This project toolkit, Cut and Paste: Preventing Visual Plagiarism, addresses a topic that can affect everyone in the design industry and yet visual plagiarism is a topic that is seldom discussed. This could be due to the ambiguity between taking reference from an image and copying from it. Therefore, what this project proposes is to bring awareness to the grey areas surrounding visual plagiarism and position this at the forefront of conversations around creativity.

Lisa Winstanley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Art Design and Media. For the past decade she worked internationally as a design educator, however her academic career is also underpinned by over 20 years of commercial experience; working in the UK as a creative practitioner and design consultant. As a visual communicator, Lisa’s work has won many prestigious industry awards including, The World Wide Logo Design Awards (WOLDA) 2019 Gold Award and most recently her branding work has been awarded as one of the top 25 Graphic Designs of 2019 in the International Creative Quarterly best 100 Annual. With further works showcased in exhibitions in New York City, Barcelona, Zurich and Florida's Fort Lauderdale Art & Design Week. Her current research reviews the intersections between ethical and collaborative design practices and pedagogies, though the lens of design for change. She is interested in investigating multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations which allow designers to work together with society, to produce life-centric design solutions for society. Her research reviews what tools can help facilitate such collaborations and what systems need to be in place for effective and meaningful collaboration to transpire. In short, Lisa’s work investigates how we can leverage design collaboratively and ethically for the benefit of our society.

Lisa Winstanley is an Assistant Professor of visual communication at the school of Art Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. This design project was created as part of her current research into preventing visual plagiarism.