Who I am
Start with learning, not the furniture.
I am a geography educator who ended up designing learning experiences. I work on how space, technology, and pedagogy come together to shape what learners actually do — and most of what I believe runs against a common assumption: that flexible furniture or new hardware produces learning on its own. It does not. Rooms and systems teach whether or not anyone designed them to.
How I got here
I trained as a geography educator. It remains the most useful thing about me: geography teaches you to read a place, and to treat terrain, scale, and interdependence as causes rather than background.
I taught for 10 years, served as a Head of Department, and got involved in most facets of running a secondary school. The part I still miss is the students — being in a room with them while they work something out. Somewhere in that stretch I was schooled in design thinking, and it opened onto a set of questions I have not been able to put down since: self-direction, student agency, making, intentional play.
Since then I have crafted curriculum resources and shaped curriculum implementation at the Geography Unit, and I now work on the user experience of the Singapore Student Learning Space at the Educational Technology Division.
Read in order, those roles are a move across scales — one class, then one school, then one subject across every school, then one national platform. The question has not changed much. Only the size of the room.
How I work
Five commitments
01
Start with learning, not the furniture
Design begins with educational intent, activity, and interaction — not layouts, products, or platforms.
02
Make complexity legible
Diagrams over decoration. If a framework cannot be drawn, it is probably not yet a framework.
03
Novelty is not evidence
Immersion, interactivity, and AI are chosen for the learning action they enable, never for presence or newness.
04
Design for translation
Research is unfinished until it becomes a principle, a tool, and then a changed practice. The last step is the hard one.
05
Play seriously
The games I return to have deep structure and short rules. They are the cleanest lesson available in how constraint produces thought.
Now
What I am working on now
A stale "now" is worse than none. Last updated August 2026.
User experience design. Making a national learning platform legible and workable for the people who have to live in it daily.
Learning space design. How space, participation, tools, and routines support the forms of learning actually intended. Read more
Interactive digital technologies. What learners do inside an interactive system — how they act, get feedback, and build explanations. Read more
A toolkit for educational innovation. Bringing futuring, complexity, and ways of thinking together into something coherent enough to hand to a school team. This is the thread I am most interested in. Read more
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