Profile

Dr Elies Dekoninck is an Industrial Designer. Following a few years in industry, she completed her PhD ‘Eco-innovation: tools to facilitate early-stage workshops’ in 2003, after which she worked as a consultant at Kinneir Dufort Product Design Ltd. in Bristol specialising in Design Strategy and User-centred design. She developed and delivered a portfolio of new consultancy services for clients such as Roche Diagnostics, Masterfoods and Unilever. Elies then went freelance to pursue her research in eco-innovation. She worked on an EU funded project titled: ‘SUPPORT- Sustainable Innovation Tools’ and conducted consultancy for CREAX Innovation Consultants. In February 2004, she joined the University of Bath.

Research

Since joining the University she has become involved with a wide variety of projects on Design Creativity, Product Development and Innovation. She has run 5 KTP projects in conjunction with local companies, and supervised 2 MPhil students in industry. She has supervised a wide range of PhD students looking at topics such as: User-Centred Eco-design; Creativity in Virtual Design teams; to Creativity in the Latter stages of the Design Process. In 2015, she completed a large EU-research project: G.EN.ESI (http://genesi-fp7.eu/) and a short AHRC-funded game-design research project which resulted in the product launch of ‘Beasts of Balance’ (beastsofbalance.com). She is currently the project leader at Bath for a large European H2020 project exploring the role that Spatial Augmented Reality can play in co-creative design sessions (http://spark-project.net/).

Teaching

She developed the new MEng in Integrated Design Engineering (IDE) which focuses on integrating mechanical, electronic and software skills in studio-based design projects. She is now the programme leader for IDE at Bath. She teaches courses on product design and development and coordinates all the final-year major individual design projects.