Work
I am a designer and anthropologist passionate about making services work for people, staff, and organisations. My creative practice is driven by empathy, curiosity, and collaboration. I thrive in multidisciplinary teams and where I can work at the intersection of research, design, and strategy.
I use approaches and methods from service design, co-design, social science, ethnography, and user research to champion and nurture inclusive service transformation. This allows me to lead and engage others in unravelling and re-imagining individual experiences and entire systems.
Reflective design practitioner committed to continuous learning. Experienced in scoping and leading design work, in involving others in conversation and collaboration around design, and in assuring work meets high standards. Confident managing relationships, and communicating the value of design to stakeholders and team members at all levels.
Experienced in working alongside non-design teams, in training and coaching to increase capacity and understanding, and in embedding user-centred approaches. Confident in mentoring others, highlighting the benefits of design-led approaches, contributing to strategic conversations, and championing inclusive design.
Value-driven. Experienced facilitator of in-person and remote co-design workshops and participatory design for Scottish Care, Digital Health and Care Institute, NHS Scotland, Scottish Government, Royal Bank of Scotland, NHS Digital Service, The Alliance, and Crisis. Confident in developing and implementing strategies and methods towards a more inclusive design practice.
Skilled in designing, planning and conducting ethical user research using qualitative methods such as interviews, ethnography, workshops, engagement tools, and user testing methodologies. Experienced in analysing research data, using insights to produce actionable design directions for delivery teams, and visualising research insights through user journeys, service blueprints, personas, and other design tools.
Confident at developing, selecting, adapting, and applying appropriate design tools and methods. Excel at translating needs of users, staff, and organisations into service concepts and at engaging others in this process. Experienced in using design to ideate, prototype, validate, and iterate proposed digital or service solutions, and to communicate how design decisions were reached. Competent creating prototypes, exhibitions, visual maps, user journeys, personas, digital interfaces, and service blueprints to communicate and test design proposals.
Experienced and confident in working alongside a wide range of colleagues, stakeholders, and co-designers. Thrive in multi-disciplinary teams of domain experts, policy professionals, software engineers, product and programme managers, user researchers, and user interface designers. Good public speaking skills, including talks on service design at Collaborate Bristol 2022, Digital Scotland 2020, Digital Health and Care Network, The Alliance self-management week, NHS Design Community of Practice, and Scottish Care annual conference.
I work as part of an inclusive, creative, and collaborative team at this growing technology consultancy. Applying a user-centred design skillset, I identify and solve clients’ service problems. I balance user needs, business needs and technical considerations, and investigate and design end-to-end, front stage and back stage service journeys.
I champion inclusive design approaches and methods, by coaching and working alongside clinical teams. Leading service design in several long-term strategic programmes, I support teams to develop and implement new models of care, and to begin to embed a human centred approach to system change. My role focuses on building design and user research capacity internally and externally, including mentoring designers new to health, advising improvement teams new to design, and increasing understanding of senior stakeholders in health, social care, and government.
I worked with a new team at NHS Scotland developing digital tools for clinicians, care workers and patients. My role was to lead service design for multiple agile delivery teams and ensure clinicians and the people they care for are central to how products, content, and services are made. I led on advocating and embedding equality, diversity, and inclusive design practices into the organisation’s design and delivery process; on assuring that 'Scottish Approach to Service Design' standards are met; and on defining the direction and strategy for how the National Digital Platform might enable service transformation across different parts of health and care.
I collaborated with technologists to design clinical software helping users to better record and manage clinical data. I supported the team by ensuring all products are person-centred and enable end-to-end patient journeys.
Working as part of a multidisciplinary design team, I delivered projects at the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre and developed design-led methods for collaborative workshops for the Scottish Government’s Scottish Access Collaborative. I mentored junior designers and trained colleagues in a method I developed for mapping complex cross organisational health pathways. I also taught and lectured Master level students on design ethnography and innovation for health and care.
I conducted interviews and designed creative workshops to involve a variety of stakeholders in an evaluation process. I also researched and reviewed how my team might embed new design processes and tools to ensure our co-design work was inclusive, fair, and impactful.
Mentoring a multidisciplinary student team, I explored the future of banking through in-depth research into emerging behaviours. I prototyped and tested speculative concepts, and produced actionable recommendations. The resulting tools continue to support the design team at RBS to embed human centred design into their work.
I helped clarify the business opportunity, tested it against the target market, and redefined this startup’s value proposition and business model with people at its centre. I also managed student projects at West College and Strathclyde University aimed at involving young people in design.
Working in a multidisciplinary team of designers and researchers at this innovation studio, I carried out a series of primary research activities, synthesized the results, and used these to support the design of new potential user experiences. Based on insights from user research, my team and I mapped a comprehensive service blueprint and identified future opportunities to pilot this in new markets.
As someone with both lived experience and design expertise, I advise the UK Cystic Fibrosis Trust in developing a Registry dashboard where people with CF will be able to securely view their health information and enter wellbeing data that can be added to their NHS record.
I lived and worked in an ecovillage and community of purpose shared by disabled and non-disabled people on a small peninsula close to Trondheim in Norway. I learnt to weave and to knit, to cook, to collaborate, to love snow, and to pass very long winters.
I provided care and company for someone living with cerebral palsy and epilepsy while sharing their home, countless cups of tea, and after a little encouragement, an active life and love for buzzing London.
I developed a human-centred design practice with a strong focus on collaboration and translating research insights into inclusive service concepts. I explored how design can be used to understand, critically examine, and re-imagine the cultures, institutions and systems that shape our world, and to articulate preferable futures. Award: Postgraduate Scholarship by Scottish Funding Council, Travel Scholarship to Tokyo by the Japanese Government and Toshiba.
I gained theoretical knowledge and practical experience of designing and conducting ethical research projects using qualitative methods such as ethnography and interviews. Moreover, I developed critical thinking and a sociological imagination of relating individual biographies to culture, contexts, and systems.