62- Dr Iryna Kuksa- Designing green personalisation

Research lives and cultures

Dr Iryna Kuksa is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. She describes herself as a cross-disciplinary researcher, having studied and worked, in departments as diverse as History of Arts, British Politics and Theatre, Performance & Cultural Studies. The common thread in her research interests is Digital Technologies.

Growing up in Belarus, Iryna was exposed in her family environment to lots of artists, which fostered her appreciation and interest in creativity. This environment showed her the value of inclusivity when it comes to working across different disciplines. Changes in her country’s political system created new opportunities to access scholarships via the British Council. This allowed her to get her first experience of research in the UK (Oxford and LSE) and later on to embark on a PhD at The University of Warwick.

Her earlier undergraduate experiences as an industrial designer have instilled in her the curiosity of asking questions from multiple perspectives. She has shifted her research questions on personalisation towards paying more attention to reducing consumption. As a designer interested in personalisation and digital technologies, how do you reconcile your interest in new objects and products with the need to reduce consumption towards a more sustainable world. She has developed the concept of “green personalisation”.

Iryna shares:

• How important it is to recognise opportunities when they present themselves.
• How research niche and interest evolve but we don’t always need to reinvent the wheel.
• How having “thoughts partners” can help you shift your research ideas and perspectives. Her interactions with external stakeholders have been important in getting her to embrace the sustainability agenda and to promote among designers a rise in awareness of their role in sustainability issues.
• How the nature of short-term contracts continues to be a challenge and may lead researchers to accept positions with lower salaries; in her case, this allowed her to move to an open-ended contract as a research fellow.
• How volunteering on things that matter to you is a process to build your leadership. Iryna became actively involved in building a community of ECR to promote a positive and supportive research culture in her institution.
• How she has learned to become more outspoken in meetings but also how aware she is of the importance of line managers in supporting progress as an early career academic.
• How progression is never straightforward. Having taken maternity leaves, she is fully aware that the pace of progression and research output may have slowed down for some time. She acknowledges that as a mum of 2 kids with a supportive partner who is also an academic, the balance of work and life is an ongoing juggling exercise.
• How supporting PhD students provides her with a great sense of giving back to the research community.