About

I am a Principal Lecturer with responsibility for leading on Quality Assurance and Enhancement processes for the Department of Art & Design. In this role, I have had a central role in the leadership, management and implementation of organisational change across the Department. I continue to support and advise academic colleagues on policy and University regulations and work closely with the Portfolio Leads for Teaching and Learning, Business and Enterprise and Global and Academic Partnerships.

I have also worked as an Innovation Lead in the University’s Enterprise Centre where I liaised with leads across the university’s research centres to respond to the Design and business needs of regional SMEs, creating a bespoke service through consultation.

I am an experienced Product Designer, developer and Design educator. I am fascinated with the relationships we have with the products we use, why we cherish some objects whilst others are cast away, resigned to the bottom of a drawer or to landfill. My research interests range from product longevity and the methods we might employ as designers to help extend a product’s lifespan to exploring the semantics of form.

After gaining a first-class degree in Industrial Design and then completing an MA in Product Design at Sheffield Hallam I worked for several years within the Art and Design Research Centre. Here, I worked on many commercial projects for a broad range of clients but also had the opportunity to develop a practice-based approach to research working on a series of client-led projects which included diverse projects such as designing environments for people with profound disability and specialist surgical equipment.

Principal Lecturer

Specialist areas of interest

Product Design
The relationship people have with the products they use. 
Product lifespan and longevity
Experiential Design / UX / product crossover

Teaching

Department of Art and Design

College of Social Sciences and Arts

Subject area:

• Product Design
• Interior Architecture & Design and Jewellery
• Materials and Design

Courses taught:

• BA(Hons) Product Design

Modules taught:

• Design Essentials
• Products Services & Experiences
• Professional Design Practice

Research

• Art and Design Research Centre

Thinking Keeping PHASE 2 – employing the techniques employed in packaging design to amplify the sense of ownership to enhance the sense of investment in a product’s lifespan through transformation.

Form Semantics

Saving for best - social media-based initial enquiry asking what sorts of things we save for best and why.

Thinking Keeping - practice-based research enquiry that explored the irreversible act of ‘breaking in’ to a sealed package. Breaking open a product’s packaging structures the user’s first experiences of owning the product, and reinforces perceptions of the product’s newness, perfection and desirability. This was an interdisciplinary project which I worked on with a jewellery and metalwork designer and a packaging designer. Our collective research interest was to explore how the techniques employed in packaging design to amplify the sense of ownership i.e., breaking a seal or ripping off a perforated strip might be applied to a range of other products as a method to emphasise a sense of 'newness'. Our work was exhibited as part of the Design and Emotion conference 2016. As a designer and academic, I am also excited by how interdisciplinarity and co-design can transform design projects, this is something I continue to explore.

CONFERENCE PAPERS

Keyte, J., Evans, R., & Macqueen, P. (2016). Thinking Keeping : a practice-led research project which focuses on the act of opening or breaking in to product packaging. In Desmet, P., Fokkinga, S., Ludden, G., Cila, N., & Van Zuthem, H. (Eds.) 10th International Conference on Design and Emotion, Amsterdam, 27 September 2016 - 30 September 2016. Design & Emotion Society: https://www.de2016.org/proceedings

PATENTS

Dulake, N., Evans, R., & Reed, H. (2011). Water soluble sheet dispenser. WO2011EP54472 20110323.

• Julia Keyte (University of Bath)
• Peter Macqueen
• Nick Dulake (Design Futures)

Publications

Other activities

External Examiner - Swansea College of Art