Rosie McKenzie

I am primarily a human-centred designer as well as a design researcher. My work centres around a participatory approach that focusses on relationships and human connections. I believe users and stakeholders are an integral part of the design process and should be harnessed as an active participant in the creation of goods and services. I use storytelling as a design tool to encourage the user to have meaningful physically and digitally experiences. I employ user-centred research strategies to seek an understanding of human behaviours; I am particularly driven in the field of contemporary social challenges such as discrimination, biases and perceptions and I am conscious of understanding culture in relation to people’s perceptions and interactions.

‘New Stories’, my self-initiated project aims to encourage the next generation to challenge disability stereotypes by creating alternative narratives for children. ‘New Stories’ uses props and anecdotal accounts to prompt discussion and exploration surrounding the experiences of individuals with disabilities. This project stemmed from my own brief and focusses on user-interaction and stakeholder input. I conducted several interviews with experts in the field of disability awareness and the education sector. As well as this, I formed focus groups to pinpoint tension points within the current experience and conducted workshop exercises with children in an educational setting.

‘Local Coin’ was my design outcome for the Future Experiences project in conjunction with the Sustainable Futures in Africa network. It was a collaborative endeavour in which I took an economic approach to looking at how technology can play a role in the future experiences of financially poor, resource rich rural communities within the Global South. I created a digital wallet that tracked an alternative currency trading on local knowledge and expertise. The associated digital platform synthesised the data to create connections between different communities who shared the same sustainable values. Local Coin encompasses a new age of economic thought; no longer focused on individual wealth and consumption but rather a collective effort to preserve and enhance the environment for everyone.