Research & sensemaking

Unravelling tangled topics, looking for gaps and opportunities, and identifying what needs attention next - for educators, practitioners and learners alike.In practice:
Mapping where different disciplines overlap to reveal fresh perspective, or synthesising research and stakeholder input into a framework a teaching team can build on.Case studies, including:
Uncovering new capacity-building opportunities in global health messaging at WHO

Programme & learning design

Developing or refreshing programmes and learning resources, grounded in interdisciplinary insight and real-world examples.In practice:
Redesigning a course around a live local challenge, or building a CPD pathway that reflects how professionals actually encounter the problem.Case studies, including:
Building shared foundations for Doughnut Economics-inspired local policy for University of Bath

Co-design & delivery

Working alongside subject specialists and programme teams to shape the design, co-deliver, and adapt in real time - then reviewing and consolidating what's learned.In practice:
Supporting a cohort as they work through the material, developing a missing resource as the gap appears, then folding what worked into the next iteration.Case studies, including:
Coaching six UK council and community teams through climate complexity at Design Council

About

My approach has always been to walk several steps ahead and report back.

I connect evidence with design, behaviour and communication expertise to prepare people for complex changemaking - particularly when different disciplines, organisations or communities need to understand one another to keep things moving forward.I'm known for looking beneath the obvious problem to find the questions and dynamics underneath it - and for asking the questions people would sometimes rather not sit with.In recent years, I've worked across public, private and social innovation contexts, from global institutions to grassroots communities - including the World Health Organization, Design Council, University of Bath, local authorities, mission-driven businesses and community initiatives. I move as easily in a room with local changemakers as I do with civil servants: different languages, same underlying questions, all humans underneath.Before this, I spent over a decade founding and leading an innovation and design practice, creating products, spaces and public installations that introduced new ways of thinking, living and working - so I think as much in pictures and prototypes as I do in frameworks and evidence.That's still how I work: scoping the wider landscape first, so others can step into it with confidence - creatively but with rigour, and always keeping sight of the people who ultimately make change happen.

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Independent projects

Alongside client work, I run two ongoing projects exploring how strategy can be grounded in people, place and local understanding.Civic Sketchbook
A creative ethnography practice exploring what matters to people where they live - currently taking shape as a research and educational offer in its own right.Pre-Collaborative City
A developing collection of learning resources exploring what needs to be researched and understood across sectors before place-based strategy can be designed.

Case Study

Uncovering new capacity-building opportunities in global-local health messaging.

WHO | Global | Public Health

Context

WHO's graphic health warnings on tobacco products focus heavily on the adverse health effects of smoking. But evidence suggested audiences were becoming desensitised to this framing over time.WHO guidance under WHO FCTC Articles 11 and 12 encourages innovative, culturally resonant messaging to help re-engage populations and support cessation. As an external consultant to the WHO Tobacco-Free Initiative, I was invited to explore what new learning and capacity-building opportunities this might present.

Challenge

Graphic health warnings are submitted to a central depository by practitioners working across very different cultural and social contexts.The challenge was not simply to identify which messages worked. It was to develop a way of understanding what messages might be missing - and where new possibilities might lie.

What I did

As part of a six-month engagement embedded in the team, I analysed 574 graphic health warnings from over 37 countries.I brought a different disciplinary lens to the problem, applying Schwartz's Theory of Universal Human Values to explore which human motivations were being activated by existing messaging - and which were being overlooked.The analysis revealed a strong reliance on loss-framed, security-driven messaging, while identifying further potential in values including self-direction, achievement and tradition.I then compared these findings with pro-tobacco industry campaigns and anti-tobacco civil society initiatives to test whether these alternative motivational territories appeared elsewhere.Finally, I translated the analysis into visual charts, narrative insight and practical tools that WHO leadership could use with country-level practitioners.I designed visual charts and narrative analyses to translate the dataset into actionable insight, and presented the findings to WHO leadership, showing how the same approach could support capacity-building and strategy across multiple regions.

Outcome

Initial findings were published in the 10th WHO Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, reaching health ministries and policymakers across 194 Member States.The work gave WHO leadership an additional evidence-based way to explore health communication through a wider range of human motivations than health alone, alongside a potential framework for supporting country-level implementation of WHO FCTC Articles 11 and 12.

Reflections

Sometimes the quickest way to find what is missing is to stop looking at a problem through the lens of the field that owns it.This project reinforced the value of bringing a fresh disciplinary perspective to an established problem - not to replace existing expertise, but to reveal possibilities that become difficult to see from within it.

Case Study

Building shared foundations for Doughnut Economics-inspired local policy.

University of Bath | Local | Economic Policy

Context

Between 2023 and 2025, interest in Doughnut Economics - a framework for regenerative, distributive local economies - was growing across research, policy and civil society in Bath. But that interest was often siloed, limiting opportunities for shared learning and applied policy impact.Within the University of Bath's Living Well Now and in 2050 research project, researchers were exploring Doughnut Economics as a potential regional economic development strategy, but needed dedicated capacity to build the shared understanding and relationships that meaningful multi-stakeholder engagement would require.

Challenge

Doughnut Economics is not simply a framework to be taught. It is a framework that needs to be interpreted, questioned and applied collectively.That meant bringing researchers, policymakers, practitioners and residents into meaningful dialogue despite very different levels of prior knowledge, professional interests and stakes in the outcome.The challenge was to create a common starting point without flattening those differences.

What I did

I designed and led an experimental learning and engagement programme to explore how Doughnut Economics could be introduced, interpreted and applied across sectors in Bath.Rather than relying on a single formal programme, I created a varied learning ecosystem that allowed people to encounter the ideas in different ways and build confidence at their own pace:

The aim was not simply to transfer knowledge, but to create multiple entry points into the subject and opportunities for people to test the ideas against their own experience of Bath and ideas from further afield.

Outcome

The combination of flexible, low-pressure formats - cafés, walks, creative spaces and online discussion - helped level the playing field across sectors, giving participants space to develop confidence before entering more formal policy conversations.One particularly striking outcome emerged around a long-standing local tension between social and environmental priorities.Working in small, mixed groups with only the thinking tools provided, participants independently concluded that Bath's environmental challenges were best approached through a social lens - reaching shared understanding on a genuinely divisive topic without external direction.That was significant because it demonstrated what the programme was designed to enable: people with different starting points using a shared framework to arrive at their own, locally grounded understanding.

Reflections

The most important learning design is often the part participants barely notice.Acting as both knowledge broker and facilitator, I found that the visible workshops depended on quieter preparation: building trust before the formal conversation, finding shared language before the shared decision, and creating enough low-pressure opportunities for people to encounter unfamiliar ideas before asking them to act on them.That groundwork is what makes meaningful policy-shaping conversations possible.

Case Study

Coaching six UK council and community teams through climate complexity.

Design Council | National | Climate

Context

Design Council's 'Design, differently' programme brought together six project teams spanning community organisations, local authorities and social enterprises to explore how design could support regenerative, local responses to the climate crisis.Each team was grounded in local policy or insight, but faced uncertainty in translating that understanding into a clear project direction while navigating complex social and environmental systems.

Challenge

Progress depended on more than good ideas. Teams needed to engage with people and organisations beyond their immediate project group - often across very different expectations, roles and levels of influence.They also needed to apply design thinking and systems approaches to real, place-based problems, many of them encountering these methods for the first time.The challenge was therefore not simply to teach the tools, but to help teams make them useful in their own context.

What I did

Over six months, I co-delivered a programme of workshops, expert site visits and structured one-to-one coaching.My role was to help each team translate the programme's ideas into their own situation.The coaching provided a confidential space to:

I supported teams particularly through the Discovery phase, from early research and insight-gathering through to first prototypes - helping ensure that lived experience and local context remained central rather than becoming something added later.Alongside delivery, I contributed to the programme itself, helping embed systems thinking approaches into Design Council's wider frameworks.I also scriptwrote and presented a futures narrative for the Design Council 'Design for Planet' event, imagining circular communities in 2033, exploring possible futures across energy, mobility, food and education.

Outcome

The six teams progressed through Discovery with greater clarity and confidence, becoming better equipped to anticipate obstacles, make decisions and collaborate across organisational boundaries.The coaching also strengthened relationships between council and community stakeholders, helping create conditions for more collaborative, community-centred climate action.For Design Council, the work demonstrated how structured coaching can help participants move from learning a methodology to applying it within the complexity of their own context.

Reflections

Under pressure to demonstrate progress, teams naturally want to move towards ideas and solutions. But climate and community challenges rarely offer simple starting points.The coaching created space to pause, deepen the discovery process and properly understand the people and systems involved before deciding what to make or do.That patience was not a delay to the work, it was the work, creating the space for relationships that would ensure relevance, appropriateness and ongoing use.