Helen Milne is a second year PhD candidate associated with the Making With research cluster and Wearable Senses Lab. She coaches students in the Crafting Wearable Senses Squad at Bachelor and Master level.

In her research, she works closely with supervisors Kristina Andersen and Bruna Goveia da Rocha and her colleague Hsaing-Lin Kuo under the umbrella of 'Making in the Dark'. Making in the Dark calls for first-person, situated making practices that engage with emergence and uncertainty. Building upon the growing departmental tradition of Digital Craftsmanship, we embrace historical textile making techiques and contemporary technologies to explore what emerges through the interaction of knowledge, material, and machines. We consider this to be a relational space in which embodied knowlege and other ways of knowing surface contemporary socio-political-material struggles. 

Helen holds a BA in Textile Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art. She specialised in hand weaving, accumulating knowledge of shaft looms and digital jacquard weaving processes through various short-format design projects, live industry briefs and a final graduation project, which took the form of a series of protest flags examining detrimental human effects on our lived environment. 

She went on to study MA Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, a course that encourages the examining and deepening of Designer Authorship and the relational, contextually situated and dependent aspects of designing. The course focused primarily on making as a mode of knowledge creation, and she graduated with a project examining the relationship between between the embodied knowledge rehearsed through working with cloth, thread, and different weaving technologies and the phenomenological experience of engaing in textile practice in contemporary society. The film surfaces disciplinary movement, choreographies of making and the monotony of textile labour.

As part of her role at New Order of Fashion, Helen participated in and contributed to the three year Erasmus+ 'Transitions' project. She was deeply involved in the development of the 'Loopholes Toolkit', designed to support changes in circular fashion and textile systems. She tested the toolkit with various external companies, emerging designers and students, to validate the generative and transformational modes of play. 

Additionally, she was involved in the creation and testing of the modular curriculum, one of the final outputs of the project, designed to support education in sustainability, digitisation, stakeholder engagement and business & management principles for the green and digital transition for VET, HEI and Professionals.