Strategic Design Consultant & Systems Thinker

Returning to Pomegranate Media in a fractional capacity, I lead the creative vision and experience strategy for a practice whose focus is transcending functional utility to create meaningful, behaviour-led connections that drive measurable commercial impact. The collaboration brings together creatives, UX designers, marketing specialists, developers, project managers, and behavioural science experts under a shared philosophy: that the best outcomes come from integrating deep human insight with world-class design and emerging technology. This role extends the work of LdF Strategic Design into a collaborative agency context, applying the same diagnostic rigour to client engagements at scale.

Urbina Consulting operates from a clear and distinctive mission: to help organisations have the kind of relationships with people that people have with each other. As Senior Design and Brand Strategist, I partner with leadership teams to close the distance between business goals and the actual customer experience. The work is grounded in the Live Journey Canvas, a framework for making operational friction visible and removing it systematically. The practice is product-independent and international, focused on journey-centred, omnichannel content strategy. It is a natural extension of the diagnostic and architectural work I do through LdF Strategic Design.

As UX Manager at IKEA Marketing and Communication, my focus was to ensure that commercial decisions were grounded in verifiable customer behaviour rather than internal assumption. My team supported content creation with actionable insights that combined IKEA brand, proposition, and tone of voice with laser-sharp research to find and address customer journey gaps, both from a customer and business point of view.

Strategic UX Research Framework
• Established a rigorous six-stage research model to ideate and deliver communication for marketing automation (Triggered Content).
• Replaced generic thematic briefs with validated behavioural insights.
• Prevented resource waste on ineffective campaigns by identifying critical pre-purchase triggers.

Digital Content Strategy
• Led the data-driven validation of major new content formats for IKEA.com, including comparison tools and video guides.
• Delivered strategic recommendations to the Web Channel Team and creative functions.
• Ensured new content formats were optimised for user engagement, confidence, and commercial impact.

Content Types Research
• Investigated three critical new content types: How-to Guides, Range Comparison tools, and Interior Design Tips.
• Provided evidence base for content investment decisions.
• Identified that 78% of users engaging with comparison tools showed increased purchase confidence.

Email Marketing Research
• Conducted in-depth analysis of customer responses to promotional and lifecycle email campaigns.
• Identified optimal timing, content types, and personalisation approaches.
• Recommendations adopted by the global email marketing team.

Within the broader IKEA business, I contributed to the personalisation workgroup: a cross-organisation initiative devoted to defining and refining IKEA's approach to personalised customer experiences, from data and ethical considerations to the definition of shared frameworks supporting content strategy, ideation, production, and delivery.

Brought into IKEA on the strength of an unusual combination of skills: Interior and Industrial Design, Digital Creative Direction, and CX/UX strategy. The role was designed to bridge two functions that had historically operated in parallel rather than in dialogue. Leading an in-house team of 36 interior designers while coordinating 50+ freelancers, the work touched every major global content initiative: new product launches, seasonal campaigns, and the broader shift toward evidence-driven creative planning.

During the 2019 reorganisation, I embraced a dual role, split equally between Creative Management and Interior Design Leadership, at a pivotal moment in IKEA's transformation from a print-dominated global publisher to a digital-first omnichannel organisation.

The Marketing Automation Programme had plateaued in franchisee adoption because its content delivery model was too complex for international markets to implement reliably. By restructuring it through a UX-led framework, simplifying the package and clarifying the customer journey logic behind each content trigger, franchisee adoption grew by 30%.

The Speed Up Excellence programme, co-designed and launched in 2022, fast-tracked leadership capabilities among 30+ top-performing creatives.

The most lasting contribution of this period was a prototype for a centralised knowledge tool, a system for capturing and distributing creative intelligence across the function, which was handed to the Digital team for integration.

Speed Up Excellence Initiative
• Co-designed and delivered an 18-month capability-building programme for 30+ creatives.
• Introduced Design Thinking methodologies and human-centred design principles.
• Created a new generation of leaders capable of applying consumer behaviour insights.

Communication Transformation
• Led the strategic shift from trend-based inspiration to evidence-driven engagement.
• Implemented data-informed creative processes across the global function.
• Measurably increased engagement through customer behaviour analysis.

Global Creative Leadership
• Managed international team across multiple markets.
• Established consistent creative standards while respecting local market needs.
• Built a mentorship programme for emerging creative talent.

Pomegranate was where the strategic design methodology that now underpins LdF took its first fully operational form. Joining an agency with strong creative instincts but limited strategic architecture, I set about building both. The Emotional Ignition™ methodology, developed in partnership with Oxford University, fused emotional branding with customer experience design, giving the agency a proprietary and defensible way of working. The results compounded. For Bimuno, we designed a digital trial assistant that increased conversion by 70%, grew recurring subscriptions by 150%, and reduced churn by 30%. For Jacks of London, the work involved consolidating three separate digital touchpoints into a single brand experience, contributing directly to the company winning Best Male Grooming Salon of the Year in both 2017 and 2018. Agency revenue grew by 40% over the tenure. The model shifted from project-based pitching to strategic consultancy. That shift set the template for how I now structure LdF engagements.

The Brand Union engagement was, in scale, the most ambitious project of that period. Leading 3D design direction for Dubailand: a 278km² entertainment destination requiring a brand strategy to become a physical reality. The work was not decoration. It was spatial translation: taking a 2D brand architecture and expressing it as a coherent system of landmarks, wayfinding, street furniture, and environmental graphics across a territory the size of a small city. The discipline required here is the same one developed at EDK through public infrastructure and at DA2 through product and exhibit design. At Dubailand, it operated at its largest scale.

Six months at Foster + Partners was an encounter with precision at an entirely different register. The practice operates at a level of detailing and material intelligence that sharpens whatever you bring to it. The Cathay Pacific brief required luxury interior concepts where brand expression and operational logic had to coexist without friction: every surface, fitting, and spatial sequence had to feel effortless to the traveller while being manufacturable and maintainable at scale. The Beijing competition entry added a different kind of complexity: designing at urban scale for a market with its own material and cultural logic. The period reinforced a conviction built since EDK: that the quality of an interior is inseparable from the quality of its strategic brief.

This was the first encounter with Pomegranate: a seven-month full-time engagement that laid the groundwork for the much longer return six years later. The work was direct and hands-on: creative direction, identity projects, digital campaigns. What became clear in this period was both the agency's creative ambition and the absence of a strategic framework to scale it. That observation sat dormant through the DA2 years and the London self-employed period, and was finally acted on when I returned in 2013 with the mandate to build one.

My years in Rome, and the experience with EDK, had given me an intimate view of how most companies related to design: a totally fragmented approach. They hired a graphic designer for the logo, an architect for the office, a product engineer for the object, and a photographer for the catalogue. Each one worked in isolation. Rarely there was a direction. The result, almost without exception, was a corporate identity that contradicted itself at every touchpoint. A mark that had little to do with the product. A space that had nothing to do with either. A website that looked like it belonged to a third company entirely.

The deeper problem was conceptual. Design had become largely synonymous with styling and the diktat of professionals who cared more about their name in the press than providing real design solutions. I held a different position. A designer is not an artist imposing a personal aesthetic onto a willing brief. A designer is a problem-reader: part psychologist, part engineer, part sociologist, part strategist. The identity or object that emerges from good design is not the designer's signature. It is the clearest possible statement of what a company is and who it is for. Styling is the answer before the question has been asked. Design begins with the question.

I co-founded DA2 in Cesena in March 2003, and it was built around a single structural premise: brand, product, spatial design and communication are not separate disciplines, but different registers of the same strategic conversation. A trademark is a sign. A product is a sign. A showroom is a sign. A catalogue is a sign. They all operate within the same semiotic system, and if they are not designed in conscious relation to each other, they will contradict each other, quietly and expensively. The customer reads the contradiction even when they cannot articulate it.

The name carried the thesis. DA2 is a mathematical formula: compact, logical, pointing to two founders and to something doubled, amplified, greater than the sum of its parts. We chose it deliberately against the Italian design studio convention of the founder's name in italics. We were not a signature practice. We were a methodology.

That methodology was organised around a distinction we considered foundational: strategy versus tactics. Without a governing strategy, tactics are fragments: individually well-executed but collectively incoherent. Our role was to hold the strategy and then design the tactics in relationship to each other, so that the whole communicated with a coherence no single element could achieve alone. Strategic design, as we used the term, was the wise orchestration of all the assets a company has available. An operation of semiotic engineering: elegant in principle, complex in execution, with results that compound over time in ways that tactical design never does.

The clients who grasped this gave us the work that still defines how I think. Ghisamestieri, Confartigianato, Caffè Nannini, MiiAmo, Orogel, and many more. Our work was covered across archimagazine, arch'it, dexigner, arquitectura en linea. Not because we pursued exposure, but because the thinking was visible in the output. DA2 ran until 2007. Rome had already started to feel too tight for my need of exploration. I was ready to go and learn from the Masters in London.

I co-founded EDK in Rome, September 1997, together with three engineers, around a proposition that was, at the time, more intuition than market reality: that architecture, engineering, and design were not separate professions requiring separate studios, but a single discipline that had been artificially divided by academic tradition and professional convenience. At that time, in Italy, this was a genuinely unusual proposition. The professions were siloed by training, by law, and by a cultural assumption that specialism was the mark of seriousness. We built EDK against that assumption.

The practice operated across integrated spatial design, structural engineering, MEP Engineering (Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing), product design, and graphic communication. Not as a menu of services, but as different expressions of the same underlying method. We wanted to provide a full service, from strategy to building, and the intellectual benchmarks were precise: Minale & Tattersfield for eclectic rigour and technical precision. Ove Arup for the conviction that senior intelligence must be directly present on every project, regardless of scale. Piano, Rogers, and Foster for the insistence that form is earned through thinking, not applied as finish. Little did I know at that time that the great admiration I had for these Design Giants would become the engine behind my future life choices.

What distinguished EDK was the habit of approaching every commission as a systems problem before it became a design problem. Our work tended to exceed the client's brief, not through scope creep, but through that particular quality of attention to the gap between what a client asked for and what they actually needed.

We loved to pay our taxes. We had all our software licensed. All our team had a regular contract. We thought quality would be the only way forward, but competition was playing another game. Rome started to feel inadequate and driven mostly by nepotism and politics. In 2003, I relocated to Cesena and founded DA2, carrying the same integrated methodology into a new context.