Professor Lucy Kimbell

Biography

Lucy Kimbell (PhD) is Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her research explores service design, social design and design for policy. She is co-director of the international Sustainable Transitions through Democratic Design Doctoral Network funded by the EU Marie Curie programme and led the Design and Public Policy Research Network funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. An innovator in post-graduate education, she taught design on the MBA at Said Business School for 15 years and helped set up the MBA at Central Saint Martins.

Current and recent funded research projects

Lucy initiated and is Co-Director of the Sustainable Transitions through Democratic Design Doctoral Network funded by the EU Marie Curie scheme (2024-28) which provides fully-funded roles for 13 people in 8 universities in 7 countries to conduct original research at the intersection of design, sustainable transitions and democratic innovation. She is also Co-Investigator on a major AHRC grant to develop sustainabie approaches grounded in democratic localism in Ulster led by Belfast School of Art. Lucy was previously Principal Investigator of the AHRC Design & Policy Research Network (2022-23).

Lucy led the research in Creative Lenses, a four-year European collaboration project funded by Creative Europe (2015-19), about business models in arts organisations, funded through Creative Europe. She was the director of UAL's Social Design Institute (2019-2022), which brought together and amplified UAL's varied expertise in design for society through capacity building, joint research bids, new publications and public events. Before joining UAL Lucy was AHRC Research Fellow in Policy Lab in the Cabinet Office (2014-15), principal research fellow at the University of Brighton (2013-15) and Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford (2005-10).

Artworks

Lucy's artworks include Air Pollution Toile, a concept for wallpaper that changes in response to air pollution, shown at Modern Art Oxford (2018), and Pindices, taking the form of physical bar charts, a collaboration with sociologist Andrew Barry, shown about 10 times internationally after originally being commissioned by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel for Making Things Public, ZKM Karlsruhe (2005). Other experiments in materialising data including The Lix Index for Channel 4/Arts Council’s identinet (2002), Audit published by Bookworks (2002) and group exhibitions Soda at Lux Gallery (1998), Making Things Public at ZKM Karlsruhe (2005), Declining Democracy at Palazzo Strozzi (2011).

Lucy co-founded one of the UK’s first digital arts groups, Soda, worked as a BBC radio business journalist and went on to work in digital innovation consultancy before joining academia. She has been a volunteer teaching English in Sudan and Palestine.