Design Practice & Community Leadership

Alongside product delivery, I’ve consistently contributed to building stronger design practice within teams and organisations. This work focuses on improving how design operates at scale — through shared ways of working, clearer communication, and creating space for collaboration beyond individual projects.

This has been embedded in my day-to-day role: supporting designers, improving cross-discipline understanding, and reducing friction in how design decisions are made, documented, and discussed.

Design Jam Pilot: Propagate

While working within the Scottish Government, I initiated and organised Propagate — a pilot scheme designed to test whether bringing together digital professionals to work on passion projects outside their usual delivery scope could improve collaboration, skills-sharing, and engagement across the organisation.

I planned and set up the pilot, working closely with the Head of Design to shape a set of clear, time-bound design briefs that balanced autonomy with enough structure to support meaningful outcomes. The scheme was intentionally framed as an experiment, with success measured by participation, learning, and cross-discipline collaboration rather than polished outputs.

Alongside organising the pilot, I also took part as a contributor in the first cohort, allowing me to experience the format and constraints first-hand and helping inform a grounded evaluation of what worked well and what needed refinement.

Following the pilot, I documented successes, challenges, and opportunities for improvement and reported these back to senior stakeholders. These insights contributed to a business case that supported extending Propagate to additional teams, with the scheme continuing to grow beyond the initial pilot.

Communications & Engagement — UX Community of Practice

Alongside my design role at the Scottish Government, I worked as Communications and Engagement Lead under the UX Community of Practice Lead, focusing on increasing participation, knowledge-sharing, and ongoing dialogue within the UX community.

I created an engagement plan aimed at encouraging more active involvement, prompting members to share knowledge on specific topics and engage in discussion around shared tools and practices, including the design system.

As part of this work, I planned and facilitated virtual meet-ups, including cross-team design crits that brought together designers from different work streams. These sessions helped reduce siloed working and build confidence in open critique across the community.

I also sourced and coordinated external speakers for the Interaction Design Day series, attending networking events to identify contributors. This included organising an organisation-wide talk on sustainable digital design from an external guest speaker and supporting follow-on work to create sustainability statements to help guide future digital design decisions.

Creating Shared Design Documentation

In my current role, there was no existing standard for documenting design work or the wider user-centred design (UCD) process, making it difficult to maintain continuity or share design rationale across teams.

To address this, I created a design documentation template from scratch and worked with a cross-discipline UCD team to ensure it supported all aspects of the process, including research, insights, design decisions, accessibility considerations, and iteration over time.

I also collaborated closely with developers and service owners to ensure the documentation met their needs and supported technical and service decision-making alongside design intent. The resulting documentation created a shared reference point across disciplines, reduced reliance on informal knowledge, and improved consistency as work moved between teams.

Impact

Across these initiatives, the common thread has been improving how design functions as a practice — not just what it produces. By investing in community, communication, and shared foundations, I aim to help teams work more confidently, make better-informed decisions, and deliver more consistent outcomes at scale.