Professor of Design at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Research Environment Lead for Manchester School of Art

Leads DoWell–the Design for Health and Wellbeing Research Group

BIOGRAPHY

Professor Kristina Niedderer (PhD, MA RCA) is Professor of Design at Manchester Metropolitan University. She is Research Environment Lead for Manchester School of Art and leads DoWell–the Design for Health and Wellbeing Research Group. She was originally apprenticed and worked as a goldsmith and silversmith in Germany and then trained as a designer and design researcher in the United Kingdom. She is an experienced researcher and supervisor who is recognised internationally for her work on using craft and design to engender mindful interaction and behaviour change within health and sustainability. She has published two edited books on Design for Behaviour Change and Design for Dementia, Health and Wellbeing, numerous journal articles, chapters and conference papers as well as design guides, toolkits and commercial designs. She is the founding editor of the journal Craft Research, which she has co-edited from 2010-2024. She has been project lead for several national and European research projects, including the Horizon 2020 MSCA RISE grant MinD ‘Designing for people with dementia: designing for mindful self-empowerment and social engagement’ (2016-2020, GA 691001), a MSCA individual fellowship (2020-2022, GA 895620) and an ESRC catalyst Grant (2023-24) for developing the ICanDo volunteer service to help people with early-stage dementia to explore their strengths and interests, build their confidence and provide support to go into volunteering to give people a purpose and improve their wellbeing.

Mindful care: a creative-ethical approach to wellbeing for people and planet

In this keynote, I will explore the concept of mindful design as an integral response to the need for ethical responsibility to guide the social relevance of practices in design, music and the arts.

Coming from a background in craft and design, I believe we can employ creative practices and their outcomes to help us foster personal and social responsibility, integrity and tolerance, and that these characteristics are key to countering some of the current global political and social developments and their destructive consequences.

I posit that taking personal responsibility for our everyday decisions, from voting to using social interaction to lifestyle decisions, is not just important but essential for making our social and environmental future sustainable. I will explain how mindfulness can help develop integrity and responsibility, and what role creative processes and outcomes can play in this.

Using examples from craft and design, I will explore their role in our everyday lives, how they guide our actions to make them more mindless, or mindful. I will unpack different ways in which mindfulness can be supported or arise from creative practices, how mindfulness can foster personal responsibility, integrity and tolerance, and ultimately create social awareness and responsibility.