Dr Wenbo ai

Biography

Dr. Wenbo Ai is a design researcher. Currently, he serves as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at LCC, working on the NIHR-funded "I-sample" project, which employs service design to improve blood culture pathways for potential sepsis patients in hospital emergency departments. This project involves collaboration with researchers from the University of Leicester and three NHS hospitals. It helps clinical decision making so that patients can receive the best infection specific antibiotic at the earliest stage of their treatment, and to reduce antibiotic overuse.

Previously, he worked as a Design Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, partnering with academic research centers from the University of Sheffield and commercial industries. The project, "Smart Sanitisation," was funded by Innovate UK and focused on improving hand sanitization in the workplace through interdisciplinary research across service design, communication design, and social healthcare.

Additionally, he worked as both a Service Designer and Graphic Designer at the Design Against Crime Research Centre at Central Saint Martins, contributing to three projects centered on design for social innovation and sustainability: Graffiti, Empathy Design Research, and Makeright, a co-design project with HMP Thameside prison.

He holds a Master's degree in Service Design from the London College of Communication. Prior to pursuing his graduate studies, he gained valuable experience in the graphic design industry after earning his first degree in Visual Communication.

He earned his PhD from the Royal College of Art's School of Communication and HHCD Research Centre. His doctoral research explored the integration of design literacy within the context of Chinese Health Promoting Hospitals. As part of his work, he developed and proposed comprehensive design-thinking frameworks to increase the accessibility and inclusivity of design ontology, epistemology, and methodology in Chinese health promotion contexts.

His research has developed and refined the participatory communication design field through three fields: participatory design, communication design and participatory communication. He also developed participatory communication design methodology along pathways driven by different inter-disciplines both from design and no- design fields: design anthropology, service design, participatory design, user experience, inclusive design, social design, transition design, communication theories.