Laith Wallace

Laith leads design and digital at Urban Insight Collective. He is responsible for how evidence reaches the people who have to use it: the platforms, interactive outputs and reporting tools we build for partners.

He has spent fourteen years building product design functions and design systems across fintech, streaming and B2B software. He built the Discovery+ design system from the ground up and scaled it to 22 million subscribers, leading twelve designers across London, New York, California and Singapore. The part that matters here is what he built into it: a component library, a contribution model, and governance that let distributed teams ship without going through him. He builds things other people can run. That is the same problem a research platform has. A synthesis nobody can maintain goes stale the day the contract ends.

He also builds frameworks. CRISP, his design evaluation framework, gives teams a shared standard to benchmark decisions against, removing the review bottleneck rather than adding another approval gate. Accessibility is treated as a floor to exceed rather than a box to tick.

He is from the same part of south London the work is about. Research organisations usually treat design as the last step, done by someone who arrives at the end and has never met the community. Here it is done by someone from it. Laith trained as an architect, First Class at the University for the Creative Arts, where he now guest lectures.