The Problem

According to the Health and Safety Executive (2018), depression and anxiety accounted for 49% of all sick days taken by employees between 2016 and 2017; equating to an annual loss of 12.5 million working days. Combined with costs associated with presenteeism and staff turnover, mental health amounts to an outgoing of £33 to £42 billion for employers every year (Stevenson & Farmer, 2017).

The Solution

The Coell online platform is designed to bring employees from SMEs together to follow and share their passions, creating connected wellness within the working community. Coell’s platform enables employees to:

• Start their own societies or join existing ones
• Attend society events and regain a sense of autonomy and fulfillment
• Reconnect with colleagues and the world while boosting the wellness of their team but also their motivation and productivity back in the workplace

The Journey

• For this project I collaborated with a Psychology with Innovation student.
• We started by validating the problem by performing desk research and interviewing employees and employers about their workplace experiences and their wellbeing status.
• We then compiled our insights from research into a proof of problem/opportunity report which helped us to analyse the root causes of the issues and determine a series of solutions.
• Testing these solutions with our stakeholders as well as with experts of the field, we arrived at a mixture of several ideas including the Coell digital platform for employees.
• We created an awareness campaign in the form of a video and website to test whether this iteration of the product would be desirable.
• Throughout this process, we advised other teams on how they could perform their product iteration steps and were advised by experts on how to move forwards with our processes.
• From feedback, we tweaked the final service to be more feasible for us as a startup and more desirable to the employees.

The Problem

As highlighted in the picture to the right, which shows one frame from the game ‘The Division 2’ (released in 2018), the cost of producing 3D assets for a variety of applications is large and growing. The games industry is growing rapidly, with 8.2% compound annual growth rate from 2016 to 2020.

The Solution

A piece of software that can synthesise and stylise new 3D assets, learning from the data which creative companies have stored in order to create new designs. Using techniques such as Generative Adversarial Networks and Transfer Learning, we believe this problem is solvable with a new kind of AI.

The Journey

• We began with secondary research into whether this was a desirable problem to solve, and whether it would be feasible for us to build.
• After interviewing a number of people, including AI specialists, game designers and companies of the field, we validated that this is an area worth exploring.
• Following our initial conversations, Aardman expressed an interest in collaborating with us on this project.
• We pitched the idea for a small amount of funding in the New Enterprise Competition and we won, passing to the next phase of the competition.
• We are now developing a solution to this problem alongside Aardman in an iterative way.
• Development with PyTorch and Tensorflow, using Google Colab and Azure.

The Problem

Watershed challenged the team with a brief for their Playable Cities project. The challenge was to create an installation that puts people and play at the heart of the city. From our client’s brief it was clear that the solution design should respond to the theme of winter gathering and our target users should be the everyday commuters.

The Solution

The goal for the Cairn People was to be in the intersection of art, society and technology. The idea of Cairn People involves a number of large-scale figures depicting everyday commuter poses, built from brightly coloured blocked that light up from the bottom to the top as the sum sets. They are centered around the theme of winter and its effect on our lives during the cold, dark months, bringing colour and light to various areas of Bristol in a playful experience. The project is a celebration of the everyday, and hopefully it will be something that inspires an excited people on their everyday journeys. We hope to create a little wonder in people’s lives, and, through this, to spark genuine human connection.

The Journey

• For this project I worked with a higly diverse, transdisciplinary team.
• We conducted early chalk-based drawing experiments set out to explore commuter interaction with novel installations. This provided them with an opportunity to play.
• We discovered that a lot of individuals did not want to be involved in something that seemed intrusive to them.
• More experiments in public routed showed us that the majority of commuters were naturally quite averse to actively participating in a physical manner with an installation.
• Then we asked ourselves “How might we engage commuters more?”.
• We constructed our final playtest prototype using LED balloons, plastic bags and string to give a low fidelity model.
• We tested our Cairn People in one of the locations we envisage it being placed, Castle Park.
• The Cairn Person attracted attention as early as he was being put up. Plenty of passers by stopped to take a picture on their way. Many seemed intrigued by the abstract nature of the prototype, stopping to work out what it represented which sparked conversations between people.
• The final stage of prototyping affirmed that our decision to make actual statues more abstract in shape and structure fostered engagement.

Mentor for Innovation and Enterprise

Over the last two years, I regularly mentored a global cohort of students in how to develop a growth mindset, learn from failure, how to network, how to develop lean business models, and how to ideate successfully.

This is part of my role as a mentor for the Bristol Futures Online Course, one of the university's flagship online programmes, which I have been with helping with from the start.

Mentor for Software Engineering

I have facilitated and mentored students designing web applications in how to solve the real needs of their clients.

I provided guidance on developing technical specifications, excelling in client relationships, performing unit and user testing and presenting and writing their final project.

Leading a Summer Camp

I organised and led an entire summer camp consisting of a hundred children and fifteen staff members.

I was responsible for giving to children and parents alike an overall excellent experience.

Being a Student Ambassador

I inspired potential university applicants to apply for our university’s Innovation degree while sharing my passion and enthusiasm about my studies.

Financial Advisory Intern

I acquired experience in the field of financial consulting and assessed various business plans for Deloitte’s customers.

Joined senior consultants in their meeting with the Bank of Cyprus.

Attended Deloitte’s financial model building training and conducted a number of financial modelling case studies.