I am a designer, developing new ways of thinking about and experiencing death and dying in the 21st century.

Designing products and experiences alongside writing and research, I combine design methodologies with different practices in transdisciplinary collaboration with other designers, academics, clinicians and the public. My work is situated within academic research, design research and development, and commercial delivery. I am Senior Design Associate at the Helix Centre, the founder of design research group Being and Dying, and co-founder of the social tech companies Humane Engineering and Digital Care Planning.

My expertise includes communication and product design, and design research around health, death and dying. I lead the end-of-life care projects at the Helix Centre, an innovation design lab inside the Institute for Global Health Innovation led by Lord Ara Darzi at St Mary’s Hospital in London. I co-lead the development of Cove, a flagship mental health app available on the NHS, with my social tech company Humane Engineering. With Lord Ara Darzi and Matt Harrison, I co-founded the Helix Centre's first spin-out venture, Digital Care Planning. I am a visiting lecturer at Imperial College London, and was visiting professor of Information Design at the Università Iuav di Venezia from 2014–2016.

Born and raised in Scotland, I studied design at the Glasgow School of Art and have been a practising designer for over 10 years in the UK, Italy and the Netherlands. I was an art director at design studio Tellart, studio director at the design research centre Fabrica, and designer for Graphic Thought Facility, John Morgan studio and others. My work has been featured in the British Medical Journal, The Guardian, Wired, Harvard Business Review and has received awards from D&AD, Graphis and Core77. Alongside designing products and experiences, I design books. Publishers include Rizzoli Skira, JRP Ringier and Gagosian Gallery. One of my books was nomimated for the Most Beautiful Swiss Books award in 2009. I also write, publish and lecture regularly. Talks include Radical change: a blueprint for the next 50 years of dying at the Royal Society of Medicine and Designing the human experience at End Well. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a council member for the Association for the Study of Death and Society, advisor for AHRC’s Creative Economy Healthcare Hub and End Well, the annual end-of-life symposium in San Francisco.