Dr. Rebecca Anne Price is an Assistant Professor of Transition Design at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands. Educated and practiced as an industrial designer, Rebecca was quickly drawn to the strategic potential of design as source of resilience. Rebecca completed a PhD in design-led innovation at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Now at TU Delft, Dr. Price works with public and private organisations to support the application of design upon complex innovation challenges. While the predominant domain of her work to date has been mobility (aviation, automotive, urban transport), her methodological research in particular holds increasing value to domains related to public health and energy transitions that stem from a socio-technical perspective of the possibilities of design.

Other events:

Not Invented Here: Organizational misalignment as a barrier to innovation implementation in service organisations

Ravi Mahamuni, a service design researcher and practitioner, is heading the Design Research at Tata Consultancy Services and completed his PhD in Service Design from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, India. He is a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering, Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Computing and MBA. He has twenty-four years of industry experience in diverse roles. He is an author of 18 plus research papers and lead inventor of 10 plus patents. His research interest is the aspects that inform design for change, service design for scale and how service designers can facilitate the change that people and communities desire. Due to his technology and management background, he believes in technology as an enabler while humanizing the services. He is a lead service designer for various in-house service design initiatives like employee onboarding, employee integration and employee referral services. He has developed ten plus technology products and anchored several service design projects.

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Proliferating service design in a large multi-cultural IT organisation – an inside-out approach

I am a strategic designer, facilitator, educator and researcher working to evolve creative practices to address increasingly complex problems. My work draws on leading design methodologies including systemic design, frame creation, participatory design and transition design to explore problems, propose pathways forward and build alliances for change.

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Designing for informal services: A participatory approach to prevent sexual violence within a university

Dr Ksenija Kuzmina is a Programme Director and Lecturer for the MA/MSc Design Innovation programme within the Institute for Design Innovation. Ksenija’s research is in the field of design and service innovation for environmentally friendly and socially viable futures. She is interested in exploring design’s capability to support change in service organisations at the intersection of public, private and third sectors. In particular, her research looks at how service design thinking, human-centered design, and more recently, big data methodologies can be strategically integrated to enable organisations to review, reflect on and reimagine new service models to promote social innovation, well-being and sustainability.

Other events:

Service design meets strategic action: Exploring new tools for activating change

Associate Professor Abby Mellick Lopes is a design studies scholar engaged in interdisciplinary, design-led social research and the Director of Postgraduate Design Studies at UTS. An award-winning teacher and experienced postgraduate supervisor, Abby’s research focuses on the relationship between design and social arrangements to support the transition to more sustainable cultures and economies. Her recent projects have tackled issues such as civic trust in drinking water, the impact of development trends on the urban commons, food and waste economies and cultures of repair. Her research practice brings design into relation with a number of disciplines including cultural studies, geography, urban studies and sociology. She collaborates with a wide range of academic, industry and government partners, currently holding an Adjunct position in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University and is also an Associate of the Institute for Culture and Society.

Lucy Kimbell is Director of the Social Design Institute, and Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at University of the Arts London. Her research looks at the emergence and development of ‘design thinking’ and the use of design expertise to address organisational, social and public policy issues, drawing on her doctoral study combining design and sociological research. Lucy is co-investigator on two UKRI funded projects which are cross-disciplinary and co-produced with non-academic partners to explore and addresses social issues including AI and anti-microbial resistance. Lucy was AHRC design research fellow in Policy Lab, a team in the UK civil service in 2014-15 and worked with the EU Joint Research Centre on a project using foresight and design to explore government futures.

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