MrIvor Williams

Ivor Williams is an Honorary Research Fellow with the Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI).

Prior to this he was Lead for End-of-Life Care at the IGHI and led the development of innovation projects that are used across the NHS including ReSPECT and Palliate, and co-founded their first spin-out, Digital Care Planning in 2017 with Matt Harrison. He was also Senior Design Associate at the Helix Centre, the innovation lab based at St Mary's Hospital.

As designer he works through all stages of the design process. Including discovery, design research and fundraising; design and prototyping with healthcare professionals, people and communities; product and service development with academic and clinical partners; scaling, sustaining through spin-out and commercialisation.

In 2018, he was named a ‘New Radical’ by Nesta and the Observer newspaper for ‘pioneering a human-centric approach to the experience of dying, bereavement and grief'

He is Visiting Lecturer on the Healthcare and Design MSc at Imperial College London, and was previously Visiting Professor of Information Design at the University of Venice from 2014–2016. In 2022, he completed his initial training to become an end-of-life doula with the accredited organisation, Living Well Dying Well.

He speaks regularly around the world and has presented keynotes at End Well, IxDA in the US; Human Understanding Design Centre in South Korea; DesignTO Festival in Canada; Domus Academy, Accademia delle Scienze di Medicina Palliativa, ISIA Urbino in Italy; the Festival of Curiosity and DotMed in Ireland; Graphic Design Festival Breda and Dutch Design Week in The Netherlands; European Health Care Design conference, the Royal Society of Medicine in the UK and presented at the Scottish and European Parliaments.

Along with a number of published articles, he is also co-author of a number of key reports including The Children’s Palliative Care Provider of the Future: A blueprint to spark scale and share innovation, with Jonty Roland, Gianluca Fontana, Laura Dale-Harris, Alexandra Shaw and Madeleine Lambert; and This Too Shall Pass: Collective Mourning in the Age of Covid-19, with Alex Evans and Casper ter Kuile.

Alongside his roles at Imperial College London, he is an entrepreneur and has previously co-founded a mental health start-up which developed the pioneering NHS-approved music therapy app, Cove. His ventures have been backed by Bethnal Green Ventures, NHS England and SBRI Healthcare. He is also an advisor for Zinc VC, and provides expert consultancy for a number of start-ups, charities and organisations in the private sector.