Designer working at the intersection of service design, care ethics, and graphic communication. Interested in where design meets public institutions and what happens when it asks harder questions.
Get in touchI'm a designer from Dublin, based in Copenhagen, currently studying MSc Service Systems Design.
I'm drawn to the places public systems fall short: the unforeseen circumstances, the people at the edges, the things that get designed around rather than for. Care, accessibility, and moral seriousness matter to me as much as the craft.
MSc Service Systems Design
Aalborg University Copenhagen
Collaborating with PitchDrop
This Same World, 2025-26
Seeking internship placement
Service design, public sector, Sep 2026
Making volunteer participation visible, flexible, and human for a member-run Copenhagen food cooperative.
KBHFF veg collection day - Osterbro pickup point
KBHFF is a member-run food cooperative with strong values and committed members, and an onboarding system that was quietly failing younger people.
Volunteering was understood almost entirely as fixed pick-up shift work. Other ways of contributing were invisible. For younger people balancing study, work, and unpredictable schedules, this created a wall, not from lack of motivation, but lack of visible, flexible pathways.
The project explored how onboarding could be redesigned to make skills-based contribution more accessible, without destroying the informal, human ethos that made KBHFF worth joining.
KBHFF Onboarding Service, system map, v.04 2026
Understanding the system from the inside
Desk research, field observation, a survey, an Instagram takeover, and in-depth interviews with current members and young people who had considered joining but did not. A motivational workshop surfaced what drew people to the cooperative, and where the experience broke down.
From insight to design challenge
Stakeholder mapping, metaphor workshops, and lotus blossom ideation. Core insight: the problem was not lack of motivation, it was lack of visibility. Members could not see how to contribute beyond scheduled shifts.
Three rounds of prototype testing
From early sketches through three prototype iterations, testing clarity, structure, and tone at each stage. Each round sharpened the onboarding survey, role structure, and communication flows between new members and coordinators.
A coordinating service, not a prescriptive pathway
A redesigned onboarding survey, three new lightweight coordination roles - Onboarding Coordinator, Pick-up Lead, Workgroup Lead, and a matching system built on tools KBHFF already uses. Structure without rigidity.
Three rounds of testing, from early sketches to refined flow
A coordinating infrastructure, not a rigid system
The solution reframes onboarding as a routing service, matching people to what fits their skills and availability. The cooperative's informal ethos is preserved, not replaced.
Three new lightweight coordination roles
The Onboarding Coordinator, Pick-up Lead, and Workgroup Lead guide new members from digital signup into real community participation without adding overhead.
Validated direction, ready for real-world testing
Three prototype iterations refined the survey, matching logic, and communication flows. The clear next step is testing with actual KBHFF members in a live operational context.
Led qualitative interviews with members of cooperatives, community gardens, and volunteering organisations across Copenhagen. Responsible for synthesising findings into actionable insights and identifying the core tension between motivation and structural visibility.
Designed the coordination layer at the heart of the solution, the three new roles and their communication flows. Contributed to the service blueprint and the logic of the onboarding survey, translating research findings into a system that could actually be built.
Facilitated team workshops including the motivational workshop and metaphor sessions. Contributed to stakeholder mapping and the iterative prototype testing process, bridging the research and design phases and ensuring the project stayed grounded in the cooperative's actual values and constraints.
What I'd do differently. Prototype testing was limited to design students, people who navigate complex systems intuitively. Testing with actual KBHFF members and coordinators would have revealed friction we could not see from inside a university context.
I'd also push harder on the governance question: who owns these new roles long-term, and how does the cooperative sustain the coordination layer without it becoming a burden? The design works structurally but sustainability depends on organisational buy-in we did not fully test.
One intervention in a ten-year backcasting project - using feminist design and care ethics to move IKEA Vesterbro from data extraction toward genuine community membership by 2036.
IKEA Vesterbro, architectural render showing the urban format store and community gardens
IKEA Family is not a loyalty programme. It is a data extraction system dressed in the language of community and care. VARD is one step in a long project to make that visible - and then to change it.
IKEA opened its Vesterbro store in Copenhagen as part of a new urban retail strategy: smaller, city-centre, closer to where people actually live. The move is framed as a shift toward community. But the underlying data logic of IKEA Family remains unchanged: members exchange personal data for discounts, without meaningful understanding of what they are giving up or why.
This project starts from a simple provocation: what would it look like if IKEA Vesterbro genuinely committed to the community it claims to serve? Getting there requires a series of design interventions that progressively shift the balance of power. VARD is the first of them.
VARD sits at rungs 2-3 on Arnstein's ladder, the first intervention in a backcasting sequence from manipulation to citizen control by 2036.
Through a futures workshop and research into IKEA Vesterbro's urban positioning, the project developed a speculative end state for 2036: a community steering model in which IKEA acts not as a retailer extracting value from Vesterbro, but as a resource accountable to the neighbourhood it occupies. Members hold genuine decision-making power over how the store operates, what it stocks, and how community spaces are used.
IKEA Vesterbro's urban format, city-centre, smaller-scale, positioned as community-facing, creates a legible gap between its rhetoric and the reality of its data practices. That gap is the site of the project.
Sherry Arnstein's Ladder of Citizen Participation (1969) describes eight rungs from manipulation to citizen control. IKEA Family sits at rung 1. The loyalty programme presents data collection as mutual benefit, but the terms of exchange are set entirely by IKEA, and the appearance of value obscures a significant transfer of power.
Backcasting from the 2036 horizon means asking: what sequence of interventions could plausibly move this structure up the ladder, rung by rung? VARD is the answer to what rungs 2 and 3 look like.
Coercion made visible
IKEA Family presents data extraction as care. VÅRD is designed to name that gap directly, not as critique from outside, but as a tool that operates within the system and tells the truth about it.
Agency, not just clarity
Understanding without the ability to act is not care. VÅRD is designed so that every interaction leaves the member more capable of acting on their own behalf than when they arrived.
A step, not a solution
VÅRD does not resolve the contradiction between data extraction and community membership. Its job is to make the next rung imaginable, and the current position harder to sustain unchallenged.
VARD prototype demo, conversational AI data transparency interface, 2026
Therapy
Arnstein rung 2
Arnstein describes therapy as the rung where institutions acknowledge a problem exists but channel that acknowledgement back into managing member behaviour rather than changing their own. VÅRD breaks this pattern. It surfaces the actual logic of the system: what is collected, how it is used, and what the member's data is worth to IKEA.
Informing
Arnstein rung 3
VÅRD is designed around Joan Tronto's care ethics framework, attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness, to provide information that is genuinely useful. A member can ask what IKEA knows about them and get honest answers rather than managed ones.
Care Ethics
Feminist design lens
Care ethics reframes the design problem entirely. Instead of asking how do we display data clearly, it asks what does it mean to genuinely care about this person's relationship to their own data. A care-centred system that cannot counsel a member to share less data is not actually care-centred.
Led the iterative development of the VÅRD prototype across multiple rounds, from early conversational logic sketches through to the working AI interface. Each iteration tested a different aspect of how care ethics could be operationalised as actual interaction design rather than just framing.
Conducted the theoretical research grounding the project in feminist design practice and care ethics, specifically Tronto's framework, more-than-human design, and participatory approaches. Responsible for translating this into a methodology the group could work with practically, not just cite academically.
Developed materials and facilitated sessions to make care ethics, Arnstein's ladder, and feminist design legible across the group - building a shared vocabulary for the design decisions.
The unresolved tension. A care-centred transparency tool that genuinely works might lead members to share less data, opt out of tracking, or reconsider membership entirely. A system that cannot say those things without being overridden by the commercial context is not operating at rung 3 - it is still at rung 1, just with better design.
The Vesterbro context sharpens this rather than softening it. IKEA's move into the city centre is itself a claim about community. That claim creates an obligation - a legible gap between rhetoric and practice, that the project is designed to make visible and then to close, step by step across a ten-year horizon.