About

Innovation once meant speed; more data, more disruption, more noise. But real progress isn’t just about moving faster. It’s about moving with purpose.

At nucleus.transcend, we believe innovation begins with people. Their needs, decisions, and stories shape every meaningful change.

By combining AI, behavioural science, and collaborative design, we help organisations turn uncertainty into clarity; and ideas into action.

Innovation, for us, isn’t invention for its own sake. It’s the courage to ask better questions, to slow down enough to see what matters, and to create solutions that feel human, not mechanical.

We help organisations transcend business as usual; from complexity to clarity, from insight to impact.

Because the future isn’t built by machines or models. It’s imagined by people.

And when innovation serves meaning, it serves us all.

We use a people-centred design framework that blends collaborative methods with the latest in AI and behavioural science. This helps us make sense of complex research, frame the right problems, and design solutions that truly matter.

1. IMAGINE We start by turning research into clarity. Using AI to enhance data synthesis, we build a clear picture of users — their needs, motivations, and pain points. Outputs include personas, empathy maps, journey maps, and prioritised needs lists. This ensures design challenges are always framed around people, while also balancing feasibility and business goals.

2. MAKE Next, we co-create with the people who matter most. Through workshops and collaborative sessions, users share their insights as the experts of their own experience. Together, we generate ideas, shape prototypes, and test concepts iteratively — learning what works, discarding what doesn’t, and evolving designs until they’re ready to deliver real impact.

3. LEARN Design doesn’t stop at launch. We gather insights from testing, beta releases, and real-world use, feeding them back into the process. Sometimes this means refining solutions; other times it means redefining the problem entirely. By staying engaged with users, we help organisations adapt, improve, and ensure their solutions stay relevant and effective.

Our design methodology takes our clients through a structured framework of activities and services that aligns internal and external design teams behind the real problem to be solved, and then reveals routes to a solution based on insight and research. We have designed over 40 activities and services that our clients can utilise to reveal data and insights that guides the teams toward a solution.

Our playbook details how to apply these services in a real business environment in a 3 step process:

1. Define your business need - whether you're designing a brand new product or service, or redesigning an existing one, or maybe just running a benchmarking exercise.

2. Find a UX service pack based on your business need - each pack contains the activities and resources your team needs to deliver the objective.

3. Choose from tools recommended based on your UX service pack - from Explore, Empathise, Test, Prototype and Accelerate to sharpen focus on the project.

Alternatively, our playbook can help a team or individual researcher choose activities and tools based on solving a specific design question. Questions such as 'how do I define a project scope and prioritise?' or 'how do I understand users better?'.

The Design Thinking process was introduced by IDEO and perfected by researchers at Stanford. This training is user-driven innovation at its best, perfect for companies that want to discover hidden opportunities in a specific market segment.

Why is Design Thinking so important today? Over 40% of startups fail because there is no market need for what they offer. That’s why the development of every new product or service must start with a deep understanding of the problem being solved, your customers needs and how to innovate effectively.

Our Design Thinking session gives your team a broad perspective on applying design thinking to solving design problems and experiencing every stage of the process. It covers user research, needs analysis, persona creation, prototyping and design, and finally testing and feedback.

We can tailor these workshops to your particular requirements. From our 2 hour Design Thinking immersion sessions that give your people a taste of how to innovate using this methodology, to our 5 day innovation sprints that can tackle specific challenges such as optimising customer facing processes, to developing new products and services.

Our Innovation Sprint is a four day course that helps solve real business problems. This is great for team building, and getting a thorough understanding of Design Thinking and Lean UX methodology and implementation.

We spend a substantial amount of the course in each of the phases, Discover, Define, Design and Deliver, so that candidates gain a thorough understanding how to research, analyse data, prioritise user needs and create solutions that lead to prototyping and making. We encourage the use of real life use cases so that teams can work on actual problems in their workplace.

Day 1. Discovery. We learn how to formulate the problem statement, manage assumptions, create personas based on target audiences and gather insights from end users. Activities include interviewing, structuring research and collating data.

Day 2. Define. We define the problem statement, analyse our discovery work and formulate user needs based on personas. Activities include persona creation, empathy mapping, needs analysis and much more.

Day 3. Design. We take the user needs and create solutions using the 'how might we' technique. We then prioritise our ideas and start to sketch and make concepts. Teams then present concepts and test them against their personas.

Day 4. Deliver. Teams vote on the preferred concept and then start to make a finished prototype of their concept. Finally concepts are presented and we talk about how to create an innovation pipeline and managing a balanced innovation approach.

Duration: 4 days Method: Online over Teams, Skype or Zoom, Miro whiteboarding Session size: 6 people maximum Cost: Please enquire per session.

Lean UX was created to add a design component to Agile software development. It focuses on the think-make-check cycle and is the complete opposite of front loaded processes such as waterfall. Developed out of vehicle manufacturing it’s objective is to eliminate waste in the manufacturing process that has no value to the customer.

The Lean UX deepdive covers the three stages. Think focuses on articulating assumptions of the problem, the benefit of solving the problem to the customer and what would success look like. Make is about sketching and buidling a concept or ‘minimum viable product’ to help us communicate our idea and test our assumptions with our end users. And finally Check allows us to validate our hypotheses quickly by testing with end users.

Duration: 5 hours Method: Online over Teams, Skype or Zoom, Miro whiteboarding Session size: 6 people maximum Cost: Please enquire per session.

Agile is primarily a software development methodology aimed at small teams using the principles of continuous design improvement and testing based on rapid feedback and change. Agile software is never finished and lives in a state of perpetual beta.

Our half day deep dive will explain what scrum is and why it’s so good at delivering complex projects. We will run through the various techniques and the difference between the various team roles, events and artefacts. The deepdive will also include practical examples on how to apply Agile and a team exercise covering key elements of the methodology.

Duration: 3 hours Method: Online over Teams, Skype or Zoom, Miro whiteboarding Session size: 6 people maximum Cost: Please enquire per session.