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Hi there! I’m Judit – design strategist and researcher, interested in the intersection of the designed and the natural world. My work focuses on how design can contribute to sustaining & enhancing urban ecosystems.
Judit Boros

designer, researcher

Judit Boros

Teaching experiences, from facilitation of workshops, design sprints to designing and managing lectures and short courses

An introduction to my doctoral research: a comparative analysis on how design frameworks contribute to unfolding the regenerative potential of urban nature-based solutions

I have been builing a Tumblr page since 2013 to collect food for thought on topics such as #design #climate change #biodesign #sustainability #service design #interaction design #nature #bioart #bioprinting #art #science

Examples form my service design & strategic design experience gained while working for large-scale service providers and NGOs or small companies alike

Examples from my product design and experimental design activity in the intersection of art, technology and design with natural elements. (Also my favorite works).

Hi there! Get in touch:

email ~ boros_judit@phd.ceu.edu

twitter ~ b_j_z

LinkedIn

Currently in Budapest, Hungary

With a background in product design engineering and service design, she has a systems-based approach to design that she applies to work on cross-disciplinary projects and educational activities for knowledge sharing. Before engaging in scientific research, she worked as a design consultant in various domains stretching from experimental designs for biotech projects to product/service/business development for large service providers (telecommunications and financial sector). Now she is keen to utilize her practice and experiences in working for a turn in design practices to place ecology and the non-human at the forefront of urban design and placemaking activities and ultimately infuse ‘human-centeredness’ with ‘nature-basedness.’

She has been involved in diverse educational programs. She has worked as a mentor for groups of young people to bring their ideas to life at Kitchen Budapest’s Talent program, at Climate KIC’s Accelerator program, and at Milestone Institute. She ran the Service Design Expert course at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) and the Advanced Design for Sustainability course at the Institute of Advanced Design Studies (ADES). She has held presentations at several academic institutions and participated in numerous talks, workshops, and industry events.

Most interested in

Lectures & Workshops

Lectures and courses

2020 – Guest lecture (online) at the Urban and Environmental Design Studio Master course at Politecnico di Milano (class size: 55). My lecture: ‘Strategic integration of nature-based solutions’

2019 – Service Design Expert course (SxD) for MOME OPEN: “Telemedicine Healthcare services” (5 weeks, class size: 15)

2018 – Teaching assistantship for Prof. László Pintér’s Masters class; Sustainable Development and Global transitions at the Environmental Sciences and Policy Department of CEU (class size: 34)

2018 – Module teaching: Art portfolio development for Milestone Institute Budapest (8 weeks, class size: 11)

2018 – SxD “Designing for multimodal connectivity – the Budapest Airport” (5 weeks, class size: 18)

2017 – Guest lecture for Dr. Zoltán Buzády’s Design Thinking course, joint course between CEU and MOME (class size: 20). My lecture: ‘Design Thinking in Service Design’

2017 – SxD “Service design for e-mobility” (5 weeks, class size: 22)

Selected workshops

2020 – Urban design thinking: online workshop for CEU Community Engagement Office

2019 – Re-design the City workshop for CEU Community Engagement week

2019 – Design Thinking workshop for Kreatív Kolozsvár

2019 – Design Thinking workshop for Climate KIC Greenhouse program

2017 – LogMeIn Innovation workshop series

2017 – Hospitality Driven Design workshop for Isobar Budapest

2016 – Living Cities: The Next Urban Revolution designlab at BrainBar Budapest with BIOPOLUS and Kitchen Budapest

2015 – Format Project Workshop: Social Design Cookbook at the Digital Bauhaus Summit, Weimar

2014 – Service Design Jam Budapest

Teaching experience

Teaching, facilitating learning, and mentoring others along the way have been entangled with my professional work, mostly in the form of running workshops, design sprints, or managing short courses. I am a product design engineer by trade, and the learning methods of my early training years have left a mark on my thinking and working approaches. Project-based studio-style lessons, holistic inquiries, and the joy and perks of group work grounded my experiences about how to get things done. I have run Hungary’s first service design course, called ‘SxD’ at MOME (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design), and I have mentored Milestone students interested in Arts and Design to develop a portfolio of work that best represents their creativity and skills. I have also run various design thinking workshops and sprints for small and large organizations who wanted to refresh their teams’ working methods through a creative problem-solving process.

Educational activities

For more insights please see my portfolio of previous workshops and other educative activities.

Lectures and courses

2022 – Co-moderating the ‘Design Fiction’ R&D course at MOME (4 months, class size: 12)

2020 – Moderating and developing the ‘Thinking Design’ module of the advanced studies for sustainability course (ades4s) at the Institute of Advanced Design Studies (ADES) (1 month, class size: 9)

2020 – Moderating and developing the ‘Sustainability, Ecology, Resilience’ module of the ades4s course at ADES (1 month, class size: 9)

2020 – Guest lecture (online) at the Urban and Environmental Design Studio Master course at Politecnico di Milano (class size: 55). My lecture: ‘Strategic integration of nature-based solutions’

2019 – Service Design Expert course (SxD) for MOME OPEN: “Telemedicine Healthcare services” (5 weeks, class size: 15)

2019 – Guest lecture at MOME Graphic Design BA course: “Service design basics” (class size: 20)

2018 – Teaching assistantship for Prof. László Pintér’s Masters class; Sustainable Development and Global transitions at the Environmental Sciences and Policy Department of CEU (class size: 34)

2018 – Module teaching: Art portfolio development for Milestone Institute Budapest (8 weeks, class size: 11)

2018 – SxD “Designing for multimodal connectivity – the Budapest Airport” (5 weeks, class size: 18)

2018 – Service design booster for Design Terminal’s mentor program

2017 – Guest lecture for Dr. Zoltán Buzády’s Design Thinking course, joint course between CEU and MOME (class size: 20). My lecture: ‘Design Thinking in Service Design’

2017 – SxD “Service design for e-mobility” (5 weeks, class size: 22)

2017 – “On socially responsible design”: talk at Impact Hub Budapest’s Design espresso

Selected workshops

2020 – Urban design thinking: online workshop for CEU Community Engagement Office

2019 – Re-design the City workshop for CEU Community Engagement week

2019 – Design Thinking workshop for Kreatív Kolozsvár

2019 – Design Thinking workshop for Climate KIC Greenhouse program

2017 – LogMeIn Innovation workshop series

2017 – Hospitality Driven Design workshop for Isobar Budapest

2016 – Living Cities: The Next Urban Revolution designlab at BrainBar Budapest with BIOPOLUS and Kitchen Budapest

2015 – Format Project Workshop: Social Design Cookbook at the Digital Bauhaus Summit, Weimar

2014 – Service Design Jam Budapest

Teaching experience

Teaching, facilitating learning, and mentoring others along the way have been entangled with my professional work, mostly in the form of running workshops, design sprints, or managing short courses. I am a product design engineer by trade, and the learning methods of my early training years have left a mark on my thinking and working approaches. Project-based studio-style lessons, holistic inquiries, and the joy and perks of group work grounded my experiences about how to get things done. I have run Hungary’s first service design course, called ‘SxD’ at MOME (Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design), and I have mentored Milestone students interested in Arts and Design to develop a portfolio of work that best represents their creativity and skills. I have also run various design thinking workshops and sprints for small and large organizations who wanted to refresh their teams’ working methods through a creative problem-solving process.

Educational activities

For more insights please see my portfolio of previous workshops and other educative activities.

The Design of nature-based solutions

Abstract

Nature-based solutions (NBS) have gained popularity within mainstream sustainability research agendas due to efforts to coordinate global responses to urban sustainability challenges. Their potential is promising: by applying an ecosystem services approach inherent in NBS to urban development, they simultaneously provide social, economic, and environmental benefits, and they help operationalize regenerative urban development. Urban NBS are diverse in scales and forms (from green belts to urban parks at the macro scale or rain gardens at the micro scale). As NBS, these green solutions are portrayed as means to the use of the urban environments’ capacity to deliver ecologically sound and socially desirable outcomes not only with but for nature. Still, at present, urban NBS are often temporary, fragmented, and used in an ad-hoc way. One of their major criticisms is that realizing NBS in practice can be detached from their theoretical promise. As a result, NBS can deliver below their actual potential, limiting their contribution to the challenge of urban transformation. Delivering below potential is intricately connected with the way urban spaces are designated and designed, reflecting user practices, culture, and lifestyle, and the understanding that NBS must serve humans and the natural environment alike. This dissertation explores the mutual interplay between NBS and the ‘designed’ features of the urban environment: how NBS can be amplified through strategic design considerations and enhance the ‘urban’ with human well-being as its integral part. I examine the design of NBS to understand the consequences of applying specific design frameworks and argue that a broad range of design factors affect their application and potential impact on regenerative urban transformation beyond sustainability. I apply Mang and Haggard’s (2016) ‘three lines of work’ tool to construct a holistic design framework that represents critical dimensions that influence the creation and implementation of NBS for urban transformations. It was intended to guide design projects to develop regenerative synergies within their immediate and larger context. The ‘three lines of work’ comprise the ‘spheres of influence’ of a design project exerted across three dimensions: 1) the motivations behind the actions (design approaches), 2) the capacity and capability of the community to deploy the project (design processes), and the contribution to the regenerative capacity of living systems (design outcomes). Through a multidisciplinary case study analysis, the research highlights the role of design in conceptualizing, adopting, and implementing urban NBS and how the critical design dimensions influence these efforts in making their regenerative potentials happen. Qualitative, empirical evidence is gained from nine case studies in three cities (Győr, Hungary; Milan, Italy; and Melbourne, Australia). Through this assessment, I demonstrate the relevance of the interconnected design dimensions for embedding NBS into urban environments, thus, affording a transformed urbanity with different experiences, usages, and actions. Furthermore, by exploring the design framework of NBS, I provide a systematic and critical reflection on current urban design-based placemaking practices. I argue that a radical repurposing of the urban space is necessary where streets, buildings, homes, and open spaces can be redesigned into regenerative, living ecosystems.

Doctoral thesis

The Design of Nature-Based Solutions: Learning from Practices of Regenerative Transformation

Academic profile

Research publication

Open access publication: Boros, Judit, and Israa Mahmoud. “Urban design and the role of placemaking in mainstreaming nature-based solutions. Learning from the Biblioteca degli Alberi case study in Milan.” Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 3 (2021): 635610.

Link to publication

Public lectures and presentations about the research

10.2022 – ‘Biophilia & Regenerative Design’ guest lecture at the Urban Design for Health and Wellbeing course at Heriot Watt University

07. 2022 – poster presentation of the thesis at NBSI Nature-Based Solutions Conference, University of Oxford

10. 2021 – ‘Nature-based solutions for resilient cities’, online presentation at MARUF 21 (Marmara Urban Forum)

07.2020 – ‘More-than-human-centered-design’ online talk at UX Budapest Meetup

04.2020 – ‘Urban design thinking’ online workshop for CEU Community Engagement Office

04.2020 – ‘Strategic integration of nature-based solutions’ guest lecture at the Urban and Environmental Design Studio Master course at Politecnico di Milano

11.2019 – ‘The Design of Nature-based Solutions’ @ Centre for Urban Research, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia

06.2019 – ‘Re-design the City’ workshop for CEU Community Engagement week @ Budapest, Hungary

05.2019 – ‘The Design of Nature-based Solutions: Milan cases’ @ Budapest, Hungary

The Design of Nature- Based Solutions: Learning from Practices of Regenerative Transformation

I presented this poster virtually at the 2022 NBSI Nature-Based Solutions Conference organized at the University of Oxford. It summarizes the aim, methods, conceptual framework, results and main contribution of my doctoral research.

Skills & Experience

Specialized in designing participative service design projects.

Managed and lead teams for creative project development.

Experienced designer and facilitator of co-creation workshops.

Loves to work in the intersection of art, design, and technology.

Keen on connecting creativity with entrepreneurship.

Know-how

Service design tools and methodology.

Collaborative idea generation, workshop design, and facilitation.

Concept development for products and services, visual identity & branding.

Presentation design and visualizations.

References

09. 2022 – ongoing – Co-founder of Physi Solutions

09. 2019 – ongoing – Course lead @ Institute of Advanced Design Studies (ADES)

10. 2016 – 12. 2019 – Independent Service Design consultant

03. 2015 – 10. 2016 – Service Design consultant @ Isobar Budapest

06. 2014 – 04. 2015 – Design & communication consultant @ SZTE ÁOK (University of Szeged, Faculty of Medicine)

01. 2014 – 03. 2015 – Design coordinator @ Kitchen Budapest

01 – 12. 2013 – Product-system designer @ BIOPOLUS Institute

Exhibitions

04. 2015 – Plantus project – OTTHON Design @ Budapest

02. 2015 – Plantus project – FISE Fresh @ Budapest

10-12. 2014 – assistant curator @ IMAGINING VISION program and exhibition – by Kitchen Budapest and Capa Center

10. 2014 – Selected projects (Plantus’09, Gourmet Gardens, Plantus’14) – Figurative Senses / Budapest Design Week @ Budapest

09. 2014 – Plantus project – Designjunction / London Design Week @ London

05. 2012 – Cultivator project – Parsons MFA Design and Technology Thesis exhibition @ New York

12. 2011 – CuciMi project – GdoWeek Young Idea for Retail Award @ Milan

04. 2011 – Polimi expo – Xtremely Ordinary Design / Salone del Mobile @ Milan

06. 2010 – Talking Flower project – Art’n Science night / Collegium Hungaricum Berlin @ Berlin

03. 2010 – Poem Bean project – Pixelache @ Helsinki

09. 2009 – Poem Bean project – Ars Electronica Festival @ Linz