Intelligence for 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 more than ever. I’m an independent design researcher with a military intelligence and creative background based in Perth, Australia. I help clients make better design decisions for the market they'll enter tomorrow, not today.
What I Do
From qualitative data collection to usability testing, ethnographic studies and threat evaluation, my work supports product, UX, brand, and customer experience transformation programs.
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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.
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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.
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I’m sure you’ve got insights — and your team does too. I design and deliver workshops using Structured Analytic Techniques (SATs) to make sense of qualitative information and explore where the market might be going in the future. This helps you design for what’s next, not just what exists today.
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This is where my military side comes out. I bring blunt honesty to the table to cut through internal politics. My aim is to understand your long-term product or brand vision and ensure your research architecture continues to challenge bias and turn scattered insights into a shared understanding that supports design decision points.
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As the saying goes “assumptions are the mother of all f**k ups!” With a background in agile sprint, 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.
You can engage me in a number of ways. I offer day and project-based pricing, depending on the scope of work. If it feels right, I will explore a longer term partnership.
CORE OPERATING PHILOSOPHY
How I work reflects what I believe: that analytical work needs intuition and creative work needs intellect — without both, designers lose their edge.
That’s why I start with discovery — but my work is unified by one core operating philosophy. A way of thinking that melds imagination with sense-making to form better judgements in complex environments. Not just evaluating what is known, but what is unknown and what could be.
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 both 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.
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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 the incomplete signals. These assessments helped the design team delicately balance the companies quirky personality with credibility.
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![Cover of the Illume storytelling studio website featuring the company name, logo, and the text 'Illume is an Information Storytelling Studio' on a dark blue background.]()
The Illume Project
In 2026, Australia’s first and only Information Storytelling company launched. Before I started discovery, I immersed myself in the 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.
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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.
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![A sepia-toned photo of snow-capped mountains and a river valley, with overlaid text promoting a playful and intelligent approach to writing and copywriting for various brands.]()
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 signals of how the category is shifting with AI, helping them make clearer decisions about the design direction ahead of those changes.
HIRE ME
Need to chat? You can DM me on Linked In or send me an email enquiry and I’ll get back to you within 24–48 hours (I’m usually deep in a research rabbit hole).
Perth, Australia
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