I think I’ve been doing this all along

I’ve had conversations with teenagers navigating their post-GCSE choices. The current expectation seems to be, with the right decision at sixteen, everything else should fall neatly into place.

I’ve also been battling with a chapter for my PhD. on my praxis, which might, in the end, not be necessary for the thesis. So, I’m putting some of the ideas from those two things here.

It’s taken me a long time to land where I am.

2026 - I’m trying to lean into the title I now have. Design Researcher.

You know, I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be a design researcher. I have however been circling the same set of questions for most of my working life. I just didn’t always have the language for them.

For years, my work sat at the intersection of creativity, community and participation. I thought of it as cultural work, media work, producing, facilitation. Looking back, with the language I now have, it was also about designing conditions.

Starting with access

One of the first places to understand this was co-founding Access Space, an open access media lab in Sheffield. Built on recycled hardware and open-source software, the aim was simple and radical at the same time: to make digital tools and creative production accessible to people who were usually locked out of them, and to bring technologists and artists together to “make”.

The lab was built on recycled hardware and open source software. At the time a practical response to limited resources. It also reflects a set of values that are easier to name now: reuse rather than replacement, repair rather than disposal and a quiet resistance to consumerism and waste. All combined with creativity.

We tried to make a space where people could turn up, learn from one another, experiment and take ownership of their work. The design was the infrastructure, the openness, the permission to participate.

At the time, I wouldn’t have called this design. I can now see that it was. I can also see how the choices carried values of fairness, care and persistence. All these values still shape how I think about creative practice today.

Participation is never neutral

When I worked with Community Media Association these questions expanded into the areas of voice, representation and legitimacy. Community media is often framed as inherently participatory, but in practice participation is never neutral.

Community media is also often framed around voice and representation, but for me the work was also about advocating for the role of art and media within participatory practice. It involved insisting that creative work had a legitimate place in community media, and that community media had a legitimate place in the arts landscape.

Much of the work was advocating for community media as an open space for artistic experimentation. Supporting work that was exploratory, unfinished or uncertain. Making room for participation that valued creative risk rather than clarity of message. Another way of designing conditions rather than outcomes.

Producing as relational work

Alongside this, I spent many years producing in the arts. Often invisible work. It involves holding relationships, managing uncertainty, supporting collaboration and creating the conditions where creative risk feels possible.

I became more interested in the process around it. How were people brought together? What atmospheres were created? How was care practised? How were disagreements handled and held? Without realising it, I was paying attention to (*academic phrasing Klaxon*) the emotional and relational infrastructures that make creative work possible.

Sustaining the work

I’ve also got a significant strand of work in organisational and business development in the arts and third sector. This has felt separate from creative practice work. Is it significantly connected. Maybe.

It was often about shaping structures that could hold uncertainty, protect values and sustain participation over time. It involved thinking about governance, resources, roles and responsibilities as lived conditions that affect who burns out, who stays and whose voices are protected.

It taught me that hope doesn’t live in vision statements. It lives in whether an organisation can keep going without exhausting the people within it.

Making, place and collective life

These questions became more explicit through my work on City of Makers, which approached making as a collective, place-based practice. Working at a city scale made visible how creative activity is tied to identity, belonging and the stories a place tells about itself.

In a city long defined by a narrative of making rooted in the steel industry, the project had different interpretations of what “making” could mean. While some framed it in terms of productivity and innovation, my interest was in what making does for people.

I was drawn to how creative practice helps people in a shared landscape of change, particularly in post-industrial contexts and how many forms of making can contribute to a more lived sense of what a city is and who it is for.

Slowing down to understand

Circumstance changed, life happened, I felt the need to slow down and reflect on the human experiences I kept bumping up against in practice: uncertainty, attachment, fatigue, resilience, hope. Going back to university at 50 for a master’s degree gave me that space (and a whole host of questions about imposter syndrome but that’s probably a different post).

This time helped me see it more clearly. It gave me language for why creative spaces matter even when they don’t fix anything and why staying with something can be as meaningful as changing it.

Naming the work

My PhD grows directly out of all this. It explores how socially engaged arts practice design the conditions for hope in contexts where closure isn’t possible. Working with arts organisations in South Yorkshire, I’m looking at how creative practices help people live with loss, sustain collective imagination and negotiate belonging over time. I’m working towards a meta-process that makes visible the small, often overlooked work that holds things together.

I don’t see a series of jobs or projects. I see a long time thinking about the same question: how do we create spaces where people can stay, contribute and imagine together, even when the future is uncertain?

It turns out I’ve been doing this all along. I just needed many years, several job titles and a PhD. journey to see it. The idea that everything should fall neatly into place at sixteen is wild, hearing this might be some comfort to the teenagers I know (It wont - they don’t and shouldn’t listen to me, they should be out finding things for themselves).

In the meantime I’m still working out what I want to be when I grow up.