Strong Design

— a book in the making

about designing culture, capability, and community

About the book

To digitally transform your organisation, you need to change culture — technology alone doesn’t make the difference. Designing culture through forming communities and building capability is vital to driving transformation in the right way.

Clara Greo, Kara Kane and Martin Jordan spent the last 7 years building a culture of design in UK government. Learn how they scaled design, built community and capability and enabled a design mindset that ultimately helped make better, more equitable services for users.

They scaled and led the UK government user-centred design community which attracts and retains designers, fosters a culture of inclusion and enables people to collaborate on complex problems.

The book is coming in 2024.

About the authors

We are designers who worked together to build, support and grow the cross-government user-centred design (UCD) community in the UK, based out of the Government Digital Service.

Before that, we worked in consultancies, start-ups and global tech companies and various sectors, including finance, health, media, telecommunications, education, and the third sector. We have worked across 4 continents.

We tried many things, learnt many things and want to create a place to keep these conversations going.


Clara Greo is a designer and researcher who has been working in the industry for over 15 years. She has done a lot of work in building capability through training and community-based education. She is determined to bring equity and justice into public sector digital transformation. She’s Australian, an immigrant, a part-time worker and a parent.

Kara Kane is a designer and community builder whose expertise is in building design culture in large scale organisations. She managed the UK’s user-centred design community and co-founded the International Design in Government community bringing together design-minded public servants from over 70 countries.

Martin Jordan is a designer, connector and maker. For the last decade, communities have been at the centre of his work – whether it’s while co-creating international conference series, making newspapers, or documenting digital service transformation and building service design capability in the UK government.

Get in touch

We’d love you to talk to us about anything to do with strong design and shaping culture, capability, and community.