Contact me

A few work related notes

• Email me to chat about a project. Explain a little bit about the work and what you are thinking, and if it might be a fit we can jump on a call or video chat.
• I love hearing from people doing interesting things. I love receiving creative, kooky, and thoughtful pieces in my inbox too. If you think I'd like to read it, listen to it, watch it, or know about it, please feel welcome to write. Big fan of interesting links. If you think I might know someone that can help you out with your project, please ask and I'll try to introduce you if I have someone I think could help.
• I am happy to work in english, français, nederlands. You can write to me in whichever is easiest for you, or the one you're practicing more of. Bring me the expressions of your language - I love them!
• If you're not sure what skills I can bring to the table, run through some case studies in my portfolio and look at this overview. I absolutely adore speaking with people, hearing their stories, and learning from their reality, their dreams, and their needs. On projects, I am best suited to doing good things through design, research (qualitative and quantitative), product, services, and measurement.
• I do not take on free or pro-bono work (I do a lot of this in my personal life). I need to pay for rent and food but I also make money so my mum doesn’t worry too much, so it makes our work relationship fair, and so I can invest my time in your project. I offer lower rates for charities or startups majority run by historically underrepresented people, or mostly for underrepresented groups, and who have limited funding. Let me know if this is you so I can quote appropriately. You can read more about my ethics and find my rates.
• I work with many timezones. I live in France. The tricky ones are in Asia Pacific. I’ll do an early morning or late night meeting to get some face time in or overlap around the world, no problem. I no longer do 7am to 7pm meetings as a regular feature though. I train travel across Europe and UK as needed for workshops.
• If you are trying to do something good, I'm probably up for working with it. I’ve worked across so many different and interesting spaces and I adore delving into new ones. I can usually recommend you a great and experienced bunch of people who can support you if I can't, or if we need to gather more folks onboard.
• I am comfortable doing deep research with all ages and place safety guidelines for trauma and support. I genuinely love learning from people and listening to people's stories. I am infinitely grateful that I have quite a bit of experience with end beneficiaries, users, buyers, and humans providing the services from adolescents through to older people (think Generation Z through to the Silent Generation), in all kinds of environments.
• I work with physical products too. I've created my own, I'm used to patterns, print and manufacturing, and I've worked on them for others. I come at this from sustainable, low-waste, ethical production methodology in combination with good, profitable business models. Supply chain folks will know much more of the nitty-gritty if you're looking for globally large-scale and logistics work.

Notes on work related tangents

• If I don't respond, it's probably because my inbox overflowed. I prioritize project related queries and newsletter readers, and try to respond to other things where possible. I don't have email on my phone. I love chatting with people and I am sorry if I haven't written back. I do not want to dictate how anyone writes, writing is creativity, but it does help if you keep initial emails shorter.
• If you're looking for some help to get a job, find a mentor, or get some advice from me, email me a specific question. I'm honored you're asking and excited to see you enter the field or grow further. I have a helpline available if you're looking for something deeper or longer and are in a position to pay for this. If not, I'm unable to answer all emails but if you have a specific question, send it through and I will try to reply if my words or resources might be of some use.
• I am more than happy to train, skill-up and create a creative, cohesive, happy team. I always try to learn from you, you and your team are the experts in what you do, and in turn educate during my work too.
• My working day rate is for a dedicated, full six hours and includes my costs for working materials, software, and communication with you. This means you get my best, aren't paying for non-working time, and leaves enough over for brainstorming and administrative activities outside of this. Across projects I've been told I'm really efficient and effective with my time. I pack a lot into these hours.
• I don't do many podcasts but if you're keen to chat let me know what it's for and your favorite episode of the show so far and I'll get back to you. Thank you so much.
• My employee experience work tends to focus on support professionals. That is, employees, staff, freelancers, contractors and other support workers who provide a service to an end beneficiary (such as healthcare workers, teachers, aids, mental health professionals, translators etc).
• I can help grow your business and your revenue. I've worked with many funding and business models. I want a world filled with appropriately scaled businesses and local thriving communities. I have a commercial brain, have helped others create millions in profit, and have run numerous businesses of my own. I'm not hyperfixated on shareholder prices because I like to hope for a better world, but I'm highly attuned to investment cycles, revenue leakage, opportunities, costs, profit. For not-for-profits, I know the funding, grant and philanthropy cycles well.
• If you are looking for my photography work, you can find that here on Instagram. Any money I earn from photography is directly donated to families in the community I work with in Cambodia.
• I do not code client projects and haven't for many years. I have spent fifteen years coding though. I am fairly fluent in a number of languages, package managers, frameworks and CMS (you can see which in my skills). I still code for myself, including this site. With engineers, I try to understand enough of other languages, and infrastructure, to learn about our setup, restrictions, data models, and where we can excel.

Quick answers to questions that sometimes come up and others that never do

• Leonard Cohen usually has the words I cannot find.
• People often ask me if I have hope for the future. My hope is that we can reduce suffering.
• I find grapefruit delicious. When I was young my parents would grill halves with honey as a treat to scoop out. I love them juiced, cold, and warm in summer salads. Cherries are my fruit foraging delight.
• I do not have a natural talent for learning languages (code or human). I persist endlessly and ridiculously and try to find things I can enjoy. Like most things I do, I suck at the beginning and through sheer, determined frustration and tears, arrive at a point I'm more comfortable with. Except for calculus. I continued to suck. And I'm sorry to my colleague who was so kind and clever, and tried desperately to teach me how to solve complicated equations before I had to realize that physics was probably not going to be my thing.
• I wanted to be an ancient historian when I was younger. Read all the books. Had the best professor ever who gifted me more books. Decided not to pursue it when somebody told me I'd spend most of my life digging up dirt never finding anything. Nowadays, that sounds like a dream (sun, no screen, a bunch of colleagues, hands in the sand). If you have a related project, tell me all about it. There's probably a lesson in here too.
• I think one of the biggest problems we need to solve is inequity. But we have some extremely pressing planetary boundaries too.
• I do not enjoy working with hardware (but I know people that inexplicably do if you need someone). I do not use Windows if I don't have to (but I do use Excel). I do not like fudge nor macarons nor violence.
• I cannot grasp how most kids can so perfectly imitate pronounciation through tongue, mouth and breath placement without knowing how to mechanically manage all that.
• I am terrified of most things. I try to do them anyway. Except ice climbing. I do not ever want to be so cold nor so reliant on frozen water to remain solid against the sun's clear desire for it to run.

Thank you for reading!