Harriet Harriss's teaching, research and writing are largely focussed upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education, particularly those that respond to specific community challenges: as captured in her noted publications, Architecture Live Projects: Pedagogy into Practice (Routledge, 2014); and Radical Pedagogies: Architecture & the British Tradition (RIBA Publishing, 2015). Her most recent publication, A Gendered Profession (RIBA publishing, 2016) asserts the need for widening participation in architecture, as a means to ensure the profession remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve.

In addition to winning a Clore Fellowship (2016/17), Harriet has won a range of awards for teaching, research and practice. These include an Oxford Brookes Teaching Fellowship (2010–12) for excellence in teaching, a Winston Churchill Fellowship (2011); a Higher Education Academy Internationalisation Fellowship (2012) for research excellence; and most recently two Santander Awards for scholarship & development respectively. Previously, in 2004 Harriet won a public funding commission (NESTA) to establish and co-direct Design Heroine Architecture (DHA); a niche practice that focused on public participation in architecture and co-created both innovative and responsive spatial projects and design research publications. DHA also specialised in developing 'participation prototypes’, for a diverse range of public and private sector clients. 

In 2007, Harriet was awarded a British Academy Rome Scholarship enabling her to pursue a research interest in the Baroque theatre of an abandoned abattoir and establishing her trajectory into academia. In January 2013, Harriet was selected as one of just 60 women nationally for the BBC Expert Women database project and has made appearances on BBC Breakfast, BBC News online and on the Radio 4 Today programme.

As well as teaching design, architectural history, theory and representation, her other areas of interest include film and animation, the history of British social housing, the growth of seventeenth-century London estates, participatory design methods, the power stations of London repurposing of post-industrial space and the future of design education.

Harriet also campaigns for making architecture a better understood, more publicly inclusive and accessible profession, since – despite the errors of the past – Harriet believes that architects can enable people to live better lives and that the public or ‘end users’ should be given a more active role in shaping the spaces and communities in which they live and work.