Dr Laura Warwick is a Senior Lecturer in Service Design and Social Innovation at Northumbria University. She completed her PhD in 2015, which explored the value of design approaches to Voluntary Community Sector (VCS) organisations delivering public services.

Laura continues to research and work in the sector, supporting national and international voluntary organisations and funders to embed service design into their practices to improve their impact. She also collaborates with researchers from across Europe and North America to understand how co-design can be used to improve mental health services.

Laura was also the Associate on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership embedding Service Design methodology within Age UK Newcastle, which won the Research Councils of UK Knowledge Base Impact Award in 2013. She was selected to be a Centenary Young Fellow of the RSA and is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Dr Laura Warwick researches extensively into the impact of design on Voluntary Community Sector (VCS) organisations. She does this through collaborations with local, national and international charities and funders looking to use Service Design to increase their impact. 

The foundation for this work was Laura's PhD, completed in 2015, which explored the value of design approaches to Voluntary Community Sector (VCS) organisations delivering public services. Since then, Laura has coached, trained and undertaken research with Service Design teams to share evolving best practice and continue to learn about the factors that amplify and inhibit the impact of Service Design in this context. 

Laura also collaborates with researchers from across Europe and North America to understand how co-design can be used to improve mental health services. She also researches into the impact of co-design on co-design participants, specifically exploring how this can be best managed when designing in mental health contexts.