Work
J. Paul Neeley / A selection of projects and concepts
Unfocused Focus
I evolve and shift and combine my focus from in-house work to consultancy to start-up to side project work over time based on my energy and opportunities to create impact. Here is a small selection of the work I've done.
I don't define my design practice in a singular way, but I generally think of my work in the understanding and design of systems, processes, organizations, experiences, complexity, looking at multiple interactions overtime, and working in both immediate and future time frames.
I don't define my design practice in a singular way, but I generally think of my work in the understanding and design of systems, processes, organizations, experiences, complexity, looking at multiple interactions overtime, and working in both immediate and future time frames.
Threads
I work across multiple domains, and have expertise and experience in healthcare, happiness, wellbeing, emerging technology, systems, complexity, mobility, climate, and AI.
As a consultant a large set of my work is behind NDA's and I'm unable to share it publicly, but I hope these public projects give a representative hint of the spaces I like to explore and work in.
I'm addicted to solving complex problems and finding elegant solutions.
As a consultant a large set of my work is behind NDA's and I'm unable to share it publicly, but I hope these public projects give a representative hint of the spaces I like to explore and work in.
I'm addicted to solving complex problems and finding elegant solutions.
A moonshot factory within Telefonica exploring the future of digital healthcare and wellbeing. The factory's most notable spin-out, Koa Health, secured over €14 million in initial funding to build personalised digital mental health solutions, now reaching over 250,000 users.
Telefonica Alpha
2018 - 2019
Telefonica Alpha / Royal College of Art
A speculative design project exploring the intersection of data, spirituality, and ritual. The work examines how our relationship with personal data might evolve to take on qualities of devotion, confession, and faith.
Data Prayers
2010
Neeley
An experimental design school dedicated to the professional application of emerging methods like speculative design, critical design, and applied futures to innovation, research, and strategy. With over 15 years of experience, it offers courses and workshops helping individuals and organisations use futures thinking to meet the critical challenges facing people, planet, and business.
School of Critical Design
2016 - Present
Neeley
A course at London Business School introducing MBA and executive education students to design thinking, speculative design, and innovation methods. The programme bridges the gap between business strategy and design practice, equipping future leaders with tools for navigating complexity and uncertainty.
Design Led Innovation
2020 - Present
London Business School
A design provocation addressing the climate crisis through "declarations of context" — public acknowledgements that frame personal and organisational activities within the reality of climate breakdown. The project challenges individuals and organisations to make visible declarations of their power and responsibility in the face of climate change.
Climate Studio
2018 - Present
Neeley
An open-source tool that puts websites to sleep at bedtime, encouraging users to go to bed and addressing the global health crisis of sleep debt. Built on the principle of "universal responsibility" — the idea that technology creators must take responsibility for all outcomes of their creations, including the wellbeing of their users.
Night Night Everyone
2016
Neeley
A provocation exploring the cognitive value of sleep by invoicing a client for design work completed during a lucid dream. Backed by WHOOP biometric data showing 100% sleep performance, the project challenges assumptions about when and where productive thinking occurs, and asks what it would mean to recognise and compensate the creative labour that happens while we sleep.
Dream Work
2024
Neeley
A set of seven principles and emerging practices for designing in a complex, computationally irreducible world, where considering anything less than everything means missing something. NKD provides a philosophical and practical framework advocating for approaches like "consider everything" and "universal responsibility" that underpin much of the work across the portfolio.
New Kind of Design
2011 - Present
Neeley
A collaborative knowledge project aiming to map all the arguments and opinions in the world — doing for opinions what Wikipedia has done for facts. Built as a tool for civil discourse, it catalogues the variety of human opinion across thousands of questions in calm, descriptive, dispassionate language.
Encyclopedia of Opinion
2020 - Present
Jadala
A psychographic assessment tool that maps personality, values, and meta-thinking across 48 dimensions, developed over two years with 60+ world experts from institutions including Oxford, Cambridge, NYU, and the University of Pennsylvania. Unlike traditional personality tests, it combines three dimensions into a single comprehensive profile to reveal why people believe what they believe.
Opinion DNA
2020 - Present
Jadala
A decade-long role as tutor and lecturer in Service Design at the Royal College of Art, shaping the next generation of service designers. The position involved teaching design research, speculative design, and systems thinking to postgraduate students across multiple cohorts.
RCA Service Design
2012 - 2022
Royal College of Art
A project exploring the relationship between objects, their representations, and the systems of meaning we construct around them. Inspired by Magritte's famous painting, the work examines how design can challenge our assumptions about reality and representation.
This is NOT a pipe
2009 - 2010
Neeley
A speculative design project created during an MA at the Royal College of Art that imagines a future corporation acting as steward of the Earth's intellectual property. The project explores the social, political, and economic implications of emerging synthetic biology by envisioning a business that administers the planet's genetic catalogue and protects biodiversity against commercial exploitation.
Gaia Corporation
2010
Neeley / RCA
A self-discovery engine and civil discourse platform co-founded with Turi Munthe. Built around Opinion DNA, the platform maps personality, values, and meta-thinking across 48 dimensions, seeking to understand what drives human opinions and polarisation, with the goal of radically improving communication and understanding in the world.
Parlia
2020 - Present
Jadala
A company using advanced design techniques to reimagine every part of the world for happiness, originating as a speculative design project at the Royal College of Art. The practice explores what the world would look like if everything were optimised not for profit or growth, but for happiness, offering tools and courses for personal, organisational, and civic happiness design.
Masamichi Souzou
2011 - Present
Neeley
A metaphorical search engine that returned results conceptually and metaphorically related to a user's query rather than the most popular results, designed to encourage creative thinking and avoid the filter bubble. Co-founded with Daniel Foster-Smith while students at the Royal College of Art, it was featured in WIRED, The Observer, the New York Times, and New Scientist, and described as "the metaphorical Google."
Yossarian
2011 - 2019
Yossarian Lives
A co-founded venture pioneering a sustainable, non-toxic, carbon-negative alternative to Medium Density Fibreboard (MDF). Decarbonite's innovative composite fabrication panels offer the construction and furniture industries a material that sequesters carbon rather than releasing it.
Decarbonite
2024 - 2026
Decarbonite
A design fiction exploring a near-future startup that sells "human scripts" — downloadable behaviours made possible by advances in neuroscience, optogenetics, and nanotechnology that allow information to be written directly to the brain. Users could run a dishwashing script on their body while reading literature, or download a tennis forehand and watch their fingers perform a concerto. Featured in WIRED's Design Fiction series by Bruce Sterling.
Mimic
2010
Neeley / T-Mobile Creation Center Berlin
An ongoing research and design programme exploring the science and practice of happiness optimisation. The work investigates how design thinking can be applied to personal wellbeing, organisational culture, and civic life, drawing on positive psychology, complexity theory, and systems thinking.
Optimizing Happiness
2010 - Present
Masamichi Souzou
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