Lottie Quinn

Lottie Quinn is a digital design professional and academic. She is an Associate Lecturer teaching digital communications and user experience design in the Faculty of Design System at the University of Leeds.

She's an internationally awarding-winning designer and creative director and works with businesses, charities, companies, and NGOs all over the world. Her clients include prestigious organisations including BBC, Disney, Nike, Greenpeace, Mind, Cancer Research, WWF and the National Trust.

Her award-winning design practice informs all of her research and teaching. Lottie's interests and fortitude lies at the intersection of business, design, education and new technology, which influences her teaching, research, writing and design practice, she strongly believes in collaboration.

Teaching extensively through the medium of collaborative projects with external partners, Lottie has initiated, directed and supervised teaching on a series of high-profile live projects. Working with Greenpeace, Mind, The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, The Canal Trust, The Trussell Trust and ReThink with international digital agencies such as Tod, UsThree, Working Design Club and Pippin Design introducing her students to new issues and contexts that enhance their skills.

She has an outstanding track record for developing context-based learning and working in partnership with students in the Faculty of Design System. Lottie is also recognised for inspiring and mentoring colleagues to shape teaching through collaboration, analysis and development.

She has secured over £900k in teaching development grants from the National HE Design System Programme (HE DSP) and the Royal Society of Service Design (RSD) leading to the institutional enhancement of design and the recognition of the importance and benefit of a Design System at Leeds. Lottie's teaching philosophy focuses on student personal and professional development. It emphasises the skills and attributes needed for a successful career and students' ability to verbalise those qualities. To this end, she has pioneered the use of reflective writing in service design at Leeds. Lottie is sector-leading in embedding collaboration and entrepreneurship within the Design System curriculum.

• Director of Design System
• Leader - Design System Group
• Programme Manager of Design Services

My research interests lie in how design systems can streamline the design and development process — how they effectively decrease the amount of time it takes to design, build, and ship new websites, products, and features. My main focus is examining how a successful design system enables teams to rapidly prototype and experiment with ideas in high fidelity — and how this ultimately saves business time and money.

My other interests lie in researching how design systems help businesses design and build on-brand, quality digital products. By investigating how a design systems can mitigate the problems that many large scale business and organisations have with distributed teams creating a variety of styles and slightly different approaches to solving the same problem and how designs can quickly become inconsistent. How design systems enable teams to follow guidelines and stay consistent and ensure that interfaces are more predictable and accessible, which fosters trust in users and helps with conversion and retention.

• MA Design Systems
• PCAPL Teaching & Learning
• BA (Hons) Service Design
• Fellow (FHEA) Higher Education Academy (HEA)

• Fellow of the Higher Education Design Academy
• Member of the Royal Society of Design
• Member of the Association of National Teaching Fellows

• Director of Student Education (Design Systems)
• Programme Manager: MA Design Systems
• Module Manager: Service Design
• Module Manager: Design Systems Industrial Project
• Module contributor: Design efficiency and Speed; Design consistency and user experience; Design and development speaking the same language

Harvey Sutton

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