Dr Jennifer Whyte MA, PhD
Dr Jennifer Whyte is a Reader in Innovation and Design in the School of Construction Management and Engineering at the University of Reading. She has broad interests in innovation and design, with particularly in-depth work on technologies and governance in large projects. She joined the University of Reading in autumn (fall) 2007, having been a Senior Research Fellow at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London. At Imperial, she led a portfolio of research projects on design and visualization, working with colleagues to explore the strategic questions associated with visualization, design, technologies and decision-making across the pharmaceutical, oil and gas and construction sectors. She was particularly involved in the fieldwork and analysis associated with an in-depth study of technologies and practices at Heathrow Terminal 5.
She provided input into the UK government's Cox review on Design and Creativity, co-authoring a 'think-piece' for the DTI strategy unit with Profs John Bessant and Andrew Neely and talking directly with George Cox. She was a keynote presenter at the Audi Design Foundation's 10th Annual Dinner, presenting the results of her study on 'Skills for Innovation in the Design Industries.' Links that she developed across Imperial and the Royal College of Art supported the successful bid for the £5m Design London centre. She sits on the Development Board of the Construction Industry Council's Design Quality Indicators (DQIs). She has written 20 refereed journal articles and a book and edited 2 special issues and is book review editor for the international journal Building Research and Information.
Within KIM, Jennifer is contributing to Task 3.1, with her interest is in the role of inter-organizational governance arrangements in supporting innovation processes. She is particularly interested in how boundary objects, such as integrated project models, structure the delivery of capital assets and infrastructures.
The move to the University of Reading provides the opportunity to develop and extend her work in new directions. Within the Innovative Construction Research Centre http://www.icrc-reading.org/ at the University of Reading, Dr Whyte is leading a new research project 'Infrastructure through Life: Technology Use in Global Projects' (2008-2011) that draws on outputs of the KIM programme as well as building on her previous work. She is also involved in the project 'Design Quality in Schools' (2005-9). Further details of her work and interests can be found at http://www.reading.ac.uk/~kcs07jw/
Special Issues
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Whyte, J.K. and Ewenstein, B. eds. (2007) Special Issue on Visual Practices: Artifacts of Knowing, Building Research and Information, forthcoming.
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Gann, D.M. and Whyte, J.K. eds. (2003) Special Issue on Design Quality, Building Research and Information, 31(5).
Books
- Whyte, J.K. (2002) Virtual Reality and the Built Environment, Architectural Press (ISBN 0 7506 5372 8)
Papers
- Ewenstein, B. and Whyte, J. (2008) 'Knowledge practices in design: The role of visual representations as 'epistemic objects', Organization Studies, forthcoming.
- Whyte, J., Ewenstein, B. Hales, M. and Tidd, J. (2008) How to visualize knowledge in project-based work, Long Range Planning, Vol. 41, No. 1, forthcoming.
- Ewenstein, B. and Whyte, J. (2007) Beyond words: aesthetic knowledge and knowing in design, Organization Studies, Vol. 28, No. 5, pp. 689-708.
- Whyte, J.K., Ewenstein, B. Hales, M. and Tidd, J. (2007) Visual practices, and the objects of design, Building Research and Information, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 18-27.
- Steen, J. Coopmans, C. and Whyte, J. K. (2006) SO!APBOX: Editorial Essay: Structure and agency? Actor network theory and strategic organization, Strategic Organization, 4(3) forthcoming.
- Soutter, J.K. and Whyte, J.K. (2005) Making sense of it all: implementing an emerging knowledge management technology within the organization, International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 308-320
- Whyte, J.K. (2003) Innovation and users: virtual reality in the construction sector Construction Management and Economics, 21(6) 565 -- 572.
- Whyte, J.K., Davies, A., Salter, A.J. and Gann, D.M. (2003) Designing to compete: lessons from Millennium Product winners, Design Studies, 24(5) 395-409.
- Gann, D.M., Salter, A.J. and Whyte, J.K. (2003) The Design Quality Indicator as a tool for thinking, Building Research and Information, 31(5) 318-333.
