Dr Lara Salinas

Biography

Lara is a practitioner and researcher with an interdisciplinary background in digital culture. She is a design researcher and education: Senior Research Fellow in Knowledge Exchange at the University of the Arts London and lecturer on the MA Service Design at the London College of Communication.

Currently she is leading research on knowledge exchange in arts and design. Lara’s research interests include knowledge exchange in arts and design, facilitating participatory design for innovation, designing for services and policy and physical-digital hybrids. Her expertise extends to facilitating participatory design and knowledge exchange with academia, creative industries and public sector organisations.

Her undergraduate and postgraduate studies were in Art, Technology and Digital Culture, and specialising in web-based art and creative uses of locative media. Her work has been exhibited internationally, outstanding TodaysArt (Netherlands) FutureEverything (UK), Urban Transcript (Italy), NewMediaFest (Germany) and Web Biennial (Turkey). Her AHRC-funded, practice-led PhD was completed at Lancaster University in 2016. She examined how digital services can facilitate the social production of spaces through ‘knowledge exchange experiments’ with pioneering companies, local authorities and academic thinkers. She did her post-doctoral studies at the AHRC-funded Public Collaboration Lab (CSM) investigating the potential of design education in supporting innovation practices within local government through collaborative design practice. She has been involved in a number of publicly-funded research projects, such as the Horizon 2020-funded Pharma-Factory, aiming to maximize impact by developing new tools to facilitate communication to help understand and reduce barriers to acceptance of plant-based pharmaceutical products and services.