Research Biography
Rebecca Cain is Assistant Professor of Experiential Engineering, based within the Digital Lab. With a design background and training in industrial design, she has gone on to specialise in user-centred design, in particular participatory design methods. Dr Cain has always worked in multi-disciplinary research environments, and uses her design thinking to approach engineering-based problems in creative ways. Dr Cain holds the position of Honorary Secretary on the council for the Design Research Society (the international learned society for the design community worldwide).
Dr Cain began her appointment as Assistant Professor in January 2010, and heads up the new research programme Participation in healthcare environment engineering with the support of a prestigious £1.3 m EPSRC Challenging Engineering 
award, which she was awarded in 2009. In this innovative new research programme, she is building a new research group to tackle the problems of poor healthcare environment design, and through the support of industrial partners, she is weaving together the disciplines of design and engineering, with architecture, psychology, healthcare and ICT. Fundamental to Dr Cain’s research, is the involvement of end users in design, so the new research group will develop new methods for engaging with and involving patients, clinicians and other stakeholders in the design process of new healthcare environments.
Continuing with her interest in participatory design and the built environment, Dr Cain is also a Principal Investigator on the TSB/EPSRC funded project EMPOWER (Empowering empathic energy efficiency design) in collaboration with More Associates and Brunel University. EMPOWER uses participatory design to drive a behaviour change process within workplaces, with the outcome being the development of a new product/service which enhances users' interactions with energy use.
Dr Cain also has a strong interest in the role that sound can play in our perception of an environment, and prior to this, Dr Cain was a Senior Research Fellow on the 3 year EPSRC Positive Soundscapes Project. Working as part of a multi-disciplinary team in collaboration with acousticians, social scientists and sonic artists, psychologists and human physiologists at other academic institutions, she explored how decision makers (including planners, engineers and architects) could seek to “design in” positive sound into environment design, through understanding more about people’s experiences of urban spaces, specifically through their perception of the auditory soundscape. Using WMG’s sound laboratories, and adapting methodologies traditionally used within automotive sound quality, she identified the principal emotional dimensions on which people evaluate their experiences of an urban space through its sound, and is continuing to develop her findings of the research into a tool to support urban design. Following on from her research into the sound in urban spaces and linking into healthcare, Dr Cain also supervises a PhD project looking at the role of sound within hospitals, with a view to answering the question; what is a positive healthcare soundscape?
In addition to her work on the built environment, Dr Cain also applies her design thinking and user-centred design methodologies to the automotive sector and has worked closely with engineers at Jaguar and LandRover, since her first post at WMG in January 2005, where she was a project Engineer on the Premium Automotive R&D Project (PARD). Dr Cain worked on the Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) project where she conducted research into customer perceptions of HMI technologies such as switches and touchscreen designs. Dr Cain is currently a Co-Investigator on the WIMRC Project APPRAISE (Appropriate Product Representations for Assessment in Structured Evaluations) which explores how to capture “perception forming processes” from customers evaluating aspects of a car design such as its sound. The project explores how the different levels of reality used in a customer assessment of a new vehicle (e.g. a driving simulator versus a real on-road test drive), can elicit different perceptions of particular vehicle attributes (such as sound), and is uncovering how people make decisions in structured evaluations. Dr Cain is also module leader for Design for Safety and Comfort 2 on the MEng Automotive Engineering degree.
Qualifications
- PhD from Loughborough University (2005) in participatory design: Involving users in the design process: the role of product representations in co-designing.
- BA (Hons) Industrial Design & Technology from Loughborough University (Class 1)
Appointments
- Jan 2010 - Present - Assistant Professor in Experiential Engineering, in WMG, The University of Warwick
- Oct 2006 - Dec 2009 - Senior Research Fellow on the EPSRC Positive Soundscapes Project, in WMG, The University of Warwick
- May 2006 - Oct 2006 - Lead on the WIMRC Scoping Project PROPER (Product Perception research Roadmap), in WMG, The University of Warwick
- Jan 2005 - Oct 2006 - Project Engineer on the Premium Automotive R&D Programme HMI Project, in WMG, The University of Warwick
Publications
Research Funding
Prizes and Awards
- September 2009 - EPSRC Challenging Engineering award (£1.3m to start a new research group)
- March 2009 - SET for Britain competition (prize for poster presentation)
Committees
- Hon Secretary on the council for the Design Research Society (the interdisciplinary learned society for the design community worldwide)
- Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College (April 2010 - )
- Member of the WMG Research Degrees Executive - the committe which looks after all WMG research students on the PhD, EngD and MSc by Research programmes
- Member of WMG's Radical Innovative Working Group
Research students
- Mujthaba Ahtamad
- Jamie Mackrill
- Rachel Potter
- Kieu Anh Vuong
- Salma Patel
- Mahdad Sadeghi
Teaching
- Module leader for Design for Safety and Comfort 2 - a 4th year module on the MEng Automotive Engineering degree.
- Undergraduate 3rd year project supervision on the MEng and BEng degrees within the School of Engineering
- Project supervsion on WMG's full-time MSc programmes
- Research Methods (REME) for postrgraduates, including WMG's full time and professional MSc programmes and WMGs doctoral researchers
- Contributor to workshops on Warwick Medical School's Clinical Systems Improvement courses.
Other activities
Invited talks
- "Putting the gggrrrr into car sound design". Invited talk to Design & Technology students at Cokethorpe School, Oxfordshire (May 2010)
- "Improving the Urban Soundscape". Invited speaker at the Engineering Integrity Society (EIS) seminar and exhibition Right Sound your Product (Decmber 2009)
- "The emotional dimensions of a soundscape". Invited speaker at the Greater London Authority conference Tranquil Spaces to an audience of 170 policy makers, planners, government departments and academics (October 2009)
