Carra Santos

Designer, researcher & learning practitioner

Alongside this work, I’m developing two long-term learning projects exploring how strategy design can be grounded in people, place and local understanding:Civic Sketchbook
Field guides for researching place identity through observation and creative ethnography.Pre-Collaborative City
Learning resources exploring what needs to be understood before place-based strategy can work.

My experience includes work with the World Health Organization, Design Council and the Centre for Sustainable Design, building on more than a decade of cross-disciplinary experience spanning systems thinking, communication, sustainable development and design for sustainable behaviour.For a more complete overview of my experience, publications and projects, please visit my LinkedIn profile.

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Pre-Collaborative City

The work we need to do before we bring everyone into the room.

Place-based collaborations often begin by bringing people together, only to find that people arrive with different understandings of the situation they are trying to change.When those differences remain unexplored, conversations can become debates about positions rather than opportunities to build shared understanding.The most important work may happen before collaboration begins.

Knowledge-Sharing Request

I'm currently speaking with people designing, leading and supporting collaborative responses to complex place-based social and environmental challenges to understand their experiences of where collaboration becomes difficult and what support would be most useful beforehand.If you'd like to share your experiences in a 30 minute knowledge-sharing conversation, I'd be delighted to hear from you. Where useful, I'll share emerging tools, reflections and resources from this work.Email me or use the form below, and I'll get back to you shortly.