That's me : ) sketched, at the whiteboard, where it usually starts

Loughborough was the first time design stopped being something I did and became something I lived inside. Before the MSc I'd shipped real products platforms with real users, metrics that proved they worked. But I'd never had to justify a design decision with academic rigour. Nobody had ever asked me not just why the button worked, but why the behaviour occurred, what model supported it, where the evidence was. That friction between three years of industry instinct and a room full of people who wanted citations is what sharpened me.

Testing the VR showroom. also losing track of reality for a bit.

The Canonical project was short three months but it was dense with the right kind of learning. The client didn't just give feedback, they gave direction. They opened up how they thought about contributor flows, about the system underneath the interface, and that generosity shaped how our team approached the whole problem. Inside the team there was someone who changed how I brainstorm entirely. She was an artist during our sessions she'd sketch ideas by hand, loose and fast, and watching her think on paper made me realise I'd been brainstorming in straight lines my whole career. She showed me what divergent thinking actually looks like when someone isn't afraid of it.

Twelve months, four moments, one degree — everyone who made it what it was.

The foundation for understanding research was laid in Digital Health where I first learned how to properly conduct evaluations, run different testing methods, and use SPSS to analyse the results. Those sessions taught me what numbers actually reveal when you know how to read them. NASA-TLX, PANAS, SUS they stopped being acronyms and became a way of listening to users that no interview could replicate. The dissertation then brought Ruth a senior lecturer who supervised me through the research and made me take ethics seriously, not as a checkbox but as a design constraint. She helped me understand that when you're studying how people make decisions under stress, the methodology is a moral choice as much as an academic one. Industry taught me how to ship. Loughborough taught me why it matters.