Dr Rebecca Anne Price

Dr Rebecca Price is an Australian design researcher, educator, and academic leader committed to preparing designers for long, healthy, and impactful careers. Her work explores how design education can evolve to equip graduates with the resilience, creativity, and professional capabilities needed to address increasingly complex social, environmental, and technological challenges. At the heart of her research is a simple proposition: if design seeks to create meaningful systemic change, then we must also prepare the people who will lead it. This commitment underpins The Resilient Designer's Handbook, multiple teaching awards, and her leadership of nationally and internationally funded educational initiatives.

Rebecca holds a PhD in Design from Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane, Australia), where her research examined the implementation of design-led innovation within an Australian airport corporation. She subsequently spent almost a decade at Delft University of Technology in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering (Netherlands), progressing from Postdoctoral Research Fellow to Assistant Professor and Master's Programme Director of Strategic Product Design. Alongside teaching and research, she led curriculum innovation, supervised three Doctoral candidates and 40 Master of Science thesis students, and contributed to faculty leadership and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Dr Price's research spans industrial design, design innovation, human-centred and systemic design, design education, and the emerging field of designer resilience. She has published in leading journals including Designing, Design Issues, She Ji:The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, Studies in Higher Education, The Design Journal, and Action Research. Her work has contributed to international conversations about resilience, wellbeing, and the future of design education, while The Resilient Designer's Handbook has been adopted by students, educators, and practitioners across multiple countries.

Alongside her work on designer resilience, Rebecca has led and contributed to research exploring how design can strengthen the resilience of organisations, cities, and communities. As lead investigator, she has secured more than AUD $2 million in competitive funding from government, industry, and higher education agencies. Major awards include the CLICKNL project i-Tree 2.0: Next-Generation Metrics and Methodologies for Urban Forestry and Climate Resilience in Dutch Cities (€800,000), which developed new approaches to designing climate-resilient urban environments; the Roffa Lab project Climate Resilience by Design (€200,000), advancing transdisciplinary approaches to urban resilience; and a Dutch National Comenius Senior Fellowship (€100,000) for Forging Designer Resilience, which translated this systems perspective into educational practice by embedding resilience and wellbeing within design curricula. Together, these projects reflect a sustained research agenda that examines resilience from two complementary perspectives: designing more resilient systems and developing more resilient designers.

An award-winning educator, Rebecca received Delft University of Technology's Most Inspiring Teacher Award on multiple occasions, an annual award voted for by graduating Master's students in recognition of educators who had the greatest influence on their learning and professional development. She has also received faculty recognition for educational innovation and leadership, securing €70,000 of internal competitive funding to advance education at TU Delft. Dr Price continues to contribute to the international academic community through doctoral and journal reviewing, conference leadership, and invited keynote presentations.