Rio to London, the scenic route.

Currently heading the Design & Research function for BA's customer platforms, shifting the model from partner-led delivery to a senior in-house practice. The work is building the team, the research capabilities and the design standards a transformation of this scale demands.

I stepped up acting as Mobile Design Lead within BA's transformation programme, shaping the Travel Companion vision for the next-generation app and overseeing delivery partner designers across the mobile estate.

In parallel with BA, I taught on Falmouth University's MA User Experience Design programme, later stepping up as Lecturer and Deputy Course Leader across the UX and Indie Game Development master's programmes.

Fourteen years after checking in passengers, I join the Digital Product & Experience team at British Airways to design the digital version of that journey: consumer-facing, revenue-generating service flows across BA's estate, built with several agile squads and used by millions of customers.

Alongside industry work I led the part-time UX Design programme at BrainStation London, guiding cohorts of up to 12 career-changers through the full design process on hands-on, real-world briefs.

On Sky's Group OTT design team I developed UX concepts for NOW across European markets: cross-platform experiences spanning TV, mobile and web, inside a culture with exacting motion and brand standards.

At ENGINE I designed PizzaExpress's loyalty app for connected dining: a single journey threading booking, check-in, menu, redemption, payment and earning into the restaurant experience. Prototypes were validated through qualitative testing with target customers across the full dine-in flow.

Through the Outra Coisa studio I led discovery, research and product design for startups and global brands: Coca-Cola Brasil's digital hub, a stock research platform for fintech Aleeph, and Brazil's first voice-first education app, built with Descomplica and Google.

I joined the Air France–KLM cabin innovation team in Paris, ten years after checking in its passengers in Rio. I built the discovery frameworks that guided long-term experience work, including an experience matrix that teams across the group adopted to align concepts with macro consumer trends.

What began as a student project became La Cool Co. We built the world's first open-source DIY smart greenhouse kit, took it to 25 Maker Faires worldwide and earned coverage in WIRED, Vanity Fair and Le Figaro. Hardware, software, community and commerce, all on one steep learning curve with a 10-person team.

At Accenture Strategy's Paris Innovation Centre I designed immersive strategy workshops for C-level clients: bespoke playbooks, journey maps, trend reports and foresight films, all built to push executives past their default thinking.

As part of the Cockpit Operations R&T team at Airbus, I spent six months prototyping cockpit interfaces for an airport moving map: scenarios, wireframes and interactive prototypes tested with pilots, engineers and HMI specialists. The work contributed to a patent for optimised aircraft taxiing operations.

In 2011 I moved to Paris for ENSCI–Les Ateliers, completing four of the programme's five years before the work itself took over. La Cool Co. grew out of an atelier project, and the school's studio culture carried me into Airbus, Accenture Strategy and Air France–KLM.

I joined MJV's newly founded Design Thinking team on a FINEP-funded programme to design products and services for the visitors Brazil expected at the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics: innovation roadmaps, future scenarios and early-stage concepts for the tourist experience around the games. It was my first design job, and my first encounter with design as a strategic discipline rather than a deliverable.

I trained in Industrial Design at ESDI/UERJ in Rio, studying while working the check-in counter and then at MJV. Physical product thinking still shapes how I approach digital systems: everything ships into a context.

My first aviation job was not in design: I was a customer service representative for Air France and LATAM Airlines passengers at Rio de Janeiro/Galeão International airport. A year of customer interactions, delayed flights, irregular operations, lost luggage and face-to-face service recovery taught me what broken journeys cost people, long before I had the tools to fix them.

As a small child in Brazil I cut brands and logos out of magazine adverts to see how they were put together. Around the same time my father brought home a copy of Ícaro, Varig's inflight magazine, and design and aviation arrived in my life together. I took the second far enough to train as a private pilot at sixteen. One love became the work. The other never left.