Media and Design at the University of Wales. She was the Acting Programme Leader for the MA/MFA Design by Practice course and led 10 modules in an academic year that spanned MA/MFA Design by Practice, BA (Hons) Interactive Media and MA Creative Sound and Music (2010). She has also taught as a Visiting Lecturer in the Creative Arts at Coleg Gwent (2013). In 2010, Taslima championed the role of special needs co-ordinator for the screen media cluster in the AMD School where she worked with staff and students across the department to co-ordinate and facilitate improved mechanisms of support and provision of pastoral care for students with disabilities and special needs studying in higher education. In 2013, she completed an advanced TEFL/TESOL course in order to better support students with English as their second language supporting the ethos of diversity and widening participation in education.

Practice
Over the past decade, Taslima has undertaken freelance projects within the design and marketing industry working with and managing convergent media designers, small businesses (SME’s) and independent clients providing complete rebranding services, ranging from the design and production of banners, letterheads, business cards, logos, websites and digital content. Her previous professional experience (2003) includes published work as a 3D animation artist, website and games designer with new media developers. She worked collaboratively alongside other educators, animators, web designers and games developers to produce educational curriculum-incorporated games software on C-ROM for GCSE students distributed nationally in schools across the UK.

Education
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, motion triggered installations, website design, and innovative interface design. In 2008, Taslima was awarded 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 real-time, sonic 3d motion mapping. In 2010, alongside her research responsibilities, Taslima went on to gain a postgraduate certificate in higher education (PGCHE) and received HEA fellowship recognition in attainment against the UK professional standards framework. Her PGCHE explored three action research cycles in depth, namely: (i) The practice-research-theory relationship; (ii) utilising emotional intelligence for deep learning; and (iii) self-directed and blended learning approaches.

Research
Taslima’s research interests span the fields of technology, industrial design, cultural studies and computing. She recently completed her PhD doctoral research in 2015 which was: ‘A postcolonial investigation into the role of cultural hegemony within western industrial design history, praxis and pedagogy’. The research investigated how products and systems produced in the West can embody culturally hegemonic assumptions. By reinterpreting technological formations in light of research emerging from post-colonial studies, she conveys how product design often relies upon western [hegemonic] aesthetic and deep cultural archetypes. The enquiry highlights the potentials that exist to explore a synergy between east and west in industrial design with a prospective vision for globally inclusive design practice.

Keywords: Industrial and Product Design, Technology, Postcolonial and Cultural Studies, Design Practice, Design Process and Education, Hegemony, Trans-cultural and Global Products, Globalisation and Glocalisation, Higher Education Pedagogy and Curricula, Inclusivity and Cultural Capital, Cultural Cognizance, Design History, Theory and Philosophy, Metaphysics of Technology.

You can read her copyrighted thesis at:
https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk//handle/10026.1/3410

Taslima has undergone many professional development workshops and research training events between the University of Wales, the University of Plymouth, and Cardiff Metropolitan University. She has attended conferences and research events both nationally and internationally and is multi-lingual with language skills including fluency in English, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, basic French and German.
She is currently learning Arabic at intermediate level along with enjoying exploring the curious overlaps and dissimilarities between the respective disciplinary approaches, methods and thinking employed by computer scientists and data analysts with those of artists, designers and makers in the hope to develop rigorous design theories for future research. Research that reflects on the necessity for the analytic and the synthetic and the generalist and the specialist to collaborate, co-create and reciprocally inform and evolve their own disciplines.