Cat Sutton-Long

Cat is an empathetic and reflective design and research leader with almost 20 years of experience in the field. She has a deep knowledge of research methods and their relationship to design, social innovation and policy.

Cat has spent her career exploring human behaviour and its drivers, working to ensure that project outcomes are truly human-centred and deliver shared value for organisations and their communities. She has designed and implemented projects at all levels, international, national and local; and for all scopes, from massive cohorts (think, ‘Europe’) to small and precise groups of people with a specific shared experience; and has used just about every research tool in existence.

Over the past twenty years, Cat’s career has seen her lead high-profile global research for Atlassian; conduct hundreds of hours of interviews, workshops, surveys and capability building for clients such as Beyond Blue, ANZ, and RACV; and undertake ethnographic and placemaking research with market traders and customers of Melbourne's famed Queen Victoria Markets.

Cat enjoys the challenging thinking and work of emotionally and culturally complex research design. This is best exemplified by her strategic research and co-design in the deathcare sector, understanding diverse cultural needs and end-of-life practices to create customer experience strategies that support the communities they serve.

Cat holds a Bachelor of Science and Business Management from the University of Surrey. She also oversees all of Paper Giant’s design research projects, our research practice and our team. She is an exceptional leader and coach; she helps guide how we do our work and sets us up, as individuals and as a company, to deliver powerful research of unrivalled depth and value.