Our work

We help you make things people want, rather than make people want things

We have worked with over 90 clients on hundreds of projects since we started in 2011.

Below you will find a short descriptions of some of our most recent and favourite work. If you are interested in finding out about our work with other clients, which might align with your business or particular issue, please get in touch.

“John is a truly inspiring person to learn from and to partner with. Always insightful, creative and generous with his thinking, ideas and delivery, he was instrumental in the marketing capabilities work we delivered for Unilever (2021/22) and a true partner in terms of ideating around the future of work, future skills and marketing innovation. He is entirely unpretentious and pragmatic, whilst always stretching and challenging your assumptions and perspectives in the most motivating way. A thoroughly enjoyable and effective, impactful partnership.”

Jo Royce

Unilever

“I’ve found that if you have half an idea that you are excited about – John probably has the other half. He has a generous imagination earthed in an intellectual rigour that makes him a rare bird. I have benefited from his eclectic frame of reference and uncanny ability to make generative connections between people, ideas, genres. Working with John feels like play – why isn’t all work like that?”

Tracey Camilleri

Thompson Harrison

“Working with John is great. Not only do you get to experience his creative process, you also get exposure to the kaleidoscopic ecosystem that is Artefact Cards, Cardstock (all things cards), his amazingly insightful blogs and inspirational talks, and his network of other great craftspeople. I have learnt a lot. His easy manner and way with people, makes working with him a pleasure. He creates insightful outputs, with great passion and care, that inspired and influenced our stakeholders and allies.”

Jim Maltby

Principal Scientist, Dstl (MOD)

“We love working with John; he is an awesome source of brilliant ideas and endless energy in our creative process.”

Thomas Moradpour

The Glenmorangie Company

“John is an excellent team player. He is very knowledgeable and experienced in the fields of strategic design, innovation, and futures thinking. A collegial colleague, John is full of ideas always presented with a very positive mindset. He pushes the group towards positive outcomes, with a diverse professional experience that enhanced our team’s perspectives”

Vanessa Howe-Jones

United Nations Development Programme

“Working with Smithery has been a brilliant adventure for my entire team. They are not afraid of a challenge and their creativity and passion have opened our minds up to more innovative ways of working by helping to shape our thinking, actions and behaviours. Their work has helped us to create the culture of change we’ve needed to continue on our path of growth.”

Julie Doleman

Experian

“John is the single most creatively fertile person I have met in the last five years”

Adam Morgan

Eat Big Fish

“Over the past four years John has supported our senior tutors by leading design and futures workshops, helped with career development for our students, provided expertise in a strategic capacity, and helped us reflect on our research approaches and practices. John is exceptionally trusted and has been invited back to the RCA Design Products programme on countless occasions. His professional approach, thought provoking expertise and outputs are still very welcome for the future.”

Dr Robert Phillips

Royal College of Art

FAQs

What sort of clients do you work with?

We are experts in exploring the edges for emergent practices, and we thrive in the liminal spaces between departments and disciplines, roles and responsibilities. This means we typically work across existing teams, or with those empowered to explore future-facing strategy. Our experience is much broader than most as a result. Recently, we have been:

Helping an Intergovernmental Organisation build out a Future Trends and Signals System
Shaping a strategy around learning capability for a large multinational FMCG
Creating a strategic customer-service framework for a housing association
Designing online micro-network services for government innovation
Working with a fast-growing dating start-up with their future business strategy

We have also worked with clients across the following sectors:

Financial services companies

Media corporations

Interior designers

Global and local charities

Technology giants

Government science groups

University leadership teams

Legal firms

Global brewing companies

Toy manufacturers

Professional bodies

National and local museums

You can read more about our client work here.

How do you typically work?

We like to start small.

Designing quick, creative research discovery sprints helps us understand what makes your problems unique, or what we’ve seen before.

We then want to support our clients by helping them build skills and knowledge internally which will help them thrive. We will recommend bringing some of our collaborators network, but prefer to build the skills of your own team.

What sort of projects are you interested in?

We are fairly agnostic to the type of project that a client brings us, or indeed the sector it comes from – what matters most is that the people involved are truly up for exploring broadly and imagining wildly.

Currently we are particularly interested in clients who are looking to explore what a regenerative future would look like for their organisation. What does it mean for your organisation to contribute to the healthiest environment, with the greatest economy, for all in society?

How could we explore a potential partnership?

Talking about a thing is the best way to start.

After an informal conversation we can arrange a deeper discussion with others in your organisation, as long as we agree that there is something interesting to explore.

Get in touch with us here.

UNDP

Developing a Future Trends and Signals System

Since Autumn 2022, we have been working with the Strategy and Futures team from the Executive Office of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to develop the Future Trends and Signals System (FTSS).

Alongside our regular collaborators and friends Changeist, we have been conducting research, running workshops, designing prototypes, building communities of practice and evaluating progress of the FTSS so far.

This work has been a privilege to be involved in; the FTSS is an important development that will help move UNDP to become a more anticipatory organisation in these challenging times.

Wellcome Trust

Scouting the emerging Climate and Health intersection

In 2023, we began work with the Climate & Health team at Wellcome Trust in a variety of different ways as they researched how climate emergency impacting the health of communities around the world, including adaptation and mitigation measures.

From facilitating reflections on how research funding can be improved in future, to building out frameworks for ongoing use by the team as they support community-led initiatives, we are committed to increasing the capacity and capabilities of the Wellcome Trust as they take on this vital work.

Unilever

Setting a strategy for building capabilities

Working with the team leading Unilever’s in-house academy, we worked during in 2021-22 to start shaping different ways of understanding and evaluating what was in place already, before helping structure a strategy to careful consider who and would be important in developing new skills.

Crucially, developing a systemic framework to categorise and prioritise initiatives became essential for a cross-disciplinary team in making major strides forward.

The Royal Society

Making Time Capsules from the Future

We were invited by The Royal Society to create a session for their fellowship of leading academics that demonstrated how design fiction could play a role in decision-making around policy.

We created the Time Capsule Retrieval Service, a fictional new department in The Royal Society that could reach forward into different future scenarios and find time capsules, which communities in that future had assembled to represent their lives.

We then asked the fellows what they felt these time capsules said about each future scenario, and what it should mean for setting policy for The Royal Society today.