The five-year EPSRC Early Career Fellowship will allow Nathan to create design guidance that will assist in developing products from emerging technologies.

Emerging technologies are science-based innovations with the potential to create, transform or obsolete entire industries. Examples range from 'small-tech' materials constructed at the atomic level through to 'large-tech' infrastructures enabled by the internet and other complex systems. Irrespective of their physical scale, emerging technologies have the potential to drive and support sustained economic growth. However, realising these opportunities critically depends on the capacity to translate scientific advances and technological developments into product ideas that are suitable for manufacture, distribution and use.

The fellowship project involves developing fundamental design knowledge that is relevant to a broad range of different types of system. Multiple system types will be investigated, along with the attributes of those systems and the system behaviours that those attributes promote. A comparative analysis of industrial case studies will be used to develop flexibly applicable design guidance. In doing so, the project will provide scientists, technologists and engineers with the cross-domain knowledge of systems that they require to design for newly emerging technologies and for technologies that have not yet been imagined.

Nathan's research interests are in the areas of design, creativity and communication. He employs an interdisciplinary approach to studying designed products and systems. In particular, he studies how these artefacts are developed, the properties they exhibit and the ways in which users respond to them. Nathan works with the Cambridge Engineering Design Centre, where he leads the Design Practice theme. He is a member of the Design Research Society and serves on the International Editorial Board of Design Studies.