About

Dr. Joanna Boehnert (also known as Jody) is a sustainable design researcher and  educator. She is a Senior Lecturer in Design at Bath Spa University where she is working on two UKRI funded projects in design for sustainability. The first is a three-year Innovation Scholars secondment with Livework Studio called “Transition Templates: Pathways to NetZero”. The second is a called “Enacting Gregory Bateson’s Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture and Design” with PIs Ben Sweeting & Dulmini Perera. 

Joanna is also visiting Research Fellow at CUSPS (Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity). She previously worked as a lecturer in communication design at the Loughborough University (2018-2022) and as a Research Fellow (2015-2017) in Design at CREAM (the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media) at the University of Westminster.

She was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR) in CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences) at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is founder of the amorphous EcoLabs (established 2006) – a studio visualising complex environmental issues and working in design for sustainability. She completed an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded PhD titled: ‘The Visual Communication of Ecological Literacy: Designing, Learning and Emergent Ecological Perception’ at the University of Brighton in 2012. Her research focuses on issues how images work to help audiences understand complex systems.

Her book Design, Ecology, Politics: Toward the Ecocene  was published in 2018. She is Canadian. She is also know as Jody – a nick name. She would like to have more time for forests and mountains. She tweets at @ecocene and @ecolabs.