Six months inside CrossSense, helping a small team turn an ambitious idea into something buildable, through co-design, feasibility work, and a lot of hard questions.
CrossSense is developing AI-powered assistive smart glasses for people living with early-stage dementia, launching in 2027. I joined for a six-month contract as Service Designer, working across a small, fast-moving team to bring structure to an early-stage, technically complex product.
My focus was on leading co-design research across two separately funded studies, a dyads study across Sheffield and Ipswich, and a study with participants living with ADD and depression in Nottingham. I converted the qualitative insights from this research into design recommendations, then translated these into wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes used directly within the community.
Working with people who would actually use the product wasn't a phase of the process, it was the process. Designing for early-stage dementia means designing for a huge range of lived experience, and it was critical that the people we were building for weren't just consulted once and left out of the room. I made sure the community's voice stayed present throughout, from early research through to the recommendations that reached the development team, so that what got built reflected real needs rather than assumptions made on their behalf.