At STBY, Sophie feels she has come full circle: after spending most of her career as a journalist, she’s now returning to the knowledge and methods she learned from her degree in anthropology. As a design researcher she is most interested in the mental and physical health impact of environment and everyday experiences.
Sophie moved to Amsterdam in 2015, after living in Tokyo for seven years. There she worked as a journalist for a Japanese newspaper and news wire Reuters before switching to design research. She has led a project at a think tank exploring how Japan’s built landscape is responding to social and demographic change, publishing the results in The Financial Times and three other publications. She has also conducted ethnographic research in Japan and Zimbabwe for design and strategy consultancy Studio D.
Sophie graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences with a BA in Social and Cultural Anthropology and speaks Japanese, Spanish, a smattering of Italian, and ever-improving Dutch.