Skip to content
Rachael Wickenden

Rachael Wickenden

Senior Lecturer

Nottingham School of Art & Design

Staff Group(s)
Fashion, knitwear and textile design

Role

Dr Rachael Wickenden teaches across the BA Textile Design, MA Textile Design Innovation and BSc Product Design courses. She is a specialist in smart and functional textiles, woven textile design, sustainability and textile engineering and has a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration.

Career overview

Rachael has over 10 years' industry experience working in the UK and abroad for multinational textile companies as a designer and engineer developing automotive, transport and contract interior textiles. She has worked with a broad range of materials, textile constructions and surface design techniques, including weaving carbon fibre, warp knitting, embossing, high-frequency welding, laser treatment, embroidery, positioned stitching and thermal bonding. Her M3C funded PhD, awarded in 2021, critically examined the design process for E-textiles and explored novel approaches to designing with emerging textile technologies.

Research areas

  • Smart, electronic and functional textiles
  • Sustainable fashion, textile and product design
  • User centred and participatory textile and fashion design research

External activity

Member of:

  • The Union of Concerned Researchers in Fashion
  • The Design Research Society
  • The Society for Research into Higher Education

Publications

Hardy, D., Wickenden, R. and McLaren, A. (2020) ‘Electronic Textile Reparability’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 276(124328), pp. 1–10. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2020.124328.

Wickenden, R., McLaren, A. and Hardy, D. (2019) ‘Electronic Textiles and Product Lifetimes: Teardowns’, in 3rd PLATE 2019 Conference Berlin, Germany, 18-20 September 2019. Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, pp. 855–862.

Course(s) I teach on

  • Textile design featuring a green butterfly on a cream fabric
    Undergraduate | Full-time / Sandwich

    https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/art-and-design/ug/ba-hons-textile-design

  • Bethany Wignall work BSc Product Design
    Undergraduate | Full-time / Sandwich

    https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/architecture-design-and-the-built-environment/ug/bsc-hons-product-design

  • qMA Textile Design Innovation
    Postgraduate taught | Full-time

    https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/art-and-design/pg/ma-textile-design-innovation

  • MA Fashion and Textile Design
    Postgraduate taught | Part-time (day)

    https://www.ntu.ac.uk/course/art-and-design/pg/ma-fashion-and-textile-design