Cara Wrigley

Cara Wrigley (born 18 April 1985) is an Australian industrial designer, design researcher and author. She is 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 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 appointed as the Royal Australian Air Force Jericho Chair of Design Innovation 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
In 2018, the Design Innovation Research Group was established by Wrigley where she led a team of researchers whose purpose was to conduct 'exploratory research' into how design can affect 'people, emotions, strategy and business'.

In 2019 Wrigley was appointed to the position of Jericho Chair of Design Innovation at The University of Sydney. Under her direction, and with sponsorship for the Royal Australian Air force, a multi-disciplinary team conducted research projects which sought to understand how different design processes could accelerate the development of innovative military technology.

This coincided with Wrigley establishing the Defence by Design Group, whose purpose was to apply the research in practical military scenarios. The outcome of this research was the foundation of 'military design thinking ' —a theoretical framework which has since been adopted by the Australian Defence Force.

Due to her insight into design for the military, she is a regular guest speaker at the Australian Defence College and the Australian Defence Force Academy.

Wrigley launched the Master of Design Innovation and Strategic Design (2019) curriculum at the University of Sydney. This course was referenced as a case study in the book, ‘Design Thinking Education for Innovation and Impact’ (2022).

Wrigley has received Australian Good Design Awards for her work advising organisations in her role as Chief Investigator on Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery and Linkage projects.

In addition to her work researching design innovation applications for the military, medical design innovation has been another area of focus of her work. As a result, she has been invited to speak at medical academic conferences around the world, including:


 * European Mechanical Circulatory Support Summit (EUMS) Conference (2019, Vienna)
 * the American Society of Artificial Internal Organs (ASAIO) 65th Annual Conference (San Francisco (2019)
 * the Asia-Pacific Extracorporeal Life Support Organisation (APELSO) Conference (2018).

Books
Wrigley has written or co-authored a total of seven books including Design Innovation for Health and Medicine (2020), Design Innovation and Integration (2021), Affected: Emotionally Engaging Customers in the Digital Age (2018) and the Research Handbook on Design Thinking (2023).

Publications
In addition to the books listed, Wrigley has written or contributed to more than 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.