PDR

Graphic designer, April to November 2017, hired onto Design4Innovation. The project existed to get small companies using design, and to help governments write it into their action plans.

I made tools. Four reusable workshop tools went into PDR's Greenhouse toolkit. One of them is called the Iceberg Problem, a structured way of taking a stated problem down to the actual one underneath it, and that one is mine by name. The other three were a staged speculative thinking tool, an ideation-by-drawing tool, and one for pulling an idea apart into what an optimist would scope and what a realist would detail.

I designed and ran my first solo workshop for HMRC within weeks of starting, a speculative session on the hundred ideas method. After that I ran workshops for Scottish Enterprise, the Singapore Design Council and a parliamentary design group, all of them on speculative design as a way of writing policy and designing public services. The work was divergent and convergent thinking to get ideas out, then user centred design to test a policy or a service before it is implemented, or to understand one already running.

In Belfast I was part of the team running a workshop for a public sector group on the same method, and rather than leave user research as a slide I took them out to St George's Market to do it themselves. Amsterdam was the biggest piece, mapping how a credit insurer and its brokers actually interact and where that breaks down. I also represented PDR at an Interreg seminar in Barcelona.

The method under all of it came from my MA thesis, which combined phenomenology with speculative design to get to the root of a problem before solving it. I worked at PDR during my masters degree and for a period after finishing it.