Seeing the unseen is my working philosophy for how I design, lead, and build.
It is not a narrative about my career.
It is the method I use inside it.
It is how I notice what is not yet visible.
How I translate complexity into something people can see and respond to.
And how I turn observation into action inside organisations and everyday life.
It sits across everything I do — from large-scale systems thinking in global design teams to small human gestures that shape how people connect, behave, and understand each other.
It is not a fixed framework.
It is a way of staying alert to the world and choosing how to respond.
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Choosing to respond is the practical expression of this philosophy.
It is where curiosity becomes attention.
Where attention becomes care.
And where care becomes small, deliberate acts that change how people experience the world around them.
These are not exceptional moments.
They are often quiet, ordinary, and easy to miss.
A conversation.
A drawing.
A bench.
A workshop.
A question asked at the right moment.
A way of making something visible so others can enter it.
This is where my work becomes human.
People often ask me how I have moved between so many different disciplines — from silversmithing to global design leadership to ethnographic research to organisational strategy.
But I don’t experience it as movement between disciplines.
I experience it as a continuous practice of learning how to see, and how to respond.
The tools change.
The environments change.
The scale changes.
But the intention stays the same:
To make things visible enough that people can think together, and act together.
Small Acts
A few years ago, I spent many months visiting an NHS mental health ward almost every day.
Someone I love was there.
The staff worked with extraordinary dedication, often in difficult circumstances, caring for people through some of the hardest moments of their lives.
What struck me wasn’t what the hospital lacked.
It was how much difference the smallest gestures could make.
The building couldn’t change overnight.
The funding couldn’t suddenly appear.
But perhaps someone’s day could.
So I stopped asking, “What would fix this?”
Instead, I asked, “What can I do today?”
Sometimes it was arriving with fresh strawberries or cherries to share.
Sometimes it was a pack of cards that encouraged people to sit together rather than alone.
Sometimes it was planting sunflowers in a small garden so that there was something growing, something hopeful to look towards.
Every day I wrote a handwritten letter on good paper.
I sealed it with wax.
I made posters that counted down the days, not because they changed reality, but because they made hope visible.
None of these things solved the bigger problem.
They weren’t meant to.
They simply reminded people that someone cared.
I’ve come to believe that we often underestimate the power of small acts.
We wait until we have more money.
More authority.
More time.
A bigger budget.
But change doesn’t always begin with scale.
Sometimes it begins with a handwritten letter.
A conversation.
A sunflower.
A shared bowl of strawberries.
As a designer, I’ve spent my career making ideas tangible.
As a human being, I’ve realised the same principle applies to kindness.
When care becomes visible, people feel it.
And sometimes that’s enough to help someone take one more step forward.
Shared Imagination
During COVID, a friend’s young son was struggling at home, as many children were. Attention was fractured. Days felt long. Everything felt uncertain.
So we started something very simple.
Once a week, we met online for an hour.
There was no plan beyond that.
I would ask him a question.
What’s in your mind today?
What are you noticing around you?
What are you thinking about?
And then we would draw.
Not to produce finished artwork.
Not to be correct.
But to make his thoughts visible.
As he described what he saw in his imagination, I would draw alongside him. Slowly, a shared world began to form between us. His ideas, spoken aloud, became images. And those images became something we could both see at the same time.
What surprised me most was how expansive his imagination was.
At that age, there is no hesitation about whether something is right or wrong. There is only curiosity. Possibility. Movement. Story.
He wasn’t drawing what things looked like.
He was drawing what things felt like.
After lockdown, I gave them all the drawings.
My friend has framed them in her home.
They are not just drawings of a moment in time.
They are records of how we helped each other stay connected through it.
Looking back, I realise this was not really about drawing at all.
It was about creating a shared space where imagination could exist between two people.
A space where thoughts didn’t have to stay private.
Where ideas could be seen, responded to, and extended.
I’ve come to believe that this is another form of care.
Not the care of fixing something.
But the care of staying present with someone’s thinking long enough for it to become something they can see.
We often assume connection requires proximity.
But sometimes it only requires attention.
And a pencil.
Translation
A large part of my work has involved moving between different worlds.
Designers and marketers.
Creatives and engineers.
Senior leadership and studio teams.
Global strategy and local execution.
What I’ve learned is that most problems in organisations are not caused by a lack of ideas.
They are caused by ideas that cannot be understood clearly enough to move.
Early in my career, I realised that design was often seen as separate from the rest of the business. Something distant. Something abstract. Something difficult to access.
But I didn’t experience it that way.
For me, design was always a way of making thinking visible.
So I began to translate.
Not by simplifying ideas until they lost their meaning.
But by turning them into something people could engage with.
A creative brief that explained not just what something was, but why it mattered.
A workshop where people could experience design decisions rather than just read about them.
A set of visual artefacts that allowed different teams to understand the same intention from different perspectives.
Over time, I realised something important.
Most resistance is not resistance to the idea itself.
It is resistance to not understanding it.
When people cannot see the meaning, they cannot move with it.
So I learned to make meaning travel.
Across disciplines.
Across hierarchies.
Across language.
Across expectation.
Sometimes this meant sitting with complexity long enough to find its simplest expression.
Sometimes it meant turning strategy into something visual.
Sometimes it meant bringing people into the design process so they could feel part of it rather than separate from it.
I stopped thinking of this as communication.
I started thinking of it as translation.
Because translation is not about reducing meaning.
It is about carrying it safely from one world into another.
When this works, something shifts.
People stop defending positions.
They start building together.
And what once felt complex becomes something shared.
I’ve come to believe that this kind of translation is not secondary to design.
It is design.
Because without it, even the best ideas remain isolated.
And isolated ideas do not change anything.
Project Metallica
Ideas often fail not because they are wrong, but because they remain abstract for too long.
When i was working at Microsoft, I began to notice a shift in mobile phone design. The industry was moving from plastic towards metal. It wasn’t just an aesthetic change — it represented a deeper evolution in how products were being understood, engineered and experienced.
At the time, I was working in design strategy and communication, and I felt strongly that we needed to explore what this shift could really mean — not just visually, but physically and functionally.
So I wrote a proposal.
I called it Project Metallica.
The idea was simple. Instead of debating what metal might mean for design, we would work with it directly.
I proposed going back to the Royal College of Art, where I had trained as a silversmith, and collaborating with practitioners I trusted deeply: people who understood material at a fundamental level.
With a modest budget approved by my head of design, we began working every Friday in the workshop.
We didn’t start with answers.
We started with questions:
How could metal improve grip?
How could it manage heat?
How could it support internal components?
How could it shape antenna performance?
How could it allow for a more pure, unified form?
We explored, tested, made and remade.
The work was not theoretical — it was physical. We were holding ideas in our hands.
Over time, those experiments began to form a body of work. Objects, drawings, material studies, prototypes.
After three months, I brought everything back into the design studio.
I placed it all on a large table.
Not as a presentation.
But as evidence.
People didn’t need a lengthy explanation.
They could see it. Touch it. Understand it immediately.
The response was instant. The work unlocked conversations that had previously been difficult to have. It gave designers and engineers a shared starting point — a way of thinking differently about what metal could do, beyond surface and casing.
What followed was unexpected.
My line manager suggested we turn the work into a publication.
A designer in the team worked with me to document the drawings, research and artefacts.
Project Metallica became a book.
A record of a moment where exploration turned into shared understanding.
Looking back, I realise this project was never really about metal.
It was about what happens when ideas are allowed to become real early.
When proposals are not just discussed, but built.
When leaders are willing to say:
“Show me.”
And when designers are willing to respond:
“I already have.”
Make It Your Own
There are moments in a career that quietly redefine how you show up in the world.
For me, one of those moments happened shortly after returning to work following maternity leave.
I had been away from the project, but when an opportunity came up to present work in China, I said yes.
It felt like an adventure. I had never been to China before. I didn’t want to miss it.
What I didn’t fully understand was the scale of what I was stepping into.
I found myself standing on a stage in front of a large audience — around 600 people — in a vast auditorium.
And in that moment, something shifted.
I wasn’t just presenting work.
I was presenting myself.
I did what I thought I should do.
I showed the slides.
I read the notes.
I tried to stay close to the material.
But afterwards, I knew it hadn’t landed in the way I had hoped.
A senior leader, Peter Skillman, came up to me afterwards and gave me feedback that I have never forgotten.
He said:
“I never want to see you do that again.”
He didn’t mean it harshly.
He meant it clearly.
He explained that it didn’t matter if I forgot the script. It didn’t matter if I didn’t cover everything perfectly.
What mattered was this:
I had to make it my own.
At the time, I felt I had failed. I felt I had let the team down. I was disappointed in myself.
But something deeper was happening.
I had been treating communication as delivery of information.
When in fact, it is something else entirely.
It is presence.
The next day, I didn’t go back into the studio.
Instead, I went to the Great Wall of China.
I joined a group of strangers and climbed it alone, thinking about what had happened.
At the top, I made a decision.
I would never again treat communication as something I simply pass on.
It had to be something I inhabit.
When I returned home, I started changing everything about how I prepared.
I wrote scripts, but then I spoke them aloud repeatedly.
I recorded myself and listened while cycling.
I rehearsed until the words stopped being words and became thought.
I learned to stand inside the material rather than stand beside it.
Over time, this changed everything.
Not just how I presented.
But how I thought.
How I prepared.
How I led.
Now, when I speak, I don’t aim for perfection.
I aim for connection.
For something that feels alive in the room.
That moment taught me something I carry into every part of my work:
It is not enough to understand the work.
You have to inhabit it.
And then you have to make it your own.
The Madonna Curve
Someone once said to me, “You’re like the Madonna Curve.”
I remember being slightly confused by it at first.
The idea was simple: Madonna would rise, reach a peak, and then just as something began to plateau, she would reinvent herself. Not once, but repeatedly.
At the time, it was meant as a compliment about adaptability.
But I’ve never really thought of it as reinvention.
I don’t experience my career as a series of reinventions.
I experience it as a series of moments where I stop, reflect, and ask whether I am still learning.
If the answer is no, something shifts.
Not dramatically. Not theatrically.
But directionally.
I begin to explore. I begin to question. I begin to look for new ways of thinking, new tools, new environments, new problems.
Sometimes that comes from within an organisation. Sometimes it comes from moving between organisations. Sometimes it comes from simply refusing to stay still in how I think.
I have learned that staying still for too long can quietly reduce your ability to see clearly.
Not because you become less capable.
But because you stop being stretched.
People often describe this as reinvention.
I think of it differently.
I think of it as staying responsive to change — in yourself, in your environment, and in the world around you.
Today, that might mean learning a new tool or platform. I often find myself going back to learn through what I call “YouTube University” — picking up new skills, ideas, perspectives, quickly and practically.
Because the reality is simple.
The world does not stay fixed long enough for any of us to remain unchanged within it.
So I don’t aim to reinvent myself.
I aim to stay in motion.
