Green Flag proudly on display, January 2025
Co-Design & Facilitation
Collaboration is at the heart of my practice and a consistent thread across very different contexts and stakeholders.
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I am experienced in designing and delivering collaborative processes that balance competing needs, constraints, and perspectives. I have found that restrictions and narrowing of possibilities within collaboration often breed the most innovative outcomes.
This adaptability is core to how I work. I have applied collaborative methodologies across paradigms as distinct as product development and community co-design, facilitating neighbourhood planning processes with residents, working with local government on public space, and co-creating physical products with commercial partners.
Service Design for Social Impact
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Designing for positive outcomes is the cornerstone of my practice. In all the settings I work in, I believe the systems and practices around the work itself should embody this principle: what we are putting into the world should benefit more than the bottom line, giving back to people, communities, and planet.
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In fashion and jewellery this took the form of a pioneering sustainable jewellery brand that challenged prevailing assumptions of what ethical design could look like, and consultancy work with start-up sustainable brands, embedding ethical and sustainable principles across manufacture, product, culture and supply chain.
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I bring the same orientation to every engagement. Design thinking, in my practice, is a tool for empowerment, for lifting up, for rebuilding thoughtfully within real constraints, and for creating outcomes that serve people as well as organisations. I only take on work where that is the intent.
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Understanding Creative Practices
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Creative practice has been the thread running through everything I do; my own work, years alongside artists and makers, and an ongoing inquiry into how imagination moves through communities and culture.
I write and research at the intersection of creativity, barriers, and civic life, and I draw on that same curiosity when facilitating collaborative work with groups.
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Research & Insight
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I research, gather and analyse data to make actionable strategic insights, and build user and customer journeys with a particular focus on barriers.
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Notable work includes understanding barriers to financial empowerment for women. Working with a team split across three time zones and subjects from 23 countries, I analysed surveys and one-to-one interviews to map journeys and barriers to investment. The insights are practical and actionable, designed for use by financial institutions seeking to engage women as investors.
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Recent and ongoing work includes research on planning loopholes and low quality housing, building insights that can inform policy and advocacy.
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Quantitative and qualitative methods sit alongside each other in my practice, and my lived experience and empathy for the subjects I work on mean my insights are tuned in and relevant.
Problem Framing & Strategy
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Effective problem-solving begins with understanding, actively sought, not assumed. Across fashion styling, creative collaboration, and community placemaking, I apply structured listening and empathy to identify what clients, communities, and stakeholders actually need, rather than what appears to be needed from the outside.
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This approach is particularly valuable in contexts where standard frameworks fall short: where the human dimension of a challenge has been underweighted, or where trust and engagement are prerequisites for any solution to land.
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Systems Thinking
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Complex challenges rarely have isolated causes. I approach problems holistically, mapping ecosystems, tracing interdependencies, and identifying the underlying cycles that generate symptoms organisations are often trying to treat in isolation.
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This means looking beyond the presenting problem to understand what is sustaining it, where change in one area cascades outward, and where the highest-leverage points for intervention actually are.
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