Harvey Bewley is a multidisciplinary designer based in Copenhagen, with over 12 years of experience designing and fabricating products, furniture, soft robotics, med-tech devices and interactive installations.

He is Co-founder of Batch Productions, Lab Manager of the IxD lab, and External Lecturer at the IT University of Copenhagen.

His work brings together an engineering background with a playful, hands-on and story-driven approach to design and form-giving.

  • My personal practice: playful kinetic sculptures that combine interaction design, provocative aesthetics, material experiments and performative movement.

    Technology increasingly lives behind screens and inside chips: intelligent, but without a body. I use materials and computational actuation to bring objects to life, so we can read machine "body language".

    The work has led to long-running research projects at the IT University of Copenhagen, a residency at Cambridge University's Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, the Creative Europe-funded Circus without Circusresidency, and talks including Future Talks at IDA.

    I'm still experimenting with movement and materials.

  • I work with companies, institutions, artists and researchers to develop technologies, installations and objects, and to shape the creative processes behind them. With five years of medtech design and engineering consulting in Cambridge behind me, I bring a playful approach to ideation, storytelling and engineering to complex product development.

  • For ten years I have worked in and around academia. Part of this is my own research into soft and social robotics, and part is as a design collaborator for researchers who need help moving from theory and idea – in to hands-on design practice.

    Selected publications:

    • Designing Blo-nut: Design Principles, Choreography and Otherness of an Expressive Social Robot (DIS 2018): Honourable Mention, top 5% of submissions

    • Ovum: Designing for Fertility Tracking as a Shared and Domestic Experience (DIS 2019): Honourable Mention, top 5% of submissions

    • Provoking Performing Objects: Expanding the Design Space for Soft Robotics (DIS 2017)

    • Gut Tracking as Cultivation (DIS 2020)