Different fields.
One way of looking.
My work sits somewhere between design, systems research, technology and lived experience. I am interested in a deceptively simple question:
What changes when we stop trying to fix the visible outcome and start looking at the conditions that make it possible?
Different worlds. Same structure
That question did not begin in a design studio.
For many years I worked in technical environments, including theatre technology, where light, sound, space, timing and human attention constantly interact. Later, my work moved into mental health and community-based care, both as a professional and from lived experience.
These may seem like very different worlds.
To me, they increasingly looked like the same kind of problem.
Systems shape what can happen.
Relationships shape what actually happens.
And every observer — human or otherwise — can only select part of what is there.
That became the foundation for the I·V·O Lens.
From observation to design
Design by Authenticity is where I develop that thinking through research, visual notation, software, physical objects, installations, prototypes and experiments.
Some projects are practical. Some are speculative. Some begin with code, others with a room, an organisation, a social situation or a strange observation that refuses to go away.
I do not see those as separate disciplines.
They are different environments in which the same questions can be tested.
The I·V·O Lens provides a structural language for doing that: looking at possibility, relation and selectivity without reducing a complex situation too quickly to a single explanation.
The aim is not to make complexity complicated.
It is to make enough of its structure visible that another possibility can appear.
Outside the studio
Not all of this work happens behind a screen.
My background in mental health care and experiential expertise continues to influence how I think about recovery, autonomy, environments and intervention.
Sail4Recovery takes part of that exploration onto the water. Small crews, open water, shared responsibility and fewer external demands create a radically different environment — without turning the experience into therapy or a fixed programme.
Other work moves in the opposite direction: into computational experiments, generative systems, spatial design and installations.
The medium changes.
The underlying curiosity does not.
An open practice
I treat Design by Authenticity as an evolving practice rather than a finished doctrine.
The I·V·O Lens is published, tested, challenged and developed in public. Prototypes are built to discover what an idea does, not merely to demonstrate that it works. Research instruments are designed to make assumptions and failure visible. Some experiments succeed. Others expose where the framework needs to change.
That is part of the work.
I am particularly interested in collaborations where disciplines normally remain separated: design and mental health, technology and lived experience, AI and human judgement, systems thinking and physical environments, research and experimentation.
Not everything needs to become a product.
Sometimes the most valuable result is a better question.
Elsewhere
You can also find my work through LinkedIn, Substack, GitHub and Zenodo, alongside publications, interviews, exhibitions and public experiments.
Sail4Recovery has its own home for the work taking place at sea.
Design by Authenticity is where these different lines meet.
Not because they are the same.Because looking closely enough often reveals that they are connected.