Dr Jesse Adams Stein is a Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow at the UTS School of Design. She is an interdisciplinary design researcher specialising in the relationship between technology, work and material culture. Her research shifts between historical and contemporary contexts and focuses on the quieter and less fashionable aspects of design: industrial craft, manufacturing, repair, skill loss and the human experience of economic restructuring and deindustrialisation.
Stein's most recent book, "Industrial Craft in Australia" (Palgrave Macmillan 2021), focuses on ongoing significance of industrial craft (trade skills) in Australian manufacturing, and provides an historically informed understanding of Australia’s creative and productive capacity, offering constructive alternatives to nostalgic representations of ‘lost trades’. Stein's first monograph, "Hot Metal: Material Culture & Tangible Labour" (Manchester University Press, 2016), re-examined technological change and workplace upheaval in the Australian printing industry between the 1960s and the 1980s.
Stein receives funding from the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship (DECRA 2021), and she is currently investigating the project "Makers, Manufacturers & Designers: Connecting Histories". https://connectinghistories.design
Stein was co-Chief Investigator of the collaborative research project "Repair Design: Shared Knowledge & Practice" (Co-CI: A. Crosby), and is a public commentator on the 'right to repair' debate in Australia.