Meet the people who make up STEM Faculty.
Professional experience
Maja is a Visiting Fellow with the Design Group at The Open University as part of her Innovation Scholar in Design secondment to the OU, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI).
Maja has over 20 years' experience as a transdisciplinary practitioner in the field of societal change through approaches such as community capacity building, placemaking, health innovation, and social and community-led housing. She has worked for organisations such as Greater London Authority, Plymouth Community Homes, Health Innovation South West, and The Glass-House Community-Led Design.
Research interests
As a transdisciplinary researcher and practitioner, Maja has a broad field of interests and expertise:
Current projects
Radical Roots, a collaborative research project addressing inequalities of opportunity through place-based co-design approaches. I'm leading this partnership project with Zebra Collective, based at Mount Wise Neighbourhood Centre in Devonport, Plymouth.
Find Your Village, a flexible, co-produced approach to enabling peer support in pregnancy and the early years (the ‘first 1001 days’) for communities and neighbourhoods developed by Tom Allport of University of Bristol/Sirona Care and Health in partnership with Barton Hill Activity Club. Providing strategic design consultancy towards a transferable resource for the approach, in partnership with independent researcher Hannah Arnett of Studio Altaa.
Council of Archaeological Beings: a more-than-human archaeology; a project led by Alice Clough and Sadie Watson of Museum of London Archaeology. Co-design and strategic consultant to an exploratory project working towards designing a new tool to support the interpretative practices of archaeologists in the developer-funded sector.
Muddy Waters: A collaborative and reflexive piece exploring everyday ethics in participatory research through practitioner views. A conversation piece on the 'muddy waters' of working in an embedded and relational way in communities. In partnership with Roisin Bartlam, University of Plymouth.
Previous projects
As a practitioner, I have led and contributed to a range of cross-sector and interdisciplinary projects exploring design, innovation and systems change.
With The Glass-House Community Led Design
Contributed to research examining how capability approaches can strengthen sustainable and resilient co-design practices within communities. Selected projects:
Empowering Design Practices - exploring how community-led design supports communities to shape historic places of worship into more vibrant, sustainable places that enhance their heritage.
Cross-pollination - exploring how to grow cross-sector design collaboration in placemaking
Starting from values: Evaluating intangible legacies.
Within local government and health innovation
Led interdisciplinary projects developing new models of collaboration and service design. Selected projects:
Publications
