Dr Valerie Mace

Biography

Valérie is a Senior Lecturer in Experience Design whose work as an educator encompasses teaching, curriculum development, and course leadership across interior and spatial design, interaction design, and user experience design. She is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE and has received three UAL Outstanding Teaching Awards in recognition of her sustained contribution to teaching, learning, and curriculum enhancement.

Her research explores embodied experience, with a particular focus on the relationships between sensory design, emotional responses and wellbeing. Employing qualitative research methods, she investigates how environments and objects are perceived, interpreted, and experienced. She disseminates this work through peer-reviewed publications and international conferences, contributing to discussions in sensory studies, experiential practice, and design education. Valérie is a member of the Space and Place Research Hub and the Experimental Pedagogies Research Group at London College of Communication, and contributes to the Design for Placemaking Working Group at the Cumulus Association.

Valérie's pedagogic practice is informed by the close relationship she sees between research and teaching. Through embodied and experiential learning approaches, she encourages students to critically examine the social, ethical, and environmental implications of the spaces, products, and interactions they design. She has led a number of cross-institutional projects, including a collaboration with Malta's National Art Museum, where students developed site-specific responses to climate change, and a project in a dementia care setting in Milan, where MA Interior Design students explored empathy-led sensory design through direct engagement with people and place. In addition, she facilitates embodied learning workshops across a range of international institutions, including the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins in London, Politecnico di Milano, the University of Navarra in Pamplona, and ESDi in Barcelona.

Across her teaching, research, and collaborative activities, Valérie's work is characterised by a commitment to socially and environmentally engaged design practice. She is particularly interested in developing research-enhanced embodied learning experiences that foster critical inquiry, inclusivity, and meaningful engagement with contemporary design challenges.



Valérie is open to Doctoral supervision on the following topics: experience design, sensory design, space and place, experiential and embodied pedagogies.