Melanie Wendland

Melanie is a senior designer and strategist, who has spent over 15 years designing services and solutions with a human-centred approach. She leads multidisciplinary teams through complex research and design projects, and designs and facilitates workshops, events and conferences. Melanie has extensive experience applying design thinking and service design approaches to research, rethink and redesign reproductive, maternal and new born child health services and systems in Kenya, India, Nigeria and Uganda and worked with organisation such as the WHO, Plan International, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition she has worked with The Swiss Foreign Ministry and GAAMAC in the design and facilitation of online workshops, events and conferences on transitional justice and combatting hate speech. Melanie enjoys creating enabling environments for collaboration through design using her diplomatic skills and building genuine relationships with project partners. In her most recent project Pathways, she leads a design, behavioural science and data science team through a design process to deepen the understanding of social vulnerability to poor health outcomes. Before founding Sonder, she was the Director of Service Design and Innovation at social impact company Scope Impact (formerly M4ID) and a service design lead with Fjord/Accenture designing and developing digital tools and services for the private sector. Melanie co-founded Sonder because she wanted to create a platform for collaboration for people to continue reinventing the way work is done and where working styles are more aligned with individual needs, intensities and life cycles. Melanie believes that we can only do our best work and create impact in other people's lives, if the change-makers themselves practice a culture of kindness, respect and love at work. Aside from work, Melanie teaches social innovation, is a mother of two, an avid trail runner, personal trainer and a curious explorer of nature and life.