Bios

Suzanne Cleal: Social impact associate
Suzanne’s focus is on finding and working with organisations that want to have the biggest positive social impact possible. She is an experienced strategy consultant and business coach who works with businesses that are passionate about making a positive difference in the world.

She has previously worked in senior marketing roles at Lombard Direct and Reader’s Digest, and as a coach she has worked with individuals and leadership teams in social businesses and start-ups as well as in large corporate organisations.

She is accredited by the Association for Coaching and has an MBA (with distinction) from Kingston University. Suzanne works on a voluntary basis with students at the School for Social Entrepreneurs, loves travelling and mountain walking, and is learning Spanish.

Toby Hopwood: Communications consultant
Before this, he worked at The National Social Marketing Centre, taking a lead role in external communications projects and resource development. He worked closely with the NHS to build capacity and skills in social marketing and developed specialist knowledge in behaviour change techniques.

Keen for hands-on behaviour change and engagement project experience, he joined Uscreates on secondment in 2011. A skilled writer, Toby has written and edited a number of publications and articles on behaviour change and has worked as a press officer at the Department of Health. His also sits on the management committee of London Football Journeys, an innovative project to build social cohesion and engagement among London’s youth.

Robbie Bates: Junior designer
Robbie works for Uscreates as a freelancer, designing communication materials for various projects. Robbie did his BA in Graphic & Media Design at LCC, where he specialised in design and advertising for social causes. Since graduating he has worked with The Good Agency and Mindshare and during his studies mentored secondary school pupils for the Design Museum, and worked with Diabetes UK. Robbie is also developing work with The Big Issue and collaborating on a self initiated project with Frontera to develop an interactive documentary showcasing the lives of Cystic Fibrosis sufferers.

Phillippa Banister: Engagement associate
Phillippa has a passion for harnessing the power of communities to deliver social change.

Before joining Uscreates Phillippa completed a Masters in Sustainable development at Forum for the Future. Having worked in international development, homelessness, care work and for various start ups Phillippa is now keen to gain experience in public service design as an approach to tackling some of the world’s most challenging problems. In her spare time, Phillippa enjoys going on wwoofing adventures and singing in choirs.

Libby Scarlett: Researcher and designer
Libby Scarlett did an internship at Uscreates in early 2010, and now works freelance with the team a few days a week on various projects. She specialises in recruiting, researching, interviewing, leading focus groups, and creatively communicating ideas as well as coming up with innovative ways of engaging the public. Her background is in graphic arts, which she studied at the Manchester School of Art, graduating in 2009. She has since worked with Elle magazine and Droog, Amsterdam. She is also part of artist collective, Parlour Press.

Catherine Max: Policy, strategy and partnership
Catherine is a strategic consultant specialising in sustainable development, health and social care. She is independent sustainability advisor to the Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) for whom she leads a national Department of Health-funded programme investigating the practical and ethical implications of sustainable development approaches to care services.

Catherine is a non-executive director of the three primary care trusts in the NHS East London and the City Cluster (City & Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham), where she is board Design Champion and Chair of the Independent Funding Requests Appeals Panel. At a regional level, she chairs the London NHS Carbon Reduction Strategy Steering Group.

Joseph Harrington: Service designer
Joseph is a service design associate specialising in public sector work and social research. At Uscreates, Joseph leads our ethics programme; building a network of designers and academics and developing tools to support the ethical discourse in the design community. For the past few years, when he’s not at Uscreates, he has been leading the public sector work at Engine Service Design.

Joseph’s design focus is on promoting the significance of people’s experiences to better design sustainable and meaningful services and influencing the ways in which policy and strategy are developed in public sector organisations. He has a lot of experience in leading diverse social research projects with vulnerable and hard-to-reach groups and always aims to deliver a people-centred design methodology to inspire and transform at the service delivery, organisational, strategic and policy level.

Sheila Pontis: Information designer
Sheila is an information design consultant and researcher with over 9 years of experience. At Uscreates she works on various stages of projects, from creating campaign graphics and producing project reports to delivering high volume multi-channel design work. She advises in the process of creating information design projects from a wide range of complexities, such as information graphics, maps, visualisation tools, statistical graphics, magazine and book design.

Sheila is completing her PhD in Information Design at the London College of Communication (UAL), following a first class distinction MRes in Editorial Techniques at the University of Barcelona and a BA in Graphic Design and Visual Communications at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.