Louise Annable, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design

After a degree in product design and management and an MA in product design, Louise Annable began work for Design Knowledge Network, a funded project based at the University of Central England, as Research Team Leader, offering design and product advice to SMEs in West Midlands high value added sectors such as furniture, jewellery and ceramics. Louise is a member of the Designing and Consuming project team, on which she works as researcher.

Irene Cieraad, Delft University of Technology

Irene Cieraad, Senior Researcher at the Faculty of Architecture, Department of Interior Architecture and Design, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. She is a cultural anthropologist who has published widely on the subject of the history of Dutch vernacular interior architecture, furnishings and household technology. She was the editor of At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space (Syracuse University Press). In 2000/2001 she was a curator of exhibitions on the history of vernacular interior design.

Rachel Cooper, School of Art and Design, University of Salford

Rachel Cooper is Professor of Design Management at the University of Salford, where she is Director of the Adelphi Research Institute for Creative Arts and Sciences and also co-director of the EPSRC-funded Salford Centre for Research and Innovation in the Built and Human Environment. Her research interests cover design management; design policy; new product development; design in the built environment; urban regeneration; design against crime and socially responsible design. She has authored several books in the field including The Design Experience (2003), Process Management in Design and Construction (2004) and is currently commissioning editor for an Ashgate series on Socially Responsible Design. She has undertaken research for the Home Office, DTI, the Design Council and leading UK companies and currently leads ‘Vivacity 2020’ Sustainable Urban Design for the 24 Hour City, a £3m EPSRC funded project over five years looking at Manchester, London and Sheffield. Professor Cooper is President of the European Academy of Design, and Editor of The Design Journal. She is currently a member of the Infrastructure and Environment Strategic Advisory Team of the EPSRC, and is a member of the advisory panel on the AHRC/ESRC Cultures of Consumption programme and chairs the advisory panel for the Designing for the 21st Century initiative. In addition she is panel convenor for visual arts and media practice, history, theory postgraduate awards and sits on the Council of the AHRC. She was appointed this year to sit on Panel 63 (Art and Design) of the forthcoming RAE. She is regularly invited to give keynote addresses internationally, in 2003 she gave the EPSRC Annual Lecture and she is often called to work with governmental and industry bodies.

Tim Cooper, Centre for Sustainable Consumption, Sheffield Hallam University

Tim Cooper is Head of the Centre for Sustainable Consumption at Sheffield Hallam University, which specialises in research on the environmental impact of consumer products. His current research addresses repair activity and marketing issues relating to product durability and he has a three year grant from the EPSRC to establish a multidisciplinary Research Network on Product Life Spans. In recent years Tim has acted as advisor to the Belgian Government, Irish Environmental Protection Agency and House of Commons Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee.

Tim Dant, Sociology, University of East Anglia

Tim Dant is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East Anglia where he teaches social theory and the sociology of culture. He has research interests in the sociology of material culture and critical theory and has published a number of journal articles on both themes. He is the author of Material Culture in a Social World (Open University Press 1999), Critical Social Theory (Sage 2003) and Materiality and Society (Open University Press 2004).

Tom Fisher, Arts and Design Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University

Tom Fisher is a graduate in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, worked for eight years as a designer and maker of furniture and has worked at Sheffield Hallam University since 1990. His recent research in SHU's Art and Design Research Centre has concentrated on the significance of materials in consumption.

Gordon Hush, Historical and Critical Studies, Glasgow School of Art

Gordon Hush is a sociologist working within Glasgow School of Art’s Department of Historical & Critical studies. He works largely with design students, in particular the Product Design students of the B.Des/MEDes programme for whom he co-ordinates a social science research programme. This is aimed at overhauling the role of the designer, shifting the focus of design activity from technical, functional and aesthetic considerations to include a greater focus upon the user participation with the objects, services and experiences of available to the inhabitants of contemporary capitalist society. In addition, he is writing-up his doctoral thesis, The Socio-Spatial Construction of Consumption: an historical and contemporary analysis, which proposes a critical interrogation of sociology’s reliance upon concepts derived from economic theory as the means to investigate ‘consumption’ activities.

Jack Ingram, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design

Jack Ingram is Head of School of Product Design at the University of Central England. He works with companies in the management of new product development, and is Project Director for the Centre for High Value-Added Products, a £1.5m project to develop the role of design in SMEs in the West Midlands, part funded by the European Regional Development Fund. His research and consultancy are in the fields of design methods, product evolution and the management of continuous new product development, for clients that have included Post Office Engineering Research, Hills Industries limited and Rotadex Systems. He is a Council member of the Design Research Society, a founder member of the European Academy of Design, and co-founder of The Design Journal.

Guy Julier, The Leeds School of Art, Architecture & Design, Leeds Metropolitan University

Guy Julier is Professor of Design, Course Leader of the MA Design Culture and Head of Research in the School of Architecture, Landscape and Design at Leeds Metropolitan University as well as being an Honorary Professor at the Glasgow School of Art. He is author of The Culture of Design (2000) and Design since 1900 (2004) and an Editorial Board member of the Journal of Visual Culture.

Katrina Jungnickel, INCITE, University of Surrey

Anne Sofie Lægran, Norwegian University of Science and Technology/University of Edinburgh

Anne Sofie Laegran is a geographer at NTNU in Norway, based at the Research Centre for Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. With a general interest in technology and everyday practice, she is currently doing a post doc. on people in rural areas working from home. She plans to do a new project on DIY and home improvement.

Lydia Martens, Sociology, Durham University

Dr Lydia Martens research interests centre on the connections between consumer culture and domestic life. Her book Eating Out, co-authored with Alan Warde, came out in 2000 (Cambridge). She has also published in the Journal of Consumer Culture; the British Journal of Sociology of Education and Consumption, Markets and Culture.

Nicholas Oddy, Historical and Critical Studies, Glasgow School of Art

Nicholas Oddy trained and qualified initially as a ceramics and glass maker in Edinburgh before taking an MA in Design History at the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum. He lectured at Teesside and Dundee before moving to Glasgow in 1993. Responsible for design history teaching across Glasgow School of Art, with specialist input in the areas of product design, ceramics and graphics. His main academic research interests focus on late 19th and early 20th century mass manufactures and commercial design, particularly the cycle and related industries. Currently working on a PhD exploring the relationship between the aesthetic, technology and use of cycles from 1870-1950. Also a lifelong collector of numerous objects that would normally fall under the title of 'collectors' items'. A frequent contributor to arcane collectors' publications and freelance consultant to various auctioneers, dealers and private collectors.

Kate Orton-Johnson, University of Edinburgh

Kate completed her PhD research at INCITE at the University of Surrey, in collaboration with Sage Publishing Ltd. Her PhD researched the impact and use of digital resources in higher education exploring how students use and consume technology for learning. Kate is currently working on a three year project at the University of Edinburgh, designing web-based learning resources for graduate student research training.

Inge Ropke, IPL - Department of Manufacturing Engineering, Technical University of Denmark

Inge Røpke was trained as an economist, with heterodox socio-economic inclinations. She has worked for more than 20 years at different interdisciplinary departments at the Technical University of Denmark. Her research interests were formerly within the economics of innovation and now concentrate on ecological economics, consumption and the environment, technology and everyday life.

Isabel Shaw, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University

Isabel specialised in the history of African art and archaeology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She then continued her interest in the anthropology of visual and material culture at UCL, where she completed her MA. Currently she is doing a PhD at Lancaster University. She is looking at the commercial practices and processes that attempt to make normal mundane technologies such as the tooth brush and paste in different cultural and social contexts. As part of her project she is exploring the ways in which consumers are configured in relation to design as part of attempts to produce ‘global’ dental technologies.

Elizabeth Shove, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University

Elizabeth Shove is Reader in Sociology at Lancaster University and principal applicant for the Designing and Consuming project. She is currently interested in the sociology of practice, technology and ordinary consumption. She has written about concepts of comfort, cleanliness and convenience and has recently completed a project on sustainable domestic technologies in the kitchen and the bathroom. The Designing and Consuming project provides an opportunity to engage with designers, to explore the material aspects of material culture and to examine the dynamic relation between materials, images and forms of competence.

Nina Wakeford, INCITE, University of Surrey

Matt Watson, Department of Geography, Durham University

Matt Watson is a Senior Research Associate in Geography at Durham University, and co-applicant and researcher on the Designing and Consuming project. His research interests address issues of practice, particularly in relation to knowledge and materiality. Research projects have explored these themes in relation to nature reserves, waste practices and domestic consumption.

Darcy White, Sheffield Hallam University

Darcy White lectures on the history and theory of art, design and visual culture, at Sheffield Hallam University. Her current research considers the productive aspects of contemporary consumption in relation to products and product design and the everyday use of consumption in constructions of self-identity. She is also preparing a forthcoming book on the public sculpture of Sheffield and South Yorkshire for the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association’s National Recording Project. A co-authored article on ‘Teaching Transculturation’ is to be published in the Journal of Design History in September 2005.

Anne Witz, Department of Sociology, University of Leicester

Anne Witz is Reader in Sociology at the University of Leicester. She is currently completing a book on Gender, Embodiment and the Social. Her interest in this workshop reflects her interest in The Sociology of Style, a new course she is putting on, and in Domestic interior Design. She is preparing two research proposals at the moment. One is with Jennifer Smith in the Department of Sociology/Centre for Media Studies at Leicester University, on The Production, Consumption and Appropriation of Domestic Interior Design. The other is with her sister, the artist Teresa Witz, and will look at Essex Style: the case of a local taste community, combining visual (photographic) and interview methodologies.

Robert Young, School of Design, University of Northumbria

Disciplines include: Industrial Design and Product Design, New Media Design and Interaction Design. Robert Young is Associate Dean for Research and Consultancy at the School of Design at the Northumbria University and was previously its Research Director since 1991. He has also been Director of the Centre for Design Research since 1995. He has led the development of design research degree programmes at Northumbria, including many PhD candidates engaged directly in collaborative research and live design practice projects with industry. Research and consultancy interests include; complex systems design, digital design practice, design innovation, user experience issues in design, sustainable and inclusive design and action research in design practice.