Rate My Professor Robert Crocker

Dr Robert Crocker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Built Environment, College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities at Adelaide University. He holds a Doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil) from the University of Oxford (1979-1987) in early modern history of science and philosophy, and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours First Class) from the University of Adelaide (1976-1978). His career includes serving as Senior Lecturer at the University of South Australia from 1997 to 2026 and Lecturer at Flinders University from 1990 to 1995. Crocker's teaching strengths lie in design for sustainability and research methods, and he delivers courses such as Consumer Culture, Technology and Sustainable Design. He supervises higher degree by research students, including doctoral candidates on designing for adaptive reuse in the built environment and scaling networks of design and distributed manufacturing for assistive technology in low- and middle-income countries.

For over a decade, Crocker's research has focused on the social and environmental problems of consumption and waste, particularly the role of design in sustainability and the circular economy. He has authored and co-edited numerous works, including the sole-authored book Somebody Else's Problem: Consumerism, Sustainability and Design (Routledge, 2016), which won gold in the 2017 Axiom Best Business Books awards; Unmaking Waste in Production and Consumption: Towards the Circular Economy (Emerald, 2018, co-edited); Subverting Consumerism: Reuse in an Accelerated World (Routledge, 2018, co-edited); and Designing for Zero Waste: Consumption, Technologies and the Built Environment (Earthscan, 2012, co-edited). Earlier publications include Henry More, 1614-1687: A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). Currently, he is co-editing Rethinking Waste through Design: The World is Already Full (Intellect, 2026) and preparing a second edition of Somebody Else's Problem. His collaborative projects explore reducing overconsumption through design, including the repair economy's role in circular systems, and he participates in the Adelaide Living Lab Hub within the CRC for Low Carbon Living.