SANS is a multidisciplinary team driven by curiosity, empathy, and impact. We believe that empowered communities can create places that nurture social, cultural, and economic value, delivering prosperity and resilience.

Yijing Xu

Yijing is an urban curator, architectural designer, and cultural strategist. Skilled in decisively managing complex projects, she has built a reputation for a quality of outcome despite challenging circumstances. 

Her ability in communicating and mediating between culture, community and commerce has underpinned many high profile events and projects over the past decade. These experiences have given her a unique cross-sectional view of organisations large and small, which helps in ensuring smooth operations, as well as targeted capacity building for both clients and beneficiaries.

Neill Mclean Gaddes

As a strategic designer with a background in Industrial Design, Neill is committed to developing methodologies and tools to enable communities and organisations to approach and solve the problems important to them.

This socially-driven, pragmatic, and collaborative approach has been tested through numerous successfully completed projects ranging in scale from bottom-up “happenings” to top-down urban revitalisation planning and implementation. Critical to these successes is his approach to deeply understanding problems from a users point of view and focusing on the right fit between context, problems, and solutions.

Mark Henley

Within the role of Strategist, Mark specialises in turning evidence-based insights into implementable strategies. Mark’s extensive knowledge of workshopping process’ and experience in stakeholder engagement delivers tangible and unique outcomes for each diverse project. 

His experience both domestically and internationally has seen the successful implementation of creative direction, place-led strategies and revitalisation programs for public, private and institutional clients.