Expertise

Sharron brings a rare combination of creative practice, environmental design, dementia knowledge, neuroaesthetic thinking, and emerging academic scholarship. Her expertise has been developed across decades of hands-on project work, independent research, conference engagement, and sustained investigation into how art and design can improve lived experience in residential, corporate, health and aged-care settings.

Her expertise has included the development of Design Finishes that instantly uplift and update environments with beauty and a sense of well-being. They included, custom art as tile, mosaic, glass murals, wallpaper, ceiling murals and splashbacks.

Designing Human-centered Systems- through Art

However, Sharron’s central focus has been on Art-Based Technologies: purpose-designed visual and environmental interventions that go beyond decoration to support human well-being, engagement, orientation and dignity. This includes the design of murals, door systems, intuitive signage, themed environmental cues, window illusions and other visual frameworks that can help transform institutional settings into places that feel more humane, meaningful and navigable.

Sharron’s work is especially informed by the needs of older people and those living with dementia. She has a strong interest in how beauty, salience, contrast, familiarity, identity and environmental meaning influence attention, mood and wayfinding. Her approach draws together design practice, dementia care principles, neuroaesthetics, cognitive ageing, and person-centred thinking to explore how holisticly designed environments can reduce distress, support recognition, and create more emotionally supportive experiences of care.

Her expertise spans:

• art-based environmental design for aged care and dementia settings
• neuroaesthetics and the role of beauty in health environments
• intuitive signage and complete wayfinding systems
• identity-affirming room doors and environmental cues
• window illusions, murals and therapeutic visual interventions
• person-centred and dementia-friendly design thinking
• conference speaking, concept development and interdisciplinary collaboration
• translating practice-based innovation into academic and professional discussion

What distinguishes Sharron is her ability to connect creative insight with biology, policy, ethics, practical application and broader research questions. She does not approach art as surface styling. She approaches it as a serious environmental tool, based on neuroaesthetics, with the potential to influence emotion, behaviour, orientation and quality of life.

Sharron’s Scientific Influences

Demonstrating Neuroaesthetic’s for Dementia Wayfinding into a Cognitive Map

Combining her learnings across Aged Care Environmental Policy, Ethics and Biology led Sharron to create a Cognitive Pathway Linking Visual Design to Environmental Wayfinding to show how Art-based Technologies can be used to help people living with dementia in residential care:

How Art integrated as Architecture can increase WELL outcomes and Sustainability

Where would humanity be if we had never learned to imagine beyond what already exists? Neuroscience is increasingly showing that creativity is not a luxury — it is a core function of the human brain. Creative thinking emerges from the interaction between multiple brain systems- those responsible for control, emotion, memory and spontaneous insight working together to generate something new. In other words, creativity is not randomness.

It is the brain’s way of solving problems, adapting, and building meaning. The emerging field of neuroarts goes further — demonstrating that engaging with art and aesthetic experiences can measurably change the brain, body and behaviour, improving health, learning and wellbeing. But there is another layer we are only beginning to understand.

When art is embedded into our environments, it does more than engage us momentarily. It becomes part of the system we live within. Because humans are drawn to beauty, we preserve it. We maintain it. We return to it. And in doing so, art begins to systematise well-being over time — not as an intervention, but as part of everyday life. This matters. Because if creativity is how we:

• solve problems
• build culture
• connect as humans

…then embedding art into our environments is not an aesthetic choice. It is a structural one. In health, in education, and in how we design the spaces we inhabit, the question is no longer: Is creativity valuable? But: Can we afford to ignore it?

So now, imagine how much more powerful a tool art could be when neuroaesthetically designed for efficacy in Health and Aged Care environments.

Demonstrating Integrated Art for Longer Building Life into a Cognitive Map

”Art is not decoration. It is how the brain makes sense of the world — and when embedded in our environments, it becomes a system for sustaining well-being and human function over time.” Sharron, 2026

Sharron has presented at numerous Aged Care and Neurology conferences including:

‘Innovating Person Centred Care through Science-driven Designed Art’ Dementia Alzheimers and Neurology Conference – DANC 2024 Dubai
‘Innovating dementia-friendly Art to Facilitate Person-Centred Care’ International Dementia Conference – IDC 2024 Sydney
‘Using Art Technologies to extend the Frontiers in Dementia Cognitive Sensory and Reminiscence Therapy’ Dementia Alzheimers Conference – DAC 2025 Delaware
‘Enhancing Person-centered Care through Neuroaesthetics and Art-based Technologies’ Australian Recreational Therapists Association – ARTA 2025 Australia
‘Are Art-based Technologies the Next Innovation in Health- and Aged-Care’ Health Informatics Knowledge Management Conference – HIKM 2025
‘Art Technologies Delivering Therapy for Dementia Residents in Aged Care residents’ Global Conference on Neurology and Brain Disorder – GNBD 2026 Bangkok

If you would like to invite Sharron to present at your organisation please contact us.