About Jamie
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” Pablo Picasso
Jamie works where design, systems thinking, and enterprise meet, helping people, communities, and organisations step out of old patterns and into new possibilities.
His practice is collapse aware. He works knowing that the tools, stories, and systems we have built over centuries have shaped us as much as we have shaped them, and that the consequences of those designs are now compounding. Modernity is fracturing.
We are at the end of an era, facing the degenerative and divisive outcomes of our collective designs, and the stakes could not be higher. The economic engines that hold our social fabrics together and the planetary ecosystems that give us everything we need to survive are collapsing under the strain of human design.
His work is about exploring the design of design itself, seeing life as one interconnected whole rather than a collection of separate parts. Humans are not the center. Transformation emerges when we pay attention to how we relate to each other and to the communities and ecosystems we inhabit. In that process gifts reveal themselves, the ideas, capacities, and ways of being that can emerge when the old no longer holds us back.
At the heart of his practice is reciprocity. Every conversation, collaboration, and project is a mutual exchange. Giving and receiving, holding space for someone and being held in return, creates the conditions for something new to emerge. His work is participatory and co-creative. It asks us to step into new spaces with open hands, open minds, and open hearts. We cannot build the new with old tools, old stories, or old ways of being. Part of the practice is helping each other let go of what no longer serves us so that fresh ways of working, relating, and imagining can take shape. In creating new contexts, we shape them, and they shape us back, revealing gifts we may not have known we had.
Regenerative enterprise design for Jamie goes far beyond sustainability or impact. Every container, collaboration, and experiment becomes a living moment of resilience, interconnected impact, and emergent futures. It transforms mechanistic, transactional ways of working into life-affirming, relational ways of being, creating shared learning, reciprocity, and hope. It is about giving gifts back to the world in the face of the monsters we meet at the end of modernity.
My Story
I reached a point where moving through modernity no longer made sense to me. In truth, I’m not sure it ever did. The promise of a livable future felt absent, and the place I was being asked to inhabit, despite its insistence, never felt right. Not a place I failed to fit into, but perhaps a place we were never meant to fit into at all.
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To move forward, I had to let that idea go. I had to grieve for it. Only then could I begin to imagine and build ways of living beyond it. Hope returned when I remembered that, in my most authentic state of being, I am good at holding space with others, spaces where possibility can be felt, explored, and shaped collectively. That is where the real work begins. From this way of being and seeing, the prospect of viable futures re-emerged.
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My childhood was oriented around world-building. I invited others into co-creation, holding speculative space to build imagined worlds together. This was how I played, how I related, how I made sense of being alive with others. Alongside this, I sought freedom in the natural world, often drawing people with me into places that felt less constrained and more alive. It was simply my way of being, and others understood it instinctively. Participation flowed naturally.
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Then, as we grew older, that participation was no longer welcome. The house of modernity asked us to leave this way of being behind. Despite the pressures, I continued to practice in these ways throughout my adult life. It is what I know. It is where my value lies. I learned to mask it at times to survive, to avoid marginalisation, but I never stopped practising. I learned instead to conceal it behind words, posture, passion, and generosity.
I found refuge in disciplines that could still hold this way of working: speculative design, alternative world-building, start-up and social enterprise creation, emergence, and place-based design, prototyping possibilities in the places I feel most connected to. Over time, I came to understand this as a gift, freely shared, rarely reciprocated or fully understood. A generative offering that asks nothing in an extractive paradigm that takes all it can.
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Working in this way, I have become a practised holder of wisdom at the edges, developing ways of being and seeing that help others notice and begin to participate in world-building once more. I describe this place as being a Child of the Strandline: a liminal space I inhabited confidently as a child, mirroring our collective condition as young inhabitants of Earth. Not masters of it, but its youngest kin. The strandline is the meeting place of two forces that shaped me and the place I feel most indigenous: one whole and living, the other synthetic and designed. To be a Child of the Strandline is to remain in relationship with both, without collapsing one into the other, and without claiming mastery over either.
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With modernity pushed to its breaking point, more people will remember how to participate, or find themselves with no choice but to. In this moment, I have begun to recognise how vital this gift of holding space to imagine and build new worlds has become and, more importantly, how to protect it, to secure it, to ensure the containers of new possible futures remain grounded. While it may feel as though we are encountering only the monsters at the end of modernity, an equal and opposite truth is emerging. This is a time of transformation. Despite the uncertainty, I sense I am exactly where I need to be, and all that is missing will come.
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For now, this work remains a gift few know how to notice or receive. Yet, for the first time in a long time, I feel hopeful about the future and ready to begin unmasking more fully.
