Humanly

This week we’re celebrating our 9th birthday! As we enter our 10th year, we’re working on projects in England, Scotland, Wales and the U.S. - spanning community healthcare, careers support, special educational needs and disabilities, charitable giving, and more. As a small studio focused entirely on social impact projects, we’re proud to have made it this far, and we look forward to what’s still to come! Thanks to everyone who has supported us along the way, it means the world to us!

We’re delighted to share a new publication in CoDesign: International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts (Taylor & Francis), co-authored with an incredible group of collaborators. ‘Co-designing the future of respiratory healthcare’ documents @asthmaandlunguk and Humanly’s innovation accelerator designed with people living with lung conditions - involving them in shaping decisions, evaluating technologies, interpreting findings and influencing outcomes. A huge amount of care, trust-building and learning sits behind this work, and we’re really proud of what it represents for how we approach co-design at Humanly. Massive thanks to our co-authors Erika Kennington, Ian Jarrold, Naomi Bennett-Steele, KA McKercher, Rupert Tebb, and lived experience co-authors Juber Ahmed, Fiona C. Olsen and Neshat Hamidi, as well as everyone who contributed their time, expertise and lived experience to this work. We hope people find this useful and would love to hear your reflections! 🔗 Link in bio

Delighted to bring home a Highly Commended award from The Innovation Awards on Friday! 🏆 Humanly was recognised in the Innovation Thought Leader of the Year (Organisation) category, and it was a real honour to accept this award. We’re genuinely thrilled to see social innovation and inclusive design getting this kind of spotlight. A huge thank you to everyone who cheered us on and took the time to vote in the early rounds. Your support means a lot to us!!

Yesterday we were visited at our studio by the wonderful Bridget Hawryluk who is doing amazing work at Research Jam (part of the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute)! We first spoke to the Research Jam team earlier this year, after they came across the ‘Big Plans’ toolkit developed by Humanly for Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) to support the meaningful involvement of people with learning disabilities in developing their social care plans. After a couple of conversations about how they might approach their own engagement sessions with people with learning disabilities, they adapted our ‘Mini Me’ method to fit their healthcare research project. We absolutely loved seeing the beautiful tools and templates they designed, and hearing about how well they worked in action! Through their thoughtful, creative and inclusive approach they were able to co-create ways for people with learning disabilities to communicate their physical and mental health needs to professionals. We love these types of knowledge exchanges and collaborations across continents and contexts! Thanks to the Research Jam team for respectfully adapting our methods and for sharing your beautiful templates with us. We hope to use them in a project soon!

The DAFPAK programme in Pakistan, which aims to increase access to quality family planning services, is the largest-scale project we at Humanly have ever contributed to. A multi-agency collaboration led by M&C Saatchi World Services has to date helped avert: 👉 7.11 million unintended pregnancies 👉 2.31 million unsafe abortions 👉 5,412 maternal deaths We’re proud to have played a small part, designing inclusive research approaches and training a national team of researchers at Icarus Incorporated in human-centred design. Full case study on our website!

Last week we ran a session on participant and practitioner safety at the Service Design in Government conference in Edinburgh. We shared some of our own practices around this, from safeguarding to wellbeing practices, before opening up the discussion. The conversations that ensued were really rich, and we really appreciated people sharing their experiences and approaching the discussion from a place of non-judgemental collaboration and collective learning. We’re keen to keep the conversation going - if this is a topic of interest to you, feel free to get in touch! #SDinGov

Last month we ran a 5-day deep dive into human-centred design for fellows on the @amillionrealities programme, an ambitious initiative aimed at creating large-scale social change. 🚀 Together, we explored challenges, co-created ideas with young people, and built early prototypes to kick-start the next phase of solution development. It was a pleasure to be part of their journey, and we’re excited to see how their ideas evolve into solutions that measurably improve the transition from childhood to adulthood. Big thanks to @unlocuk for hosting us at your fantastic Changemaker Studios and connecting us with your brilliant network of young people 🙌

We're delighted to announce that Humanly has made it to the finals for the #InnovationAwards! 🏆 We’re up for the ‘Innovation Thought Leader - Organisation’ award, AND our very own @ali_fawkes is a finalist for ‘Innovation Thought Leader - Individual’! Thank you SO much to everyone who took the time to vote for us in the last stage, we couldn’t have made it to the final round without your support. The next step is for us to head to Birmingham to attend an interview with the judging panel in September, before the winners are announced at the awards ceremony in November. Keep your fingers crossed for us! 🤞

✨ Exciting news! ✨ I’m thrilled to share that Humanly and I have been named as finalists in the Innovation Awards 2025 in the categories of: Innovation Thought Leader – Individual Innovation Thought Leader – Organisation It’s such an honour to be recognised for the work we do to make innovation more inclusive, creative and human-centred. A huge thank you to everyone who voted, supported, collaborated, and believed in our work. 💛 Your encouragement means the world to us. #InnovationAwards2025 #IA2025 #InnovationThoughtLeader #Humanly #HumanCentredDesign #SocialInnovation #InclusiveDesign #Finalists

✨ Exciting news - we’ve been shortlisted in *three* categories at the #InnovationAwards2025! ✨ It would mean the world to us if you could take a moment to vote for us by visiting /voting (link also in bio!) and selecting the following 3 options: ✅ Innovation Thought Leader - Organisation: Vote for Humanly ✅ Innovation Thought Leader - Individual: Vote for @ali_fawkes ✅ Technology Innovation Champion: Vote for Humanly Your support will help us reach the final 5 in our categories. Thanks so much!

Humanly is 8! 🎂 We’ve had a great 8th year, here are a few of our highlights: 🎉 Applying co-design and mobile ethnography to transform lung health innovations with @asthmaandlunguk @breathmentapp 🎉 Co-presenting at #SDinGov with a co-designer with lived experience 🎉 Working with @beyondstickynotes to deliver training on ‘Co-designing with Care’ in London for the second year running 🎉 Running more creative workshops with young people in Scotland and seeing their ideas launched in the new @mywowscotland website 🎉 Being invited by @anjalidance to share our work with people with learning disabilities at their Culture for Change event Looking forward to seeing what the year ahead brings!

As we come to the end of a busy year, we’d like to wish all of our collaborators, partners, friends and extended Humanly family a very Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year when it comes. Thank you to everyone who has supported us this year. We look forward to catching up in 2025! [Animation description: A Christmas present wrapped in colourful paper that changes between yellow, red and blue. Text says ‘Happy Holidays from Humanly!’ with the Humanly logo.]