Dr Joanna Boehnert

Personal statement 

Dr Joanna Boehnert is an AHRC Innovation Scholar and Reader in Design for Sustainable Transitions at Bath School of Design. Over the past twenty years she has developed the theory and practice of ecological literacy in design supporting robust forms of design for sustainability, and design education for sustainability. Her work at the intersection of design, ecology, and politics has been used in a wide range of contexts to understand and respond to complex socio-ecological problems. 

Many people have accessed Joanna's work for the first time with her monograph Design/ Ecology/Politics: Towards the Ecocene (Bloomsbury, 2018). It has been favourably reviewed in journals three times: The Design Journal, Communication Design Quarterly, and Eye Magazine.

More recently, Joanna is an editor of the upcoming Routledge Handbook of Design for Sustainability Transitions (2027) with Idil Gaziulusoy, Fabrizio Ceschin, Silvana Juri, and Andrés Felipe Valderrama Pineda. Other important publications include: Design Knowledge in the Anthropocene/Ecocene (2026); Ecological Theory in Design: Participant Designers in an Age of Entanglement (2023); and Design Politics in the Anthropocene (2023).

Joanna's design research puts new ideas into practice in diverse contexts. For example, Joanna's AHRC funded research project Transition Templates: Pathways to Net Zero+ is a three-year research project developing participatory mapping of energy transitions in five sectors of the UK economy. This 2023–2026 research project is a secondment with Livework, a service design consultancy in London. The research led to a second project prototyping the Transition Templates method in the AI and digital sector for the Design Observatory. These research projects use  service, systemic, and transition design approaches to map and enact decarbonisation agendas.

Joanna was a co-investigator on Enacting Gregory Bateson's Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design on an AHRC-DRF funded research project led by the University of Brighton and Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. In this research project, Joanna worked with colleagues in the UK and Germany on a multiple creative outputs inlcuding an ARC-GIS StoryMap, titled "No.1 Epistemological Error: Mapping Ecologies of Mind and Nature" telling a story about growing up on the Lake Erie watershed. The research group's book, titled Gregory Bateson, Design, Ecology, edited by Ben Sweeting and Dulmini Perara, will be published in 2027.

Joanna serves as co-convenor of the Designing for Sustainability and Transitions Special Interest Group in the Design Research Society. She has worked to advance Transition Design as a new field of practice (as a chair of sustainable transitions tracks at DRS2026, DRS2024, DRS2020, and ADIM2018) and in key publications. Joanna is an Associate at the Transition Design Institute, based at Carnegie Mellon University.

Meanwhile, she is also a founding member of the Systemic Design Association. She has attended the annual Relating Systems Thinking and Design conferences since RSD1, held during her PhD. She now serves  on the editorial board of Context – the Systemic Design Journal.

Joanna is an official Design Council Design for Planet expert. When not busy creating methods to help groups map decarbonisation pathways in five sectors of the UK economy, Joanna teaches on the undergraduate Critical Design Thinking courses. Bath School of Design has become the first to implement the Design Council's Skills for Planet Framework in their undergraduate courses. Joanna published a conference paper titled "UG Design Education forSustainability: Designing for Planet & for Life" at the Design Research Society's LearnX2025 conference. 

Joanna serves as reviewer for the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Formas (theSwedish Research Council for Sustainable Development). She has examined PhDs in the USA, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, and the UK. 

Academic qualifications

• HEA Fellowship, Loughborough University
• HEA Associate Fellowship, University of Westminster
• PhD in Design, University of Brighton
• MA Graphic Design, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London
• BA Specialised Honours Fine Arts, University of Guelph

Professional memberships

• Design Research Society (DRS) member
• DRS Sustainability Special Interest Group
• Systemic Design Association (founding member)

Areas of expertise

• Design for sustainability
• Feminist design ecologies
• Design studies and design contexts
• Responsible design education
• Design theory and design thinking
• Systemic design (theory and practice)
• Communication design 
• Collaborative design 
• Transdisciplinary design 
• Design transitions
• Design futuring

Research supervision

I am actively seeking PhD students working in design for sustainability and other topics.