Ned Gartside

Ned is a service designer at the UK’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, where he spends half his time working on the design of a new UK-wide digital waste-tracking service, which aspires to boost material reuse and recycling, combat waste crime, and enable the shift to a more circular economy.

The other half of his time, he spends leading work on developing principles and frameworks for ‘Greener Services,’ which aim to empower multi-disciplinary teams to design and deliver more sustainable outcomes. This effort has received support from across government and is part of a suite of collaborative efforts that also includes work being done on the crucial question of measuring the environmental footprints of services end-to-end, as well as developing training for all of the roles involved in delivering those services.

Ned used to work in the educational field, but after ‘discovering’ UX design, he was lucky enough to get a job at a startup or two before moving on to bigger service projects in the agency and consultancy world. A longstanding lover of the natural world, he also had a side project focused on using satellite data to help farmers boost the health of their soil, through which he won a place on a UCL-run startup accelerator programme.