Dr Valerie Mace

Biography

A Senior Lecturer and the recipient of three UAL Outstanding Teaching Awards recognising her contribution to teaching and learning, Valérie also holds a Senior Fellowship of Advance HE (SFHEA) in recognition of her work in course leadership and curriculum development.

Teaching across disciplines, including spatial, interaction, and user experience design, Valérie highly values creating embodied learning experiences that emphasise the role of the senses in mediating how we experience, understand, and interact with the world.

This practice is intimately connected to her PhD and broader research, which explores how the environments, objects, and experiences we design are perceived, felt, and interpreted.

This work is shared through publications, international conferences, and memberships in research groups such as the Experimental Pedagogies Research Group at London College of Communication and the Design for Placemaking Working Group at the Cumulus Association.

For Valérie, research and teaching are deeply intertwined and she regularly leads cross-institutional projects, including:

:: A collaboration with Malta’s National Art Museum, where UAL students developed site-specific design interventions in response to climate change.

:: A project in a dementia care setting in Milan, where students at Politecnico di Milano explored empathy-led design through sensory ethnographic interactions with people and place.

:: Sensory mapping and design workshops at the Royal College of Art, Central Saint Martins, Politecnico di Milano, the University of Navarra (Pamplona), and ESDi (Barcelona).

Across all teaching, research, and collaborations, Valérie aims to inspire enthusiasm and curiosity, provoke critical thinking, and foster meaningful, responsible engagement with contemporary challenges.

She is always open to connecting with fellow educators, researchers, and practitioners interested in sensory practices, experiential pedagogy, and design, and also welcomes enquiries for doctoral supervision in areas related to experience design, sensory design, sensory ethnography, space and place, and experiential and embodied pedagogies.