Senior Lecturer, Product Design and Engineering, Department of Design, Engineering and Mathematics. Programme Leader for the BA/BEng/MEng Product Design Engineering suite of Programmes.
Associate Director of redLoop: the MDX design and innovation centre.
Her expertise is in product, service and interaction design which she practices with external clients through redLoop and through collaboration with research colleagues in the university and wider academic community.
She conceived of redLoop, along with Andy Bardill, to build capactiy in the University to respond to research, knowledge transfer and partnership opportunities.
redLoop is a research led, innovation and design collaboration centre run by the faculty of Science and Technology.
It is driven by collaborative innovation, working successfully with research teams and project groups to develop and deliver projects that increase the potential and impact of the University’s work for internal and external partners, networks and clients.
It provides opportunities for students to gain experience in a unique working environment, with leading edge design and innovation practice, delivered with the insight of educators.
It develops professional competence and employability potential of students through projects, placements and internships.
You can find out more about our work at www.redloop.mdx.ac.uk
Prior to her current position at Middlesex University, Kate has worked in across the design industry in positions ranging from professional modelmaker to Product Designer, working in innovation and product development with SMEs
Programme Leader for BA, BEng, MEng Product Design Engineering suite of programmes
Kate currently teaches across all year groups in the programmes, with a focus on studio skills in year 1 and 2, and academic writing and research in years 3/4. In association with her work at redLoop and ongoing research interests, her focus is on developing well rounded designers who are great critical thinkers, both those in the studio and those under the supervision of herself and Andy at redLoop.
As an associate director of redLoop Kate engages in research with a broad range of collaborators in areas including psychology, museology, biomedical engineering, etc. (Please see publication feed below for details).
Her personal research interests lie in the area of user experience, design research methods (such as design probes), and design for subjective wellbeing (happiness).
PhD: 'The Development of Conceptual Models for Designing for Co-Design in Mass Customisation'
This research investigates the customer co-design experience, developing models and tools to inform the emergent task of designing for customer co-design. It uses 'design probes' as part of a mixed-method approach to explore the entirety of the customer co-design experience from co-design to receipt of the product and beyond, bringing together empathic research methods and theories from the field of product design.
Jordan, Patrick W., Bardill, Andy, Herd, Kate and Grimaldi, Silvia (2020). Narrative and design for wellbeing: a user-centered approach. ACTIO - Journal of Technology in Design, Film, Arts and Visual Communication. ISSN 2665-1890 [Article] (Accepted/In press)
Jordan, Patrick W., Bardill, Andy, Herd, Kate and Grimaldi, Silvia (2017) Design for subjective wellbeing: towards a design framework for constructing narrative. The Design Journal, 20 (Sup1). S4292-S4306. ISSN 1460-6925 (doi:10.1080/14606925.2017.1352926)
Jordan, Patrick, Bardill, Andy, Herd, Kate and Grimaldi, Silvia (2017) Design for subjective wellbeing: towards a design framework for constructing narrative. In: Design for Next 12th EAD Conference, 12-14 Apr 2017, Rome, Italy.
Marzano, Lisa, Al-Ayoubi, Laila, Bardill, Andy, Herd, Kate, Vale, David, Grey, Nick and Moran, Paul (2017) Making a difference with ‘smartphone psychology’: can mobile digital technologies help create new insights into self-harming behaviours? In: Making a Difference with Psychology. Niven, Karen, Lewis, Suzan and Kagan, Carolyn, eds. Richard Benjamin Trust, United Kingdom, pp. 139-147. ISBN 9781788085670
Nguyen, Phong H., Xu, Kai, Bardill, Andy, Salman, Betul, Herd, Kate and Wong, B. L. William (2016) SenseMap: supporting browser-based online sensemaking through analytic provenance. In: VIS 2016: IEEE Visualization Conference, 23-28 Oct 2016, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Marzano, Lisa, Bardill, Andy, Fields, Bob, Herd, Kate, Veale, David, Grey, Nick and Moran, Paul (2015) The application of ‘mHealth’ to mental health: opportunities and challenges. The Lancet Psychiatry, 2 (10). pp. 942-948. ISSN 2215-0366
Fields, Bob, Bardill, Andy, Marzano, Lisa and Herd, Kate (2015) Hard-to-get-at data from difficult-to-access users. In: 15th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction – Interact 2015:, 14-18 Sept 2015, Bamberg, Germany.
Herd, Kate (2012) The development of conceptual models and frameworks to inform design for co‐design in mass customisation. PhD thesis, Middlesex University.
Griffiths, Wyn, Bardill, Andy and Herd, Kate (2012) Participatory Design in a compressed timeframe, through an unConference format. In: Perspectives on Participation @ DIS 2012, June 2012, Newcastle University.
Herd, Kate, Karamanoglu, Mehmet and Bardill, Andy (2011) Mass customisation. What are we designing? In: 2011 World Conference on Mass Customization, Personalization, and Co-Creation, 16-19 Nov 2011, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Herd, Kate, Bardill, Andy and Karamanoglu, Mehmet (2009) The co-design experience: conceptual models and design tools for mass customisation. In: Advances in mass customization and personalization. Piller, Frank T. and Tseng, Mitchell M., eds. World Scientific Publishing, London, UK, pp. 181-207.
Herd, Kate, Bardill, Andy and Karamanoglu, Mehmet (2009) X-ray specs, stickers and colouring in: seeing beyond the configurator using design probes. In: The 5th International Conference on Mass Customization and Personalization, 04-08 Oct 2009, Helsinki, Finland.
Herd, Kate, Bardill, Andy and Karamanoglu, Mehmet (2009) Development of a design probe to reveal customer touch points in the sale of mass customised products. Design Principles and Practices, 3 (3). pp. 193-208. ISSN 1833-1874
Bardill, Andy, Herd, Kate and Karamanoglu, Mehmet (2007) Designing for co-design: using the product envelope model as a framework for reflection. In: Proceedings of the World Conference on Mass Customization & Personalization (MCPC), Innovation and Research Conference, 07-10 Oct 2007, Cambridge/Boston, MA, USA.
Bardill, Andy, Herd, Kate and Karamanoglu, Mehmet (2007) Product envelopes: designing positive interplay between brand DNA and customer co-designers. International Journal of Mass Customization, 2 (1/2). pp. 57-75. ISSN 1742-4208
Bardill, Andy and Herd, Kate (2006) Maintaining positive interplay between brand DNA and customer co-designers in mass customised products. In: International Conference on Strategic Innovation and Creativity in Brand & Design Management, 29 Nov 2006, Korea.
Karamanoglu, Mehmet , Bardill, Andy and Herd, Kate (2005) Pleasure-based design approaches to the built environment. Municipal Engineer, 158 (3). pp. 183-193. ISSN 0965-0903
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As part of her work at redLoop Kate is contributing to the following projects:
CoRLEIT, Covid Regional Lung EIT, funded by UKRI £0.5M. A key challenge for the COVID-19 pandemic is the requirement to monitor for deterioration and provide timely escalation interventions to an unprecedented number of patients at risk of respiratory failure. Existing monitoring poorly predicts sudden deterioration in COVID-19 pneumonia. There is an urgent need for a low cost, bedside, non-invasive imaging system, to continuously monitor dynamic changes in regional lung ventilation. The principal contribution of redLoop is to develop new, low-cost patient wearable interfaces that can be manufactured at large scale, within an agile suplly chain. They have developed patentable technology to meet this need and will oversee the industrial design of the ICU bedside devices and is advising on clinical interface design.
PNEUMACRIT project, funded by the EPSRC to a total of £1.8M in collaboration with UCl and Cambridge University. This project aims to create an integrated, intelligent and wearable electronic diagnostic tool that incorporates organic devices to drastically reduce damage caused to neonates by respiratory support and address the challenges of personalised wearable healthcare devices.
redLoop were previously contributing to the CRADL project - Continuous Regional Analysis Device for neonate Lung (CRADL)
This was a Horizon 2020 project funded by the eu and the Swiss govenment to a total of €5.5M
Each year 15 million babies are born prematurely and many suffer from respiratory failure due to immaturity of the lung and lack of control of breathing.
Although respiratory support, especially mechanical ventilation, can improve their survival, it also causes severe injury to the vulnerable lung resulting in severe and chronic pulmonary morbidity lasting in to adulthood. Heterogeneity of lung aeration, resulting in areas of lung over inflation and lung collapse, plays a crucial part in the risk of mortality and morbidity due to respiratory failure.
This distribution of lung aeration cannot be detected by currently available bedside monitoring tools and imaging methods. Thus, an imaging technique for continuous non-invasive bedside monitoring of infants lung function is urgently needed. In order to address this, CRADL will use EIT technology to establish a monitoring tool for interventions in the paediatric population.
Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a non-radiative, inexpensive technique that can facilitate real time monitoring of lung aeration, and recent studies have shown that it is effective in monitoring aeration in preterm babies.
CRADL showed how EIT can provide new cost effective, easy to use, respiratory management tools and clinical protocols that can be universally adopted to reduce deaths and disability in preterm babies by delivering a tool that provides continuous, non-invasive, radiation free, bedside information on regional lung aeration and ventilation during daily clinical care of (preterm) infants and children with respiratory failure.
The principal contributions of redLoop were in developing new product architectures to optimise manufacturability and reduce costs of the wearable devices, affective design features to improve parental emotional response to the devices and affordance design features to reduce error in the use of the device by medics.
As Associate Director of redLoop Kate has collaborated a number of projects with external partners, increasing the impact of the University's work and its reach into the local community. We get a great deal out of working with collaborative partners, not least in being able to provide enriched educational experiences for our own students, many of whom have been involved in these projects. Some examples include:
Alexandra Palace
Working with Andy Bardill and Helen Bendon we are STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) education partners with Alexandra Palace and have an ongoing project to develop innovative educational resources that can inspire the next generation of innovators. Alexandra Palace has a rich history of innovation bringing together science and the arts to provide new entertainment experiences, through theatre, cinema, as a visitor attraction and as the birthplace of mass-broadcast television.
We have been having fun delving into this rich history to develop educational experiences – reverse engineering and then building a working John Logie Baird flying spot scanner and televisor, making a 3D zoetrope, painting with light, reconstructing cinema projection technology from first principles – all to enable pupils from local schools to experience how science and technology works with the arts to enhance human experience.
The Raising of the Dornier Do17
Working with Andy Bardill, Helen Bendon and Bob Fields on a partnership project with the RAF Museum, Hendon on raising the Dornier Do 17, the last known surviving light bomber of its kind from WWII.
The plane was raised from the Goodwin Sands in the summer of 2013. The team has devised a media and exhibition strategy to engage the public through the stages of the process from the lifting of the plane from the seabed to its final resting place in the museum, including physical exhibit builds, online and situated digital media and an augmented reality smartphone app.
This project was funded via RAF Museum sponsors http://rafmuseum.mdx.ac.uk/dornier17/
Project video on youTube
