Green Flag proudly on display, January 2025
Collaborative Work
Collaboration is at the heart of my practice and a consistent thread across very different contexts and stakeholders.
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.
Design For Good.
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.
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.
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.
Understanding Creative Practices
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.
Strategic Insights
I research, gather and analyse data to make actionable strategic insights, and build user and customer journeys with a particular focus on barriers.
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.
Recent and ongoing work includes research on planning loopholes and low quality housing, building insights that can inform policy and advocacy.
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.
Empathetic Problem-Solving
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.
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.
Systems Thinking
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.
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.