Dr David Boyd is an artist and practitioner at the School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape at Newcastle University, where he has co-run a Master’s design studio since 2019. Through critical inquiry by creative practice, his research and teaching investigates hand drawing as an essential instrument for spatial invention, and examines the political, ethical, and practical tensions between traditional architectural making and the contemporary modes of technocratic production. His doctoral thesis, titled ‘Fallible Projections: The Resistant Mechanisms of a Pataphysical Practice’, examines the technical ocular language of isometric and axonometric projection through the lens of Alfred Jarry’s philosophy of Pataphysics: a late 19th-century movement that embraces the invention of ‘imaginary solutions’. Through the creation of 38 hand-drawn plates, the research critically reconfigures the technical design language of axonometry and isometry into a space for embodied poetic invention, speculating ways of spatial invention that resist the commercially facilitative, architecturally restrictive mechanisms of contemporary production. He has recently co-edited a book titled ‘Embodied Awareness of Space: Body, Agency, and Current Practice,’ which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in January 2025.