Some of my Past Work

With colleagues at Open Lab, I facilitated Not-Equal’s community panel. In this panel, citizens were supported to participate in making decisions about funding for social-justice oriented tech projects.

Panel members collectively created guidelines for deciding desirable features in projects, and then were supported to evaluate projects against these guidelines. This fed into the process of evaluating the submitted projects alongside (and with equal weighting to) traditional expert reviews.

You can read more about the funded projects here.

In 2021, the North of Tyne Combined Authority hired me to undertake user research evaluating their digital inclusion scheme, which was intended to maintain digital access for school pupils, people in adult education or employability programmes, and care home residents during a time when social distancing restrictions prevented in-person gatherings.

I engaged with NTCA, the three local authorities delivering the scheme, dozens of supporting organisations such as schools and education providers, as well as local residents who benefitted from the scheme. I delivered findings on the success of the scheme in achieving its goals and recommendations to inform future digital inclusion work.

With colleagues at Open Lab and Barnardo’s, we designed It’s Our Future – a card game made to channel the energy of youth movements around the world, and provide a platform for care experienced young people to describe bold visions for the future.

The game leverages the form and aesthetics of tarot to provide a simple way to collectively build out a route to a desired future world.

We then compiled these visions into a manifesto for young people, which was distributed ahead of the 2019 UK general election. You can read the manifesto here.

With a team of designers at Escape Rooms Durham, we designed Lily of Lumley, an innovative and immersive escape room game in historic Lumley Castle. The game was heavily inspired by the history and folklore of the castle, and contains a great many twists, turns, and puzzles. Unfortunately, if I told you about them, it would spoil the experience, but you can read some press coverage here!