Find your path to a better Product, Service, Experience or Entire Organisation

Cognitive Ink provides Human Centred Design

Human Centred Design is a practical methodology to make better experiences by starting any project or program with real people’s needs. By starting with people, and testing ideas early, HCD avoids wasted time, money and attention. It avoids building the wrong thing, or building the right thing the wrong way. The goal is to deliver experiences that are safe, useful, usable, engaging, higher‑performing and valuable. And to tie those outcomes to clear measures like greater satisfaction, reduced errors, lower support costs and increased revenue.

Good HCD needs experienced guides. Cognitive Ink’s co‑founders each have twenty years’ research and design in multiple domains: finance, health, engineering, telecommunications, government and more. Our background in psychology, design, law, finance and business analysis means we have the skills to untangle the most complex experiences.

We offer rapid approaches to researching, mapping, designing and testing any experience, with defined deliverables so teams can make confident decisions and reduce risk. Our insights, coming from research with real people, are used to visualise how a future exceptional experience could work, and to map the workflows, data and rules that support its operation.

We give teams a prioritised roadmap of future-facing features, requirements, journeys and business models that can be used to guide detailed strategy, design, marketing and development.

That’s what it means to do Human Centred Design well.

Meet your guides, Christopher & Anna, twenty year veterans in HCD

Small-but-mighty, Christopher and Anna are the heart of Cognitive Ink. We assess, manage, and provide the core work on any project. When required, we scale via a hand-selected team.

Christopher is a Researcher, Experience and Service Designer. He focuses on people, their behaviour and context to create systems that work for people. He has a Masters in Psychology and a postgraduate Certificate in Human Factors. Prior to co-founding Cognitive Ink, he learned his craft with some of Australia’s first Usability and Experience Design (UX) companies in the early 2000s.

Anna, is a Business Analyst and Service Designer. She focuses on bringing business and technology together to create businesses that solve genuine problems for people, and to solve them well. She has a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Laws (business law), Master of Laws (Honours) (technology law) and Certifications in Business Analysis and Financial Analysis. Prior to co-founding Cognitive Ink, Anna held lead roles as a Business Analyst and Service Designer for Babcock & Brown and Macquarie Bank in the 2000s.

“You two are the king and queen of design research. It’s not just about your insights, it’s how you lift them up and bring them into the business. You never fail to astound me.”

~Maureen Thurston

Acting Director of Design Factory at Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Former Chief Experience Officer of Aurecon, and Chair Emeritus of Good Design Australia

Since 2013, we’ve designed useful, usable, valuable and award-winning products, services and experiences for clients across the world

Short Facts

2013: Cognitive Ink was founded to bring the best of social science, system analysis, business optimisation and experience design and physical / visual thinking to bear on solving problems. It’s in our name, we Think in Ink.

165+ Projects: across domains spanning built environment, financial services, manufacturing, healthcare and logistics.

70+ Clients: We’ve helped businesses and government-funded organisations, startups and established well-known names. Our clients have spanned the global, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, the UK and the US.

Award-winning: Key contributions to the transformational AMP Goals 360 program, which won several Good Design awards.