Apart from having studied Media and Communications to a graduate level, Dean is a fine artist, designer and motion picture producer. His interest in historical image and historical media, led to Dean completing honours in the field of historical narrative and new media. Exploring the issues of multi-linearity and hypertext, and the potential of creative archival design, Dean undertook research into a multidisciplinary study into the history of Tasmania, as a landmass, and a natural and human historical vector. As a result of pursuing research, Dean was offered to manage the heritage library of Andrew Long and Associates, an Archaeological firm in Melbourne Australia. Thus he designed and executed a new classification system suited for its usage and applied it to the collection. Dean’s other task was to produce graphics for Cultural Heritage Management Plans (CHMP), in the form of excavation site maps and excavation stratigraphic diagrams.

Dean has an interest in furthering cultural heritage practice into a form that has value to communities. Dean’s interest is developing cultural heritage visualisation beyond commemorative plaques, and moving it into building design, both architecturally repurposing artefacts and features, and referencing through quotation. These practices can allow cultural heritage and art’s strategies to overlap, provide work to local artisans, and raise the profile of both cultural heritage and arts industry simultaneously.

Dean also believes that Augmented Reality (AR) offers enormous opportunities in this field. AR creates an opportunity to interface directly into prepared narratives, other image content, and from hypertext then onto into databases. This can lead any viewer into immediate research and allow ordinary people to access online scholarly resources at a whim