A design leader working in health, care and innovation

Born and raised in Scotland, Ivor studied design at the Glasgow School of Art and has been a practising designer for 15 years in the UK, Italy and the Netherlands.

In 2018, he was named a New Radical by innovation foundation Nesta and the Observer newspaper for "pioneering a human-centric approach to the experience of dying, bereavement and grief".

Since 2015 he has been a designer at the Helix Centre, where he has been leading the end-of-life care projects, developing projects that are used in the NHS, and co-founding their first spin-out, Digital Care Planning in 2017.

He co-founded the tech-for-good mental health start-up Humane Engineering with Alex Rothera in 2015. Their first product Cove, was one of the first apps evaluated by the NHS for its app library, which launched in 2017. It remains one of the most popular mental health apps available today. His ventures have been backed by Bethnal Green Ventures, NHS England and SBRI Healthcare.

Prior to that, he founded the research and design consultancy group Being and Dying, one of the first design studios dedicated to re-designing the death and dying experience. From 2014 to 2020, the studio created products, prototypes and provocations that helped to embed design as an integral part of the modern death.

He began his career working on videogames at Rockstar North, before becoming a designer. After graduating in 2007, he worked as a graphic designer with renowned British design studios such as John Morgan studio, Graphic Thought Facility, Browns and Burberry.

He designed brand identities, exhibitions, books and catalogues for commercial clients, corporate organisations and national governments. He has received awards from D&AD, Graphis and Core77. One of his books was nominated for the Most Beautiful Swiss Books award in 2009.

In 2013, he joined Fabrica - the research design centre in Treviso, Italy - under the leadership of Dan Hill, as a studio director leading experimental design projects exploring death and dying.

As a long-time educator, he is currently Visiting Lecturer on the Healthcare and Design MSc at Imperial College London.

He was Visiting Professor of Information Design at the Università Iuav di Venezia from 2014–2016, and has held teaching positions at Design Academy Eindhoven and the Glasgow School of Art. He has taught at numerous design and architecture schools around the world.

Short biography
Ivor Williams is a Scottish designer dedicated to transforming our relationship to life, death and loss. He is Lead for End-of-Life Care at the Institute of Global Health Innovation and Helix Centre at Imperial College London, leading cross-functional teams of designers, developers, academics, clinicians and policy analysts. He previously co-founded the mental health start-up Humane Engineering and created the NHS-approved music therapy app, Cove. He is an advisor to start-ups and venture groups including Zinc VC and other organisations such as End Well and The Collective Psychology Project, and is a visiting lecturer at Imperial College London. In 2018, he was named a New Radical by innovation foundation Nesta and the Observer newspaper for "pioneering a human-centric approach to the experience of dying, bereavement and grief".