Andrea is a post-doctoral researcher within the Inter-Actions Research Grouip and lecturer in the Masters of Design and Art Education programme. A designer, researcher and lecturer in design, her expertise domains are design education, interaction design, visual language communication and service design. In her research, she mainly focuses on the experience of the designer and how empathy emerges from interaction and participation with design-poor individuals (people with dementia, young people with autism, people with a disability, people on the fringes of society, etc). This relation-based design participation between designer and participant and necessary proxy participants informs design decisions (products, services, functionality) as well as the designer’s future creative practice.

Most recently she has been looking at reflection within the design process and how this is related to knowledge generation looking to identify best practices for integrating reflection into education and how to translate experience into sharable knowledge. Next to this, she has been interviewing experts in the creative cultural sector within the topic of diviversity and learning pathways.

In 2016, she co-founded the international dementia and design conference, the Dementia Lab Conference. A native of the US, but based in Belgium since 2010, Andrea is active mainly in Belgium, but has also worked in New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and Portugal in workshops and educational exchanges.