Barnaby Tuke

Barnaby Tuke is a product designer whose research focuses on mobile dwelling, vernacular marine architecture and the social and material landscapes of urban waterways. His practice-based PhD project, Navigation, examines the itinerant boat-dwelling community along the Lee Navigation in East London. Combining auto-ethnography, oral history, psychogeographic walking and visual documentation, the research explores how boaters adapt vessels into homes and construct everyday infrastructures within the constraints of life on the canal network.

Drawing on lived experience as a canal boat resident aboard Demeter, the project documents improvised and repurposed vessels—such as adapted speedboats and lifeboats—and investigates how these material practices shape the boating landscape. Through design-led research, the work develops a critical visual guide to this overlooked urban community while contributing new approaches to design research and the study of mobile and marginalised environments.