Ned Gartside

Ned is the Sustainable Design Lead at the UK’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). In this role he focuses on developing the ‘ecosystem’ of guidance, tooling, governance process and training materials that teams need to design and operate services that are as environmentally and socially sustainable as possible. 

A service designer by background, Ned previously spent a few years at Defra working on a service that aimed to boost material reuse and recycling, combat waste crime, and enable the shift to a more circular economy. Before that, he worked as a designer in a startup or two before moving on to projects for bigger organisations via the agency and consultancy world. 

He is a big fan of a side project, and in the past these have focused on designing and testing an app to help arable farmers protect the health of their soil or helping scale a social enterprise for community agriculture. He is currently working with a university to design a semester-long project for postgraduate students focused on accelerating the move to a more circular economy in the city of Bristol.