Dr. Britta Kalkreuter is an Associate Professor of Design Studies at the School of Textiles and Design at Heriot-Watt University, where she also currently serves as Director of Research. Her research focuses on heritage and innovation in design, with an emphasis on how exploring heritage may be harnessed as one guiding resource to transform design practices in the face of current challenges. With a particular interest in climate emergency and marginalisation of communities, her work is positioned within the UNSDG framework and explores responsible production and consumption and associated environmental and socio-economic goals. Connecting object and archive-based investigations with ethnographic methods, and by seeking collaborators from fields such as economics, computer sciences and engineering, interdisciplinary aspects of innovation, material practices and knowledge transmission are as central as local and global aspects of production and consumption scenarios, which she explores within several international networks.
