Dr Garrath T. Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in Experience Design and is part of the Responsible Design Group at Loughborough Design School, Loughborough University, UK. Comfortable teaching both practice and theory-based content at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, Garrath also supervises doctoral students across a range of responsible design related topics, including fashion practices and identity at the liminality of pregnancy, and responsible service design and emotional attachment.
Garrath received his PhD in Sustainable Design in 2013, with a doctoral thesis titled “Design for Sustainable Behaviour: Feedback Interventions to Reduce Domestic Energy Consumption”. He has since held roles across several RCUK/UKRI grants, most recently as Principal Investigator of the Perpetual Plastic for Food to Go (PPFTG) project (NE/V01076X/1).
With a strong research and design consultancy background, Garrath has written, consulted, and talked internationally on the topics of Experience Design, Product-Service Systems, and Design for Behaviour Change. He was invited by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific to participate in the Asia-Pacific Business Forum 2019, Hong Kong, China. As part of the Impact Entrepreneurship Panel, Garrath discussed the role and value of UX within the context of Asia-Pacific business development and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Garrath is also currently Co-Convenor of the Design Research Society (DRS) Sustainability Special Interest Group. Design and research activities have featured in public media, including: the BBC, Time magazine, and The Guardian.
Garrath is Principal Investigator on the Perpetual Plastic for Food to Go (PPFTG) project. Funded as part of the ISCF Smart Sustainable Plastic Packaging Challenge initiative, this ‘design-led’ project is developing, prototyping, and evaluating a novel circular business model that combines smart-technology enabled products and services to reduce the environmental, societal, and economic impact of food to go packaging. Working with project partners (M&S, Hubbub, Klöckner Pentaplast, and Multivac), this all-Loughborough University team led by Garrath comprises of three Co-I’s and a Researcher Co-I, two Research Associates and a Doctoral Researcher.
Responsibilities include the development and delivery of taught content across undergraduate programmes BA. Industrial Design, BA. Design, and the postgraduate programme MA. User Experience Design. Garrath is currently Module Leader of DSC022 User Experience Design, the departments flagship undergraduate UX module.
- Nikki Clark (2017 – 2020): The importance of understanding consumer behaviour in the development of food-to-go packaging for a circular economy within the UK
- Marie Lefebvre (2014 – 2019): To repair or not to repair: an investigation of the factors influencing prosumer repair propensity
- Zoe John (2016 – present): [Ad]dressing Mamma: Can design for wellbeing align with sustainable practices of consumption, use, and disposal during pregnancy and into the post-partum period
- Yolanta Gale (2018 – present): The Pursuit for Perfection: Investigating user perception towards material change in clothing surfaces
- Matthew Smith (2018 – present): The Data-Hungry Home: Exploring the existence of technological beings and their implications for our relationships with data, technological objects, and the physical-digital world.