Rachel Wingfield

Rachel Wingfield is an internationally recognised designer, researcher and educator with over 10 years experience operating at the interface between specialist disciplines. She works closely with science, academia and business, as well as regeneration agencies and community groups to develop and pilot near future visions for sustainable urban habitats.

Rachel intervenes at an urban scale, which calls her to move beyond specialist boundaries. This has provided several years of experience putting together multidisciplinary teams and facilitating unlikely partnerships that mediate between digital & biological media, participatory design, urban crafts, and public realm initiatives.

Rachel co-founded Loop.pH in 2003, a London based art and design studio specializing in transformative ecological design and ephemeral textile architecture. Loop.pH are part of a global network of creative thinkers and doers celebrating a new role for design as a catalyst for change and redefining conventions of how, why and with what things are made. Rachel’s expertise lies in bringing together divergent fields of knowledge and practice to demonstrate the potential of new materials and technologies through conceiving, designing and fabricating visionary prototypes and environments that are both familiar and transformative.

Core interests:

- Ecological synthesis of Biological, Digital & Electronic Media.

- People-centred, participatory design methods.

- Open Innovation & collaborative platforms to share and create new knowledge.

- Using design thinking to tackle complex problems through creative visioning.

- Ecomimicry - Learning from ecologies to design better artefacts & system.

Rachel has consulted on creative strategies and future scoping for industry, start-up businesses and the public sector with health care and regeneration agencies. The Leverhulme Trust, Medical Research Council, Audi Design Foundation and the Technology Strategy Board have all funded recent design research projects.She lectures and delivers keynote speeches internationally and runs workshops at a number of leading institutes, such as the Royal College of Art, London, Parsons School of Art and Design, NY, ECAL, Rietveld Academie, NL and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen.

Rachel was recently commissioned by Lord Norman Foster and has works in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the V&A Museum, London.

As Research Fellow at Central St Martins, London, Rachel’s recent work has been to explore a new role for design in urban-scale research projects. In 2008 Rachel founded MetaboliCity, a design-led urban farming initiative with the aim to create less fragmented and more sustainable cities (funded by Audi Design Foundation).

Previous research (1998-2008) has been into the use of smart-textiles in Responsive Environments and developing concepts for printed electronics with pioneering work in light emitting, photovoltaic architectural application since 2002 (MPhil RCA). Research artefacts range from the first fully animated electroluminescent wallpaper (Elumin8, 2002), and biomimetic photovoltaic window coverings (Risø DTU, 2008), to responsive, green architectural cladding.

Rachel is recognized for innovative architectural applications of printed electroluminescent technology, which are part of a wider creative strategy to explore new markets for clean-technologies, and is currently design partner of RISØ DTU developing cutting edge demonstrations of Dr. Frederik Krebs’ research on printed polymer photovoltaics.