Designing for profit | Designing for prizes | Designing for users
Designing for People & Planet
makes me feel like a Super•hu•man

Who am I?

Hi, I'm Daniel!

A strategic design leader with a diverse skill set within service design, research, and innovation management. Hi there to all generalists!

I excel at leveraging design to drive impactful change and foster innovative and sustainable solutions across various sectors and businesses, whether B2B, B2C, G2G, or G2C. By adopting both planet and people-driven approaches, I deliver value that respects our planet and expand beyond human-centred design.

Let's innovate, design, and succeed together.

What do I do?

Drawing from years of experience in design, research and digital transformation. Here's how I typically work with clients to ensure impactful and sustainable outcomes:
  • 1. Discover
    • Deep dive: I collaborate with key stakeholders to gain a thorough understanding of their context and challenges;
    • Insight Gathering: I apply mixed methods to conduct design research to uncover key insights and opportunities.
  • 2. Define
    • Co-Create: Together with stakeholders I redefine the challenge based on gathered insights, generating innovative solutions;
    • Strategise: I develop a targeted action plan addressing core issues and aligning with organisational goals and strategy.
  • 3. Deliver
    • Implement: Execute the strategy adjusting the methodology and tools, working closely with stakeholders to deliver value efficiently.
    • Optimise: Continuously measure and refine approaches to ensure lasting impact and success.

What's my skill set?

Evidenced by my extensive and diverse experience in designing and improving value propositions across products, services, and organisations within both public and private sectors, my core skill set* includes:

  • People & Planet-Centered Design

    Creating product and services that are effective and sustainable, aligning with organisational goals while prioritising both human needs and environmental responsibility.

  • Strategic Foresight and Advisory

    Combining future-thinking with expertise guidance to shape future scenarios and provide strategic recommendations to design services that meet evolving customer needs

  • System Thinking

    Applying holistic approaches to understand and optimise complex systems, ensuring that service solutions are both effective and sustainable.

  • Innovation and Change Management

    Leading digital transformation initiatives and innovation projects, continuously improving processes and services.

  • Organisational Design & cross-functional collab

    Aligning organisational capabilities and processes with strategic goals, while enabling cross-functional initiatives to enhance performance and collaboration among diverse teams.

  • Agile Transformation

    Implementing agile practices to improve processes and culture and embrace both flexibility and responsiveness, enabling teams to deliver value quickly and efficiently.

Selected work

Here are some of my most impactful projects, showcasing my expertise across various sectors. Each project highlights the value delivered and the positive change achieved.
For some projects, specific details are not disclosed due to Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDA).

  • Usability and UX Assessment: Public Employment Portal

    Role: Design and Research Lead
    Org.: LabX / AMA
    Client: Employment and Professional Training Institute (IEFP)
    Overview: Lead the usability and UX assessments to enhance the user experience of the public employment portal, named IEFP Online, focusing on interface design and accessibility. It involved applying mixed research methods to understand the needs and pain points of users, combined with an heuristic analysis to identify key areas of improvement, which fed directly to the portal's development backlog.
    Impact: The portal became more intuitive and user-friendly, making it easier for citizens to navigate and access employment services. Some of the metrics of the improvements led to a 75% increase in access from mobile devices, a 36% increase in applications for professional internships, a 49% increase in the number of new users, and a 25% reduction in dropout rates.
    References:
    1

  • An AI-Augmented Design Practice

    Role: Lead B2B Service Design & Customer Experience
    Org.: AUTODOC
    Overview: Building a design practice where AI does the connective work between research and delivery. This includes internal tools that turn static design artefacts into working ones – a live blueprint tracker that keeps cross-functional requirements visible across six delivery domains, and a discovery-to-delivery engine that translates upstream research into backlog-ready epics and stories. It also includes AI agents applied to causal systems analysis: mapping adoption drivers, feedback loops, and subsystem interdependencies from field research to inform product strategy decisions.
    Impact: Reduced the meaning lost between discovery and development, and gave a small team the leverage to work at a scale usually requiring a much larger one. My working conviction: as AI accelerates execution, design's job becomes keeping the product coherent.
    References: NDA protected
    2

  • Designing the B2B Service Backbone

    Role: Lead B2B Service Design & Customer Experience
    Org.: AUTODOC
    Overview: Leading service design and research for AUTODOC's B2B business, defining the end-to-end service vision for delay management, warranty, and returns — customer journeys, service blueprints, cross-functional flows, and the requirement sets that product and engineering teams build from. Alongside this, I led a root-cause analysis of pan-European customer feedback, synthesising recurring pain points into a core-needs framework co-created with Business, Product, Tech, Marketing, Operations, and Support. The framework gives cross-functional teams a shared, evidence-based language for prioritising the B2B improvement portfolio.
    Impact: Moved prioritisation conversations from anecdote to evidence, giving teams across six functions one agreed view of customer friction and a repeatable method for translating feedback into portfolio decisions.
    References: NDA protected
    3

  • Smart City Blueprint: HCD for Urban Innovation

    Role: Design Lead
    Org.: FutureEverything
    Client: Partner organisations from the UK
    Overview: Led the design and implementation of the Smart City Blueprint, using the city of Manchester as a testing bed, integrating Human-Centred Design (HCD) principles to address urban challenges and improve citizen experiences, in partnership with a cohort made by public authorities, universities and leading tech companies, developing innovative solutions that not only address immediate needs but also consider long-term environmental and societal sustainability.
    Impact: Developed innovative solutions for urban infrastructure and services, enhancing overall city functionality and citizen engagement.
    References:
    4

  • Transforming the One Stop Shops for Public Services

    Role: Senior Service Designer
    Org.: LabX / AMA
    Client: One Stop Shops
    Overview: Designed initiatives that had a transformative role in enhancing the "Loja de Cidadão", Portugal's one-stop shop for public services, by embedding innovation and human-centred design into their operations. Through co-creation sessions and participatory design processes, my team and I have engaged a wide range of stakeholders, including public officials, citizens, and businesses, to identify and address real needs. This has led to the development of more accessible, inclusive, and efficient public services.
    Impact: Significantly impacted the efficiency and user experience of Loja de Cidadão services through this innovative and user-centred approach, being by engaging citizens directly to identify and address key pain points in service delivery or by the redesign of processes to be more intuitive and accessible, or implementating solutions that streamline operations and reduced wait times. Our interventions have made Loja de Cidadão services more efficient, user-friendly, and aligned with the needs of the public
    References:
    5

  • Cross-Sector Innovation for User Engagement

    Role: Design Lead
    Org.: FutureEvertyhing
    Client: Partner organisations from the UK and EU
    Overview: GROW Observatory is a citizen-driven observatory project which aimed at empowering individuals and entire communities to take action on soil and climate issues across Europe and was named. I've facilitated multidisciplinary collaborations, bringing together artists, technologists, and other stakeholders to co-create innovative solutions.
    Impact: Promoted community involvement in environmental monitoring and provided actionable insights, fostering sustainable practices and empowered farmer and food-growing communities to improve soil quality using low-cost sensors, an app, and satellite data.
    References:
    6

  • Changing the Face of Public Sector Innovation

    Role: Design and Facilitation Lead
    Org.: LabX / AMA
    Client: Multiple
    Overview: LabX created a Network of Innovators, which is a community of practice with ~700 members from public administration. Within this community, I designed the framework, program and innovation governance model to apply to the Network of Experimentation Labs and dozens of Public Servants within the Portuguese public sector. This network aimed to foster a culture of experimentation and innovation across various government departments.
    I also led and contributed to the practice infrastructure behind the network — toolboxes, playbooks, and a guide for the (re)design and evaluation of public services — published by LabX and freely available to public bodies across Portugal.
    Impact: Established a collaborative ecosystem and platform for public sector innovation, enabling the sharing of best practices and facilitating the development of innovative public services.
    Fostering a culture of innovation within the public sector. It has empowered over 10,000 citizens and 2,250 public servants through training and collaborative projects, resulting in improved service delivery and enhanced capacity for ongoing innovation.
    References:
    7

  • Living Lab for Real-World testing and iteration

    Role: Senior Service Designer
    Org.: LabX / AMA
    Client: One Stop Shops
    Overview: Designed the concept of "Public Service as a Living Lab" to transform public services in Portugal. This approach involved using real-world environments to experiment, test, and refine public services in collaboration with citizens and public officials. The program operates in two phases: the first phase involves ethnographic research and co-creation sessions to identify user needs and pain points, while the second phase focuses on prototyping and testing solutions based on real-time feedback. This living lab environment fosters collaboration among citizens, public servants, and stakeholders, challenging traditional bureaucratic processes and encouraging innovative thinking.
    Impact: Tangible improvements in service delivery, redesigning processes that became more intuitive and efficient, enhancing the overall service experience. Additionally, the program has instilled a culture of continuous improvement and HCD thinking within public administration, empowering public servants to seek innovative solutions actively reducing the risks associated with public sector innovation, and leading to more effective outcomes.
    References:
    8

Organisations I've worked with

Both as an employee and independent, and as an individual contributor or within teams, I have had the privilege of collaborating with a diverse range of organisations, driving impactful change and fostering innovation across multiple sectors. Here are some of the key organisation, clients and partners we've worked with:
(Non-exhaustive list)
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