tangerine appoints Geraint Edwards as Chief Growth Officer

tangerine appoints Geraint Edwards as Chief Growth Officer to build on the consultancy’s international credentials in service and experience design and grow the business in new and existing sectors.

Geraint began his career as an intern at global design consultancy IDEO, before going on to lead some of the company’s largest programmes of work including, envisioning human behaviour in a kitchen of the future for IKEA and redesigning the care home experience for relatives for Care UK.

His experience in healthcare took him to work at BUPA as their Global Design Director in their newly constructed Customer Lab. It was there that Geraint championed a human centred design process across the organisation’s key markets, shifting from reactive to proactive and predictive care, in bringing the business closer to the needs of their customers through a range of digital experiences. Two years later, The Collective, a leading co-living business start-up, enticed Geraint to join them to help them to build-out a broader customer experience.

Today, it is design consultancy tangerine that Geraint chooses for his next step.

“I believe that at tangerine I can really add value to their collaborative design processes and introduce service design methodologies to support innovation across their diverse sector experience,” says Geraint. “Ten years at IDEO and then gaining an acute understanding of the challenges of ‘doing innovation’ within a 80,000 person organisation, before working with a start-up near to the beginning of their journey, has given me a wealth of experience working with different types of organisations and the ability to empathise with clients’ distinct challenges.”

“tangerine chose Geraint as much as he chose us”, says tangerine CEO and Founder Martin Darbyshire,

Indeed, it is the shared IDEO DNA that was influential in the partnership. Martin ‘cut his teeth’ in the early 1980’s with Moggridge Associates in London and ID TWO in San Francisco before IDEO was formed and tangerine was born.

“Geraint’s product design training coupled with his understanding of service and experience design fits well with tangerine’s capabilities. Increasingly we are asked by our clients to look further and dig deeper. It is not about asking a lot of questions but about asking the right questions to gain an insight into what the right approach can be that will unearth new opportunities and create new value for our clients.”

On this point, both designers agree. According to Geraint, “Great insight can produce great design, lazy insight work will only produce lazy outcomes”.

It is perhaps his understanding and observation of working for Care UK and BUPA that will kick-start Geraint’s career at tangerine, as the studio pushes ahead with start-up Bluebell to bring their InTouch Elderly Care device into the market. Designed in the early period of the Covid-19 London lockdown, InTouch is a wearable device that monitors breathing, temperature, falls and sleep, with real-time alerts that are AI enabled to a remote setting.

A project close to Martin’s heart, early BETA trials of InTouch at a care charity in the UK, have shown efficacy.

“Geraint will bring his expertise of delivering insights, data, both physical and digital experiences and service design together to enable tangerine to deliver a compelling proposition. Bluebell InTouch has the potential to transform lives, and Geraint will be a part of that.”