A short personal history
Düsseldorf to Amsterdam, by way of São Paulo and London.
Now · Amsterdam
Communication design in Düsseldorf, finished in São Paulo on a journeyman year — my first lesson in what a good question can open up.
Amsterdam, then London, then Amsterdam again, where I lead a blended team. The hard part of digital work is getting people with different pictures in their heads to build the same thing. For the last eighteen months the material has been AI, and the question is the same size: what has to be true before an organisation can adopt, trust and govern it. The long version, with photographs, is below ↓ — or start with what it produced.
A Diploma at Master level in Communication Design in Düsseldorf, focused on corporate design and user experience. I graduated with distinction — and with questions the craft alone could not answer: how do people, products, and systems fit together?
Following the old German journeyman tradition — the Walz, where trainees leave home to work among strangers and return changed — I closed my studies in São Paulo, art-directing campaigns at AlmapBBDO in 2006.
My graduation project: six months interviewing forty-two creative people across advertising, design, street art, and social projects, bound into a 432-page book — my first long-form research, and my first lesson in what a good question can gather around itself.
At Mediamatic and Mattmo in Amsterdam I designed complex digital products — among them a self-publishing platform connecting artists across Africa and Asia.
I worked with teams split between Amsterdam and Shanghai. It taught me early where the hard part of digital work sits: getting people with different pictures in their heads to build the same thing.
The 2012 Global Service Jam introduced me to service design: the whole service, backstage and front, with the interface as its last ten minutes. It also moved facilitation to the centre of my practice — designing the conversation as carefully as the artefact.
Inside London product teams and enterprise transformation, I learned to take the separate pictures leadership, technology, and delivery each carry and pull them into one everyone can see — and challenge.
A twelve-week MVP across London and San Francisco taught me to earn trust through small, safe experiments. Scaling a bank's onboarding from three days to five seconds, and one team to more than 150 people across six offices, taught me to grow what works without losing coherence or culture.
I took a Business Design MBA (d.MBA) to think in value models, governance, and adoption, and a REFORGE programme in Digital Product Management to stay close to how modern product teams operate — alongside service-design and prototyping certifications. The work keeps changing, and I would rather update my toolkit than defend it.
As Product Director I ran the product practice — hiring and coaching designers, data scientists and product managers — and took the FutureNHS and apparel work from first conversation to signed team.
With the rest of the leadership team, I wrote the playbooks that describe how we run the business — how we hire, promote, and position the organisation. Writing down how a company works is humbling: it forces you to say what you believe, in a way a team can hold you to.
Seven years as Course Director at Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm and five teaching Creative Problem Solving at King's College London. Teaching is how I test whether I understand something; I still sit on Berghs' International Advisory Board. The full account is on the practice page.
Three of them, none of it quite planned. After a decade, we traded double-deckers for bakfietsen and moved to the Netherlands, our second time in the country and the first as a family of five.
I lead a multidisciplinary team here — business design, product, UX, engineering — guiding a large mobility provider through its transformation toward integrated sales and service. For the past 18 months the work has been AI, hands on, and the interesting questions are practical: how it behaves, where it helps, and what has to be true before an organisation can adopt, trust, and govern it.
My AI Sandbox is where client questions get stress-tested: what an opportunity requires, where a concept breaks, and what has to be true before it becomes a product, service, or programme of work. Field notes from summits and hackathons feed it; what survives feeds the practice.
A coffee, a meetup, a conversation — and you leave with an idea that reshapes the work. Most of what I know arrived this way: someone was generous with their thinking, and later I could be generous with mine.
Twenty years, four countries, one habit: getting people with different pictures in their heads to build the same thing. If that is your habit too, let’s compare notes.