Clara Gaggero Westaway

Clara Gaggero Westaway is a designer, inventor and creative director who integrates art and engineering to create hopeful, human-centred innovation. As co-founder and creative director of Special Projects Studio, she has built a reputation for blending the physical and digital, purpose and aestheticism, with a design method shaped by her background in both industrial design and fashion. Clara also teaches at the Royal College of Art, Queen Mary University of London and Oxford University's Saïd Business School. Her sessions inspire organisations to challenge mainstream thinking, embrace interdisciplinary creativity and develop products that genuinely enrich people's lives through thoughtful, boundary-pushing design.

Clara Gaggero Westaway co-founded Special Projects Studio to bridge worlds that rarely meet: art and engineering, the physical and the digital, purpose and beauty. Born to a mechanical engineer and a fashion boutique owner, she studied industrial design in Italy before launching her own fashion label in Berlin, then returned to design engineering in London. That unconventional path shaped her into a designer who refuses to see boundaries where others assume they exist, and who approaches every challenge with the belief that innovation should enrich lives, not simply dazzle.

As creative director of Special Projects, Clara has built a practice defined by hopeful, human-centred invention. Her work integrates seemingly disparate disciplines into products and experiences that feel both thoughtful and transformative. Beyond the studio, she shares her methodology as a visiting senior lecturer at the Royal College of Art and Queen Mary University of London, and as a faculty member at Oxford University's Saïd Business School. Her teaching and speaking engagements reflect a commitment to making interdisciplinary creativity accessible, demonstrating how design thinking can solve real problems with elegance and intention. In 2027, Clara will attempt a world record by cycling from John O'Groats to Land's End, pushing a wheelchair and passenger for 864 miles over 34 days. The endeavour aims to raise awareness for the UK's five million unpaid carers and to support charities that provide respite and joy for those who care and those they look after.

Clara's sessions challenge organisations to rethink how they approach innovation, showing leaders and teams how to embrace complexity without losing clarity. She helps audiences understand that the most meaningful breakthroughs often come from combining perspectives that seem unrelated, and that great design serves people first. Whether speaking about product development, creative leadership, or the courage required to step outside conventional thinking, Clara equips organisations with practical tools to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and build solutions that genuinely improve lives. Her warmth, curiosity, and grounded optimism leave audiences inspired to look at their own challenges differently, and ready to create work that matters.