Dr Matthew Harkness

Matthew is an early-career designer, researcher, and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of New South Wales and focuses on non-traditional research outcomes and specialises in object design from a Circular Economy, critical making, speculative, co-design, and more-than-human perspective. Matthew’s research draws on these to interrogate the ethics of making, specifically, wasteful, exclusive, and exploitative DIY and maker practices. Through material experiments, his practice-based research includes waste plastic and bioplastic materials, ceramics, electronics, and repurposed objects.