| What industry do you work in and how would you describe what you do (your elevator pitch!)? |
| I get to work across lots of different industries with the customers I consult with to design innovative solutions to their biggest challenges. I come from a perspective of human-centred design, so we start by really deeply understanding the needs of the humans involved and then use the latest technologies to design impactful solutions around the human needs and the business needs. These might be new products, experiences or even whole businesses. Collaboration is a big part of my work too, so I get to work in teams with people from lots of different backgrounds and ways of thinking, which makes what we design even stronger.
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| What was your favourite subject in school and why? |
| I loved art, for many reasons but particularly because it was a different setting to the rest of school and I loved getting hands on. I really enjoyed in art that we sat in tables in small groups, and we were encouraged to chat about art generally and one anothers work. My favourite part of art was batik, which reminds me I must pick that up again!
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| How did you get into your line of work? Can you talk us through a quick overview of your career path to date? |
| When I finished school I studied architecture in college. I loved being creative and working in a studio with my friends, and it really helped me develop my creative problem solving skills, but by the time I graduated I knew that building felt too slow a pace so I moved into the fast moving world of technology. I worked in sales for about 8 years, helping companies digitally transform (business talk for using technology to change their company for the better). I craved more creativity so moved into digital innovation, where I get to work with lots of different companies who are looking to do new exciting things.
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| When do you use creative thinking and problem solving in your line of work? |
| Always! My work is all about creatively solving problems, which might be getting a new set of customers, designing a new product or making the experience for people working in that company better. When we are designing solutions it’s important to have an element of playfulness. There might be many crazy ideas, but we often need to get through them to get to the gold. I might have a half formed idea, which one of my teammates will pick up and build upon, so creative thinking is not always about creating something new in my work, but often building on others and always saying “yes, and”.
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| What B!G idea are you most proud of in your own life/career to date? |
| I strongly believe that as creative problem solvers, the biggest impact we can make is working on societal problems together (like you do at the B!G idea!). The idea I am most proud of is the work I got to do with a charity during covid, who previously had flown volunteers around the world to help lift communities out of poverty. In 2020 it looked like they would have to shut down completely. We worked together to really deeply understand the needs of the communities they worked with, and realised that a lot of this could be met digitally once we provided computers and training. Now with the new solutions we designed together they are able to support more people in even bigger and more impactful ways (and impact the planet less with all those flights!) |
Fiona Byrne
Alexandra Moza
Gemma McLernon
Uday Bala