Samuel Haywood

A LITTLE CONTEXT

There's a photo of me somewhere, aged about four, wearing gumboots and shorts in the middle of winter. My mother wasn't thrilled. I don't remember the photo, but I remember the feeling — that the world was better encountered directly, whatever the weather. 

That instinct hasn't changed much. I'm a designer, deathwalker and devoted father by trade, and something harder to name by nature. 

Over the years I've trekked to Everest Base Camp raising funds for climate action, helped to produce a podcast exploring the pivotal moments that shape a life, and trained in end-of-life care after navigating my own long encounter with cancer. These aren't separate pursuits. They're the same inquiry, wearing different clothes. The thread connecting all of it is something I've come to think of as 'follow the fear' — moving toward the edges of experience rather than away from them, not to remove the mystery but to understand it well enough to work with it. To keep it warm. 

The walk with cancer changed things, as it tends to. It put the everyday and the existential in the same breath and asked me to hold both without flinching. I found, to my surprise, that I could. And that the people I most wanted to be around were the ones who could do the same. That's shaped everything about how I now work. 

A good day of design and strategy has a quality I can only describe as sacred — slow and structured, focused and meandering, full of the sense that something genuinely new might emerge if you stay open to it. I'm drawn to problems that matter to people at moments that matter. Not because the work is always serious, but because the people behind it always are. The person I most want to work with is someone who needs to be seen as well as helped. Who is carrying something real — a problem, a possibility, a season of change — and who suspects that the surface-level answer won't be enough. I can't promise to have the answer. I can promise to bring my whole self to finding it alongside you. 

I live in Melbourne (Naarm). I am occasionally found in the freezing cold ocean or sauntering through the mountains. I believe grief and gratitude belong in the same conversation. I take the work seriously and myself lightly.

If something here has landed — I'd love to hear from you.