How I work

Sustainability can be described as a long-term goal where social and economic needs can be sustained within the parameters of the living world. Sustainable behaviours are the everyday human habits, behaviours and decisions which contribute to these efforts while supporting equity and the wellbeing of current and future generations.

Based on these definitions, I work across disciplines and sectors to understand - and help build - the connections and conditions that shape sustainable behaviours, guided by three core questions:

How I can help

Sharing my findings, I support policy, development and creative professionals to design and deliver people-centred and systems-aware strategies for social and behavioural change. My offer focuses on two key areas:

Who I've helped

I’ve supported projects across global and local contexts in health, climate, enterprise, education and design, such as global health promotion and communication with the World Health Organization, community climate action initiatives with the UK Design Council, regenerative and equitable economies via Doughnut Economics, and the future of fashion enterprise in collaboration with the Centre for Sustainable Design.

I’ve also worked with various cities and regions, universities, and leading creative enterprises spanning brand, fashion, interior design and architecture, to embed values-led and social innovation into curricula, working practices, and urban design.

Let's talk about what you need to move your projects forward. Contact me to arrange a call.

Example Projects

I support projects that support sustainable behaviours (or displace unsustainable ones) in ways that inspire action and overcome barriers. Here are some examples of my recent applied research and implementation across public health, climate, innovation and design.

Writing

I contribute to and author pieces on public health, design, enterprise and social change, sharing ideas and stories that help people think differently and take meaningful action.

Article samples

Smoke Gets In Their Eyes: A brief history of tobacco industry interference in global public health efforts towards smoking prevention and cessation.

Outside the Box: Building strong foundations for social value and wellbeing into property development projects.

Low Cost, High Price: Unpacking the impact of fast fashion on public health.

Talking on a Loop: Fairphone tackles e-waste with a smartphone we can fix.

What people say

"Carra brought insight, thoughtfulness, and a deep sense of curiosity to the work we did together at the WHO on tobacco control. She approaches complex challenges with care and intellectual rigor, always seeking to understand the deeper dynamics at play. At the same time, she brings real joy and warmth to a team - Carra made a lasting impact on the work and on me personally."

Dr Hebe Gouda, Technical Officer, World Health Organization

"Carra is a driven, intelligent and curious colleague - when working with us at the Design Council, she helped to deliver a complex project with a range of stakeholders. She pushed participants to think deeper about the work they were aiming to deliver, and ultimately created a more meaningful process. This, in turn, led to longer-lasting outcomes."

Emily Whyman, Senior Programme Manager, Design Council

"I would describe Carra as rigorously creative, in that she combines systems thinking and critical thinking with the spontaneity needed for new ideas. Not many people can do this. She questions everything and because she's also a terrific person, connects with people on many levels. It's an impressive combination of skills for change-making. Working with Carra definitely made me a better designer."

Darren Evans, Founder, Engine Room Design & Design Council Associate

“A special talent for looking at projects delivering solutions that satisfy the requirements from all stakeholder perspectives, are truly relevant and have undeniable integrity.”

William Knight, Director, The Renew Consultancy & Material Matters, formerly 100% Design

“Working with Carra is a fantastic opportunity that all businesses should be lucky to have. You need to know more than you think you know, and I would highly recommend that Carra be the person to bring the passion and creative solution to your business.”

Nicki Oldham, Studio Manager, Holmes Studio

We engaged with Carra when we, as a studio, felt we needed to really understand sustainability properly. Carra set out a schedule of phases, fully costed and explained the route she wished to take. The first workshop was brilliant and I learnt the wonderful and spectacularly accurate term 'greenwashing', in essence waffling on about how green you are while doing nothing in reality. The actual outcome of the workshop was a very simplified approach that has worked well for us ever since and as we have progressed in our development in this area. More education planned for the team this year which will help us focus even more on the details that help to improve design within these parameters. I highly recommend!!"

Simon Clark, Managing Director & Co-Founder, Lumsden Design

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Supporting Services

Team coaching and consulting on live projects, factoring in overlooked perspectives, addressing risks, and course-correcting where required, so that progress is built on stakeholder insights throughout.

Individuals/Teams

→ Thinking, Planning & Capacity-Building

Targeted support to help individuals and teams reflect on current approaches, strengthen their foundations, and make outcomes more achievable and aligned:

Programme/Project-Based

→ Programme/Project Delivery Support

I help teams working on social, environmental and related economic challenges make sense of what’s needed to start positive conversations, and stay grounded in real-world context:

Theory into Practice

Research Approach

This human-centred research approach ultimately supports cross-sector communication and collaboration by enabling diverse stakeholders to communicate more effectively, surface and share values, and co-create solutions that are contextually grounded. It also provides a rigorous foundation for responsible innovation, entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship, ensuring that initiatives are informed by proven needs, local insights, social dynamics and shared meaning.The master table below represents my proven flow from theory into practice.Contact me for case studies →

Master Table

1. Guiding Philosophy: Human-Centred Design (HCD)

A problem-solving and innovation approach that puts people's needs, experiences, values and contexts at the heart of the research and design process. It combines empathy, creativity and iteration to develop solutions that are both meaningful to users and viable in the real world.

Next Steps

Research Planning

Exact combinations of activities and outputs, plus Evaluation methods, prospective Outcomes and Impacts are project-specific. These emerge from preliminary discussion and initial research.Contact me to discuss this approach →

Capacity-Building

Through one-to-one sessions, workshops, creative learning environments and self-led resources, I help people look at opportunities and obstacles from new angles, and apply fresh insights in ways that are engaging, evidence-informed and context-sensitive.

I’ve supported projects across global and local contexts in health, climate, enterprise, education and design, including anti-tobacco strategy and innovation with the World Health Organization, and community climate action initiatives with the UK Design Council. I’ve also worked with academics and creative enterprises to embed values-led innovation and futures literacy.

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Case Study

Reframing Smoking Cessation:

From risk to cultural relevance.

Smoking has long been sustained not just by access or addiction, but by meaning. For nearly a century, the tobacco industry has reinforced smoking as a social and cultural practice, using values-based marketing to appeal to deep psychological motivations.This indicates that - while global public health efforts have often focused on the risk-based messaging (e.g. health dangers) that have proven to evoke strong emotional responses - there is potential to explore those social and cultural drivers too.

My Role
As a strategic communication consultant to the WHO, I identified an untapped opportunity to expand the scope of cessation messaging from loss to meaning, using Social Practice Theory and Schwartz Theory of Values as a bridge between scientific facts and and behavioural and cultural insights.Approach
To identify the opportunity, I conducted a cross-analysis of:

I used Social Practice Theory to evaluate smoking and non-smoking behaviours as cultural practices shaped by knowledge, access, and meaning, then used Schwartz Values to map what meanings are missing from existing cessation messaging.

Research Approach

1. Guiding Philosophy: Human-Centred Design (HCD)

An approach to problem-solving that begins with understanding the people you’re strategising for, and involving them throughout the process to create solutions that are desirable, feasible and viable.

Table 1. Research Toolkit. This table encapsulates the overall case. For more details on each stage and specific application, email me.

Insight
96% of health warnings used loss-framed messages focused on Security (e.g. health risks). This analysis revealed an opportunity to strengthen cessation efforts by integrating untapped values like:

This insight aligns closely with the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) Articles 11 and 12, which emphasise the importance of culturally appropriate, innovative, and positive messaging strategies in tobacco control policy. By integrating values-based communication, this approach therefore supports and extends the policy goals of enhancing public awareness and driving social change across diverse populations.On this basis, I proposed this approach to form the foundation of a scalable, standardised model to craft evidence-informed, culture-specific cessation narratives, while maintaining global cohesion - setting the foundation for future capacity-building and collaboration among public health agencies and communications teams.Impact
This project contributed meaningfully to the WHO’s internal dialogue on values-based messaging, building on existing efforts by uncovering new opportunities to enhance behavioural impact in tobacco cessation communication.This case exemplifies my strength in translating complex academic theories into practical, actionable communication strategies, and my ability to apply connective thinking to bridge social psychology, cultural insights and public health. Ultimately, it reflects my commitment to advancing narrative approaches that contribute to stronger global health outcomes.

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Case Study

The World We Will Create

Inspiring Essex youth to co-create a climate-positive future by 2033.

This case study explores a design-led intervention to support Essex County Council and the Essex Climate Action Commission in engaging young people as co-creators of a student-led Climate Ambassador Network. Within the Design Council’s 'Design, differently' programme, we applied a combination of Design Thinking, Systems Thinking and Futures Thinking to support youth climate engagement action strategy in Essex.The process generated both strategic insights for the Climate Ambassador Network and replicable tools for wider community engagement. This case demonstrates how applied ethnography and design research can yield situated knowledge that is meaningful to both practice and theory.

Context
This project took place within the Design Council’s 2023 ‘Design, differently’ programme, where my colleague Darren Evans and I had been commissioned to introduce design thinking principles (among others) to councils and communities addressing local climate challenges across the UK.Challenge
In this particular project, we were supporting Essex County Council and the Essex Climate Action Commission (the project team) to test and strengthen their approach to developing a student-led Climate Ambassador Network. The project was stalling due to limited success in youth engagement across the region to date.Design Thinking
Design thinking is a process framework closely related to Human-Centred Design, a problem-solving and innovation approach that puts people's needs, experiences, values and contexts at the heart of the research and design process. It combines empathy, creativity and iteration to develop solutions that are both meaningful to users and viable in the real world.I summarise it quite simply: if you are designing something that involves, supports, or affects people, then - naturally - you will have been talking to those people. How else would you know what you need to design?This practical definition which aligns with constructionist and interpretivist epistemologies; that knowledge and meaning are co-produced with participants and shaped by their contexts.Research Approach
There can be a perceived disconnect between academic research and design research. Academic research often focuses on developing general theories and following structured methods, while design research tends to concentrate on iteratively addressing real-world problems in specific contexts. Rather than viewing these approaches as incompatible, I see an opportunity to design research processes that demonstrate both academic rigour and creative engagement from the outset, to keep things moving.This is the approach that Darren and I were positioned to provide, adopting a multi-paradigm approach that draws on:

This combination allowed us to create a research process that was grounded, responsive and rigorous, while also allowing space for creativity, reflection and participation - a hybrid approach that reflects growing trends in transdisciplinary research.

Research Approach

1. Guiding Philosophy: Human-Centred Design (HCD)

An approach to problem-solving that begins with understanding the people you’re strategising for, and involving them throughout the process to create solutions that are desirable, feasible and viable.

Table 1. Research Toolkit. This table encapsulates the overall case. For more details on each stage and specific application, email me.

Enquiry
Using Design Thinking and Systems Thinking as process frameworks, we supported the project team to explore the broader ecosystem influencing youth engagement in climate action.Stakeholder Mapping is both a system mapping tool and a data elicitation method, consistent with participatory systems thinking. Applying it identified the multiple actors involved - from students, teachers and headteachers to families and community members, spanning homes, schools, sports clubs etc across the county - highlighting the fragmentation of existing efforts, varying levels of climate anxiety among students, and the lack of clear, accessible entry points into cohesive climate action.Empathy Mapping then enabled reflection on the approach to date, with findings revealing that previous engagement efforts had leaned heavily on technical language and environmental data led by the council team, which indicated a critical barrier to effective youth engagement - especially in the context of a cost of living crisis.This revealed a gap between top-down climate initiatives and youth participation - a systems-level engagement challenge where 'meanings' or 'motivations' behind a shared goal are diverse and disconnected. This maps directly to value theory and critical design ethnography, exposing disconnects between institutional framings and lived experience.The project team developed a Knowledge Matrix to clarify knowns and unknowns and draft a Research Plan, with Value Theory and Value Analysis key methods to examine what actually resonated with students: their beliefs, emotions, and lived realities.Research Activities
To address unknowns, a co-creation workshop The World We Will Create was designed and delivered to a test sample of 15–18-year-olds and their teachers, alongside council staff. The workshop - functioning as both data generation and intervention - aimed to offer an interactive demonstration of Participatory Research, and applied a mix of Systems Thinking and Futures Thinking to encourage all participants to look beyond short-term crises toward longer-term collective aspirations.The session began with a visioning exercise based on an excerpt from The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac. Next, small groups used structured questions across three domains - Our Living World, Our Cities and Communities, and Our Working Life - exploring the 'meanings' and 'motivations' elements of the individual values and social norms that shape behaviours, as per Values Theory and Social Practice Theory. Participants also used Journalling techniques with creative prompts.Participants then engaged in Insight Clustering to connect ideas across domains, then visually expressed their visions through an exercise based on the Doughnut Economics Dream Spiral - a creative Mapping & Framing Tool rooted in individual values and imagination - culminating in a spiral of illustrated personal visions connected into one collective ethnographic artefact: a Journey Map toward a climate-positive Essex in 2033.Post-Workshop Analysis
Following the workshop, I applied Thematic Analysis to the collected artefacts and interpreted them into a set of ten participatory Narrative/Framing Statements, blending sensemaking and storytelling in a strategic framing format which articulated student hopes through a coherent, motivating lens.OutcomesThe ten emergent themes revealed how students connect direct and indirect climate action to their own lives and futures, revealing both individual motivations and collective visions:

A post-session questionnaire further revealed the five themes most resonant to the group sampled, reinforcing the participatory element of strategy development for Climate Ambassador Network communication.To extend the reach and local relevance beyond the sample, the workshop design was intentionally replicable. The project team was offered Workshop Facilitation Guides, allowing them to encourage their network of teachers to use the same methods to gather and share further data from across the county - a capacity-building outcome which is central to design justice and participatory research ethics.Conclusion
Rather than presenting a fixed solution, this work models a participatory design research process that generates insight with, not for, communities. It bridges institutional policy goals and youth voices using tools and thinking rooted in design ethnography, systems thinking, and values-based futures exploration.Overall, this case study offers a snapshot of how academic and design research might be intentionally aligned from the outset, grounding practical enquiry in robust theoretical frameworks, while retaining the creative and participatory strengths of design.

• Let’s talk to see which approach fits your needs

Project Support

I also help teams apply these skills over the longer term through tailored support:

Approach

I work with policy advisors, technical experts, educators, organisations and entrepreneurs working on strategies, initiatives or projects aimed at building more sustainable ways of working and living.In particular, I help them strengthen two interconnected capabilities that are key to building momentum and avoiding missteps - especially as this work involves engaging with people beyond their traditional frame of reference:

These capabilities are critical because today’s challenges are complex, cross-cutting, and often need more human than technical solutions. They require aligned stakeholders, adaptive mindsets, and the ability to turn learning into action - while engaging the right people, at the right time, in the right way.

Contact me to talk about what this might look like for you ↓

Article samples

Smoke Gets In Their Eyes: A brief history of tobacco industry interference in global public health efforts towards smoking prevention and cessation.

Outside the Box: Building strong foundations for social value and wellbeing into property development projects.

Talking on a Loop: Fairphone tackles e-waste with a smartphone we can fix.