Helping ambitious organisations plan for and design better futures.

Actionable insight and strategic direction for future-fit products, services, systems & experiences.

  • Sense-making at the interface of anthropology & technology

  • Decoding future signals from the noise of now

  • Forging resilient strategies for a future in flux

➔ About

An Associate Director-level researcher & strategist with over a decade of experience working in Foresight and Product teams. In-house at the BBC and in consultancy with design & innovation pioneers Seymourpowell.

Key Experience

  • Currently design researching in the product group at the BBC

  • 12+ years working in the Foresight team at Seymourpowell. Starting as a Junior Researcher in 2010 I left as an Associate Director in Strategy & Insight in 2022. This unique consultancy has given me a wealth of experience across a wide range of industries, categories and project scopes.

  • A trained designer graduating with a BA(Hons) Product Design degree from London-based university Ravensbourne. This creative foundation informs my approach to insight and strategy, finding ways to identify critical user needs and translate them into actionable direction for designers.

Trained in Product Design but specialised in research and strategy. This discipline allows me to blend my natural aptitudes - balancing creative curiosity with critical thinking.

Extensive experience in human insight and innovation strategy for brands and businesses across a breadth of industries - from big tech to transport from finance to FMCG - giving a rich and diverse perspective, fuelling my ability to form connections and problem-solve obliquely. 

Always open to opportunities to do good work with good people.

Approach

  • Innovation lives in liminal spaces; it is in the alchemy of connecting ideas and contexts in new combinations.

  • Our future depends on radical systemic change like never before. We owe it to the future to innovate responsibly not recklessly.

  • Why always comes before how, because it informs the what and the how for the better.

➔ Toolkit

A decade of experience using a wide range of methodologies from scoping and discovery to strategy and direction. 

  • Trend Tracking
    PESTLE Modelling
    Statistical Signals & Data Mining
    Expert Insight
    Scenario Planning

  • Behavioural Insight
    In-context Ethnography
    Community Research
    Cultural Insight
    Survey Design & Analysis
    User Archtypes & Persona
    User Needs & Stories
    Experience Mapping

  • Market Dynamics & Benchmarking
    Workshop Facilitation
    Vision Creation
    Innovation & NPD Roadmaps
    White Space Opportunity Framing
    Proposition Design
    Brand & Experience DNA
    Portfolio & Architecture Strategy

  • Physical, Digital & XR Prototype Testing
    Design Sprints & Iterative Evaluations
    Co-Development & Community Testing
    Usability Testing

Applying a creative but critical approach to briefs. Adopting the most appropriate tools and adapting them to the challenge,whether defining long-term future strategic visions or fast-paced, tactical NPD.

With a strong grounding in human and behavioural research, an empathetic facilitation style that’s underpinned by astute observation and analysis that translate insights into actionable strategies.

➔ Projects

Due to the confidential nature of many client projects I have worked on, presented here is a snapshot of the variety of challenges and approaches taken. If you want to discuss the methods or scope, just get in touch.

#01 A Journey into Sound

  • Creating a strategic vision for a global technology giant to shape the next frontier of home AV experience: future audio experiences. Listening for market signals and expert-user insight revealed a rich landscape of opportunities in personal and shared experiences waiting to be heard.

#02 Survival of the Smartest

  • Insight from experts who’ve survived life at the world’s extremes to inform a wearable tech product to support explorer survival strategies. Insight directly informed the creation of experience scenarios to define the innovative vision for the brand’s next evolution of life supporting technology.

#03 Investing in the Future

  • Helping a financial institution invest in their future with an innovation pipeline built on rich user and behavioural insight. Creating saver typologies and identifying behavioural nudges to inspire future products and services to help people become better savers.

#04 Transformation with Impact

  • Helping one of the world’s fastest growing digital transformation companies envision an innovative platform to help their customers realise and accelerate their time to value. Exploratory research, vision creation, feature planning, architecture and UX prototyping to provide a North Star end-state vision that’s already in development.

#05 Inclusive Innovation

  • An innovation approach, engaging and collaborating with diverse communities to listen to and create inclusive product propositions that invite more people to take part and be part of change.

#06 Decoding Human Values

  • Helping a consulting firm define and create a framework to map and track universal human values. Trend analysis, data mining and quantitive surveys to help build and test our model with outputs used to help brands and businesses make more purpose-driven decisions.

➔ Clients

➔ Journal

Random Access Memos is my journal, a public, searchable notebook to share interesting things and thoughts-in-progress.

It’s a filing cabinet.
For my brain.
On the internet.