Cara Wrigley

Cara Wrigley
Born	18 April 1985
Nationality	Australian
Occupation(s)	Industrial Designer, Design Researcher, Author
Known for	Design thinking, design innovation, design education, military design.
Academic background
Thesis	"Visceral Hedonic Rhetoric" (2011)
Academic work
Discipline	Industrial Design
Main interests	Design Innovation, Design Education, Business Model Design, Designing Digital Channels, Emotional Design, Medical Design & Innovation, Military Design Thinking
Notable works	Affected: Emotionally Engaging Customers in The Digital Age, (2018)
Website	https://www.carawrigley.com/

Cara Wrigley (born 18 April 1985) is an Australian industrial designer, design researcher and author. She is the Professor of Design Innovation at The University of Queensland. Her research interests include design thinking, design-led innovation, design education, and emotional design.

Biography

Born in Brisbane, Australia, Wrigley received bachelor’s degrees in design studies from the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University (2006) and Industrial Design at the Queensland University of Technology (2007) and a PhD in emotional design 2011.

In 2012 she started working in the Queensland University of Technology Design School as lecturer of Industrial Design where she taught on topics such as new product development and design innovation. She held a joint appointment with QUT's Information Systems School.

She was promoted to associate professor in 2016 when she joined the University of Sydney. Her time in the Sydney School of Architecture, Design & planning saw her establish a University wide Design Major and a Master of Design Innovation.

In 2019 she was promoted again to full professor where she was the Royal Australian Air Force Jericho Chair of Design where she led defence projects.

Wrigley became the Professor of Design Innovation at the University of Queensland in the Faculty of Engineering, Information Technology and Architecture in 2022.

Work

During her time as the Jericho Chair of Design Innovation at The University of Sydney, Wrigley led an interdisciplinary research group sponsored by the Royal Australian Air Force. This engagement brought together the Australian Defence Force and researchers from around the world to investigate the role that design plays in the creation of disruptive technologies for military capability.

During her time at the University of Sydney, Wrigley established the Defence by Design Group, where she ran applied research projects in the military domain. This collaboration contributed to the theoretical development of ‘military design thinking’ that has been taught and applied widely throughout the Australian Defence Force. In 2018, she established and directed the Design Innovation Research Group, leading a research team that focused on design-led exploratory research, conducting applied and theoretical research into people, emotions, strategy and business.

Also during her time at the University of Sydney, Wrigley launched the Master of Design Innovation and Strategic Design (2019) program. This degree was referenced as a case study in the book ‘Design Thinking Education for Innovation and Impact’ by Routledge published in 2022.

Wrigley is currently Chief Investigator on ARC Discovery and Linkage projects. She is a reviewer for the Australian Research Council (ARC) and provides advice to organisations and their executives from diverse industries. For this work she has received Australian Good Design Awards.

Wrigley has delivered keynotes at global academic conferences in the medical field including the European Mechanical Circulatory Support Summit (EUMS) Conference (2019, Vienna), the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs (ASAIO) 65th Annual Conference (San Francisco (2019) and the Asia-Pacific Extracorporeal Life Support Organisation (APELSO) Conference (2018). Furthermore, she is a regular invited speaker at the Australian Defence College and the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra for her work in Defence.

Books

Wrigley has published extensively on the application and adoption of design disseminated through seven books, including the Research Handbook on Design Thinking (2023), Design Innovation and Integration (2021), Design Innovation for Health and Medicine (2020) and Affected: Emotionally Engaging Customers in the Digital Age (2018).

Books

Title	Author/s	Publisher	Date	ISBN
Research Handbook on Design Thinking	Edited by Karla Straker, Cara Wrigley	Edward Elgar Publishing	2023	978 1 80220 312 7
Design Thinking Pedagogy	Cara Wrigley, Genevieve Mosely	Routledge	August 15, 2022	9781032279831
Design Innovation for Health and Medicine	Cara Wrigley, Erez Nusem, and Karla Straker	Palgrave Macmillan	05 September 2020	978-981-15-4362-3
Affected: Emotionally Engaging Customers in The Digital Age	Cara Wrigley and Karla Straker	Wiley	May 2018	978-0-730-35701-8
Design Innovation and Integration	Karla Straker, Cara Wrigley and Erez Nusem	BIS Publishers	FEB 1, 2021	978 90 6369 603 0
Design. Think. Make. Break. Repeat.	Tomitsch, M., Borthwick, M., Ahmadpour, N., Cooper, C., Frawley, J., Hepburn, L.A., Kocaballi, A.B., Loke, L., Núñez-Pacheco, C., Straker, K., Wrigley, C.	BIS Publishers	18 January 2018	9789063695859

Publications

In addition to the books listed, Wrigley has written or contributed to 170 referred research papers and scholarly articles and has been cited more than 2800 times at the time of writing.

She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Design, Business and Society published bi-annually.

Articles, a selection:

• Wrigley, C., Straker, K. (2017): Design thinking pedagogy: The educational design ladder. In: Innovations in Education and Teaching International, Vol 54, Issue 4, pp. 374-385.
• Straker, K., Wrigley, C., Rosemann, M., (2015): Typologies and touchpoints: designing multi-channel digital strategies. In: Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol 9, Issue 2, pp. 110-128.
• Matthews, j., Wrigley, C., (2017): Design and design thinking in business and management higher education. In: Journal of Learning Design, Vol 10, Issue 4 pp. 41-54.