Kelly Harrigan

About

Kelly is a designer, researcher, and maker seeking to inspire curiosity and connectedness to our tangible world.  She takes on systemic challenges through place-based projects where she leads research and ideation, material exploration and prototyping, as well as curriculum development. 

Before moving to London, Kelly spent 12 years as an industrial designer, strategist, and course designer working with large universities and corporations like Neutrogena, Deere, and Hanes.  While this provided a lot of ‘big brand’ experience and over a dozen patents, her recent work at the Royal College Art redefines the designer as a key collaborator in restoring human and environmental wellbeing. 

Her latest project, Swift Village, makes a case for nature-connectedness as a new design field blending ecology, craft, and community.

Swift Village

Nature-based therapies are increasingly prescribed to reduce anxiety and depression, however, many city residents cannot afford homes with private green space.  This disparity is mirrored in the decline in local wildlife –  the UK’s swift population has dropped over 50% in just 20 years, attributed primarily to habitat loss.  

Through community workshops, Swift Village encourages fascination and attachment to the red-listed swift by bringing together locals to build, observe, and care for their nests in public parks.  Makers work with aspiring citizen scientists to transform fallen branches into handcrafted nestboxes inspired by the swift’s ancient habitat: abandoned woodpecker holes in decaying trees. 

A reclaimed telegraph pole serves as a hub to investigate how swifts respond to different materials, layouts, colors, and textures over time.  With a simple QR scan, park visitors can watch individual nestbox cameras to see which features create a better habitat for swifts – and should be reproduced at scale.  Workshop participants record their observations and personal reflections in field notebooks throughout the summer, expanding the body of research supporting nature-connectedness policies.

2049 Oceans Committee of Enfield

For the RCA’s annual Grand Challenge, Kelly led a team of textile, fashion, and graphic designers to create the award-winning co-design project, 2049 Oceans Committee of Enfield.

How do you democratize the design of our cities for stakeholders who can’t speak for themselves?  Set in the near future of 2049, these role-playing workshops give birds and rivers and oceans a voice and an actual seat at the table to debate local policy.  Combining playful costumes, research-based characters, and public discourse, the semi-structured framework can be adapted to the unique stakeholders of cities across the world.