Designer

Having spent several years studying art and design theory and practice in her teens and early twenties, set-up her first design-led business on graduation from her bachelors degree, and undertaken her first freelance design job while still in school, Melissa has over thirty years experience in the field.

Initially specialising in fashion and textiles design, undertaking several courses and work placements with leading international designers, retailers, and manufacturers, she went on to launch her own label in the mid-90s, while also undertaking freelance jobs ranging from private client work creating bespoke evening wear to designing ready-to-wear collections for commercial clients. Keen to learn more about the commercial side of fashion, and building on her earlier studies on international markets, merchandising, branding, and trends reports, she then went in to buying, including working in womenswear for a major British retailer. During her early years in the fashion industry she showed both her final college collection, and two further collections in London, attended many leading international trade and fashion shows including the VH-1 fashion awards in New York, and gained hands-on experience of working across myriad aspects of the industry - taking concepts from paper to store, and every step in between.

Championing sustainability issues since childhood, Melissa first interrogated the potentialities of biomaterials and the concept that went onto be known as circular design in the early 90s, while still an undergraduate. Anticipating the need to address the issues of waste, pollution, and resource depletion, she created a concept for an apparel collection that would biodegrade at the end of its life - to be safely reabsorbed by the environment - circular fashion. The collection, of which the construct emerged from an earlier project - a trends bible that anticipated the dominant design themes that would emerge in the coming decades, served as the catalyst of further bio-informed, bio-inspired, and bio-material ideas she would go onto develop to the present day.

Her then side hustle digital, Melissa first utilised computer design software for designing textiles and surface patterns in 1992, when creating her final project for an art & design foundation course. Further experimenting with the potential of digital media during her first degree - which the world’s first interdisciplinary degree, integrated collaborative projects across fashion, spatial, and graphic design - she then explored the medium’s potential in areas including publishing and communications. By her late twenties, having concluded the digital sector offered more compelling and interesting opportunities than the fashion industry of the time, she left fashion full-time and switched to working in the digital sector. Initially taking a consultancy role in new media, by thirty, her experience included having led business development for a design agency and been director of two first-to-market digital start-ups.

By her mid-thirties Melissa had founded a sustainability consultancy, collaborative laboratory and think tank, and held several further executive functions working pro bono and in other voluntary roles for creative and charitable causes and campaigns. In this time, among other things, she applied her design skills to designing events, promotions, and art directing photographic shoots and publications. She further worked with many designers and other creatives, both visual and audio, to create hybrid often experimental projects, including fashion shows, album launches, after show parties, and showcases working with leading suppliers from across multiple fields.

Having worked across many traditional, new, and emerging areas of design in her earlier career, upon reaching her mid-thirties Melissa chose to focus her professional activities around the environmental and social problems that concern her most. Recognising that the nature of those problems is systemic, and that her every work of past involved taking an idea, an institution, or an industry back to the drawing board, since then her research and practice has drawn on the wide-ranging expertise, skills, and understanding she has gained throughout her career to develop both her own projects and those of others.

Her research always involving yet to be established fields and concepts, she has independently designed, directed, and funded her every project, and in doing so had greater autonomy and creative freedom that might otherwise have been the case. Outputs have included her PhD, multiple award-winning design systems focused research and publishing projects, and contributions to wide-ranging works by others. Additionally, she has served as a judge to various national and international design awards; a visiting lecturer, professor, fellow, critic, external examiner, and supervisor at several leading international design and architecture schools; and mentored and advised many students and practitioners of design from undergraduate to executive level.

In addition to her wider activities in design, in summer 2022, Melissa launched Biotique® - collections of British-made luxury soft furnishings, dining ware, stationary, and men’s and women’s accessories featuring her surface pattern designs [see preview below]. Made-on-demand using processes that reduce material and ink wastage to an absolute minimum, her new collections feature designs she has created using a technique she’s been developing since her first exploration into surface pattern and textile design in the early 90s. Integrating some of the several hundred microscopic and other images that she’s created in the course of both her scientific and design research and practice, the collections draw on the natural world for inspiration and are the product of multiple visual experiments and processes. In addition to the three inaugural collections - ‘Gothica’, Gothica' Noir’, and ‘Natura' - she will be introducing further collections over time, including both seasonal and limited editions.

Design is a way of approaching a problem. Though Melissa has had many job titles across many industries, she is and always will be, first and foremost, a designer, be that of systems, of services, of things, or more. Her folio is as large as it is diverse, but its themes are constant - aligning human material, information, and production systems with those of the natural world, and in a way that places humans not at the apex of those systems, but us, and the things we create, as an integral part of them. Read Melissa’s biography here and her CV here.

Expertise

Primary fields of expertise are planetary and biofutures inc. biodesign, bioscience, bioengineering, biotechnology, and biourbansim; emerging material, information, and production systems and their applications in science, commerce, industry, and wider society; ecological design and urban and peri-urban resilience to hazards inc. wildfires, floods, storm systems and other natural, human, and hybrid events; transdisciplinary, complexity and systems theory and practice; sustainable innovation and enterprise in fields including design, technology, manufacturing, utilities, and the built environment; and corporate social responsibility, environmental social governance, and business ethics.

Skills

Speculative design and design fiction; design trends forecasting, reporting, and commentary; design concept creation, research, and development; directing and mentoring design projects, campaigns, awards, and publications; reviewing and critiquing design ideas.

Folio

Find select items from Melissa’s design folio, including original concepts, sketches, illustrations, montages, photography, and other visualisation works below. Her design interrogations and wider practice spanning over three decades and several design genres, including fashion, textiles, surface pattern, spatial, architecture, graphics, installation, and web, the selection below conveys some of the constant themes her work explores, including circularity in materiality and production, design informed and enabled by the processes of the natural world, novel patterns and forms, and experimental and hybrid design and other creative processes, both traditional and emerging.