About
I got into this work sideways. I studied library and information management because my sister said it wouldn't close any doors — and somewhere in that degree, in the early days of the internet and search engines and thinking about how people find information, something clicked.
I ended up at the BBC cataloguing radio programmes, and then managing the archives for 6 Music, which had its perks. But I knew I wanted to be on the creative, building side of things rather than the filing side. I'd started teaching myself web design in my own time, built a site for an artist I knew, and found I loved it. So when a woman came to talk to my team about her work as an information architect, content models, component relationships, how everything fits together. I tracked her down afterwards. She was about to leave. Did I want her job?
That's more or less how my career has gone ever since. Curiosity, conversation, and finding a way in.
What I love about this work, and I'm aware not everyone feels this way, is the foundations. The structure. The part where you have to understand how everything fits together before you can make any of it better. Other designers sometimes find that stuff dry. I find it fascinating. I can sit with complexity, hold the detail and the bigger picture at the same time, and work out where things connect and where they don't.
That same instinct shows up everywhere in my life. I taught myself to renovate my house, took off radiators, rehung doors, laid floors, because I wanted to know how it worked and I knew I could figure it out. I do escape rooms and murder mysteries for fun. I recently finished a part time master's in cybercrime and digital investigation, just because I found it interesting.
I care just as much about the people doing the work as I do about the work itself. I've managed and mentored designers who doubted themselves and watched them find their stride. I've rebuilt team culture after redundancy gutted a team. A new starter once told me at their first team social that they'd never seen anything like it. That kind of thing matters to me more than I can really explain.​​