I’m a service designer, facilitator, trainer and learning designer with over two decades’ experience of working with government departments, commercial companies and charities. I focus on systems thinking and service design as complementary approaches to organisational transformation and have particular skills in strategy, co-design and technology.
For over eight years I led Ravensbourne University’s MDes in Service Design Innovation before becoming course lead for the Social Innovation MDes and more recently sessional lecturer in Design Management.
At Ravensbourne I built partnerships with companies and government organisations to enable the students to work on “live briefs”. Early projects saw the students working with the Open Data Institute, Food Standards Agency and Cypher Coders. My approach to working with students drew upon my client work: practical sessions, workshops and reflective practice allowed the students to deliver meaningful outcomes for clients.
I also developed themes and materials that allowed for collaboration between courses. From year one I developed a series of projects that supported cross-disciplinary working, including: Transition Design Strategic Design Futures and Foresight Platform Design and Technology
I also drew on my economics background to introduce a module in economics for designers. This later grew into an ongoing project—Design and Economics—which became an established research project and one of the Design Council’s featured resources on the design economy. The project has led to collaboration with a number of leading universities, including Aalto, Lancaster and Loughborough.
I supported the development of core skills with a particular focus on facilitation. Facilitation skills were an element of every year of the course but I also expanded this to include students, hosting, running and facilitating events with outside organisations. These included working with Greenwich Food Network on a food futures event for local stakeholders and two ThingsCamp events which brought together outside companies to explore the application and ethics of connected technologies.
The students also learned by teaching others and hosted a group from Slovakia who were keen to apply facilitation skills to urban challenges in their home country. Most recently the students were instrumental in developing the first Design and Economics unconference. These projects were designed to help foster confidence and leadership skills in complex areas.
As the courses and cross-disciplinary programmes grew over the years it became clear that some areas were critical to future development and these became core elements:
Establishing these approaches over the course of more than a decade has helped to prepare students for a workplace that increasingly demands these skills.
I have also worked for other universities and education organisations, including:
For the past four years I have also helped to shape and deliver Future London Academy’s Execute Programme for Design Leaders, bringing together service/product design, futures thinking and systems thinking.
I have co-authored two articles for Touchpoint—the Service Design Network’s journal—and spoken at industry conferences (Service Design Network Global Conference and Service Design in Government) about design for procurement and agile methodology.
My recent clients include ARUP, Mars, the Government Digital Service, Yorkshire Water, McCain, Westminster City Council, Avanti West Coast, International SOS, the Met Office, the Food Standards Agency, the RSA, DCMS and the Open Data Institute. I am also an Open Data Institute Registered Trainer.
Although the core of my work outside teaching has been consultancy, I have also provided training and capability-building as part of my offer, including: