Intelligent by Design

Hi, I'm Emma.

Designers today aren’t limited by information — they’re drowning in it. I work inside that mess. Where human judgement matters now more than ever. As a design researcher, I leverage my unique background in both military intelligence and the creative industries to help teams make design decisions for the world they’ll enter tomorrow, not just today.

What I Do

From interviews to usability testing, ethnographic studies and threat evaluation, my work supports brand, user, and customer experience transformation programs.

I come from a military background so I don’t just “do research”. I collect intel. I observe people in their natural environments and push them past the polite answers. My job isn't to compile what's already known — it’s hunting for gaps. I ask the questions nobody has asked, and find opportunities hiding in the unknowns.
You don’t exist in a vacuum. The competition has a role in how people experience and perceive your industry. That’s why I study their identity, technology, and how people experience them. This exposes gaps, frustrations, and blind spots within the market, revealing real opportunities for design improvements and differentiation.
As the saying goes “assumptions make an ass out of u and me”. With qualifications in agile sprint and scrum, I test your concepts, prototypes, and designs with users, audiences and stakeholders to validate key assumptions early. The aim is to surface risk, reduce uncertainty, and strengthen concepts before the next major roll out.
I’m sure you’ve got insights — and your users do too. I deliver co-design and structured analytic workshops to make sense of qualitative and quantitative information and generate ideas with users. We explore what the users might be doing in the future to help you design for what’s next, not just what exists today.
This is where my military side comes out. I bring blunt honesty to the table to cut through internal politics and bias. Whether it’s helping design teams translate research findings into a clear problem narrative or establishing the design principles and specifications, I make sure your designs are “intelligence-driven” at all stages.

CORE OPERATING PHILOSOPHY

How I work reflects what I believe: that analysis needs intuition and creativity needs intellect — without both, design loses its edge.

A woman with a bun hairstyle wearing a dark jacket and backpack, smiling as she walks through a wooded area with tall trees and sunlight filtering through the branches.

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That’s why I start with discovery — but my process is unified by one core operating philosophy. A way of working that melds imagination with sense-making to form stronger judgements in complex environments.

Because of my background in the military (I think) — I hear this more than anything else:

“How can someone trained to follow orders also think outside the box?”

The answer is simple: they were never separate in the first place. I’ve had 17+ years of work experience in two polar opposite industries to figure it out — and watch other people f**k it up — which is why my core operating philosophy was born from both worlds.

DIVERGENT THINKING, INTELLIGENT IMPACT

Selected work.

The Evolve Project

In 2023, I led the discovery phase in support of a brand, customer and employee experience redevelopment program. The biggest challenge was gaining access to insights in a tightly guarded community. My military experience helped open doors, but it ultimately came down making inferences from incomplete information. These assessments helped the design team delicately balance the companies quirky personality within a serious industry.
The Illume Project

In 2026, Australia’s first and only Information Storytelling company launched. Before I started discovery, I immersed myself in their world by reading Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, an influential book that is shaping current thoughts around information networks from the stone age to AI. This informed the way I listened and observed during field research and allowed me to pull real opinions out of stakeholder interviews.
The Sila Project

I was first hired by this cutting-edge engineering company based in Perth to conduct discovery in the lead up to a full identity and website redevelopment initiative. We worked together over 18 months, running regular research sprints focussed on filling information gaps and testing assumptions. This directly informed critical design decisions such as information hierarchy, service framing, and how reliability was communicated.
The Fiction Project

Fiction Agency is a playful and intelligent writing company for the likes of lululemon, Nosworthy Group and Merrell Australia. It was an honour to do discovery for their brand identity and website redevelopment — including journey mapping, competitor analysis and stakeholder interviews. This work surfaced early insights for how the category is shifting with AI and helped them make clearer decisions about the design direction ahead of those changes.