Fashion Context
Written and Designed by Eden Harvey
Rachel Cooper
The vice chancellor talk I attended was that of Professor Rachel Cooper, who is director of imagination Lancaster, an exploratory design led research center. Professor Cooper finished her degree in 1976 where she completed a BA in the first multidisciplinary design course in the country in Staffordshire Poly and came out as and worked as graphic designer for the next 20 years. From 1976 to 2023, her experience got her from graphic design, into design management, new product development, design and construction, briefing and requirement capture, socially responsible design, design against crime, urban design, design and health, digital design and design and wellbeing.
Cooper believes that being an academic in design, the responsibility is not just to think about the design aspect of things but to look at the evidence that informs us. In 2011, Professor Cooper was invited to the World Economic Forum where she spoke about design.
People there were wondering what design has to do with health and asked her to write a piece on the relationship between design and non-communicable diseases, which she did, where she explained how design isn't always good. Designers create the material world, which impacts people's lifestyles and has actually done a lot of harm, but on the contrary, designers can also design all the medical equipment to cure people.
Another talk Cooper did was for the government scientific review foresight program called Mental Capital and Wellbeing. She was asked to do some research on the relationship between the environment and people's health and wellbeing, particularly our mental health. She spoke on how designers relate to designing the fabric of the physical environment and how that can have negative consequences, the quality of the ambient environment so the lighting, the acoustics, the access to nature, and the psychological fear of crime, the density of it etc.
In 2013, Cooper got some funding called the creative exchange with Newcastle Royal College of Art and Lancaster. They got 21 PhDs and decided it was going to be a new type of PhD program where they would have money to fund companies and academics in other universities. They developed a matrix which stated what they were going to do is work with industry and was all about the digital public space. It was led by an anchor company, BBC and Microsoft and was all about how we develop new products and services for commercials, social and community value, how do we think about the digital public space, and they wondered if it would it be a new PhD model and would there be new forms of knowledge between the companies.
They set it up by putting the PhDs in the middle, but those PhDs did many projects, they were interns in companies. They brought together companies, SME’s, micros, who normally can't afford to work with academics because they haven't got the time. They managed to get funding and persuade the research council to let them give money to those SME’s and micros. They also said they didn’t want to just use academics in their university, but in other universities as well, so if they had a specialist in something, they could go to any university they needed, creating an eco-relationship. They managed to work with small companies to increase these companies' turnover and created more graduate jobs. Finally, they began to think about thinking differently about the value of design in political and economic agency. The value of design is thinking about thinking differently, Rachel Cooper believes.