Sophie is an established leader in sustainable and circular design, with a focus on the investigation and promotion of circular economy design principles, behaviour change and material process. She founded the design agency, Thomas.Matthews in 1997 which is now a B-Corp and part of the EBT, Useful Simple Trust. She was Director of Circular Economy and before that, Co- Director of Design in the Action Research Centre at the RSA where she founded and ran The Great Recovery project for four years.

 

Sophie has assisted global businesses and UK government organisations to define the role of designers within discussions around waste streams, resource efficiency and circular economies. She is an active campaigner and has founded several social enterprises with aims to advance the design industry’s capacity to respond to climate challenges through knowledge sharing and investigation, including the URGE Collective.

 

Through her work on The Great Recovery Sophie has become a leader in sustainable product and process design, advising companies from the FMCG, Oil and Gas, Construction, Electronics and Technology and Textiles and apparel sector. Her approach is through the investigation of end-of-life and waste flows back into design to understand design from a closed loop perspective. She has an in-depth knowledge of material use and how to reduce the impact of design on the environment.

 

Her role at the RSA led to her being design advisor for the Circular Economy Task Force and a member of the UK Resources Council. She was also part of the UK government committee for the ‘Industry Evolution’ report that helped to set the UK’s Industrial Strategy.

 

Sophie was one of the first designers to become a Chartered Waste Manager (CIWM) and has been nominated twice for CIWM’s Industry Leader of the Year. She is a trustee for the charity WRAP (Waste, Resources Action Programme) and has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship at UAL and is an Honorary lecturer at UCL.

 

She chairs the advisory board for the NICER Textile Circular Centre, is an assessor for Innovate UK as well as sitting on many additional advisory panels. She has judged many awards, including D&AD White Pencil, Dyson Awards, National Geographic Ocean Plastic Innovation Challenge and the London Design Medal.