Professor Abby Mellick Lopes is a social design expert and design researcher in the Design Studies program at UTS. 

An award-winning teacher, highly successful researcher, and experienced postgraduate supervisor, Abby is engaged in interdisciplinary, design-led social research and teaching that advances the critical role of design in addressing the impacts of climate change and promoting the transition to more sustainable cultures and economies. She works with academic, industry, and government partners in applied research contexts. Her research practice brings design into relation with geography, urban design and planning, cultural studies, anthropology, and sociology. 

Abby was a founder and co-leads the multi-institutional, internationally recognised initiative Cooling the Commons, which explores the capacity of communities to respond to urban heat and the role of the built environment in creating socially just and liveable futures in Western Sydney and other hot cities. Abby is currently a Chief Investigator on three Category 1 research projects. She co-leads the ARC Linkage project Living with Urban Heat: Becoming Climate-Ready in Social Housing (2022-2025), which is focused on building creative, community-led solutions to the challenge of urban heat across different communities and housing typologies. She is a Chief Investigator on the RACE for 2030 CRC project Energy Scenarios for Future Living (2024-2027), which aims to support better decision-making capacity for the Australian energy sector through scenarios, models, tools, and design innovations that centre people’s everyday lives and expectations alongside emerging technology and energy trends. She is also a Chief Investigator on the upcoming NHMRC Targeted Research Call project, Community Resilience Centres for Improving Climate Adaptation to Bushfire Smoke and Heatwaves in Changing Urban Environments (2025-2028). This project will engage communities in the design of accessible resilience centres that protect people from bushfire smoke and heat, and assess implementation challenges and scalability opportunities in fast-growing, heavily affected suburbs in Western Sydney and Canberra.

Abby also leads research on Circular Economy transitions, and was previously a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery project Investigating Innovative Waste Economies: Redrawing the Circular Economy (2021-2024). This project explored economic and social innovation in three key waste streams: organics, single-use plastics, and textiles. A key focus of this study was understanding exactly how more circular practices are created. This question also informed consultancy work Abby led for Circular Australia, resulting in the Citizens' Report Circular Economy Community Hubs: a vision for a zero-waste, zero-carbon future, available in short and extended forms on the Circular Australia website.

Abby's award-winning teaching practice is governed by a commitment to research-led education. This commitment led to a teaching award for a five-year engaged design studio funded by Sydney Water, in which visual communication design students developed ambitious communication strategies to promote the world-class safety of Sydney's tap water over plastic bottled water, and less water-intensive household practices. Currently, Abby co-leads with Professor Cameron Tonkinwise a cross-disciplinary design studio funded by the Energy Scenarios for Future Living project that will engage students and partners in developing novel products and services to support a people-centred approach to the energy transition.

Prior to her role at UTS, Abby built a body of expertise in design research and community engagement at Western Sydney University (WSU), where she was a School-based member of the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) and a design educator and researcher in the Visual Communication Design program (2009-2019) and the Industrial Design program (2003-2009). She is currently an adjunct professor at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a research associate at the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) at WSU. Abby is also a member of the International Community Economies Institute (CEI) and the Community Economies Research Network. With colleagues across these institutions and organisations, she is advancing the role of design in contributing to social justice and environmental change. 

Abby is co-editor and contributor to the book Design/Repair: Place, Practice and Community (2023, Palgrave Macmillan). She has contributed book chapters to a range of design and transdisciplinary publications and has been published in highly ranked journals such as Design Studies, Design and Culture, the Journal of Cultural Economy. She has co-produced a range of reports for industry, government and academia, including Cooling Common Spaces in Densifying Urban Environments (Landcom), Closing the Loop on Waste: community engagement, cultural diversity and shared responsibilities in Waste Management in Canterbury Bankstown (City of Canterbury Bankstown), Circular Economy Community Hubs Report (Circular Australia; previously NSW Circular) and a report on Understanding the Drivers of Public Trust in Sydney Water (Sydney Water. See paper here). She writes public commentary for The Conversation, the Sydney Environment Institute, and the Integration and Implementation Insights blog.