Professor Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen

About me:

Prof Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen joined the INDEX Initiative for the Digital Economy, based in London’s South Bank, from the Royal College of Art, where she was the Head of Design Products and a Chair of Engineering Design. Prior to this she was Deputy Head and Prof of Design Engineering at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. Her role at Imperial included the Head of Global Innovation Design (MA/MSc) programme, which was delivered jointly with Royal College of Art. She spent thirteen years with the Technical University of Denmark and led the Design Engineering and Innovation section. She completed her PhD in the Engineering Design Centre, University of Cambridge and then held a fellowship with Murray Edwards College.

She has a funding portfolio of approx £24 million, and is currently PI and Director for the £12.6M UKRI EPSRC Digital Economy Centre DIGITlab and on SPHERE funded by EPSRC/NIHR to develop a full hub -bid on Systems Engineering approach to patient-centric services, she is co-I on DTNet, a Digital Twin Network plus funding by UKRI and led by the Turing Institute. She is also so PI on a partnership with AMRC, High Value Catapult enabling research on AI and Design to be focused and developed for the manufacturing sector.

She has held invited keynotes for leading Engineering Design conferences (CIRP, NordDesign, DESIGN), 100 full peer reviewed publications. She has graduated 14 PhDs.

Saeema’s research focuses on design engineering including the impact and integration of digital technologies on: creativity and cognition, data and knowledge structuring, data-driven design process to customise products and quantifying and predicting user experiences. She works closely with a range of industries; complex product, aerospace (Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems); oil (AK MH); consumer (GN Netcom); medical (Novo Nordisk), and across disciplines of psychology, computing and design, for example leading to approaches to auto-index aerospace reports, through an ontology based on design cognition and Natural Language Processing. Her research was one of the first to use a human centred approach to structuring and automating indexing of knowledge, and; to develop approaches to quantify user experiences, leading to a data driven-approach to assess comfort in headsets (now embedded within GN Netcom Product development processes and leading to awards for comfort).

Part of Initiative in the Digital Economy at Exeter (INDEX)

• Experiences: Quantifying intangible aspects of design, for example user experiences, through using data and AI, to predicting or assess experiences such as comfort, emotional responses to a product.
• Knowledge and Data to value: developing knowledge structures for complex products and systems, for example to reduce complexity, increase patient safety or increase innovativeness. Developing data-driven approaches to customise products.
• Product Development processes: developing hybrid agile and planned approaches for manufacturing.
• Creativity and Cognition: Understanding creativity in design to develop new theories and the foundation of design tools

Saeema's research addresses long-term intellectual problems supporting the design and manufacture of complex products (including product service systems) and their enabling processes (creative, product development and innovation) through developing a scientific understanding. Research is often in close collaboration with the industrial or public sector., output includes advancing and developing research theories and impacting practice underpinning new design methods, tool, products and systems, experiences and products.

PhD Applications are welcome in any of these areas.

• Ph.D. Engineering Design (Cambridge)
• BSc (hons) Product Design (Brunel)