Audrey L. Barnes

Audrey Barnes’s research centers on transition design and circularity, asking how design can catalyze societal shifts toward sustainable, equitable futures. Her work in biophilic tactical urbanism draws on ecological succession as a theory of change, exploring how designed interventions in the built environment can foster ecological and social regeneration.

Circularity threads through her teaching-research practice, from studio courses transforming reclaimed urban wood into narrative objects to international fieldwork on circular design.

Barnes employs speculative design and design justice methods throughout her scholarship, and works in documentary film as a mode of design research — including a short documentary on the evolution of industrial design.

Barnes’s research addresses the challenge of transitioning design practice, and the material systems it shapes, away from extractive, linear models toward regenerative and circular ones. Within North Carolina, her work explores how circular and biophilic design principles can take root locally. Examples include transforming a felled campus tree into narrative objects through studio-based research and developing speculative design-build work with the N.C. Plant Sciences Initiative that brings ecological thinking into the designed environment.

Beyond North Carolina, Barnes’s scholarship addresses the broader challenge of how design can catalyze societal transitions toward sustainable futures. This includes rethinking production and consumption systems, applying ecological principles like succession to social change, and preparing designers to work responsibly with emerging technologies, including intelligent systems that increasingly mediate human experience.