Enterprise Academy

Nina Lyons,  Enterprise Academy Fellow, Lecturer School of Media, researcher, graphic designer

As a graphic designer and frontend developer, Nina has worked in industry across a variety of projects with a range of clients from start-ups and SMEs to government bodies and global brands. She started to move toward research and education in 2018 when awarded a research scholarship to investigate how to leverage Augmented Reality to improve the experience of visitors to outdoor cultural heritage sites and then in 2019, joined the academic team on the Creative Digital Media (CDM) programme. More recently she serves on School of Media’s Research & Innovation Sub Committee, was work-placement coordinator of Year 3 and Year 4 Course Coordinator. Her research interests spans a number of areas including visual communication, interaction design, semiotics, and their impact on visual media and users behaviour and perceptions. She is undertaking a PhD, exploring the development of framework to aid digital creators to design enhanced AR experiences. 

Enterprise Academy Fellowship Project 

An Approach To Tailoring Content Design Provision

Content design as a specialism is growing in demand across a number of industries, however, creating content that is engaging is a challenge for those without training. The role is multi-faceted, relying on a number of skills from different areas. This fellowship project involves an investigation and identification of the different needs of the role that is specific to different industries and look to formulate a provision of training that builds on the individuals current skillset in areas of research, analysis and synthesis of findings, conceptualisation, idea generation, layout and visual presentation skills. This will be centred around a foundational approach to the teaching of basic visual communication and the functions of graphic design — information, persuasion, education, awareness — which are key to creating engaging content for different purposes and different audiences across different mediums. Industries are currently lacking individuals who can structure content for maximum impact and design visually appealing content that would engage and help users. The aim of this fellowship is to identify a full gamut of industry needs and put in place a plan that would aid industry to address these needs and provide training for their employees that would give them a fundamental grounding in the related fields of content design while also learning about best practices in content creation.