About Lisande
I play at the intersection of product or service research, design, development, and impact. I make sure things move in the right direction, and get done well. I also love getting to know people, tea, and the mountains.
Where I spend time with organizations doesn’t fit neatly into one title, but my work is a mix of research, strategy, impact measurement, content and learning design, user experience design, product management, designing for behavorial change, accessibility, systemic thinking, journey design, community engagement, and positioning. Outside of this I’ve long been a developer, played with successful campaigns, branding, go-to-market launches, search optimization, ethical manufacturing, lettering, photography, and storyboarding. I combine aesthetic and technical details with the real world in order for you to succeed.
I think my best epitaph in life would read : she really tried.
Listen to the creator (aka my mum) pronounce my name for you!
Explore a bit about me
As you’re reading this, I’m probably listening to this playlist, or this one.
I run this little letter on creativity and living life a bit better.
I speak several languages, code and human. I think the cutest word I know is choupisson.
I built this web app for book readers to teach myself react.
I cook vegetables from across cultures most days. Here’s a simple, favorite warm dinner recipe, easy breakfast beans, and a summer salad to try.
I take photos but I’m currently feeling a bit disillusioned with them in a world of artificial everything.
I really enjoy walking mountains but have precisely zero interest in scaling the tallest ones. Are you sure you know which one is? See also, not wanting to lose any digits to frost bite.
I don’t know how to behave at fancy restaurants. I once accidentally ate in one, arriving in hiking shoes.
I love the MotoGP. I love Leonard Cohen more. Pretty sure The Book Thief is one of the most beautiful books ever written. I also adore this Damien Rice performance.
Communities who compost, grow food, and have worm gardens are irresistible to me. It’s one of our ultimate forms of rebellion, it’s a great way to visibly acknowledge what we consume and create, and it’s one of the better individual actions we can take. Demand that your neighborhood has composting!
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day. - EB White
Dig into my work history
This is where I uncomfortably talk about myself if you're interested in a little background. I was born at 352ppm into a world of 5 billion people. I remember the green flower petals of ICQ as the internet made its first foray into chat when we were wonderfully naive enough to include a start random chat button. I spent a childhood formatting floppies, burning CDs, vacuuming the computer tower, and making wildly poor animated backgrounds on html sites. I started working full-time in my teens, just before the world hit economic disaster. It was during these years that AIDS deaths were peaking and 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa made a big impression on me.
I completed university often by dusk, attending night classes, studying in the low lights of cafés, and sitting exams in numerous cities across the world as I worked. I now miss overhead projector talks. I sent a surprising number of faxes, combed through boxes of archives, regularly went to the bank, and learned Pascal and VB. I took my pennies and started backpacking alongside building resources for digital nomads nearly fifteen years ago, just ahead of the wave, and therefore entirely unprofitable. I became deeply disillusioned with the true effectiveness of international law where I thought I wanted to develop a career. I worked and volunteered a lot in Cambodia. I read The Spirit Level and it aligned with what I was experiencing, hearing, and seeing.
I continued to expand my coding skills into new languages (and endless Flash), make ugly things during a more creative internet period (I once made a watercolor cupcake with a door to enter the website - truly horrible, so much fun), experience a huge digital aesthetic shift, and slowly develop a design sensibility. I was part of a little trio that branded endless small businesses before one of us become a bit famous (very much not me), and significantly less impressively, I sold a tiny website for $1,500 which was remarkable to me. I joined my friends as part of a weird, world record breaking yoga session, and a couple of years later one of my wonderful clients had Oprah visit and celebrate their business shortly after I worked with them.
After eight years, I shut my little studio down and sighed deep relief at no longer having to stay on top of so many projects and the pressure to grow. I followed this up with kids education products to push against stereotypes, and engage children with the environment, spending hundreds of hours on tangible product design. And then learned every detail of ethical manufacturing from scratch for another social enterprise. I grew a community of forty-thousand folks reaching millions of people who gave a shit about the future of our world with nuance and rationality, and was a slave to the algorithm in churning out engaging biodiversity content with scientists, to compete with whatever someone was breaking the internet with that week.
After having spent a while in the field for gender and education, I built a studio in rural Cambodia to try to create some jobs and community projects. Away from this, I managed wonderful product and innovation teams, steered numerous products back on track, and decided to hopefully never be responsible for global timezone teams again while catching up on grasse-matinée debt.
I’ve run workshops from Belize to Brisbane, and received a lovely bit of gratitude from Desmond Tutu for our work on the Book of Joy. I’ve spurred millions of dollars in client revenue for creative learning journeys, and one of my oddest work experiences was seeing Paris Hilton and Malala in the same square metre next to me. I’ve spent thousands of hours working with charities and pushing into systemic problem solving as much as possible whilst grappling with difficult topics and attempts to create and measure real world impact. I did my time in burnout and now work in a sustainable way that lets my head and heart breathe.
Businesses and charities tend to call me in to fix things that aren’t working as well as they could be, to figure hard stuff out, and to make new things they're looking to build, effectively and profitably. I feel deeply privileged and lucky to do this. I think my life outside of work is slower, and hopefully more interesting, but a few paragraphs bunched up like this probably makes this journey seem unreal or like I’m a real douche-canoe. I'm under no illusion that I'm changing the world. I am most definitely not. There are thousands of people who have dedicated their lives to doing deep and difficult work on the ground. I just hope I can help a few people and don't make anything worse. Thanks for making it through!
I believe we don't solve wicked problems, we create better and more just problems.
