About me.

Service Designer & Strategist

Like many practitioners, I am a culmination and challenge to the orientations that I move within, and have moved away from. I intentionally moved towards a service & co-design practice from a more traditional industrial design training because I was always attracted to a more experiential and temporal lens on design, rather than products that reflect a specific space and place.

And so, much of my professional practice has been, and still is, focused on working with people to try to support making sense of their lived experience. Oftentimes these lived experiences are of systems that are designed for, but without voices and stories, of its participants — the students in education, and the patients in healthcare.

To me, anecdotal evidence, subjective experience, varying worldviews, different ways of knowing and material languages are what I seek out and interweave throughout projects.

Current PhD Research

Embodied Enquiry: collective interpretation and meaning-making of one’s own experience in co-design workshops.

Simply put, I am investigating how the act of making can support participants to interpret and analyse their own stories of past, lived experiences. As a means to help participants articulate the story of their lived experiences I mainly utilise material making and exploration within the structure of a workshop. More specifically, I use material exploration to interrogate the story of one’s own experience.

Here’s where probes, prototypes, and other making methods can support participants’ abilities to analyse and envision new futures or anticipate what might happen. How might the act of making be a mechanism for coding and interpreting one’s own data? What might participant co-analysis achieve? How can workshop participants better anticipate, and design for, nascent needs that might emerge within future experiences? For instance, my current PhD research is exploring how the act of making can act as a mechanism for coding and interpreting one’s own data.

These needs that emerge in specific lived experiences are not replicable, leaving those more traditional research methods unable to capture this type of emergent data. If quantitative data explains what happened, and qualitative data describes why it happened, perhaps design data anticipates what might happen.