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. She completed 4 large EU-research projects on topics: eco-design, spatial augemented reality for design, open-source harware development and human-robot collaboration. A short AHRC-funded game-design research project, resulted in a successful start-up and the product launch of ‘Beasts of Balance’ (beastsofbalance.com). Her most  recent research projects are in mobility system design, human behaviour and inclusive design. 

Teaching

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